Articles by Prakash

The High Road of Not Knowing What Comes Next

Untangling the web of emotions that surrounds the current world situation can be quite the daunting task, especially when one sees a train of unfolding traumatic events around them: economic, ecological, and social dislocations everywhere you look. What’s going to come next? Is my job safe? Is my family’s future secure? These are the burning issues of our time – and to a large extent this is also the whip we use to drive ourselves to distraction and suffering. The anxiety we feel when confronting these questions stems from the control paradigm that we thought had so successfully served us our entire lives.

Consider: we have spent our lives learning the “right” skills, getting into the “right” schools, finding the “right” neighborhood to live in, marrying the “right” partner, etc. because everyone told us that’s the way to be happy and successful. And all along the way we acquired something else as well – a string of habits – that crept in unnoticed. Habits, you say? What habits? Well, the foremost habit that we form at an early age is seeking our happiness in things and people outside ourselves – new toy, new friend, new experiences… the list goes on. And at each stage the expectation forms that “if only I could have that then everything will be ok”. These expectations become lodged in us in the form of habits, until before we know it we’re working to keep our habits comfortable instead of ourselves.

So when we see the world shifting and changing rapidly around us, and we’ve invested our happiness in those very things which our habits have collected and surrounded us with, it should not be surprising that feelings of anxiety and fear begin to surface into our awareness. In our anxiety to secure our happiness outside of us we go to extraordinary lengths to attempt to control people, places and things around us, never realizing that all the time we’re struggling to support the comfort level of our habits, not ourselves.

What to do? Well, the first step is to recognize what’s going on – look to your own life and see for yourself if the above description rings true. Once we see this (and accept it) the next step is to look for a way out of the trap – a way out of this paradigm that depends on lining up events and situations around us so that we can be happy. And when we look, we find a central operating assumption and driving urge at the center of this mess: the need to know what comes next. It’s inextricably linked to the habit of controlling externals to maintain our happiness. In this model, the perfect world is one in which everything is known, everything is predictable, a place for everything and everything in its place.

This may be what we tell ourselves we want, but has that actually ever come to pass? And what sort of world would this be for us anyway – everything neat, orderly, predictable – is that what life is really all about? And the obvious answer to that is “of course not” – but it’s what our habits want! To break the old paradigm, we must break the core assumption – the core habit and this means launching an assault on our habits’ comfort zone and embrace the unknown! The Roman historian Tacitus observed that “the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.”

Our need to know what comes next turns into the fear that tries to run our lives. But what is fear- what is anxiety: sensation in the chest, tightness in the throat, a shrinking towards the core. Can we let these sensations in the body pass through us without turning them into some dramatic story in the mind? If we can let go of the fear, let go of the need to know, the sensations that we try at all costs to get away from turn into our greatest asset. If we can learn to embrace these feelings of anxiousness and fear they will mobilize the body and senses, heightening awareness, creativity, and alertness – bringing us into an optimum state of readiness to deal with the events and tasks at hand.

Practical methods and techniques to achieve just this will be presented in an experiential seminar at the Amrit Yoga Institute entitled “Relaxing into Uncertainty – Letting Go of the Need to Know”. Call 352-685-3001 or visit www.amrityoga.org for details.

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