The Morning Muse

Oops! It’s been 26 days since I sat down to write an update on my Sat Kriya sadhana. You can read my last post here — I don’t remember what I shared, so maybe some of this will be repetitive, or maybe it will be a different perspective completely. But here we are, on day 32 of doing my Sat Kriya sadhana.

This practice evolved into a sadhana naturally. It was the second day following the end of my 40 day sadhana for the kriya to open the heart, and I did this sweet little short practice of Sat Kriya with the lovely Yogi Gems on Youtube. It was a three-minute Sat Kriya practice and it felt just ever so right–especially for sticking to for a sadhana.

I guess Yogi Gems’ encouragement (in the video) to make it a sadhana stuck and when I read more about the kriya’s benefits of stirring up and clearing lower chakra neuroses, it felt like the right place to focus. When I did my kriya to open the heart sadhana, I often felt that the lightness “up top” didn’t translate very well in my life because I had some density in my lower chakras (as many of us do!).

The second day of my sadhana, I managed to hold up my arms for six minutes, an improvement from the prior day’s three, but I felt still intimidated from the 11 that Yogi Gems recommended. And yet, by day three, I did 11 minutes, and it stuck!

Since day three of my Kriya, I have been doing 11 minutes with just a few deviations. A few days, less than a handful, I did a three- or five-minute practice instead of 11. I knew the importance of continuing, but I chose to accommodate life on those days. On two other days, I chose to do 31 minutes of Sat Kriya. Each of those 31 minutes was somehow life-changing. I came out the other side feeling like a different person.

I chose to go back to practicing 11 minutes despite “reaching” the 31-minute mark because I felt an intuitive guidance to walk before running. There will be time enough to extend my Sat Kriya practice, and my objective for now is to be present and consistent. I hope to continue beyond 40 days, and I hope to extend the practice in time, as well.

Despite feeling no notable energy shift sensations during my Sat Kriya practice or its equal-length upright relaxation while holding giyan mudra, I have experienced many shifts in my life. The most notable shift has been the emergence of my inner dialogue (in this case, of my inner critic).

It’s not that I had no inner dialogue before, but I’m hearing my inner critic much more frequently now. Instead of feeling vague negative sensations or vague “blocks” leading me to perhaps procrastinate or avoid certain situations, I hear the thoughts playing out in my mind, leading me to better understanding the beliefs and assumptions that fuel these negative feelings and self-limitations. This has been huge!

When you can hear the negative thoughts behind a negative feeling or block, you can engage with those thoughts, you can talk back! You can take a step forward while knowing exactly what you’re overcoming. But without that view into what is causing a feeling of unworthiness, inadequacy, a feeling of “I can’t do this,” it’s much harder to engage and change a vague, wordless feeling.

When I turned to ChatGPT to ask about this strange phenomenon of suddenly hearing my inner dialogue, it seemed to think this is a well-theorized effect, where a contemplative practice like yoga or meditation can give rise to awareness of maladaptive schemas. If you’re unfamiliar with the theories behind schema therapy (like I was), let me summarize. Schemas are thought to be deep and often unconscious cognitive structures that organize how we show up in the world–how we interpret information, how we treat others, what we believe about ourselves… Our schemas are those foundational beliefs that affect all of it.

When we become more aware through a practice like yoga, these schemas can surface as internal dialogue that sounds like negative self-talk. The goal of schema therapy, by the way, is to work through and reframe these negative schemas in what it calls “cognitive restructuring.” I’m not in schema therapy, but the process is kind of happening naturally.

What I have found so liberating has been seeing these big feelings for what they are, and to stop being so intimidated by and running away from them! Behind these big feelings of shame, of feeling like a failure, feeling inadequate (all especially coming up when I try to be bold and to challenge myself in life), are just a bunch of thoughts. It’s not a process of “reality = my feelings.” It’s more like “reality -> my thoughts (so obviously, my interpretation) -> my feelings,” and you might not think, but just the awareness of that separation of my feelings from being a representation of final reality has been so freeing.

Knowing that it’s that inner dialogue I can now hear and those beliefs causing the feelings, and clearly seeing that the inner dialogue is very nasty , and definitely not a representation of how I deserve to be treated, is what helped me make the connection. My feelings are rooted in my thoughts, and are not directly rooted in reality.

I will continue to write updates on this as my practice progresses.