There are moments in life when you realise that what you are reacting to is not the situation in front of you, but the echo of something much older.
A familiar sting.
A tightening in the chest.
A story your body remembers even if your mind has forgotten its origin.
In Tantra Illuminated, Christopher Wallace writes that the purpose of spiritual practice is to “destabilise deep-seated, skewed mental constructs about yourself” until they begin to fall apart. These constructs — in yogic language, samskaras — are impressions etched into consciousness. They form the architecture of our inner world: the beliefs, fears, judgments, and emotional reflexes we carry into every new moment.
A samskara is not just a memory. It’s a pattern.
A groove.
A story that overlays itself onto experience before you even realise it’s there.
How Samskaras Become Stories
Over time, these impressions weave themselves into a narrative:
“I am not enough.”
“I have to work harder.”
“I don’t belong.”
“Love is conditional.”
The story becomes the lens through which we interpret ourselves and others. It shapes our reactions, our relationships, our choices — sometimes so subtly that we assume it is our personality, or worse, our destiny. We become characters in an outdated script, repeating scenes we no longer want to play.
This is the quiet tragedy of an unexamined life: not that we suffer, but that we suffer the same way, again and again, without ever recognising the pattern.
Yoga as the Technology of Unravelling
This is where yoga becomes something far deeper than movement or breath — it becomes a method of looking inward with honesty and compassion.
Through practices like meditation, pranayama, mantra, and pratyahara, we begin to witness the stories rather than inhabit them. The breath settles, the mind softens, and we are given enough space to see what has always been running in the background.
Kashmir Shaivism describes consciousness as spanda — the living pulse of awareness that animates everything. When we tune ourselves to this pulse, our reactive patterns become easier to recognise. They lose their solidity. The samskara that once felt like an absolute truth reveals itself as simply an imprint — something learned, not something inherent.
As Wallace explains, spiritual practice undermines these false views not by force, but through clarity. When the mind becomes clear enough to see the construct, it begins to destabilise on its own.
Light dissolves shadow.
Presence disarms the story.
Awareness reclaims what fear once held.
When the Stories Fall Away
What remains when the old stories dissolve is not emptiness, but spaciousness.
Not uncertainty, but freedom.
You begin to glimpse yourself beyond the script — not as the hardened identity you’ve been carrying, but as a fluid, creative, conscious being. Wallace calls this “a free being of blissful consciousness, playing with your powers of intent, understanding, and action.”
This is the quiet liberation yoga offers: the recognition that your life is not predetermined by what happened to you, or what you once believed about yourself. You are not the imprint; you are the consciousness that holds it. You are not the story; you are the awareness capable of rewriting it.
Living Beyond the Pattern
In other articles, we’ve spoken about the power of stories — how they bind us, shape us, and sometimes protect us. But from a yogic framework, the invitation is not to erase the story, but to see through it.
To recognise that beneath every conditioned pattern, there is something unconditioned.
Beneath every learned identity, there is something innate.
Beneath every samskara, there is pure awareness waiting to return to itself.
And when you touch that place — even for a moment — you realise the truth that yoga has been whispering all along:
You are not broken.
You are not behind.
You are not defined by your past.
You are consciousness in motion — alive, awake, and infinitely more spacious than the stories you once believed.
