Yoga on Obstacles and Distractions (Chitta Viksepa): The Challenge of The Human Condition

Yoga on Obstacles and Distractions (Chitta Viksepa):  The Challenge of The Human Condition

We find ourselves in soured states of being in many times in our lives. Example:  The relationship failed.  Irritation and, the behavior that ensues as a result, of small interruptions and changes out of control plague us.  We get depressed. We battle superiority and inferiority.  We run from our thoughts, feelings, past, or fear.  After we run from something we go to something else or someone else projecting the dis-ease of our life.  We, simply, are addicted to the more base components of the human experience. 

Though there is much debate concerning the truest account of yoga’s origins amongst Hindu and other religious theologists, historians, philosophers, and yogi’s and yogini’s.  The one constant in yoga, as it was intended, was to inform and assist the descendants of the human race in their journey to becoming less attached to our multiple sensory experiences in this life in order to be able to perceive and feel contentment, inner peace, connectedness, and oneness with all living things.

The Chitta Viksepa, or Causes of Modification of the Mind, is a line of thought, informational, and instructional, laid out in the Yoga Sutra’s of Pantanjali.  Some yoga experts argue that the Yoga Sutra’s are the foremost authority on yoga (others argue that the authoritative texts are the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, The Upanishads, and other texts). The Yoga Sutra’s are mostly written like a line of thought that resemble a philosophical arguments in format.  With a starting point beginning in the first sutra, the consecutive texts continue to build on the first and beginning sutra.  All sutra’s point to one thing… the attainment of a state of detachment. This is a vague term, but, you can easily come to know the context of this idea of detachment and what it means to become detached and how it is life changing. 

We are fortunate to have our many experts on yoga that have compiled the information for us and presented it to us in many different ways.  B.K.S Iyengar wrote in his book Light On Yoga in 1966 about the Obstacles and Distractions.  He outlines this easily for us in Light On Yoga.

We go deeper into the Obstacles and Distractions in our next blog.

Emily Kathryn Narayan, RYT

---