Taking charge of your life

By Sadhguru, Isha Foundation

If you do not make your body so important, you can stretch it to all kinds of limits. If you make it important, every step is a difficulty; comfort becomes extremely important in your life.

One basic thing is how you hold your body. What is the relationship between you and the body? If you hold a distant relationship, certain things matter, but lots of things that matter to other people do not matter to you anymore. But if you have become the body, then every little discomfort is a big difficulty.

As the body becomes less important, the undulations of life do not affect you anymore because all the undulations are only for the body. When I say the body, it includes the mind. It is only the physical and mental bodies which are affected by the ups and downs of life. Once you become less of a body, there are no undulations for you. You don’t go this way or that way, you go only one way. You simply go the way you want to go because as the physicality loses its grip on you, you take charge of life. If the physicality has a grip over you, you are never in control of your life.

The physical is ruled by too many forces. Nobody can ever understand it fully nor can you ever control it fully. It does not matter how much technology you have, you will never ever have 100% control over the physical. Right now, there are so many forces working upon us physically. The planet is round and it is spinning at a tremendous speed – we must be flying off the planet, but we are not. And the whole solar system is moving at a tremendous speed – nothing is happening to us. To keep the structure of the three particles of the atom together, so many forces are working. We will never control all of them. So, the only way to take charge of life is to distance yourself from the physical. Once you distance yourself from the physical, you are in complete charge of your life, 100%.

The science of getting there, the dimension of life of making this happen to yourself is what we are referring to as yoga. Bending your body, holding your breath and all these things are because slowly, it will create a distance between you and the physical. It will cut the ropes of the physical.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan”, India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.