Aparigraha and Suppressed Memories

Yoga Discussion General Yoga
#1

When I practice “non hoarding”, even with thoughts (even people/relationships) and as many things as I can think of… memories come back to me… The author of “Yoga of the Heart” in this book has the 10 ethics of yoga and she says the outcome of practicing aparigraha or non-hoarding is that you will have the knowledge of your 3 lives. This one, the one just past, and the one to come. The reason is because you no longer have material possessions in the way. Then these memories of your life come to you.

Maybe not suppressed, but memories of childhood. Memories that have nothing to do with what I’m doing…they randomly enter my vision, usually at night before bed or in the morning.

The more I practice this, the more crazy it makes me feel. But it’s also liberating. I remember things that my “old trusty memory” can’t help me remember! lol ! And the weird thing is that the more I do it, the stranger the memories are. They are so tucked away and I wasn’t even thinking about them. Things that have nothing to do with what I was doing. It’s like a child asking you 50 different questions in 1 hour, and each has nothing to do with each other! It’s also pretty cool. What a paradox! Sometimes I get a “key word” and all these memories related to this come back at once…and if I focus on one thing, it seems they are now available to me, as though I can now access files that I didn’t have a “password” for!!

Anyone else have any experiences, stories, or explanations for me? Is there anything I need to be doing that will help “recover” more memories or details?

#2

Anyone else have any experiences, stories, or explanations for me? Is there anything I need to be doing that will help “recover” more memories or details?

Do you mean by ‘recover’ you would like to repossess in order to dispossess, as part of your aparigraha practise?

#3

What I meant was just how do I get more details from memories, “find” more memories in general and stuff like that. From anyone who has practiced this. Is there something that you have learned … like to not even “hoard” the memories that are coming though your mind? I noticed that, but have to let them flow! Any tips or stories? Anything you know that’s not mentioned here that you could share with us/me?

Anything that anyone has learned, or just to say that you have experienced this too, because I feel quite alone in this experience Lol

#4

ColdTurkey2008,
I really am not sure what it is that you are looking for. Neither do I know what exactly you do when you ‘practise Aparigraha’ to cause you to have these memory-recovering-experiences that are obviously unfamiliar to you.
You say the experience is both ‘weird’ and ‘cool’. By the sound of it you are indeed rather like a child who has stumbled on a kind of junk room and treasure cove rolled in to one that is your very own memory store, and you are both pleasurably excited as well as a little frightened perhaps, not knowing where it will lead; seemingly unconnected memories, or bits of memories that just pop in without any apparent connection with what you are doing at the time - I am sure that you are not unique in this, you just have become aware of happenings that you were not so aware of before.

It happens to me frequently but I am not actively pursuing any of it, or denying it, for that matter. These memories, images, sensations come, pass before my inner eye, and I look at them, enjoy them, or not, as the case may be. Like you, I might ask myself, where on earth did this all of a sudden come from?, or, not that one again! They come, they go - and I let them go. After all, what else is to be done? Memories present the past, and as someone else has put it (I don’t have a memory of who did.;)):
[B]‘The past is the past, there is no future in it.’[/B]

Memories are extremely malleable and for that reason notoriously unreliable. Also, we often think or feel that we remember things that in fact have never happened in the first place!

I know nothing of the book you mention, and personally I don’t want to know three lives, finding my present one quite enough from one day to the next. That has to suffice - for me.

I am sorry, beyond having replied to your post I don’t feel that I have been very helpful.

#5

By wanting more, you stop the process. Remember, the expereinces are result of your practice of non-posesiveness. You want more ? Let go more.
Do not attach to these memories, either.