Part 3: How to cleanse your body?
How to cleanse your memory body:
If you have already picked up huge amounts of memory for your body and you wish to get rid of all the confusion, this can be fixed in various ways, through many processes in practice to wash off ‘runanubandha‘.
All the 5 elements videlicet fire, earth, wind, sky and water, have the power to cleanse your memory body. Depending on your geographical location and your convenience, you can select one or the other.
You could use wash yourself with fire. Make a bonfire, sit still next to it and meditate for some time. Then walk around the fire slowly, minding your steps carefully.
Taking regular water wash is one of the easiest ways and a very common practice in our culture. Right from the childhood, it is customary that you cannot go inside the house if you are coming from hospitals after visiting somebody or funerals or from any other crowed places, without taking shower .
It is essential in some households that you should wash your feet, and face and all the exposed parts of your body before going inside the house, on a daily basis. But most of it has gone out of practice in the name of modernity.
And for the wind wash, you can go to a beach or to the mountains early morning like 3.30 am or even just go to your roof top and stay conscious of it and close your eye and stay still. Please don’t break your bones doing gymnastics!
Earth wash can be performed by doing walking meditation. You can simply walk barefoot on sand. Or depending on the area where you live, you can sleep on the floor, only if that floor is not finished with tiles ( No use of it, if it is tiled!). And if you can have a bed made of filtered soil and use that bed to sit and meditate and change it periodically according to your feeling. Whenever you can just walk barefoot do it while being conscious of what you are doing.
As far as prevention is concerned, if you can wash your own clothes separately, that’s one of the good ways to keep yourself away from contamination. This may apply to your plates, cups, etc. as well.
By this time you understand how we pick up memory, so be mindful of it. Think twice before going into pubs, parties, clubs, dancing floors, interacting with strangers, or anybody for that matter. Be conscious of it. I might sound conservative, but hey you will listen to it, if you ever asked yourself, what is this life!? What is this life for!? How to live this life!? Is there anybody to teach me how to live!? Is there any place where I can learn how to live!? What is this body and where is its user manual!?
If your body is a flying car, would you just jump in and start riding it or do you want somebody to teach you or at least search for a manual?
Or you can drive it like a normal car without even knowing that it could fly and damage it. And you will take it to the mechanic’s shop, who doesn’t even know what it is. This mechanic will thus just patch up the scratched and damaged exteriors again. If your car has an issue would you take it to the manufacturer or to the local mechanic!?
So in ancient civilizations, jogis and siddhas found these ways to live through years of experience and studies, and passed them on to us and I am quite sure that I am not going to learn everything from my experiences. I would rather listen to these learned people when it comes to the matter of living the life the right way.
Glossary:
- Jogi: Yogi, or jogi is a yoga practitioner. Although among Sikhs, jogi is a term to represent a person who is striving to attain ‘jog‘ or ‘union‘ with God. A rough translation into English might be ‘hermit‘ or ‘ascetic‘.
- Siddha: Siddha comes from a Sanskrit word which ‘perfected one’. Siddha is ‘one who is accomplished’ or any ascetic who has achieved enlightenment. A perfected being, the siddha has worked out all past karma and freed himself from entanglement in the world of maya (another big term to explain but for now we shall translate it as illusion).
Post any questions in the comments which you need to further read on. Every question will surely be satisfied with a detailed article.