Yoga - Sources of your pain

There are five major sources of your pain and they are cumulative, meaning they build upon each other.

These sources of pain are primarily tensions or holdings in your thoughts and manifested in your body.  A newborn child is tension free both in the mind and body.  Everything is malleable.

The conditions of life surrounding the child create tensions within its body allowing it to stand up and move against gravity.  Additionally the mental perceptions of its parents and guardians set up tensions in its brain.

If the child has malformations or incurs significant injuries in its formative years, its body must develop compensating tensions that often put long-term strain on the these compensating muscles, tendons, bones, organs, ...etc.

If the child is subjected to mal-informed or injurious mentalities, then its brain develops compensating mechansims to deal with these unknown and potentially dangerous thoughts.

Yoga addresses five primary pain-causing mental conceptions (KLESHAS) that most, if not all humans are born with.

Each KLESHA is built upon the other and in order to address them you must take them in baby-steps, working through the most external first.

The external  KLESHA is named ABHINIVESHA and stands for your desire to sustain your life, or your "fight for life."  This klesha commiserates with a fear of death.  This fear of death, ABHINIVESHA, is universally held by all creatures.  

From ABHINIVESHA stems the klesha DWESHA.  DWESHA not be adequate explained without discussing its underlying klesha, RAGA.  Dwesha is in essence the equal and opposite response to RAGA. 

RAGA is the desire to repeat a pleasurable experience again and again.  DWESHA is the desire to never repeat the pain experienced from the loss of pleasure.

They are two sides of the same coin and all stem from an underlying attachment to 'feelings' or states of being induced through your senses.  This attachment to your 'sense' of self is the klesha, ASMITA.

ASMITA produces your sense of I-ness.  I am this, I am that, etc.


ASMITA is really the paradox of seer and seen.  Are you the senses of the objects or are you that which senses?

You build attachments to all the things you think are important to your existence, those ideas and concepts which you think define you.  These attachments are capable of giving you pleasure when validated and pain when contradicted.  


The attachments of your defining thoughts (ASMITA) lead to desires to repeat the pleasures of validation (RAGA) or avoid the pains of rejection (DWESHA).

ASMITA stems from the root klesha AVIDYA.  AVIDYA is a psychosis where your perception doesn't match reality.  


Have you ever been walking in the dark and mistaken a shadow as something dangerous lurking in the night?

A stump is mental transformed into a hulking bear and AVIDYA is thus experienced.


Whatever concoctions of ideas brewed up a mistaken identity, a falsehood, are not real and are but a symptom of mental phantoms....perceptions gone awry.

By turning a consistent focus on your kleshas the mental tensions they create can be reduced and potentially eliminated all-together.  They can only be altered and removed through significant focus and open attention.  

Open attention is a must.  You must be able to hold the uncomfortable thought in your mind without allowing emotional responses, such as sorrow or anger.   To do otherwise is to allow your emotional compensations to overshadow your logic.  


You must hold cognitive dissonance until it bothers you no longer.  You must sit with the shadows of yourself to free yourself from fear or judgment.

To start, confront all the attachments you are holding onto so fiercely.  Those attachments that produce your fear of death, your desire to repeat pleasure, your repulsion from pain and how they mix with your perceptions or "senses" of self.