1.11: Trauma

The buddhists say that when misfortune strikes, two arrows fly. The first is the incident itself and the second is our reaction to it. The first arrow is the moment. This second arrow is everything else. The second arrow is our trauma, our stories, our reaction, our memories. Everything but the moment. Everything else we cling to about the moment itself.

This concept is also backed up by science. Harvard brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor says that ninety seconds is all it takes to identify an emotion and allow it to disappear. "After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological reaction, over and over again."

This is the same thing Pantanjali is speaking about in the yoga sutras, in Sutra 1.11. "Recollection or memory (smriti) is mental modification caused by the inner reproducing of a previous impression of an object, but without adding any other characteristics from other sources. (anubhuta vishaya asampramoshah smriti)"

All of these philosophers and scholars are speaking of the same thing. Every single thing in life that we experience gets deposited into what Pantanaji calls our chitta, our mind. The moment itself is fleeting - someones unkind words, unkind actions, one email, one sentence, one text, one post. The moment itself is a second - but everything we hold onto about that moment is our recollection, our memory, our "smriti."

When we first start yoga, being silent in the moment can be tremendously challenging and painful, because our memory, our smriti, keeps showing up. Keeps telling us a story about who we are, what we've done, our past hurts or suffering.

The more we practice yoga, the more we learn to meditation, the more we learn to manage it. The more we get really skilled at sitting with our whole mind and sorting out what matters and what does not. The more skilled we get at letting go. The more we see that it's all a story playing out in our own minds and we have the power to let it go. The more we practice, the more skilled we get at letting "the sand settle and the water clear."

This is one of the most important parts of spiritual practice. Working with memory. This is yoga.