Annie Carpenter Kleshas Abhinivesha

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] Namaste yogis. Peace. I'm Annie Carpenter. I teach smart flow yoga at um Exhale Center for Sacred Movement here in Venice, California. Um but I also teach all over the planet. Um so today I thought we'd talk about the fifth of the five clacas, the obstacles that yogis use to identify where we get stuck, how we get stuck maybe is a better way of saying that. Um and the fifth one is abinvea. Abina. It's a Sanskrit word and it generally translates as um clinging to life. Uh this one's a little bit harder I think to hold on to um intellectually because it is an instinctive hindrance, an instinctive affliction that we all have, right? Every single living cell has this um part of it that says survive and thrive even, right? That's just part of life itself. So this is one of those things we can never really get rid of that and in fact most of the old scriptures that talk about this concept will say something like even the wisest of sages will have trouble with this one right so it is um it's not an easy thing but I find it incredibly powerful to consider it to sit with it to meditate on it um in terms of bringing a sense of deep uh acceptance and I I think we can even bring the word equinimity in when we're looking at the benefits of meditating on this concept. So this idea of clinging to life, it gets right down to the root of trusting the basic yogic concept that there is an essence, a divine spark at the center of all living beings that never dies. When we trust that, when that truly is our truth, then the idea that the body will die or even a loved one's body will die becomes a little easier to to be with, right? That idea of deep deep grief and longing for life itself, for ourselves, or the life of our loved ones, or heaven forbid, our children. That's probably the hardest of all to sit with. um is a a really challenging thing um for anyone of any spiritual persuasion to be comfortable with and I think that is not ever going to change. However, to sit with whether it's a friend who's in a terminal illness or if you have ever been able to sit with yourself in a moment where there was a depth of fear or pain that made you kind of trip off into could this be the beginning of the end? then you know that learning to deal with that part of you that goes off and running in that fear of death is a really helpful thing and contributes so much to our capacity to live with peace. Right? So what would it be like for you to you know once a day for a moment perhaps during your shabbasana to pause and to consider that this life as you know it will cease and yet life itself will continue that's the work of abinves I know it's hard hang in there stay with it thanks for listening namaste [Music] [Applause] [Music]