“This Samskara is wrecking my life!”
This morning when I saw my husband my first words were, “This Samskara is wrecking my life!”
He said, at least you haven’t lost your sense of humor. You see, he knows I have this deep seated belief that, “I wreck things.” It comes from my first memory. I went downstairs after my bedtime because it sounded like everyone was having so much fun. Oh how I longed to be part of it. Grandma, who we lived with, mom and dad were all sitting around the TV laughing at “Red Skeleton.” Everyone was so happy. Then I came. My mom told me to go back to bed and my grandma said, “Barb, you know she loves Red Skelton.” And the yelling began. As I walked up the stairs in my pajamas with the little plastic feet and cuddled into a ball in my bed saying to myself, "I wreck things.” Sadly, this has been stuck there ever since.
It was so helpful to me when I read The Untethered Soul and learned of samskaras. Micheal Singer describes a samskara as “a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.”
Even Though on one hand I know I am a precious child of God. This samskara is clearly running my life at times. Deeper than my conscious thoughts and beliefs I want to hold about myself, this still exists as a blockage a sort of energy ball that lives inside me. This morning I woke up feeling like I was going to throw up. After not sleeping much because I kept waking up dreaming of giving someone covid and then they would give it to their family and then they give it to someone who has a baby and the baby would get really sick… These dreams are happening because a samskara has been activated.
We all have these samskaras. Anytime something painful happens and we hold onto it rather than letting it pass through us it stays in us as an energy pattern that is triggered from time to time when something similar happens.
You might wonder what similar thing happened that triggered this activation of the samskara? I had covid, and am on day 10 of my 10 day quarantine. My water heater is leaking more and more each day. Once I noticed this, I put off getting a new one as long as possible to avoid spreading covid.
Today is Friday and I don’t know if the water heater can last till Monday. So, I have someone coming out to replace it today, on the 10th day after my symptoms started. I’ve got my mask on, windows open, air cleaners going and haven’t been in that room except to quickly check that the water heater had not exploded. OK, that's a lot of precautions. Especially in light of the fact that according to the CDC we are allowed to see people while wearing a mask after 5 days after symptoms first appeared. In fact, my friend who is a doctor had to go back to work on day 6. My samskara does not care about any of this logic.
Well, what should we do when a samskara becomes active? First, it is important to know that when it comes up and is active it is an opportunity to heal it.
I used to try to talk to myself logically about what was true and by that I mean factual like everything I said above. This is never, ever helpful.
There are many ways that I use for healing, all of them include becoming present to what is happening.
In this post, I want to focus on Micheal Singer's teachings. He says we should relax and release it. It is important to observe it and not become involved in it by thinking. Rather than thinking, we are to be the witness of this energy, relax and release it. If we ignore our samskaras they will continue to live in our heart as a blockage and continue to run our life.
For more informations Micheal’s thoughts on releasing samskaras and living an untethered life, check out this great article on The Untethered Soul.
If the article resonates with you, I also highly recommend his book, The Untethered Soul, the Journey Beyond Yourself and his online course: Living From a Place of Surrender . These resources have empowered me to understand what is happening inside of myself and to be able to stand back and say with awareness what is actually happening in a new way. Today it started with, “This Samskara is wrecking my life!”
Blessings to you on your road to living an untethered life.
P.S. I wish I could tell you that with the awareness of the samskara that I wrote about in this blog, I was able to relax and release it - that I was totally healed. Not so! But I can tell you that God and I are in the process of healing it.
