75. Reclaim your Inner Space🔗

As a teenager, especially during my college days, I just used to sit in meditation for six or seven hours. I would wake up in the morning around three o'clock and just sit till nine o'clock. My roommates were not ready to believe that I was meditating! Anyhow, they were frightened just seeing me every day, sitting continuously for so many hours without moving the body. That itself was too much for them!

They asked me once, 'How do you sit for so many hours just like that?' Actually, they were not able to relate with that. And the same way, I was not able to relate with them!

I told them, 'Why not? It is MY body, MY mind, I want to sit, I am sitting - that's all!'

Understand – it is YOUR body, YOUR mind; if you can't sit with them, what is going on? What is happening? It is time, reclaim your freedom. Reclaim your body. Reclaim your mind. Reclaim your inner space!

A small story:

There was a lion who kept a huge flock of sheep. Every day he would kill one sheep and eat it.

Another lion who saw the flock was shocked. He asked, 'How do you manage to keep all these sheep with you? Are they not afraid of you? Don't they run away when they see you?'

This lion said, 'No! I first hypnotized all of them, and told them they were all lions! They simply believed me. So they don't get afraid or run away when they see me. They are all there; I just need to go every day and pick up one and eat it!

This is how exactly your mind makes you believe that you are in control, you are free, you are powerful!

Understand: the freedom given by the mind is not freedom. The ultimate freedom - the only freedom -- is pratyahara, the ability to be in your center. All other freedom is just an idea taught to you. All the freedom you think you have - social freedom, economical freedom, religious freedom - all are only ideas given to you. Other than the ability you have to remain centered, free of the demands of your body and mind, there is no other freedom; there is nothing else which can be called freedom.

You may think, 'If I work for five days, I will have the freedom to go on a vacation for two days.' But try to go for vacation, and will see that you are carrying all your files inside you! You will be lying down on the beach in Hawaii and worrying about your work - nothing else. Worrying at your office desk is job, worrying on the beach is vacation! That is the only difference.

Only if you know how to get back to your center, only if you can reclaim your inner space, can you even taste freedom.

ACTIVITY

Today, spend at least 11 minutes alone with yourself, in silence, internally and externally.