Bust a Groove!

Positive Grooves
One of the best ways to create new samskaras is to keep consciously shifting our behavior and ways of thinking out of negative patterns and into positive ones. This idea is the basis of many of the transformative practices we do in yoga; for example, the practices of truthfulness and loving kindness, or Patanjali's practice of countering a negative thought or feeling with a positive one. Suppose that, every time you feel angry, you make a point of remembering love, or finding the energy behind the anger, doing a self-inquiry process like "Who's angry?" or even remembering that there might be another way of looking at the situation.

After doing any of these for a while, you'll notice a shift in yourself. You might still fall into the anger-groove, but along with the anger samskaras, you'll have developed an alternative set of samskaric grooves that will rise up along with your anger and remind you that there are more expansive ways of looking at the situation. Your practice will have created a positive "field" inside you that in time becomes as strong as the negative one. You now have more choices about how you react.

Moreover, most of the core yogic practices—asana, meditation, study, mantra repetition, visualization, pranayama—not only create new, positive samskaras, they also have a power to wash away the old, limiting, pain-producing ones. Meditation is especially effective here, because it can literally flush old samskaras out of your unconscious, and dispel them. Beginning meditators sometimes think, when mental static or strong emotions surface during practice, that they're doing something wrong. In fact, a rush of thoughts and emotions is part of the natural process of samskaric burnoff, in which some of your layers of buried impressions come up to be released. There's a reason why a period of meditation or yoga will leave you feeling calmer, clearer, and less emotionally cluttered, even if your mind didn't become noticeably calmer during the meditation itself. Simply practicing has cleansed your unconscious of some of its burden.

Surviving Falls from Grace
A few months after Dale's initial breakthrough, under the pressure of a sleepless night and a hard deadline, she heard herself calling one of her co-editors an incompetent, talentless idiot. The editor was crushed, and told Dale that she hadn't changed at all. Dale was disappointed in herself. "What's the point?" Dale asked me. "I work so hard, and it doesn't seem to make a difference."

At times like this, it helps to understand that real transformation is not a linear process, but more like a spiral. When you make a breakthrough in yoga practice, have an especially deep meditation, or let go of a layer of anger or pride, it's often followed by an internal backlash. You might feel dry, irritable, discouraged, uninterested in practice, drawn to foods that aren't good for you, or simply aware of a host of flaws and shortcomings. In my early years of practice, whenever this happened I'd feel as if I'd somehow "fallen," blown it.

Yet these "falls" are actually part of the process of integrating new states. Our brains and bodies can't integrate too much change at once. So every time we make a real leap, there's a necessary period of recalibration. But even when it feels as if you've taken two steps backward for every step forward, if you look carefully, you'll see that you've actually landed in a new default position. A spiral moves gradually upward, cycling back to a position that looks very much like the same place you've been, but which is actually at a different level altogether.

When you look carefully at yourself, you may notice that you have more awareness, so that when you catch yourself in an old pattern, you can move through it quickly. Perhaps the reactive pattern is simply less intense. Or perhaps you realize that even when you notice your own imperfections (or other people's) you're still able to stay in touch with your center, your inner self. Perhaps you have a new compassion for yourself. In short, you haven't moved backward at all. You are simply moving forward in a spiral rather than in a straight line.

Transformation is a long-term process. The big changes rarely happen overnight. At the same time, every effort you make on the transformational journey is exponential in its effects. Each time you consciously counter a negative samskara, or remember the beauty of your inner self, or limit your reactive behavior to five minutes instead of five hours, you shift not only that pattern, but thousands of related patterns as well. One day, you look at yourself and discover that you're living from an entirely different platform. That's when you realize how much power a human being has, and how miraculously fruitful a transformative journey can be.