Our focus for today is cleanliness or "saucha". Saucha is one of the 5 Niyamas, one of the internal vows or duties of a yoga student. This means that practicing cleanliness, such as removing your shoes before entering the practice area, or even the cleanliness of your speech - are parts of our yoga and meditation practice.
Today we will look at our meditation practice as a daily shower for the mind. Each day, we generate "sankaras" or little knots of craving and aversion. When we want something we don't have, or don't want something we do have - we generate a little knot that lives between the mind and body.
Each night, when we dream, we also generate "sankaras" - each moment of life and experience, generates some sankara. When these sankaras build, we might feel intense emotions or pains in our bodies.
Body scan meditation, is one way of cleaning the mind and body at this subtle level.
Just like our stomach has a microbiome of beneficial bacteria and harmful bacteria, our social system has a network of positive and negative sankaras - things that are generally agreed upon that are good to want, things that are generally agreed upon that are bad to want. Our aim is to gently remove judgment, and become neutral observers - to begin to see things - as they are - at more and more subtle levels of the mind and body.
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