Right from childhood, we are told that life is a struggle and that it’s a battlefield out there. This is where the race begins and our parents and the society at large, prepare us for the ‘battlefield’. Nowadays, the race starts for the parents even before the child is conceived and for the child as soon as it starts understanding language and comprehending instructions. A lot of emphases is laid on ‘doing’/effort and the child is programmed to believe that it’s a battlefield, where the ‘individual’ is pitted against the ‘world’, which includes people and circumstances. The result of such early programming is that, when the outside situation is perceived as favorable, we are happy. Conversely, when we perceive the outside circumstances as unfavorable, misery sets in and we engage ourselves in ‘fixing’ the situation.

It’s a vicious cycle of a never-ending delusion. From the cradle to the grave, we are caught in an undulating graph of moments of happiness and sorrow and the drama accompanying these states. So, our life is on an auto-mode, where our mood/state is dictated by outer circumstances/people, and in order to be ‘happy’, we need to keep up the effort of ‘fixing’ these factors. An appropriate analogy here would be that of a dog chasing its own tail.

In fact, often when we are ‘happy’, we intuitively know that ‘sorrow’ is just around the corner and we get into a state of preparedness. Through experience, we learn that the‘high’ state of happiness and its opposite ‘low’ state of sorrow are like two extremes of a pendulum and they are bound to follow each other.

What we are all innately seeking then is a constant state of pleasantness, which does not have any opposite. In other words, to be at ‘ease’, which means free of ‘dis-ease’, literally and figuratively.This state is more in the nature of a homecoming or an inward journey. In this state, life is effortless and it just flows.

Anyways, all the vital functions that ensure survival of the body viz. breathing, digesting, assimilation, circulation, etc is on auto mode.Existence has not entrusted us with these functions. Leave alone the cosmos, even the highly sophisticated human machinery is proof enough of a higher intelligence at work.

Life longs for itself. It is a misconception that we ‘are’ living. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say that we ‘are being’ lived. Life is happening every moment and it is only we human beings, who are deluded into believing that our lives depend on our ‘doing’ or ‘effort’. In this process, we get disconnected from the higher intelligence that is orchestrating the entire creation. In fact, we are also disconnected from our own being and are entangled in our own drama at the mental, emotional and psychological levels.

According to the yogic tradition, there are three granthis, which means energy knots or blocks in our personality, where the energy and consciousness interact and manifest in a particular way. Granthi is any one of the 3 common blockages in the central pathway (sushumna nadi) preventing the full ascent of the serpent power.