September 17, 2025
The world is full of counselors. Half of them ask us to suppress our emotions, and the other half suggest that we should freely express them. All this has been tried and found wanting. Suppression leads to explosion. Expression may seem to 'bring it all out' but it also digs it in deeper (like a tree which grows up and down at the same time).
Isn't there a third way, the middle way between these two? Yes. That is neither suppression nor expression, but knowledge. The emotion is in me, it is me, so its knowledge is self-knowledge. It has two aspects which are complimentary - abhyāsa and vairāgya. Vairāgya is turning desire or any emotion upon itself. When you seek to find answers to questions like "What is the emotion?" "Where is it?" "In whom does it arise?" that itself is meditation. Abhyāsa is the other side of it. It is the practice of the eight limbs of yoga.
Both vairāgya (which also means removal of mental coloring) and abhyāsa enable us to discover the colouring of the mind which throws up these emotional states. In order to discover this we enter the mind, go past the impurity, the perversity, to our own natural state. It is there that we discover the truth that fear, hate, etc., are born of a non-existent diversity, a division between 'me' and 'the other'. In sleep no such division exists and hence no fear and no pain either. When life and consciousness are not divided into subject and object, experiencer and experience, there is no fear and there is no pain. Pain ceases when contact ceases, when division ceases (not by avoiding contact through self-hypnosis, drugs, etc.). Thus the practice of yoga is said to promote enlightened living.
This is surely a delicate art, and yoga is a delicate art. It is easy to see that every aspect of work in the field of yoga (and of life itself involves this delicate balance. There is a subtle middle path between the extremes of license and tyranny (which is freedom), between weakness and domination (which is humility), between rigidity and liquidity (which is flexibility), between cold indifference and cruelty (which is love), between revolution and stagnation (which is evolution), between obedience and rebellion (which is cooperation), between formality and familiarity (which is affectionate respect). To find this subtle middle path is yoga - but to find this in oneself, not to look for it in others!