Little deaths...

What does little deaths mean? To me, right now, it means little parts of you that are no longer serving you have died symbolically. So it's really an internal, mental and emotional thing. Not a "real" death but they say in the world of consciousness your body cannot determine if it really happened or not, it just feels the way it feels.

So in my morning practice for some years I've been struggling to again achieve this posture named Pashasana, to spell it phonetically. The biggest part of the problem was that I used to be able to do it easily many years back and after a gap in my Ashtanga practice have now come back to a different body trying to do this posture. Now though I've finally figured it out and am doing it again.

This morning though I felt like it might kill me, I was still able to do it and breath was good and all but afterwards I got the feeling I'd just let go of something. Symbolically allowing one of these "little deaths." Well, maybe I didn't allow it so easily and thats why it felt so intense lol, and it was intense.

I also think of Shiva, or Kali, who are destroying things, often only in one's consciousness, but it always has a physical or mento-emotional effect and dealing with it can be like dealing with a real death, and your body and mind often don't realise the difference, so flip out just a little bit. I'm not flipping out today, just noticing things. I'm in a really good place right now, so another time I might flip out, but so far today I'm not.

This isn't a bad thing, many will automatically think that it is. If something, some pattern, some emotional disturbance or mental impression, is no longer serving you why on earth would you want to hold on to it anyway? Let that shit go, and do it fully and this can change your life.

Often times in the life of an Ashtangi we can have the posture doing that work for us, so rather than the mind affecting the body, the body stirs up and awakens a samskara that we didn't necessarily know we'd held on to and then that affects you mentally or emotionally, or both, then you can just let it go, or deal with the problem Or just take a break and do whatever is needed to feel this thing move out of your body and mind and off into the wilderness.... So far today I'm not feeling anything needs worked through, just that a little part of me is gone. In a good way...

Part of my habit of going to temples each morning after my practice is to feel the energy there and allow that to sweep over and through me which can help in this process, today I went to a couple usual ones and then two Narasimhan temples, one Lakshminarasimhan and the other Yoganarasimhan, one in which he still is identifying with the world and the other where he is meditating and mostly dealing with the real of spirit, so it was symbolic in itself this journey this morning and I feel better for it. Ahhhh...

Do you notice this, or have anything similar?