Letting Go of the Past Without Forgetting
Margaret Schenkman, March 24, 2021
One of the most intriguing parts of my spiritual journey is the manner in which the practice helps me to let go – let go of anger, of fears — of the past. I think many of us have experienced past events that stayed with us, gnawed at us, kept us awake at night, and eventually became part of the fabric of our personality. I can recall numerous conversations in my head about what ‘he or she did to me’, how ‘I was wronged’, how ‘unfair the situation’. I have come to understand how exhausting it is to carry these conversations around with me, how they hold me trapped in the same behaviors that I then repeat over and over again throughout my life. And, most importantly, I have come to understand the tools available to me through Heartfulness meditation practices that help to transcend these conversations in my head.
To understand the experiences that hold us in their grips it is helpful to understand the concept of the impressions that become an integral part of ourselves. Consider two people who go out to a movie together. One might really love the movie, the other might find it quite distasteful. Yet it is the same movie. The movie is whatever it is, so their reactions are not inherent to the movie itself, but rather to the experiences that these two people brought to the movie, the experiences that shaped how they would see the movie. Everything we experience from the moment of birth until death has the potential to create impressions that then form the filter through which we perceive all subsequent life events. The Sanskrit word for these impressions is ‘samskaras’. These samskaras are not formed because of the event itself, but rather are formed because of our perception to the event. These samskaras shape how we interpret every event, circumstance, or person with whom we come into contact.
One way to think about samskaras is to think of a tape that we lay down in our consciousness. The more we play that tape, the stronger it becomes, until it becomes so much a part of ourselves that we may not even be aware of its presence. The tape keeps us from expanding our consciousness to something bigger, more inclusive, grander. One of the great gifts – and mysteries – of the Heartfulness practice is its great effectiveness in helping to remove those tapes.
Daaji – my current teacher – has said that “In order for me to be a new individual, I have to destroy my edifices, my old beliefs, my old samskaras…” My first profound experience of ‘deep samskara removal’ came a few years into my spiritual journey. I had taken a ten-day vacation to experience meditating with Chariji – the head of the Heartfulness practice at that time. On the last day, I was meditating with a trainer and had the sense that there was some ‘hole’ inside me. In exploring that ‘hole’ I realized that a deep-seated fear was gone. I recognized for the first time the constant fears that my parents expressed as I was growing up. My mother worried that if she left the gravy on the counter we would all get sick. Both parents worried that if I rode my bike on the road, I would be hit by a car. When I was about 13 and my sister 15, we took a train every two weeks to a town two hours away to take piano lessons from our uncle, a musician. My parents were always afraid we would be molested. The fear conversations were endless and simply part of our life. What I didn’t realize is that my parents’ fears had set up fears in me not attached to anything real. I hadn’t realized the ‘warning voice in my head’ that ran a constant tape of fear; it was simply a part of who I was. With the feeling of the ‘hole’ I realized that I had been carrying a sense of fear unbeknownst to me and that it had been removed. I was amazed – first that I had carried unwarranted fears for most of my life and second how confining and tiring it was to carry them with me. This was just one example of the life altering experiences that I have had over the years. From that time forward, I marveled at how I could ‘sit with my eyes closed’ and such profound changes could manifest. Over the years, I have observed as more and more layers over my personality are being peeled away, letting me see the more basic and unobstructed personality underneath.
The manner in which the Heartfulness practice facilitates these changes is fundamentally simple, but totally mysterious. The practice includes two methods to clear away samskaras. The first is to sit at the end of the day and use subtle will power to let go of all impressions accumulated during the day. I understand from my teachers that the impressions that stay for more than a day or so become too deeply embedded to remove them myself, which is why the daily practice is recommended to remove impressions. The older more embedded impressions can be removed by the second method, meditation with a trainer, who uses yogic transmission to dislodge and remove them. As a scientist this sounds simply impossible. Yet I have experienced, over and over again, the gradual clarity that comes through meditating regularly with a trainer. Not all clarity comes as abruptly and distinctly as when I realized that aspects of fear had been removed but observing the changes over the past decades, it’s clear to me that somehow a gradual transformation does occur!