Breaking Your Barriers of Rigidity

Adapted from one of the lectures of Sadhguru's:

It is your rigidity that prevents your growth, your opening into consciousness. You become rigid in different dimensions....the physical, the mental, the emotional. Physical you realize even as you try to do your yoga, but it takes a little more awareness for you to know the rigidity in your mind and emotions.

Somebody who is very rigid in his thoughts and emotions believes he is perfect because he does not allow room for any other way of looking, thinking, or feeling. When you meet such a man, you think he is pig-headed, but he thinks he is perfect. 

Look at your own life and see how flexible you were at the age of 10 or 11, both physically and mentally. At the age of 20, your flexibility is considerably less, and by the age of 30, most of it has gone. As you grow, it's not just the physical rigidity, but mental rigidity that sets in severely. Life is just a regression for most people. They are not growing; they are going backwards. They don’t grow even the few assets they come with. Every advantage that comes to most people ends up as a curse. Money, influence, comfort and intelligence come as blessings, but become curses for most people. You are not using your intelligence to reach the peak of your consciousness or to become peaceful and loving.

Similarly, there can be rigidity in your energy. For someone whose energy is very fluid, energy will start moving and transforming the very first day of the simplest kriya. Whereas, for another person, even after practicing for a long time, nothing seems to happen. This simply depends on how malleable the energies are. The rigidity in all these dimensions is not really separate; they are interconnected. The rigidity in one dimension manifests itself into others.

You have kept your energies suppressed to such an extent, and the mind has become so oppressive, that it suppresses life to the point where nothing moves except what is needed to support the ego. Your energies are moving only to the extent that is convenient for your ego – a little more energy and the ego will burst.

The ego knows it very well. That is why it has kept it suppressed. If you don’t have any energy, then again the ego will become very weak and it doesn’t like that. So it just allows the amount of energy which supports and feeds it well. If the energy becomes too much, the ego will be shattered.

If kundalini begins to rise, everything will be shattered and nothing will be left. You will be just a force merging with everything around you.