Kleshas: Raga: Chasing Pleasures
We are exploring the Kleshas, or the poisons that infiltrate our mind space and cover our divine light like a veil. Avidya is the veil, the not knowing that we are divine. This is like the sun searching for her rays in the night sky because she does not know that she IS the light, or the raindrops on a mission for wet in the dessert because they do not know themselves as water! From this place of delusion the other kleshas have fertile ground to root themselves and grow all kinds of gnarly in our lifescape. Raga is the klesha of attachment to our likes or our pleasures.
Liking things and experiencing pleasure is not the problem. And while it may feel like yoga shuns desire as the root of all evil, I don’t believe the desire is the actual problem. The problem is the belief that I need the desire to be ok or to experience joy. The problem is when my mind and my life become a slave to my desires. The poison is the mental dialogue, the external manipulation, and the unconscious behaviors that possess our daily direction and interactions. The problem is missing the sunset because I am consumed with getting to the perfect location to see it, or not hearing the love story between two birds because all I hear is the justifications I will make to prove my rightness to my partner who said something I disagree with. The poison is the life sucking daily drag of endless seeking versus the life giving excitement of exploring daily life for its limitless opportunities of extra ordinary beauty and grace with the insane baseline of no two moments ever being the same. The fact remains that through all of time, no two moments, no two sunsets, or snow flakes have EVER been the same. How is this NOT the headliner, the breaking news, every single day on CNN and Fox News?
We tend to trade the fantastic facts for the trivial tragedies because we are blinded by the lies of big business. We allow ourselves to be puppets pushed into believing this pill will fix us and this vaccination will protect us. Our minds manipulated and pulled into the obedience of prescriptions written to make us even more sick and succumb to being some one else’s property.
Acknowledging raga gifts you the scissors to cut the strings. We get to rise guided, inspired and intoxicated by the realization that we are, ourselves divine. We do not have to go out and get that, we already have it! We do not have to buy, hoard, have or hold onto, for we already are, we must simply allow, emanate, emancipate, and emerge.
Muchas Gracias Dear Reader,
May these words begin the inquiry: where am I not free? What part of me feels starved, stifled, or blocked? What beliefs do I hold that are keeping me enslaved? Like Bob Marley says, “none but ourselves can free our minds.”
Always an honor,
Andrea Dawn
