Svadhyaya: Who taught you about you?
Svadhyaya is the fourth of the five Niyamas, translated as self-study. This is usually interpreted both as the studying of spiritual texts & studying your own mind.
Who told you about you?
Through the studying of our own minds we are able to make contact with the true self that sits behind layers of conditioning & false identification.
Throughout our lives we pick up various layers of conditioning on who we are. We might pick up ideas & patterns from external sources that change our relationship to ourselves & take us away from our true selves. From the moment we are born we receive messages from family, friends, culture & media about who we are & what we should be.
As a young child our primary way of understanding ourselves & who we are is through observing other people's reactions to us. Depending on the mental state of our parents & others around us, this could create a positive or negative imprint.
From there, we continue collecting information on ourselves from culture & media. We might receive positive or negative messages about our gender, race, country of origin, religion, interests & beliefs & begin to unconsciously shape our view of ourselves from these messages.
Through the studying of our own minds, we can start to pick up on beliefs we may have inherited from outside ourselves & make a conscious decision on whether we would like to keep these layers of conditioning or not. Whether we would like to allow them to continue dictating our beliefs & behaviours or redirect our compass.
When we notice beliefs like “I’m not good enough”, we can start to question these beliefs, looking back into the first time we may have felt this & trace where we may have inherited this from.
Through the study of the Self & spiritual texts, moving beyond layers of conditioning we can begin to make contact with eternal knowledge on the nature of reality, the nature of God & our place in the universe. We can start to peer beneath the layers of false identification to find the true self beneath.
