Week Three - The Storehouse of Chitta, Subconscious Mind

Hello everyone,

Thank you all so much for joining me for yoga last week, celebrating a beautiful Mother's Day! It was such a special one :) This week we will have another celebration - the spring equinox! This Friday marks an equal day and an equal night, a moment of perfect balance before it all begins to shift towards sunshine and energy. I cycled home around eight o'clock last night and swore I could see a faint glow of light buzzing on the horizon! It's happening! 

I have a few limited spaces available in the Hatha Flow this Sunday at 5pm, and a bit of room in the Soft Stretch at 6:30pm if you would like to come along :) Just send me a little message and I will save your space. We will have one more yoga practice after this Sunday, and then a big two week break for Easter :)

This week you can expect a theme of balance and energetic 'spring cleaning' in our yoga sequences. As we delve further into the Antahkarana, the four faculties of the mind - we come now to chitta, known as the heart-mind. Keep reading to understand this fascinating psychological concept - one that honours the power of our subconscious and our mind-body connection.

Chitta is a word in Sanskrit that alludes to the mind-field, referring to the subconscious part of our psyche that stores memories and impressions - out of which all of our thoughts, identity, and emotions are born. It's where you begin in the psyche, where your roots are. I think of it like a big field of mud; a fertile ground from which food can grow and nourish you - but also a place where you are likely to slip and get stuck.

Because chitta is subconscious and therefore difficult to bring to our conscious awareness, it can be helpful to think of your dreams when considering what chitta might mean to you. When I was first taught about chitta, I was told it was the storehouse for who we are; all of our memories, impressions, experiences - everything that we have ever clung to or resisted - all stored up safe and neat within this great shed inside our mind (actually, inside our hearts). None of it ever gone or buried as we may think, but rather kept as data - each piece of information influencing our every thought, action, and tendency, curating our beliefs about the world, and sometimes sneaking up into our awareness beneath the veil of symbolism and unique associations within our dreams. Most of modern psychology lives within the study of chitta - the questions of: why do we do what we do? What makes us who we are? Is it nature or nurture? Can we change?

Within the colourful world of chitta, we find yet another fascinating yogic concept called the samskaras. A samskara is a deep imprint in the mind, an experience that gets buried in the heart. The wonderful author and psychologist Gabor Maté might call this trauma; a now popular word that comes from ancient Greek and means 'wound'. Dr. Maté is a fantastic resource for this sort of personal work, if it calls to you. 

However, I recently discovered something about the samskaras that I did not know and found fascinating - that a samskara is not just a negative impression on the soul, not just as a deep wound, but can come from a positive experience as well. An experience that you cling to in your heart, that you carry with you, and that in its own way keeps you apart from happiness, just the same. Maybe there was a time when you were truly happy and satisfied. Everything was just perfect. But now that it's gone you pine for it, hope to recreate it, only to get bothered that your present moment doesn't feel the same way as it did. And even if you do recreate the experience, you may find yourself dissatisfied that it doesn't have that lovely spark of newness as it did before. The moment becomes stale in its reproduction.

This positive clinging is equally seen in yoga as a samskara, in that it is something buried in your heart. An obstacle to peace. Essentially, samskaras are the things in our heart that we feel we cannot let go of, whether they are a terrible wound or a great nostalgia. As key elements of the chitta, when samskaras are not released they end up influencing our personality, behaviours, tendencies, and can even make up who we think we are in the egoic sense.

There is a wonderful podcast on SoundsTrue.com (you can find it on Spotify), where you can hear from author Michael Singer. He speaks on what the samskaras are and gives guidance on how you might sit with them individually whenever they come up for you - uncomfortable feelings, buried beliefs. To allow them to come up, to see them and give them space, is the only way to let them go. He also has a lovely book 'The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself' that relates to this process and more.

I can't wait to see you Sunday! Here's to spring and more light in the sky :)

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realising that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.”

Le grá,

Macha