Mastering the Mind. By Bikram Choudhury in his book, “Bikram Yoga”
You will also require the will to insist on going- even when people are telling you you’re stupid to do so – and the discipline to make yourself try over and over again, to never give up no matter what the obstacles, until you reach your goal. You need both mental toughness and physical toughness. In all there are five qualities of mind that you have to instill; faith, self-control, determination, concentration and patience. Like the eight forms of yoga, they operate interdependently and simultaneously. The good news is that you’re already learning them. As you continue to improve your body in Bikram Yoga classes, you will also naturally increase all five Raja Yoga powers. And your mind will be tested and toughened under the duress that only my Torture Chamber and my unrelenting Dialogue can supply. You will become distraction proof, emotion-proof, mood-proof, attitude-proof yogi, because you have entered into cosmic consciousness. Here’s how.
First, understand that the mind is at once the most important and the most complicated subject in human life. With a foundation of mental strength, you can truly accomplish anything.
Without control of mind, you can do nothing. You have something, but you don’t know how to use it. The greatest challenge we face as human beings is controlling and properly using our own minds.
The mind is the communications system between the physical body and the Soul or Spirit; its primary responsibilities are to control the body and supply the Spirit with immediate and exact information. When the mind instead gives distracted and wrong information, the Spirit cannot govern properly – in fact, it cannot assume control at all. The ego-driven mind has had to rule for itself, and now it does not want to give up its ultimate authority over your life. This is a bitter, perverse fact about human beings, but it is the truth.
Without proper training, the mind will continue to give you the wrong information and divert your focus from your Spiritual goals. The way it does that so successfully is with fear and desire – its primary weapons. Like a drug dealer, the mind gets addicted to these two opposite but conjoined emotions, and when we are constantly reacting to our attractions and aversions to people, things and situations, we can’t see what really is and reopen the channels of our true Self, the Spirit. That’s why I say that the mind has become our worst enemy.
To overcome this will not be easy. The weak mind is ever growing, constantly feeding on your fears and negative habits. And as my Guru taught me, the natural human attraction to something negative is NINE TIMES more powerful than our gravitational pull to toward the positive– another inconvenient fact.
In the philosophy of yoga, we say there are five big negative behaviors, or Don’ts, which collectively are call Yama (in Sanskrit). They are: harming or injuring others; stealing; lying; possessiveness or greed; and neglecting or rejecting the Divine. The five Do’s, or Niyama, are keeping the body and mind pure; self discipline; training the senses; studying the Divine; and surrendering to it. Now think of our own life: Why are you so often drawn to the Yama, things you know are bad for you? Why is it so hard to resist them, to get off your fat, lazy butt and go to yoga class? The power of negative attraction. Negative attitudes and emotions are like black holes in space, so powerful that they swallow everything that passes in front of their mouths, so even light cannot escape.
Resisting them demands much mental strength and supreme control. By regularly practicing Hatha Yoga and developing your faith, self-control, determination, concentration, and patience, you can break those powerful distractions…..” Bikram Choudhury
If you take nothing else from this section, know that each time you are about to change an old negative habit you are going against something 9 times stronger than the positive change you are making.
I know this is true, coming from where I have walked; it literally felt like I was going up against an army of negative voices, to one solitary positive force.
But little by little you find your faith in your Self and your Spirit is walking with you cheering on each time you wrestle another choice from the mind. It is once again the two choices, mind or you.
Yoga is on your side.
I M Perfect lady 