One of the yogic aims to obliterate suffering. The english word “suffering” is a translation of the Sanskrit word “dukkha”. This translation is somewhat inept. The sanskrit dukkha essential refers to something be unfit – or inappropriate. The word “dukkha” can for instance describe a screw that doesn’t fit into a whole. Suffering is not the same as pain. Pain is a direct, physical experience that lasts for a limited amount of time, and then is gone. When you hit your head against a low ceiling, you experience a moment of physical discomfort. Then, after a few minutes, this pain is gone, and your mind has moved onto something else. Suffering is an inner phenomena, and it is a function of our resistance to discomfort, or pain.
As such, one of the first things we much understand as aspiring yogis is what we can call the equation of suffering. Suffering = pain + resistance, or S = P + R. Suffering is created by the mind, and is a function of our inner resistance. Our inner tension is created through our mental patterns, narratives and stories. These inner patterns are in yogic jargon referred to as samskaras. A samskara is created by an experience of a certain intensity. These experiences can both be pleasant, and unpleasant. Say that you, as a child, often were excluded. Your parents might have been insensitive to your needs, or the other kids at school might have bullied you. These experiences are so uncomfortable that the body-mind will do anything to avoid them in the future. The mind therefore begins to do one of the things it does best – pattern recognition. In order to avoid feeling excluded, we will begin to look for signs of exclusion throughout our lives. We might have an intensely negative reaction to someone not picking up the phone, or feel terrible that two of our friends met up for a coffee without inviting us. In this way, the mind replicates a past experience into the present. We rewrite our own story. This is in turn essentially a function of resistance. We resist the emotional experience of exclusion to such an extent that we begin to orient our entire lives around avoiding it.
The samskaras might also be of a pleasant nature. We might have for example have had a best friend or a partner we felt so safe and happy with, that we try to grasp onto that emotion, or mode of relationship, later in life. This is also the function behind sexual kinks. We might have had such an intense sexual experience at some point, in a certain context, that the mind obsessively aims to reproduce the same experience. In both cases, we are in service to the automatic patterns, or samskaras of the mind, and therefore not present. Samskaras are the main reason why certain patterns, issues or experiences seem to happen to us again and again and again, and the only way to uproot these is by non-judgmental presence. We judge our emotions. This creates resistance, which fuels suffering. From we’re small, we learn to void certain emotions. We adopt different strategies in order to not having to feel, such as distraction, arrogance, mentalisation, adaptability or self-destruction.
In modern times, we’ve bought into the idea that we can remove emotion by talking. We spend an endless amount of time talking about the same problems, to little or no avail. We try to analyse and conceptualise our way out of emotion, rather than simply feeling. The word emotion, interestingly enough, means to move: e-motio, in latin. This points to the fact that emotions must be experienced, and allowed to move through, and out of the body. We all know the immense clarity we might experience after crying our eyes out, or the light, humorous, almost playful sensation in the body after we’ve allowed ourselves to express anger. In both of these examples, the lightness or clarity is a consequence of the emotion having been allowed to express itself, and move out of us. When animals have been through a traumatic experience, they usually start shaking. This is not out of fear, but in order to allow the traumatic state to express itself, and thereafter leave us. Emotions are physical, not mental. They are expressions of the body’s instinct for self preservation. As such, they must be dealt with on a physical, and not emotional plane. All negative emotions have a certain somatic geometry to them. That means that all resistance to negative experience manifests itself in a certain way in the physical body. As long as these tensions remain in the body, the imprint of the emotion remains in the mind, and no amount of analysis, without somatic presence, will remove them.
