Clearing the Lens

This week, I was playing with the ocean in Cape May, watching dolphins swim back and forth while birds circled and dove into the water. It was amazing. But as I watched the waves, I began thinking about the desert. I could see camels and practically smell the heat rising from the sand.

But I wasn’t in the desert. I was at the ocean, watching dolphins.

I said to myself:

Ohh, I have to watch you, mind!

I love my practice because life gives us many opportunities in a single day to sharpen our awareness of what is happening within and around us. In yoga, we often speak about purifying the mind and heart. Purification means removing what prevents something from functioning clearly. Water is purified of contaminants. Air is filtered of pollutants. The kidneys filter waste from the blood, while the liver processes substances the body no longer needs.

Imagine a jar of muddy water. When the jar becomes still, the sediment settles and the water becomes clear again. In the same way, when the mind becomes still, our patterns, conditioning and accumulated impressions become easier to see.

Purification is not about making ourselves spiritually perfect. It is about clearing—or loosening—what prevents us from recognizing what we already are.

I’m always exploring how to deepen my relationship with the divine. It may be the relationship I value most. But perhaps that relationship is not created by reaching for something outside of myself. Perhaps it deepens as I purify the mind and heart—the instruments through which I perceive myself, other people and the world around me.

We experience life through everything we remember, anticipate, love, fear, desire and believe. No two people meet the same moment in exactly the same way because each person brings a different history into it.

We meet the present alongside the accumulated stories of the past. Those stories influence what we see, how we interpret it and what we expect to happen next.

When I hear Tom Petty, part of me returns to being 19 years old, driving my 1986 Camaro with its glass T-tops and blasting Wildflowers on the back roads of eastern Long Island. The music doesn’t simply remind me of that time. For a moment, it returns me to the person I was then—the version of Kate who was trying to figure it all out and had no idea where to look. She didn’t yet know that she could trust her path. She hadn’t discovered inch by inch.

Our internal stories work similarly.

A face reminds us of someone we once knew. A particular tone of voice returns us to an old conflict. A new opportunity activates an old fear. The circumstance may be new, but what it awakens within us is familiar.

In yoga, these impressions are called samskaras: grooves formed through previous experiences, thoughts and actions. The more frequently we travel a groove, the more natural it feels to travel it again.

Eventually, we may mistake the groove for who we are.

But a pattern is not an identity.

A memory is not the present.

Familiarity is not necessarily truth.

This is where purification begins—not by fighting every thought, but by becoming still enough to notice what is moving through us.

When the old soundtrack begins playing, we can pause and say:

This is familiar.

This feeling belongs partly to the past.

This is the story my mind associates with this moment.

But what is actually happening now?

That recognition creates space.

The soul—the deepest Self—is already whole. It does not need to be cleansed, corrected or made more divine. Life itself is not impure, nor are the experiences it gives us.

What can become clouded is the mind through which we perceive those experiences. Memories, expectations, attachments, fears and habitual stories can prevent us from seeing clearly.

We are not trying to eliminate every difficult feeling or hold on to everything that feels good. Freedom develops when we can meet a moment without immediately grasping, resisting or requiring it to become a continuation of an old story.

We purify the mind and heart so that we can meet life more clearly.

A clean mirror does not create the face it reflects. It simply allows what was already there to be seen. In the same way, a purified heart does not bring the divine into the world. It becomes capable of recognizing that the divine is already here.

We do not practice to purify the soul. We practice to clear the mind and heart so that the soul—and the divine within ordinary life—can be recognized.

Dolphins and camels included.

Big time love,

Kate