Living Your Truth with Discernment
“Obscurity is dispelled by augmenting the light of discernment, not by attacking the darkness.”~ Socrates
When I was younger, I would befriend ANYONE, usually try to buy their friendship with ice cream. I thought that’s how friendships worked! Overtime, however, life taught me to master my capacity to live more meaningfully and with awareness—also known as using good judgment or discernment. Like only giving ice cream to my real friends, not phonies.
Finding this discernment almost always comes with maturity, since it’s only overtime we can look back and see that the trajectory of our lives is in direct proportion to the decisions we made.
With these decisions, people often say to master your fear or go directly at what scares you in order to overcome it. Like this quote, “there is no illusion greater than fear,” Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching said. This is very true, but only to a certain extent.
While fear can hold us back from doing things that scare us, fear also acts as our alert system. Like for example, a toxic relationship where you’re being manipulated or a friendship with no reciprocity—fear lets us know something is wrong, discernment helps us gauge how wrong it is.
Our yoga practices help us to hone our capacity for living more meaningful and authentic lives. There are two options for living, either in suffering (kleshas) or with integration (samadhi). When we forget about our specific truth, we tend to live in confusion (avidya) that causes stress and suffering. Through the process of self-awareness and the practice of discernment, we’re able to make choices in our life from our true Self, not the Self that is in pain or ruled by our ego.
Living each day with discriminative awareness helps us notice the fundamental difference, and truth, between being and doing.
This idea has been around in yogic philosophy for ages. And in this translation here of the Sutras by Rev. Jaganath, he says Patanjali talks about viveka—or discriminative discernment—as a key to removing blocks from perceiving one’s true nature.
Sutra 2.26: viveka-khyātir aviplavā hāna-upāyaḥ
Uninterrupted discriminative discernment is the method for its removal (Swami Satchidananda translation). The remedy that removes ignorance is an unwavering flow of discriminative discernment (viveka) which perceives the difference between the Seer and seen (Rev. Jaganath translation).
In actual practice, this means doing the hard work of turning off the constant generation of opinions about what is happening, how we feel about others, and especially how we feel about ourselves.
The practice is simple, but difficult, try it.
Every time you notice that you are attaching to some idea about who you think you are or should be, just drop it in your mind. Return to just being in the moment right here, right now by describing one thing you taste, one thing you see and one thing you feel This is not a process of reducing any thoughts or emotions. In fact, it’s not about thinking at all but rather about being, just being.
Now we must ask ourselves. Can we align with the deep calmness and awareness underlying all of our thoughts, emotions and actions? What about getting rid of identifying with fleeting experiences as a new normal way of being and living? Can we set our intention to abide in more awareness?
Like learning a new language where you’re paying attention to new words and phrases, it can take some time to establish the rhythm of discriminative awareness. We’re more accustomed to discursiveness than merely being. But overtime through practices such as meditation, non-attachment, deep breathing and more, you will notice a gradual progression to connecting with your Self.