Samskaras – Uncovering Your True Self

At some point in our lives, we have faced challenging situations and our reaction has come from deep within us in a matter of microseconds, and after the episode is over, we just wonder “Where did that come from? If I have never faced something similar, why did I react that way?”. Some will say it is our survival instinct that kicked in, and some others may add it comes from our conditioning from childhood, but if we want to dig deeper, we can answer this question by looking deep into our own samskaras.

 What is a Samskara?

Samskara is a Hindu term defined beautifully by Geeta Vara in her Ayurveda blog “Samskara (deep emotional impressions)“: “The impression left behind from an intended action”. Throughout our many lifetimes, we have accumulated positive and negative samskaras, which remain imprinted in our soul until we choose to confront and heal them. Every intended action coming from our full awareness shapes our reality and becomes a samskara, first in our mind and then in our soul.

 As Tosca Park put it in her writing, “Samskaras: Unveiling our hidden habit pattern”, an analogy can be made with the statement “neurons that fire together wire together”. A samskara is created when we intentionally react with our thoughts, emotions, and sensations towards an external stimulus that gets imprinted in our souls and will follow us throughout our many lives. The different pathways developed by us become second nature, and we can say are the autopilot that governs our daily lives. It is not until we reach a certain level of awareness that we are able to spot them and start digging deep down in our subconscious mind to bring them to light and start the healing process, should we decide to go down the rabbit hole.

 How to Transform Negative Samskaras into Positive Samskaras

It is essential to note that our positive samskaras also play a role in our healing process as supportive guides. By bringing them to light, we gain greater confidence in ourselves, and it becomes easier to reach higher levels of compassion for our own souls. Geeta Vara, in her blog mentioned above, and Bo Forbes, in her writing “Stuck in a Rut?”, give eight (8) steps that could be followed in order to transform negative samskaras into positive life experiences:

1. Sankalpa (Sacred Intention)

2. Tapas (Intensity)

3. Shani (Slowing Down)

4. Vidya (Awareness)

5. Abhaya (Fearlessness)

6. Darshana (Visualization)

7. Dhyana (Meditation)

Only Geeta Vara mentions this step, 8. Abhyasa (Practice).

Navigating Life on Auto-Pilot

Our souls have been conditioned not only by our childhood experiences but also by our past life experiences, and most of us navigate every life with many blindfolds that are projecting a different picture, making us create different masks in order to navigate each one of those waters. The final goal is to lose every single one of those blindfolds and face our deep samskaras to transform them with love and compassion for ourselves so they can transmute into positive soul imprints that we can carry in our journey through our many lives.

Lose your Mask, Find your Truth

The collective consciousness in which we currently live our lives has presented ideas that create mass behaviors founded in superficial ideas that keep us distracted from our own healing and growth. The work is not an easy task; it represents taking a leap of faith and going down the rabbit hole to the deepest waters of our subconscious and our souls to bring light to an ocean of darkness that we decided to create to avoid every uncomfortable truth attached to our soul. As people born in this immediate rewards era, most of us are not willing to do it, or perhaps keep creating masks pretending we did reach that goal, however, those of us who will be willing to do the work will find a reward greater than anything the mind could possibly think, the reward will be getting to know your true self.

In the Spiritual Wellness Specialization program offered by the Natural Wellness Academy, students develop tools to assist others in reaching higher vibration, removing everything that no longer serves them, and transforming all those negative samskaras into positive life experiences full of light and true purpose.