« Balancing in yoga and life is a reflection of our inner state. Can we dance with change? Can we fall and try again with playfulness? Do we have the focus, skill, and attunement to find the still point within it all?” — Shiva Rea

SUTRA 4.11 Now Patanjali begins to turn back from his discussion of the goals of practice and once again focuses on our starting place and on the obstacles that must be overcome to move forward.  He addresses the vasanas, the combinations of mental harms that form our underlying psychological tendencies and that then manifest to shape our actions. SUTRA 4.11 and Samskaras, Vasanas, Somatic Awarness in this Episode.

In his poem Marmion, Walter Scott wrote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”  Patanjali suggests the same, but he goes further, saying that we not only weave tangled webs, but are woven ourselves into the web of delusion and otherness, our own minds working the loom.  But his is not a pessimistic statement.  He says that we, through our practice, our nonattachment, our yearning towards peace, toward unabusiveness, toward healing can cut the threads that bind us, one by one, until only a single thread, the strand of LOVE & devotion, is left whole.  It is this thread to which we should cling.  It is this thread that leads us away from the comfort of our self-made twilight and on into darkness unsounded, and passing through that darkness, on towards morning.  

… VENUSfrequency, like VENUS the powerful second planet from the sun, named after the ROMAN goddess of love and beauty. Called SHUKRA in SANSKRIT and VEDANTA terms, which means, “lucid, bright, clear”