Deep Dive – Details, episodes & analysis

If you're looking for your soulmate, listen to this audio. Sadhguru offers some much need clarity on this sticky topic!

Are all enlightened beings free of karmic bondage? Does Sadhguru have karma? Find out in this video.

Sadhguru looks at why people are going through so much stress in today's world. If you ask people why they are stressed, many will say it is because of their job. However, even if you take care of their survival process and don't make them work, still people won't be settled with life.

Stress is not a part of your life. Stress is just your inability to manage your own system. Stress happens not because of the nature of your work. The Prime Minister is complaining of stress, the peon is also complaining of stress. In between, every other person is saying his job is stressful. And those who are unemployed also find their situation stressful. So you are suffering your job – if I get you fired, will you be joyful?

No. So stress is obviously not about your job, isn’t it? It is just that you do not know how to manage your body, your mind, your emotions, your energy, your chemistry – you do not know how to manage anything. You are functioning by accident, so everything is stressful. If you get into a car where if you turn the steering wheel one way, the car goes in the opposite direction, you’ll be stressed, isn’t it?

Right now, that’s the kind of mechanism you are driving. Without understanding anything about it, just by chance, you are blundering through life – so you will be stressful. Stress is not because of the nature of the activity that you are performing or because of life situations. Stress is simply because you do not know how to manage your own system. What is stressful for one person, someone else breezes through

Changing the context of your life

So stress is just an inability to manage the inner situation, not the outer situation. Essentially, the quality of our lives changes and transforms not because we change the content of our lives, but only because we change the context of our lives. 

If you look at your ability to handle various situations in your life, is it better when you are feeling very happy or unhappy? When you are joyful, you are willing to take up any number of things and do it. When you are stressed, you don't want to do even the simplest things - it sets up a different kind of momentum within you. So the first and foremost thing we need to work at is to make a human being peaceful and joyful. This will invariably happen if you do the right type of yoga. If it is done properly - because yoga is a subjective science - if it is delivered properly, it will work like a miracle and make this happen.

Thanks,

Team Deep Dive

How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself ? A student tells Sadhguru that whenever things are going well in her life, she starts feeling that things will soon fall apart. She asks Sadhguru how she can handle these monstrous inner voices.

Excerpts from Sadhguru Conversation:

Q: I have a tendency to sabotage myself when things are going really well. Can Shambhavi Mahamudra help me break this pattern?

Sadhguru: So you like to play solitaire and you want to be your own opponent. There is sufficient life happening around to play with, you do not have to play with yourself. When you are by yourself, it is time to tend to yourself, to grow and evolve – not to create competition inside. If you play a double game inside of you and it manifests itself well, you will become schizophrenic. The sadhana that has been given to you has been given only after some fundamental preparation that makes you see that you are an individual.

An individual means, it is not further divisible. This is just one, you cannot make two out of it; but people are always busy trying to make two out of it. You said, “I sabotage myself.” But usually, people will say, “I’m doing great, but my ego comes in.” Where is the ego? Their ego, their soul, their consciousness and super-consciousness comes in – they have become many characters in one, which is not safe. There is only one here – just you.

The first and foremost thing is to establish that there is no other factor, “Everything that is being generated as an experience within me is my doing.” We have sufficiently established this in the programs that you have gone through.

In India, it was common in previous generations to hear people say, “It is my karma,” which means, “It is my doing. My life is my making; it is not somebody else’s making. It is not something else influencing me; it is me.” This is very important. If you do not establish this one factor, you will keep playing these games for the rest of your life.

The sadhana that has been given to you is designed to establish the individual, to strengthen and stabilize the individual, so that there are no two inside; there is only one. Once this happens, these games will recede. Initially, you have to start with a commitment. No matter what, the next one year, you are going to do the practice. Whether it gives you any benefit or not – just do it. Do not look every day at “What’s happening? Did this happen, did that happen?”’ – No, just do it. I am not advertising for any product. Just do it, okay?

Thanks,

Team Deep Dive

Are you breathing and eating the right way? Sadhguru offers a Yogic perspective on these two vital aspects of life, and gives us three simple tips to stay energized throughout the day.

In general, what is the connection between our body and our mind?

The Yogic system does not identify the body and mind as two different entities. It is just that what we generally refer to as mind is a certain amount of memory and intelligence. Your brains are part of your body. People generally think the brain is everything just because it handles the thought process. But between the brain and the rest of the body, which has more memory and intelligence? If you look at it carefully, your body’s memory goes back millions of years. It clearly remembers how your forefathers were. The mind cannot claim that kind of memory. When it comes to intelligence, what is happening in a single molecule of DNA is so complex that your whole brain cannot figure it out. In the Yogic system, there is a physical body and there is a mental body – an intelligence and memory running right across the body.

The type of food we eat has a huge impact on the mind. An average American is said to consume 200 pounds of meat per year. If you bring it down to 50 pounds, I would say 75% of the people will not need antidepressants anymore. Meat is a good food to survive if you are out in the desert or the jungle. If you are lost somewhere, a piece of meat will keep you going, because it provides concentrated nourishment. But it should not be a daily food that you eat when there are other choices.

There are many ways to look at this. One aspect is that animals have the intelligence to know in the last few moments that they are going to get killed, no matter how cunningly or how scientifically you do it. Any animal that has the capacity to express some kind of emotion will always grasp when it is going to be killed. Suppose you come to know, right now, that at the end of this day, you are going to get slaughtered. Imagine the struggle that you would go through, the burst of chemical reactions within you. An animal goes through at least some fraction of that. This means when you kill an animal, the negative acids and other chemicals are in the meat. When you consume the meat, it creates unnecessary levels of mental fluctuations in you.

For most of those who have become mentally ill, the illness is not pathological but has been cultivated. Such a large percentage of people cannot be mentally sick unless we are somehow culturing it within our social fabric.

If you put people who are on antidepressants on a conscious vegetarian diet, in about three months’ time, many of them will not need their medication anymore. We have seen this with many people who have come to the Isha Yoga Center.

Thanks,

Team Deep Dive

Sadhguru gives a Yogic perspective on health and explains how Yogic practices are focused on bringing balance to the energy body, which naturally brings physical and mental health.

When it comes to a chronic ailment, whatever may be the ailment, the root cause for it is always in the energy body. Your energy body functions the way it functions for various reasons. It may be because of the kinds of atmospheres you live in, the kind of food that you eat, the kinds of relationships that you hold or because of your emotions, attitudes, thoughts and opinions. It may also be because of certain external energy situations that disturb your internal energy. In some way, your energy body is disturbed which will naturally manifest both physiologically and psychologically. Once this one layer of the body—the energy body—is disturbed, the mental body and the physical body are bound to be disturbed. Actually it becomes a doctor’s concern only after it becomes a medical problem. Till then it is not a doctor’s concern because there is no physiological manifestation.

Unfortunately, medical science understands only disease.  It does not understand the roots of health, as to where it comes from and what the basis of health is. If you are a diabetic, sugar is not the problem with you. It is just that your pancreas is not functioning properly. As an emergency measure you reduce the sugar intake because in the Allopathic system of medicine, they have no other way to activate your pancreas, so this is the only measure they have taught you—“check your sugar every day and take a little more insulin”. The Allopathic system is symptomatic in treatment—the doctor looks at your symptoms and gives you the treatment.

Allopathic system is a fantastic system for any infections. Allopathy is the best thing as I see for anything that comes to your body from outside. But it does not offer any solution for the simple ailments which man is creating for himself from within, like diabetes, blood pressure, or migraine headaches. Modern medical science only offers to manage the diseases and never really talks about freeing you from those diseases. There are whole systems of medicine and so many kinds of specialists to manage diseases within certain limitations. A lot of money and time is being spent on just managing those diseases. It is just like people talking about stress management. People want to manage their stress, people want to manage their diabetes, people want to manage their blood pressure. It is ridiculous. This kind of foolishness has entered, simply because they have not understood the fundamentals of how their own life energies function.

In yoga, if there is diabetes, we see it as a very fundamental disturbance—diabetes is not taken lightly as a disease. We see that the fundamental structure of the basic body is being disturbed. That is why diabetes happens. And it is different in each individual. For each person, the level of disturbance and the type of disturbance that happens in each system is very different. So it needs to be handled individually. However, irrespective of what the disease is, yoga only aims at balancing and energising or activating the energy body. The basic premise in yoga is that if your energy body is in full flow and properly balanced, there can be no chronic disease either in your physical body or your mental body. Diabetes will go because we are not treating the disease as such, we are seeing disease only as a manifestation of the disturbance that could be existing in the energy body.

So if people are willing to do a certain amount of sadhana to balance and activate their energy body, they can definitely be free of all chronic ailments.

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Responding to a question on coping with job loss during the pandemic, Sadhguru offers a profound perspective and reminds us of the most precious things which are still with us – our life and that of our loved ones.

Few other tips by Sadhguru for a fulfilling personal and work life:

1. MANAGE YOURSELF: What you identify as stress, fear or anger doesn't happen because of what's around you, but due to your own faculties not taking instructions from you. If your mind was taking instructions from you, it would create pleasantness, not unpleasantness. It is your inability to manage your own system that causes this problem. Assume control over your own being, and everything will be fine.
2. GET THE CONTEXT RIGHT: If somebody's life is happy, it does not mean that he is doing something differently. He does the same things you do after he wakes up in the morning, or before he goes to bed at night. But somehow, his life seems magical and beautiful because of the context in which it is being seen. The quality of your life does not depend on how simple or complex it is; it depends on how you look at it.
3. BE ACTIVE, BUT HAPPY: You do not have to be ambitious to be incessantly active; it works even if you are joyful. If there's no stress in what you're doing, you will be willing to be active any number of hours per day. Being driven is overrated; you function best in an environment of freedom and intelligence.
4. DON'T LOSE PERSPECTIVE: Stress is the natural by-product of human beings losing perspective of what this life is all about. Their psychological process has become far larger than the existential process. That is the fundamental source of all suffering. Everything around you may be going pretty well, but just one wrong thought or emotion could destroy everything.
5. MIND YOUR THOUGHTS: Your mind is society's trashcan. Everyone who passes by stuffs something into your head. You have no choice about what to take, and what to discard. If you take another look at this knowledge, you will realise it's just something that is expected from you; it has nothing to do with who you are.
6. APPRECIATE REALITY: Life is about making the most of your reality, knowing it absolutely, and experiencing it just the way it is. There's no real need to distort it. If your thoughts and emotions seem important, your whole attention will focus right there. But that is a psychological reality, not existential. Stress is not showered upon us, it is manufactured.
7. DON'T PURSUE HAPPINESS: Today, we seek happiness so vigorously that we threaten the very existence of our planet. Don't be in pursuit of happiness; instead, know how to appreciate and express it. If you look back, you will find that the most beautiful moments in your life were those in which you were expressing your joy - not seeking it.
8. TRANSFORM WHAT'S WITHIN: The quality of your life is not determined by the clothes you wear or the bank balance you hold. Rather, it depends upon how peaceful and joyous you are inside. People deprived of basic needs may be physically miserable, and therefore in need to rectify their circumstances. But the needs of most others are not decided by what they have, but how they are at that moment.
9. GET YOUR MIND TO RELAX: Let's look at the various factors that influence us from dawn to dusk. If you did not sleep well last night, even your morning could be bad. As it's the level of relaxation that makes all the difference, it is necessary to keep your system relaxed in a way that activity doesn't take a toll on it. You could be physically exhausted, but it wouldn't stress you out in any way. Simple yoga can help.

Sadhguru looks at how our personality is self-created, and how we would be at out best if we could consciously wear the mask of personality and take it off as the situation demands.

The self cannot be nurtured. It is so absolute that it does not need nurture. It cannot be transformed into something else, because what you call the self is also the basis of creation. If you are talking about your personality as a “self,” your personality does not need nurture either – it needs dissolution. In the East, the goal has always been to dissolve the personality. This is the fundamental difference between the Eastern and the Western approach.

he self as the basis of creation does not need any nurture. If you refer to your personality as a “self,” this does not need nurture either.

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Sadhguru explains how fierceness and compassion are the qualities of the feminine, embodied by Linga Bhairavi - the ultimate woman.

Sadhguru talks about the three fundamental qualities of the Divine Feminine, and explains how we can make use of Navratri, or the nine auspicious nights dedicated to Devi, to hasten our spiritual growth.