Self-Understanding
It is important to understand that yoga and meditation are not miracle cures, you can’t just go to a few yoga classes and practice some meditation and then the rest falls into place by itself. The human being is a complex phenomenon, with numerous factors affecting you on a minute-to-minute basis. The path to a balanced way of living your life is not always straight forward and it involves co-operation with your own personality.
Living a normal life – whether you are a parent with children, a business person – brings so many stressors on a daily basis that is actually amazing how most people seem to cope. One fundamental part of getting to terms with improving the quality of your life and the way your relate to yourself and others is to understand your self. But what does that mean?
Most of us spend a lot of time trying to make sense and talking about the way the world is working (or not working), all the tragedies that watching the news bring to our attention everyday as well as a great deal of energy goes into trying to understand our partners, our children or our bosses. The truth is that little time is spent in getting to know YOU, how do you function? Why do you function this way? What makes you think and be the way you are today? These are the questions that are part of a what we call a Self-Understanding journey. Without engaging on the task of getting to know your inner mechanism, the practices of Yoga asanas and Meditation run the risk of never bringing you to the sense of wholeness you are looking for.
Western phychological and psychoterapeutic ideas have developed almost entirely without any understanding or appreciation of our spiritual heritage. On the other hand, spiritual traditions have tended to ignore the life of the mind and how it gets in the way of the spirit. The result is that we have psychological understanding which fails to free our hearts, and spiritual understanding which can barely penetrate our psychological barriers.
Self-Understanding is the part of YOSSUM concept where you get to meet ‘you’. There is an overused term to describe a part of you in many conversations, that term is Ego. Most of us use the term to refer to someone that we perhaps find arrogant or we don’t like, i.e. “So-and-so has such a big ego.” A more clear way of looking into that aspect that we have been calling our ego is to see it for what is: our Personality Structure. And we all have one.
Without an understanding of our personality structure it is very difficult to promote the changes we would like to see in ourselves. It is like asking a blind man to walk in a field full of holes without falling into any of them.
A big part of the reason why we keep repeating the same mistakes, following the same behavior patterns year after year (even though we are fed up with them), reacting in the way we would love not to, and getting into trouble pretty much always in the same way is that we have very little understanding of what is going on inside of ourselves prior to any of these taking place. Shedding light into our personality structure and the roads we normally take to get to the place we no longer want to go is a vital part in becoming a whole person. And most of all a content person.
YOSSUM employs the Enneagram system to promote that Self-Understanding. The Enneagram is the torch that will bring some light into all the aspects of your personality structure – and your closed ones - in a way you have probably not seen yet. Understanding the Enneagram system is a fascinating and enlightening journey into your nature.
"The sense organs, which are limited in scope and ability, randomly gather information. This partial information is arranged into judgments, which are based on previous judgments, which are usually based on someone else's foolish ideas. These false concepts and ideas are then stored in a highly selective memory system."
- Lao Tzu
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