Patanjali's Yoga Sutra

I found listening to this Video, while reviewing the summary text below provides a rich understanding of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra

Listen to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pkxuZmfK2A

Read while listening: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/yogasutr.htm

Enjoy. 

Ways of behaving

Source - Patanjali's Yoga Sutra

People are either happy or unhappy. People engage in virtuous or demonic acts.

·      Be friendly with those who are happy; be friends with them and celebrate with them, else you will feel envy

·      With unhappy people, if you become friendly, you will become unhappy; instead be compassionate towards them. That is very quite different to pitying them.

·      People who are doing meritorious work, feel happy with them – be one with them. Then competition disappears. Criticism mostly comes from those who do little. Be one with them.

·      Ignore those who are doing sinful acts. Instead, we talk about them all the time. Our newspapers are filled with all the gory details. Educate them (compassion) and ignore them. 

I  I just marvel at the wealth of wisdom in our sacred texts!

Feedback

Giving/Receiving Feedback

So what’s great or not so great about receiving and giving feedback? Why do we find it difficult to either give feedback or receive feedback?

Deep within us is a deep desire to receive acknowledgement, to feel we are doing well, that we are ok. Truth is we seek a confirmation that we are well liked and appreciated for whom we are and what we do. Painfully, when we receive feedback this expectation is not met

Most of our lives we go about collecting artifacts, symbols, materials and possessions that help us to gain more influence to manage and cope with the world around us. Our possessions reveal us and what we wish to be.

Our clothes, accessories, and possessions are carefully cultivated to ‘show’ who we are and establish linkages with the world we wish to belong to. We all wish to belong, to establish a niche for ourselves, and to anchor ourselves, to mobilize our becoming.

Yet feedback is still a very delicate subject for each of us. It requires a skill: the ability to ‘give feedback’. But is that enough. Is feedback skills a sufficient condition?

I argued in a previous blog, that only when a student is ready, a teacher appears. So too, I maintain, that the effectiveness of feedback is best, when the recipient is ready to receive the feedback.  Feedback needs to be ‘thanked’ if it is going to work.

 If feedback is just received, understood, it can be rather painful. Preparing the other for a feedback session is more critical than the act of giving feedback. 

The timing for feedback is critical. It must be well timed for it to be useful. A leader needs to be on the look out for such ‘coaching moments’.

Feedback and Coaching go together. Which means rather than give feedback, help set up the exploration:

·     “Elena, that did not go very well for you, it seems. What do you think went wrong?”

·     Instead of ‘what is the problem’ ask: What would be the outcome you would most like?

·     What would you do differently the next time?

·     What is this incident helping you to learn about yourself?

·     What is the one thing, you know that you must start doing / stop doing?

·     How important is this for you to get right?

It seems to me, that what is ‘imploded from within’ receives ownership. Unless we get the other to define the problem, gather data for analysis, analyze the data, make sense of it (interpret it), own the problem, resolve the options for resolution, and evaluate the results, true change will not occur.

Feedback is not about focusing on the issue: the issues on the ‘table top”. Instead feedback and coaching must focus on working simultaneously with the modes of thinking, modes of feeling and the modes of acting. We need to provide the client with insight into those core processes, and not just with what comes up on the table top.

Marshall Goldsmith wisely argues that Feedback as a tool should be replaced by Feed Forward. Feed forward is the process where you encourage employees to come to you with an issue they want resolved, a behavior they want to alter. This brings the focus on the future rather than the past.

Read more about feed forward on this link.

(http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/cim/articles_display.php?aid=110)

Be Responsible

Be responsible for your actions and become free!

We play a game all the time.

More than ever, we look for causation for the negativity we hold within ourselves. As we understand more of ourselves, we try and assign cause to forces outside ourselves: the systems outside, people who impacted us negatively and to whom we hold them responsible.  A parent, a past incident that betrayed our trust, binds us in reinforcing our view. Watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcVu6fgN3-g

We want to be free of this negativity, and ask repeatedly, how do we break free? Ironically we collude with our ‘hell’ yet ask for methods to break free. Psychoanalysis, then fuels the phenomena, rather than eradicate it. It goes on assigning cause to something ‘outside’. We invest in our hell: it makes us feel portent. It gives us energy, even if it is negative. It feeds the ego.

The ego, which is our shadow, a fiction, we have formulated; an invention acts as a barrier to viewing reality. Human action is not causal: it does not respond to cause and effect. It is not a science, not subject to analytical thinking, does not lend itself to an algorithm.  Behavior is a function of location and the identity – it is a locale from which springs thought, feeling and action. We are not mechanistic, that we like animals respond to the stimuli outside. We have choices, that spring from our human consciousness, to make choices, beyond frozen patterns, beyond past actions. The past can cast a shadow suggesting a programmed behavior, but we have the responsibility, to change the course of our response. I argued in an earlier blog, that an organization is perfectly designed. It is, because of the investment made to keep it that way. If the outcome is negative, then to, it is because the systems are designed to keep it ineffective.

First though, we must take responsibility for ourselves. We must hold ourselves responsible for what is happening to us. We must take responsibility for how we are perceived, understood and dealt with. Truth be said, we deserve what we get.

This choice is not of fatality, of being mortgaged to our past. This choice is a living agenda to redefine and make choices: new ones.  These new choices that help us to move us away from inevitable patterns that lead to inevitable consequences. We need to ‘let go’, accept fully what is. Let go, is not about dropping something, run to the other side. It simply means, let it be and observe. Allow to let what is happening, happen, unconditionally. By and by, you will become aware that it is the only way. Relax. Let the phenomena continue, neither defy or deny it. Neither renounce or denounce it. Neither accuse or defuse it. Just watch it.

Allow yourself to be. Become a conduit. Stay responsive. Let your poetry emerge, drop being the poet. Let the dance emerge, stay away from being the dancer.

Transformation springs from taking responsibility. Holding oneself accountable.

Your Shoe reveals you

Let's begin with a small exercise ....Match the people with the shoes they wear....

1. 

2.

3.

4.

A 

B 

 C

D

E                                                                    F








So what's the point of the exercise?

Chances are you would have got most of the matches correct. So what's the filter you unconsciously used to make these judgements? 

When Watson asks how Sherlock Holmes knows this, the detective answers:

It is simplicity itself .... My eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey.