Storms of mind & the ship of peace

 Your mind is roiling with strong feelings of hatred, anger, jealousy, lust, greed, sorrow. 

Yet if even for a tiny second, you separate and notice that these are just feelings in the mind.

You are sitting in your chair, sipping a cup of tea, in your balcony and you can see trees, buildings, - birds are chirping, there are the daily mundane sounds of a noisy city - people going about their job.

Your mind is at peace or your mind is roiling - the outside world hasnt changed a wee bit. 

So if everything around you is normal then why is your mind not normal. Your mind can be normal - there is nothing happening right now at this moment for your mind to be so disturbed. You are not in a war zone, with bullet zipping past you or bombs exploding; you are not in a dense jungle with a ravenous tiger chasing you; you are not drowning in deep seas with sharks circling around you; you are not lying half dead in the midst of the desert with vultures hovering above you. Even if you were in such situations, if you were Rajarshi Janaka or Maharishi Suka, your mind wouldnt be affected wee bit. 

My Guru has told me a story wherein when Maharishi Parashara along with his disciples Vyasa and others were fleeing the forest with the wolves chasing behind them, then Parasara asked the rest to flee and he remained behind to be the food of the wolves. As the wolves tore his body apart he had already become detached. 

In the Gita - Arjuna asks Krishna that this mind is very chanchala - restless - how to control it. 

Sri Krishna answers that the mind is very difficult to control for sure, but with abhyāsa and vairāgya it can be controlled. 

Maharishi Patañjali too says that the vṛttis in the chitta (the impressions storing aspect of the mind) can be controlled, stopped (nirodhah) through abhyāsa and vairāgya. Abhyāsa is simply practice, and long-term, continuous, enthusiastic, devoted, steady practice at that. Vairāgya is being sated with the viṣayāḥ or matters of the world and having no further desire left in them. This results in feeling detached. You dont expect anything from anything. Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says - you are nothing, you want nothing, you do nothing. When this seeps inside you - you get a sense of your insignificance in the vastness of existence. Then what jealousy, what greed, what lust and what anger. Nothing really matters. Just sip your tea and watch blankly across the balcony...prakriti laya.