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The etymology of the word “personality” comes from the Latin persona, which refers to a theatrical mask utilized by actors to disguise their true identities. Consider all of the masks that you may have placed on over time. Which of them have you ever forgotten to take off? Does your mask feel like a warm invitation or a rhino’s armoring?

Exploring the makeup of our personality is a necessary a part of remembering the ability and radiance of who we’re at our core essence. I had an incident as a toddler that gave rise to recent habits and ways of being that I used to guard myself against future pain. They concretized over time to shape a personality that was much different from who I used to be before. That version of me went unchallenged for many years until I asked the essential query—Who am I?

Once I started to analyze my personality, I used to be capable of see how seeds of experience that were planted way back had propelled me to act in certain ways and to form beliefs in regards to the world and my place in it that limited my potential. A worldview informed by pain and shame held me back from remembering my full self. Our personality consists of a cluster of our habits, that are formed by life experiences and our memory of them. This cluster is a coloring that obscures the true Self.

The teachings of yoga give us ways to know how experiences can and do shape our lives. The sage Patanjali, who is alleged to have been born sometime between the second and fourth centuries C.E., codified the oral teachings of the traditional rishis (original seers of yoga) into 196 aphorisms. The Sanskrit word sutra, which has the identical Latin root as suture, refers to a thread that’s woven through a text to attach and construct on wisdom that reveals truth. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras have 4 chapters that illuminate paths that result in spiritual freedom respectively.

Patanjali introduces the concepts of how our personalities are formed in the primary chapter of the Yoga Sutras, the Samadhi Pada, which is devoted to enlightenment, ways to clear the mind, and obstacles to yoga. It can be crucial to notice that the study of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras would take many lifetimes. What I offer is a solution to explore and introduce the concepts.

(Photo: Frames for Your Heart | Unsplash)

The Road Trip of Life

Imagine the moment you might be born. You arrive filled with potential. Whether born prematurely, in poverty, in illness, or in radiant health, there is a component of you that’s everlasting and infinitely luminous, untouched by external conditions. There may be an everlasting place inside each of us that is alleged to be effulgent and beyond all sorrow, which is my favorite translation of Yoga Sutra 1:36, viśokā vā jyotiṣmatī.

This luminosity will not be earned or granted to us in some merit-based system. It’s inherently a part of us and more sensible than the sun, moon, and all the sunshine within the galaxies, nevertheless it is veiled from our awareness. Remembering the luminous a part of ourselves is an element of our spiritual journey and a purpose in life.

Originally of the road trip, you might be behind the wheel of your vehicle and marvel at the large panoramic windshield in front of you. You start on the long road trip of life. You might be filled with infinite potential, and your vehicle has a special GPS configured to provide help to navigate life’s roads. That GPS is consistently sending you signals and signs of the right way to stay on the right track to return to remembering your true Self. That internal GPS is the wisdom of your soul, otherwise referred to as your intuition.

Samskara: Impressions of Life’s Experiences

If you may have ever been on a protracted road trip, you already know in regards to the inevitable first bug splat on the windshield. Do not forget that all the pieces we experience in life creates an impression, or samskara. Those impressions are like splats on the windshield, and so they occur on a regular basis. Scraping your knee at age five creates an impression. Learning to ride your bike creates an impression. Your grandmother dying creates an impression. Learning the right way to safely cross the road creates an impression. Falling in love creates an impression. Being betrayed creates an impression. Being told you’re a failure creates an impression. Experiencing the unconditional love of a pet creates an impression. As a toddler, being attacked for thriving as my uniquely nerdy self created an impression.

Life is a sequence of countless impressions and imprints. There isn’t any solution to escape them, so we file them away, categorizing them nearly as good, bad, or neutral. Our windshield is consistently covered. What’s on our windshield? How is it affecting our life? How can we gain clarity and reconnect to our innate gifts and wisdom?

Each of those memories is formed from a samskara, the bug colliding along with your windshield. A number of the bugs make little splats, and others make the type of huge yellow gooey splatters that make you’re thinking that to yourself, “I definitely need to wash my windshield at the subsequent gas station!”

But then on the gas station there’s a distraction—some chocolates you really need, an email dinging, your child needing your attention—and also you forget to clean the windshield. Off you go then, continuing your journey with a grimy windshield. You are trying the subsequent gas station, and there are not any resources or tools to clean your windshield—no water, no squeegee, no attendant to provide you a hand.

So you retain driving, and it just keeps accumulating increasingly more bugs. You are trying the windshield wipers and it creates an enormous smear. Now you’ll be able to’t really see what’s in front of you. All you see is a coloring. What you see through the windshield doesn’t accurately represent what’s out in front of you. You might have lost clarity, perception, and vision. You’ll be able to barely see the road ahead. After a protracted while, you forget that the windshield was ever clear. That dirty windshield seems perfectly normal. You might have forgotten that you may have an internal GPS since it is obscured by the coloring, and your attention is targeted externally.

Vasana: An Accumulation of Impressions

You retain driving and reacting in response to what you see on the windshield as an alternative of the truth of what’s ahead of you. At this point you could not even be on the road any longer. You change into a prisoner to the coloring that’s now on the windshield. That coloring is referred to as vasana, an accumulation of imprints that form a coloring of the mind. This coloring gives rise to habits or actions based in your response to the coloring. If the coloring stays on for too long, the habits change into concretized and change into our personality.

Avidya: Misperceptions Based on Impressions

We then change into attached to our personality because now we have forgotten who we actually are. Now we have forgotten our radiance. We consider that our personality is the entire of who we’re and forget that we’re wearing a mask made up of all of the coloring of life’s experiences. This could result in suffering. In yogic philosophy, the explanation for suffering is referred to as avidya, or misperception, ignorance, mistaken knowledge. Your dirty windshield has caused you to make mistaken turns and decisions because you might be in ignorance of your true nature, and also you lack clear sight.

This dirty windshield and the habits you may have formed by searching through it have now informed and concretized into your personality and your worldview, affecting the way you see the world, what you think about it, and the way you react to it. You might end up experiencing the identical things time and again and seemingly never learning the lesson.

You never stop to ask yourself, “What lesson am I uninterested in learning and why do I keep having the identical undesirable outcomes in life?” An unseen force is compelling you to proceed driving, though you may have forgotten why you might be driving and even where you is perhaps headed. Every on occasion, you will have a moment once you think you hear a voice otherwise you get inspired to make a turn in a recent direction. Still, something might hold you back from following through to the magical destination of infinite possibilities that’s just over the pass.

It’s easy to forget that there’s something great waiting for us when all we see is a grimy windshield. We’d like tools to get back heading in the right direction, practices to remind us that we will not be the automotive, the bugs, or the windshield. We’re radiant, infinite potential, and our true Self is waiting for us to recollect. The moment we realize that now we have lost our way, or have lost clarity, is a moment of transition. Now we have sparked a desire to search out ourselves again. We all know that something must change. We’d like to recollect who we actually are and start to act accordingly. But how?

Nobody can do the type of windshield cleansing you would like for you. A terrific psychotherapist can guide you, but ultimately you could do the work. You might have to be the one to clean the sticky caked-on coloring off of the windshield so you’ll be able to see again. Don’t worry—you don’t need to do it abruptly. All you would like is one tiny spot to start to achieve some clarity and momentum.

Power Washing the Windshield

Self-reflection, meditation, and deep leisure practices are like an influence wash for our windshield. We cannot escape impressions and the colorings created, as they’re all the time happening. But we are able to begin to burn the seeds of samskara, making them less potent or inert. And we are able to reduce the coloring on the windshield. You’ll need a handful of tools to start cleansing your windshield spot by spot.

Intentional Pause: Self-Inquiry

Devote just a few minutes for the next questions:

• How are your collected samskaras resulting in discomfort or stuckness in your life?
• Do you are feeling as if you might be at a transitional point in your life?

• What ways of being are you able to release?
• How would you wish to see your life change?

(Courtesy of Shambhala Publications)

Excerpted from The Luminous Self: Sacred Yogic Practices and Rituals to Remember Who You Are © 2023 by Tracee Stanley. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, Colorado. 

About Our Contributor

Tracee Stanley is the creator of the bestselling book Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Rest and Woke up Clarity and the founding father of Empowered Life Circle, a sacred community and portal of practices, rituals, and Tantric teachings inspired by greater than twenty-five years of studentship in Sri Vidya Tantra and the teachings of the Himalayan Masters. As a post-lineage teacher, Tracee is dedicated to sharing the wisdom of yoga nidra, rest, meditation, self-inquiry, nature as a teacher, and ancestor reverence. Tracee is presented in illuminating the magic and power present in liminal space and weaving devotion and practice into day by day life. She lives together with her husband and two dogs in northern Recent Mexico. Discover more about Tracee at www.traceestanley.com.