Donning The New: The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 22

42:53

42:53

Donning The New: The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 22

Rated

4.9

Type

talks

Activity

Meditation

Suitable for

Everyone

Plays

75

Join us as we explore the Bhagavad Gita. This week, we will be diving into Chapter 2, verse 21. In these weekly lectures, we focus on specific ancient teachings that we can all apply to our day-to-day lives and personal spiritual journey!

Bhagavad Gita Spirituality Reincarnation Karma Yoga Moksha Self Transformation Heart Chakra Tantra Samskara Three Bodies Divine Bliss Hatha Yoga Jnana Yoga Karma Yoga Bhakti Yoga

Meet your Teacher

Toronto, ON, Canada

Meet your Teacher

Toronto, ON, Canada

Transcript

So this whole part of the Bhagavad Gita is all about in its simplest form it's about reincarnation. It's about understanding the difference between your eternal soul and see how if you're listening to this you can't see this but as soon as I said your eternal soul my fingertips naturally touched my heart chakra and that's interesting like if I was to say to you who are you and you were to point at yourself you would naturally point at the same place I just touched and it's interesting to note that who are you really you are this eternal energy that we access through the heart chakra that's who you really are and so all of these verses we've been talking about are understanding the difference between this physical body this physical life this personality our circumstances and our eternal self because there's something very joyful about living life from our eternal self and I am a tantric at heart and so the tantric within me says but don't let go of this life play it out enjoy this mission enjoy this character you've been given to play classical yoga will say transcend all of that and only seek you know liberation which is bhagavad-gita is a classical yoga treatise it's not a tantric but I have to tell you my bias because I deeply love tantra and so I believe that you can do both and the more that you embrace your eternal self it's almost like you have more courage to play in this world you have more courage to experience the sad times we have more ability to dive into the joy so I don't think we have to choose one over the other but that's what all of these verses are talking about last week for example we talked about not being afraid of our old self dying it's not about killing or being killed like we don't have to fear that because we are eternal beings so no matter what happens in our life no matter what previous identity we once had we can let it die because we have a new life coming and whether you see that from actual physical lives or simply our identities as we shift from child to young adult to adult to older adult they're just different aspects of ourselves so that was kind of last week this week we're actually talking about shedding our old clothes so I'm reading from Stephen Mitchell's version of the bhagavad-gita so I'm going to go back a couple stanzas just so we have a sense of where we are the self never was born coming to be it will never not be birthless primordial it does not die when the body dies knowing that it is eternal unborn beyond destruction how could you ever kill and whom could you kill arjuna so here is verse 22 just as you throw out used clothes and put on other clothes new ones the self discards its used bodies and puts on others that are new just as you throw out used clothes and put on other clothes new ones the self discards its used bodies and puts on others that are new I'm going to read Maharishi Mahesh's version of this guy as a man casting off worn out garments takes other new ones so the dweller in the body casting off worn out bodies takes others that are new and then lastly let's see what Paramahansa Yogananda says about this one or how does he interpret it just as an individual forsaking dilapidated raiment dawns new clothes so the body encased soul relinquishing decayed bodily habitations enters others that are new I'm actually going to read the first paragraph that Paramahansa speaks about his interpretation here as it is common practice for a human being during a lifetime to change his attire many times so it is the habit of the eternal soul during its wanderings on the path of delusion and mortal desires to cast off karma worn bodies for new ones as a person is glad to throw away worn out useless clothes for new garments so should an individual rejoice and feel it is just as natural to change a disease torn or karmically outdated body for a new one when you guys hear that what rises in you is there an emotion or a thought or even a message does it feel peaceful does it feel scary does it feel light does it feel heavy it's a funny one ain't peaceful impossible it feels joyous it feels encouraging peaceful reassurance just wonder what bodies I was in before I like the karmically outdated body concept scary and refreshing my inner adventure child likes it but it hurts the older one it feels nearby I am eternal it feels like there are things that we don't need to take serious how do I recognize the new self and let go of the old self oh good question we'll come back to that it feels hopeful and intriguing I like that do you think it means when the soul has reached its purpose in this body it is time for the human being to die hmm we will talk about that I wonder what new body will my dad put on now that he has cast off his old one oh he passed Melissa I like PY's non-attachment vibe I wonder why we don't remember the old body um last Monday we were talking about Melissa's dad was passing and and talking about letting go and we wish the best for you Melissa and for your dad wherever he is whatever garment he is donning so I'm going to talk about what I wanted to share about this piece and it may answer the questions that everybody has shared here if at the end of our talk I haven't answered the question you asked then please ask again at the end and then we can have a good conversation about it the interesting thing about reincarnation is the idea that you every person here has been many people in many many lives you have been a woman you have been a man you have been a king you have been a pauper you have been a teacher you have been a rocket scientist you have been um who knows what you've been you know you've been a slave you've been a slave holder you've been a street walker you've been a vagrant you've been a politician you've been all these different people but what's interesting is who you are inside is the same you don't actually take on a different personality you in your essence are the same whether you are a king or a pauper or a priest or a teacher or you're living on the street or you're living in a mansion so just for a moment to imagine this to imagine yourself as royalty how do you act how do you act as royalty because what's interesting is how you act as royalty is the same as you act when you're poor and it's the same as how you act when you are a train conductor it's the same as you act when you're a monk and this is very interesting and perhaps sobering that you are actually the same essential person inside of all of these bodies so one of the foundational yogic teachings about this is that we have three bodies and i mean there are a million ways of looking at this but this is just the teaching that the Gita and these kinds of books come out of the three bodies are the physical the astral or the subtle and the causal body now what's interesting is the physical body is literally the physical body made up of earth air wind fire ether that's the physical body this is why i look the way i look and you look the way you look and this is that i am this old and this gender and this whatever and you know this is this is me this is my physical person the astral and the subtle body is your ego this is your ego and not not in the way that the self-help movement talks about you know attachment to your ego and all not that you're just your ego yourself it's your intellect it's your thoughts it is your thoughts it's your prana so now imagine your physical body is like your outer suit and your astral body or your subtle body is your inner suit it's made up of air it's made up of energy so astral doesn't necessarily mean off in the in the ethereal realms it means your ego your your energy self and then there is the causal body and the causal body is where karma lives this is where samskaras live now samskaras and karma these are like the patterns that we have lived many many many times so even if you're a king you're going to end up playing out the same patterns as you would if you were poor this means that if you were born a man you're going to live out the same patterns as you did or you would if you were born a woman it doesn't matter your circumstances are irrelevant all that matters is you are going to continue to live out the karmic unfinished business or the patterns in the samskaras that you have always lived out and to me this is fascinating because we so often think that our struggles come from our circumstances but this teaching says no your problems your challenges come from your causal body and they come from our thoughts and our in our our ego and this is really interesting that you actually are the same person in all of these incarnations so the idea is and the goal of yoga is actually to clear out the causal body so the causal body has all of these seeds of desire for pleasure or they have seeds for the fear of pain because all of the cycles we're living in are some kind of attachment to either desiring some kind of pleasure or running away from some kind of pain so this causal body it's kind of like the architect behind the scenes and so your ego yourself your thoughts your intellect it continues into each lifetime which is fascinating and the goal in each life is to almost mix things up enough so that we can start to see the patterns and i mean you can even imagine this imagine this in one life forget about multiple lifetimes let's just imagine in our life right now and whether this is true for you it doesn't matter let's pretend that you were in a relationship in high school an intimate relationship and something happened in that relationship maybe that person was super controlling let's just pretend that they were super controlling and for whatever reason you were okay you know maybe it was society-based maybe it's what you were taught maybe you had self-worth issues or whatever but you were kind of like well at least they love me and this is attention that's cool and then it came to a head and you broke up and then you got married and you ended up marrying someone who was also controlling but slightly different not in exactly the same way maybe the first person was maybe a bit physical with you and then the the person you marry ends up being more intellectually abusive or intellectually controlling so they're kind of telling you that you're not really smart or they're always correcting you or they're always doing this or whatever right and then maybe that relationship ends and then you move on to another relationship well this person isn't physically controlling and they're not mentally controlling but they play with your emotions so it's like we keep revisiting it but from a slightly different angle and then a slightly different angle and then maybe you end up having a conversation with a friend about it and you're like i don't know this person and blah blah blah and then the person says to you well actually you're you're kind of controlling i have to tell you you know when you said this thing and did that thing that was really controlling and now all of a sudden you're seeing it from the person doing the controlling's perspective and you're like oh whoa but this is the way humans are we seem to need to see things from 400 perspectives before all of a sudden we see it clearly and this isn't like something we're doing wrong this seems to be our lot it seems to be why we're here so we see it from all these different perspectives so now imagine the difference so here was one of the questions was how come we can't remember our past lives or it would be so cool to remember our past life well what if some part of you does in the same way that as we move from relationship to relationship some part of me remembers that that high school romance i'm not thinking about it all the time i'm not consciously maybe i haven't even thought about it since then but some part of me is informed by it and as we go through life we are informed by all of it but it's like it's living in the background it's living in almost our unconscious our subconscious self and then we get a fresh start and there's something about having a fresh start that suddenly you know who knows what i was in a past life but here i am born to two different people and i'm born a girl you know i i was talking to my spiritual teacher i consider him my my og spiritual teacher jim who i talk about in my books i was talking to him one day and i was saying that from the time my kids were born if you're new to me my kids are now 30 and 28 they're not babies but ever since my kids were born i've always had this i can't believe i got to have children but i can't believe it like every single time i see them i am just gobsmacked that i got to have children like that's the language i've had in my head for 30 years and i don't know why i assume it's some old pattern or something and the last time i saw jim he says to me well i think this might be one of the first times you've ever been a woman and i don't know if that's true or not but it's a funny thing to think about you know that maybe i haven't been a woman very many times you know and i'm just amazed at the whole thing i have no idea so just just to really think about that that you keep your causal body and your astral subtle body but it's only the physical body we shed and so what they say is that there's essentially two ways to clear out the causal body and once you clear out the causal body you've pulled out all the seeds kind of like a gardener going in and saying i don't want that in my garden any longer how do we do that or when we do that this is moksha freedom freedom from the cycle of reincarnation you no longer have to reincarnate because what they say is that these ideas in our minds these desires for pleasure or these fear of pain the sphere of pain they're like magnetized and it's interesting because you can kind of feel it in your day-to-day life when there's something a belief about you that's really strong and don't argue with me about that i will not let this down and it's almost like you're inside your fists are clenched and do not question me on that there's almost a magnetism in it and what they say is that the magnetism of all of these little seeds in the causal body is what brings you back to earth every time and so how do we do this how do we weed the garden well there's two ways there's the long way and the short way and the long way is just living out all these lifetimes we will learn our lessons even in a single lifetime we will learn stuff we will realize that wow if i put my hand on that burner i'm gonna get burnt and we can apply that to relationships we can apply it to business we can apply it to money we can apply it to relationship status we can apply it to anything that at some point we realize maybe this isn't the definition of happiness it's kind of like i've always been very curvy carried extra weight kind of thing right just my body type is my i don't know ancestral heritage whatever it is and so of course from the time i was 14 years old i was quite sure that being very skinny was the answer i'm quite sure i was quite sure that that was going to make me happy and popular and everything so in high school i was bulimic and i became very skinny until i realized that throwing up every day was a really really bad idea for my health and then i just kind of went back into my own self and had babies and life and depression and struggles and realizations and all the things we do and my weight fluctuated up and down and then about 10 years ago i don't know exactly what happened but it was some weird perfect storm of divorce and selling my i used to own a train station where i did all my teaching and i was selling my train station and all this stuff was going on and suddenly weight just started falling off of me and within about six months i was easily 90 pounds lighter than i am right now i was just bones i had i had thigh gap i didn't even think my body could have thigh gap and there was i mean it was a it was a wild time but it was a very interesting moment it was a moment where suddenly i realized that being skinny wasn't going to make me happy and it was like that little seed in my causal body it just became demagnetized it just just became impotent it wasn't interesting anymore so i never do anything to become skinny anymore i might do something because i want to be healthy or i want to enjoy hiking or i want to enjoy getting up and down off the floor with the grandchild who is on its way you know who knows and so it changes when we change the causal body we change the reasons we do things i still have the same brain and the same mind and the same ego but it's almost like i've turned my car in a different direction now and it doesn't matter what car i'm driving it could be the car called katrina boss or it could be the next car that i'm driving who is you know johnny smith i don't know but it's very possible that johnny smith will never worry about being skinny or fat or something like that because it's not in our causal body any longer so that's the long way the long way we can just keep living out all these lifetimes we could live a million lifetimes a million years who knows and we'll just keep having bodies and there's nothing wrong with that to be really fair there's nothing wrong with relaxing enjoying life taking the slow road it's this isn't a bad thing it just is a thing but all of us know that even within that it's a continuum because you can be totally chillaxing in your life sort of just going along but every so often you do have realizations we have realizations we have aha moments that make us think oh wait a minute we have them even if we're taking the slow road even if we're not sitting down and doing the meditation and doing the yoga and doing the journaling and doing the retreats and even if we're not doing that we'll still learn there's no pressure to be really really clear you know earth's quite a place and depending on what your particular assignment was there may be also a lot of joy in it so what's the fast way well the fast way is having experiences of divine bliss that's the fast way to understand that yoga is not asana it is the path to divine bliss that's all yoga is now depending on where you're at depending on whatever body you were born into there may be different paths to divine bliss if you are particularly physically based and you all know who you are because you love being active you love running and you love being doing things and you love hiking and you know you're you are active this isn't something you're trying to do you love being active it makes you happy you are possibly and we can be all kinds of yogis but you are very likely a hatha yogi h-a-t-h-a hatha yogi and hatha yogis find bliss through the physical body and that's why the true hatha yoga is not only asana flow things like that it's also diet it's cleansing it's cleansing the body and when you feel good in your body it is blissful and so the entire hatha yoga like if you actually go into that you'll be doing diet change and inner cleansing and and you'll do yoga and you'll do pranayama things like that but it's very physically based but a hatha yogi yogi who has never really come into contact with hatha or with yoga their yoga might be horseback riding or running marathons or hiking mountains or shoveling snow for the neighbors it doesn't matter because it brings them joy and the more joy you have every time you're it's like just imagine you're a hatha yogi who loves hiking so there you are you've got your pack you're hiking up you're sweaty you're exhausted someone who's not a hatha yogi would not enjoy this they'd be like i'm sweaty i'm exhausted i hate this a hatha yogi is like yes this is bliss so they're hiking to the top they get to the top of the mountain and the vista is so beautiful they have an experience of divine bliss and the thing about divine bliss is it tastes better than all the pleasures in the causal body whatever joy we think money brings us it is nothing like standing on the top of that mountain and looking over a beautiful view watching the sunrise watching the sunset watching puppies play there is no amount of money or weight loss or weight gain or it doesn't matter none of that comes close to divine bliss and we can all experience divine bliss all the time and what divine bliss does it kind of reminds me of in alternative medicine circles there's a theory called terrain theory t-e-r-r-a-i-n terrain kind of like the outer terrain of the meadow the simple version of terrain theory is if you want to be healthy you need to make sure the terrain inside of you is healthy and then good things grow it's kind of like if you want to have a healthy healthy garden really nurture the soil the plants are important but the soil is the most important and there is something about having experiences of divine bliss that nurture the soul inside of us it changes everything suddenly those fears we had were they're not so fearful they're not so magnetized suddenly that need to go and and achieve this incredibly important goal well maybe we'll see doesn't not so important I am what they would call a jnani yogi and you spell that j-n-a-n-i this bookshelf behind me is classic for a jnani yogi because if i'm spinning out of control in my mind all i need to do is pick up the bhagavad-gita or some ancient wise text doesn't have to be ancient it has to be a wisdom text and i become centered and i become peaceful and i remember who i am some people are karma yogis and their divine bliss is found through work and it could be through your work that you do for a living that you love it every single thing everything you do you just love it and even if the job itself isn't necessarily what you love you love the people you love everything about it karma yogis also love to volunteer one of my sisters goes to an animal shelter and she does she has walking shifts or cuddle shifts where she sits and cuddles with the dogs or the pigs or the horses because it's a big big shelter and that's karma yoga and then there's the bhakti yogis who they are all about if they're spinning out of control they will choose their favorite divine entity and say what would shakti do right now what would jesus do right now what would the buddha do right now and it brings them joy it brings them bliss and they are a bhakti yogi can you be more than one kind of yogi one hundred percent we're probably on some level all of the yogis but we definitely have favorites and maybe we have a couple that we like all that to be said our left brain loves to create little modules that ah i am a jnani yogi ah you are a hatha yogi but we have to remember the point the point is to do whatever it is that brings you to divine bliss and it's never about making money or it's never about attaining worldly success in whatever world you live in it's always something within and every time we experience joy doesn't matter like it's it's something as simple as saying what do you really love to do like your ideal sunday afternoon there's no plans what is your ideal sunday afternoon is it going for a hike is it having a bath is it hanging out with friends is it painting a picture is it what is it it's interesting to look at the individual yogis but in the end we can't get caught up in it either right it's like what do you love to do because very often especially if you've lived a very busy life we don't even know what we would do with a sunday afternoon like we know what our partner might like to do and we know what our kids might want to do and we might know what we should want to do but what would actually bring you to divine bliss and a lot of us don't know and so that becomes the journey to figure out what do i love and very often what we love to do are things that we love to do when we were children i am a hatha yogi who has become disabled i have to change my desires on the one hand i would say i would research what all the aspects of hatha yoga is because it's really a broad thing it is so far beyond the body like it's so far beyond the physical asana and you might really enjoy the other aspects of cleaning and diet and other things and it's possible that expanding into some of the other ways would be wonderful so what i'd love to kind of leave us with today is two big things one to really find the things in your life that really bring you joy pure joy what is it that actually would bring you to that divine bliss space and the second thing is to imagine reincarnation a lot like your current life and to imagine all of the identities that you've ever had in this current life and see yourself shedding the clothes of a child and putting on the clothes of a teenager and then shedding the clothes of the teenager and putting on the clothes of a young adult and shedding the clothes and when i say clothes i mean thought patterns hopes and dreams hang-ups it could be even jobs it could be relationships it could be whatever but imagine yourself changing quote clothes as soon as the last clothes are worn out you wear the clothes until you're finished with them you keep the job until it no longer fits you stay in the relationship until it no longer is working for anybody but to actually allow ourselves to reincarnate into the next journey inside this current with all of our memory intact and so even right now to imagine are there aspects and it doesn't it's not like a one and done it's not like you have to drop everything and your whole life changes it's all incremental you know i might just change this one thought pattern that i have and the other things all stay and then all of a sudden i realize wow maybe this relationship is really toxic and i need to let that friend go or maybe i really do need to move on to a different job or whatever to actually allow ourselves to change so those are the two things to just really deeply think about allowing ourselves to change our identity within this memory and to really think about what brings you to divine bliss someone asked a question i am not a yogi i do qigong would that be more like hatha hmm yes to truly do qigong to be deeply in the body to feel the energy moving definitely hatha if changing the seeds in my causal body changes my perspective until it is played out all the questions and answers so leslie brings up a great point that all three bodies can change each other it's not a top down or bottom up thing this is how hatha yoga works you can work through the body and it will change your intellect it'll change how you see things you can change how you see things and suddenly certain causal seeds no longer exist you could change your mind about something which will then change how your physical body shows up and then once that is achieved the causal seed will disappear here or you could go into deep meditation deep yoga or deep journaling or deep insight and recognize a causal seed exactly for what it is and let it go and everything changes hatha for me but as i get older and my wildly physical activities slow me down i feel i'm changing and even this is a beautiful point that robin makes that what if you also get to change that in your life maybe there was a time that a hatha yoga path was exactly your journey and then maybe later you joined the raja yoga which is a different another one which is a meditative journey which kundalini yoga that i teach is is part of the raja yoga path or maybe one day you're like you know actually i'm really digging this bhagavad gita you know it's really bringing me great peace it's okay to let go of any identity that we have you know it's it's perfect not easy to let go but a great learning experience and honestly i think we just have to really relax maybe sometimes we're meant to take a slow path and other times we're meant to do the fast path thanks everybody i hope you have a wonderful week and we'll see you soon