There are moments in life that seem to divide our lives into a before and an after.
A relationship changes. A trusted friend says something we never imagined they would say. Someone we admired reveals another side of themselves. An accusation is made. A betrayal comes to light. Whatever the circumstance, something within us is suddenly set in motion.
Before we have had time to understand what has happened, something has already begun happening within us. The body tightens almost imperceptibly, the heart beats a little faster, and the mind begins weaving together fragments of memory, imagination, fear, and interpretation until, almost without noticing, we are standing inside a story that feels completely real.
Faced with uncertainty, this is what the mind does, it tries to restore order, to make us safe. What feels like clarity, however, is not always clear seeing. More often it is an older part of ourselves responding first, a disappointment we have never fully grieved, an identity we are trying to preserve, a fear that has found something familiar to hold onto. Our awareness begins to narrow around that single experience. What only moments before felt spacious now revolves around one story, one interpretation, one need.
There is something deeply human about what happens next. Uncertainty is difficult to hold alone, so we instinctively reach toward others. We tell the story again. We look for the friend who understands, the article that reflects our view, the conversation that reassures us we are seeing clearly. Without realizing it, we stop searching for truth and begin searching for confirmation. The story grows stronger, not necessarily because it is true, but because it has been repeated often enough to feel true.
Over the years I have become curious about these moments, because they reveal so much. Whenever I notice a thought carrying a great deal of emotional charge, I no longer assume it is showing me the whole truth. Instead, I have learned to pause and ask a different question.
What is this thought protecting?
Who is it trying to defend?
What would remain if, just for a moment, I no longer needed to protect that identity?
Again and again I discover that life is revealing the places where I have forgotten who I am and, in revealing them, offers another opportunity to remember.
Earlier in this series I shared a moment during practice when the activity of my mind suddenly fell away. What remained was not another thought, but an experience of something deeper within myself, an inner knowing that has guided me ever since.
Perhaps you know this place within yourself. A place that remains steady even when life is uncertain. Practice gradually teaches us to trust it. Yet there are moments when we lose it, our attention is drawn almost entirely toward what is happening around us and when a strom arises we lose clear seeing.
The difficulty is that when we are in the storm, it can feel like reality. It arrives disguised as certainty. Our conclusions feel certain. Our reactions feel justified. We believe we are seeing clearly.
Patañjali gave this movement a name. He called it avidyā. From it arise the kleśas, patterns of attachment, aversion, fear, and mistaken identity that shape the way we meet ourselves and the world. Once an identity becomes the place from which we see, it begins shaping everything we see.
Think of a time when someone questioned you unfairly, when a relationship did not unfold as you had hoped, or when you longed for another person to understand your side of the story. Can you remember how quickly your world became smaller? How naturally your attention narrowed toward proving your point, or defending your position?
Often what we are protecting is not simply the situation itself, but an identity.
Whenever I lose my orientation to that deeper place within, I naturally begin responding as the partner, the victim, the rescuer, the one who has been wronged, the one who must always be right, or simply the one who longs to be seen, understood, and loved. There is nothing wrong with these identities. Many arose as intelligent ways of meeting life’s challenges. The difficulty begins when I forget they are roles I have come to inhabit and begin believing they are the whole of who I am. My world becomes smaller. The spaciousness I have touched in practice is still present, but I am no longer living from it.
I find this teaching profoundly compassionate because it reminds us that nothing essential has been lost. Beneath every contraction remains the same expansive awareness that has always been present. Through the practice, we gradually release the patterns that have obscured it.
The extraordinary promise woven through the Yoga Sutras is that these patterns are not fixed. Sometimes the kleśas are active. Sometimes they are weakened. Sometimes they lie dormant, waiting for the next circumstance to awaken them.
Every practice we have explored together has been preparing us for these moments. Tapas awakened the energy to change. Svādhyāya taught us to observe ourselves with honesty. Īśvara Praṇidhāna invited us to trust something greater than our conditioned mind. Pratipakṣa Bhāvana showed us that even our thoughts can be retrained toward clarity. Long before we knew the name kleśas, these practices had already begun loosening their grip.
Storms pass, and when they do, we ask ourselves, did we get lost in the storm and mistake it for who we are?
Almost everyone has tasted both ways of being. We know what it feels like to become consumed by fear, certainty, resentment, or the need to protect ourselves. We also know those unexpected moments when the heart opens, the mind relaxes, and life feels spacious once again. Nothing outside has changed, yet everything is different because we are no longer living from a contracted identity.
Perhaps this is what practice has been preparing us for all along. Not a life without storms, but the capacity to remember our own vastness while they pass through.
Next essay explores Abhyāsa & Vairāgya: The Two Wings of Practice