The Four Bhavas- Hella Naura

One of the most famous sayings from the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, may be that our conscious is comparable to just the tip of the iceberg, while the major part remains under the water level, i.e., in the unconscious. We should remember these words when our unconscious has once more spoilt one of our conscious decisions. It can be a cause of great sadness if we cannot do what we would like to do and when everything seems to be going wrong. It would be vain to put the blame for this on anyone else. Yoga practitioners should once and for all decide to want to change themselves and not others. Since life is an interdependent process where everything influences everything else, one may safely believe in what Yoga claims; that if you change yourself for the better your surroundings and events will likewise change. It may take some time but it will inevitably happen.

Yoga promises that, a right Yoga practice will not only change the conscious part of a person but also his unconscious. ‘Each often repeated conscious action will lead to the channeling of energies in the unconscious.’ It would be a vain effort wanting to change the unconscious in a direct way. All pains taken towards this end would only lead to disappointment and frustration. So what to do? One may safely rely on what Yogis have realized and clothed into words and concepts that were best understood in their times. One of these concepts is of our ‘Bhavas’, which is taught among other things at ‘The Yoga Institute’ of Santacruz East. The Bhavas are mental states lying dormant in everyone’s unconscious. Four of them are positive and four are the very contrary and negative. It is possible to change the undesirable states into desirable ones, not by a single feat but by systematic practice within a given framework.

© "Yoga and Total Health" (May, 2002) published by The Yoga Institute, Shri Yogendra Marg, Prabhat Colony, Santacruz East, Mumbai 400 055. Reprinted with permission.

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