How to stop negative emotion-Sadhguru

From tomorrow, get up at five o’ clock in the morning, have a cold shower, and start your sadhana at 5:30, every day. After some time, so many things which were a problem in your mind will be gone. It works – that is all that matters. If you want to understand how it works, what the mechanism and the process are, it takes a lot of effort and time. To make it work does not take much. But if you want to know the whole intricacy of what makes it happen, why it happens the way it happens, why a particular asana has a particular effect, then it is lifetimes of study. 

Questioner: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. Whenever I try to stop any negative emotion like anger, it only becomes stronger. How can I get a grip on my mind?
Sadhguru: If you try to stop what you don’t want, only that will happen. This has always been the nature of your mind and human mind as such.
The whole system of yoga is about experientially exploring the nature of your body and your mind. When you get up in the morning and you do your asanas, it is not because it is a stretching exercise, as a whole lot of idiots across the planet describe it. Yes, you have to stretch to do it, but fundamentally, it is an exploration of your body and your mind. Because the biggest problem in your life is you are trying to live here without having a grasp of the two basic vehicles without which you cannot go through this life – your physical body and your mind.

How comfortably you travel through life depends on how deeply you have grasped your body and your mind. For the journey to be comfortable, the vehicle has to be good, and you must understand the vehicle – how it behaves, what it does, and why it does what it does. This is not enlightenment – this is necessary even if you only want to live an ignorant life. They used to say, “Ignorance is bliss” – if that was true, the world should be blissed out by now.
Even if you have chosen to be ignorant because you think it is blissful, to walk through this world, you must have a grasp of this body and this mind. Otherwise, doing anything is a problem. I will not go into this further intellectually, because then you would get all wound up. That is why the yogic system is an experiential exploration without trying to go into it intellectually.
When you do your asanas, you explore the nature of your body and your mind. If you move your fingers in a certain way, your mind will function

4 ISHA FOREST FLOWER December 2014

SADHGURU

The Breath - Sadhguru

The following is an excerpt from a darshan with Sadhguru at the Isha Yoga Center, Coimbatore, India, on 22 June 2014.
Questioner: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. What is the role of the breath in one’s spiritual growth?
Sadhguru: In yogic terminology, the breath is referred to as koorma nadi. The koorma nadi is that which ties you as a being to this physical manifestation of a body. As you know, the body is an accumulation of what we have eaten, or in other words, it is just a piece of the planet, but right now, you perceive it as “you” because body and being are so well tied together. And it is the koorma nadi, the thread of koorma, which does that. If I take away your breath, you and your body will fall apart.
The significance of the breath in a spiritual practice is that it gives you access to that point or that dimension where the physical and the non-physical are tied together – that is if you know the breath as koorma. Right now, you only know the sensations caused by the passage of air – that is not koorma. The koorma nadi is more than the air that you breathe – but without the air that you breathe, it will not

happen. The passage of the air is important, but koorma is not limited to that. It is the life breath of existence that you are inhaling and exhaling. If it is taken away, you and your body will not be capable of staying together. They will fall apart.
Travelling with your koorma nadi is an effort to know that space where the physical and the non- physical meet. That is the purpose of the Shambhavi Mahamudra – to be in the twilight zone where you are in the physical but touch a dimension beyond the physical. It would be very simple to leave the physical and go to the non-physical – a bullet in the head would do that, but that is not our aspiration. The aspiration of a human being is to be rooted in the physical but have a taste of that which is beyond.
The breath is one of the easiest tools to approach the non-physical dimension. There are other ways too, but they would need much more care, instruction, guidance, and assistance. With the process of breath, it happens much more easily. That is why the breath is significant in a spiritual context.