Why is Cold Water Training part of the LYM

Contemplations from the 7^th lesson of the Shiva Sutras

Sutra 6:  Shakti Chakra Sandhane Vishvasamharah

‘When you become conscious of your energy centres, the world you have created disappears’.

Perhaps the way I am seeing the world in this moment is not necessarily how it really is.

Maybe with a little enquiry I might find that in truth I am actually making most of it up.

You see, the way I see the world right now, is greatly dependent on what I am looking through and I am often looking through a drunken haze of my own emotions, hormones and past experiences.

As it turns out, I am regularly ‘under the influence’! If I feel low, I am influenced to see the world as an impossible mountain to climb. If I feel fearful, I am influenced to see the world and everyone in it as a threat. If I feel insecure, I am influenced to see the world as something that I need to control. If I feel worried and anxious, I am influenced to see the world as a problem to solve and an ordeal to survive. If I feel angry, the world turns red, and if I feel bored the world turns grey.

How to come out of this influence and into perfect clarity?

Shiva says, ‘Shakti chakra sandhane vishvasamharah’

Before anger becomes an action, before anger even becomes what we call anger, it is firstly and primarily a movement of energy that we feel within our own bodies. So the first thing is to turn our attention toward the feeling of anger itself, look at it and let it be felt. If we can do this (and it requires great courage), then the second thing we will start to observe is that the ‘feeling energy’ of anger has a location in the body from which it has arisen. This is what Shiva calls the ‘Shakti chakra’ or the centre of energy.

Whatever the ‘feeling emotion’ we are experiencing, be it anger, fear or love, it will always have its source in one of six centres of energy in our body; the pelvic floor, sacrum, abdomen, heart, throat or brain stem. If we can follow the emotional energy current back to its source in one of these centres of energy, we will find that the world we would have created has disappeared, the haze we would have seen the world through has become clear and the energy we would have lost is now our own inner power for a new life. But best of all, we have liberated ourselves from the bondage of our own chemistry and are no longer under the spell of its hypnotic influence. 

Shiva says, ‘use these emotional energies of love, excitement, jealousy and fear for your own liberation by following them back to the source within yourself from which they first came and you will attain mastery over your own chemistry. This will not make your life dull it will make it electric. This is not suppression but transformation, and in time you will see that this whole world is not what you dreamed it to be when you were intoxicated by the cocktail of your own emotions. No. This world itself is a ‘Shakti Chakra’, a centre of energy, pulsating in ecstatic aliveness and supreme beauty, for you to relish and enjoy’!