Healthy Spirit -Part II

Healthy Spirit Part 2- Changing Consciousness
Swami Sitaramananda
12/03/06
Morning Satsang, Sivananda Yoga Farm, Grass Valley, CA

To be spiritually healthy you have to find your bliss independent from objects, and that is a difficult task. Your habits make you constantly go down same pathways either emotional, or mental, or physical, and that makes you unable to experience the bliss that is already there. When you love something, instead of saying, “Oh that thing is so beautiful, it’s so wonderful. I want to unite with that thing because that’s the goal of my life.” Instead of saying that you have to understand that if you want to be healthy in spirit, you have to cease to say that there is an illusion out there that is perfect for you that you love it to the point of losing yourself. You have to cease to do that, and you have to realize that the love that you see and that beauty that you see outside is within yourself. The moment that you realize that the love and the beauty that you are ready to be lost for is within yourself, then you can experience that beauty and that love with detachment. You still experience it, but you are not losing yourself, and you start to be healthy. You don’t react. You are whole. But know that at your weak point you will react.
To be healthy is to be enlightened, that means you have to know how to how to have light, how to have the knowledge that will dispel the ignorance. If you were not ignorant, you would not be here. You are working your way out - that is true of everyone on this journey. Everyone is on the journey towards liberation, whether you are conscious of it or not. We are all searching for the same thing.
The Yoga tradition has different methods for attaining liberation, and it’s very, very well thought out, very well thought out. It’s very systematic, that’s why you need to take some time. In one lecture I cannot tell you all the secrets of yoga, and even if I tell you, you are not going to make it. Why? Because in order for you to make it you have to have time to apply the teaching. You have to apply and apply and apply and then you have to see, by trail and error where you make mistakes, and then you have to do it again, do it again, do it again. You have to bring it in your life and you have to make it so far with your life. And then, it is said, the teaching will change your consciousness.
The application of the yogic teaching is called Sadhana or spiritual practices. In order for you to be healthy, you have to practice Sadhana. When you do spiritual practices, immediately you get to a place where you are healthy. That means that you have to keep yourself healthy, otherwise you are out of balance, and you become unhealthy again. Health and ill health is just like that. One moment you are healthy because you have right thinking, right feeling, right conception of yourself, and the next moment, boom! You become thick and dark, and unhealthy; you go back to your old habits. So that liberation, or that enlightenment, or that knowledge, freedom, or that health is something that you have to do all the time until you establish a new way of thinking, new way of feeling, new way of behaving, new way of seeing yourself, and it becomes more and more established.
The definition of a person who is spiritually healthy is a person who is steady in wisdom. You all have wisdom, you have glimpses of it, I am sure, but it comes and it goes. Steady wisdom means you remain there. And it’s not that easy, because you have been born. The fact that you have incarnated shows that you have past karma to work out. You are living in an imperfect kind of way, looking for something that is completely out of your reach because you are looking from an imperfect standpoint. If your consciousness is imperfect, then how can you find something that is perfect?
That relentless search for life, enlightenment, liberation is not easy. It seems out of your reach because of your conditioning. Sometimes there is some moment of awakening, and you must keep doing what’s called Sattvic life- practice Yoga and Ayurveda to regulate your life until it becomes sattvic, then you have glimpses of health. If you stay sattvic, then eventually you will become healthier and healthier in body and mind and eventually you will become healthy in spirit.