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| the soldier under siege standing in the relative plane, with the untouched peaks of the Self beyond. (Himalayas in Nepal) |
Vira Chandra: Sometimes life narrows.
The air grows thinner, and the horizon that once seemed wide and open begins to fold in on itself.
It is like coming to a mountain pass in winter — the walls of rock rising on either side, snow drifting into the path until the way ahead is only a faint suggestion beneath the white.
The siege is not always made of bullets and stone.
It can take quieter forms: the slow erosion of long days under unrelenting demands, the weight of problems that refuse to yield, the steady ache of a body carrying more than it was meant to hold.
It can be the weariness of standing your ground when work grows hostile, when home offers no rest, when the world outside rattles with its own storms.
And yet, in the midst of such pressure, you may hear the familiar words: “just pray,” “remember you are the soul, not the body.”
They are not lies.
But spoken here, at the narrow pass, they can feel like fragile paper shields against a rain that will not stop.
Because what you are facing is not imagined.
The body knows.
Its heart beats harder, its breath draws short, the muscles tighten as if bracing for a blow.
This is not a flaw in your practice.
It is the body’s ancient covenant with life — the instinct to survive.
And the path, if it is true, does not ask you to pretend it is not there.
This is the realm the sages call vyāvahārika — the practical, lived plane.
Here, the siege is not metaphor.
It is the chemistry of survival moving through blood and nerve: cortisol rising, heart pounding, muscles coiling like springs.
It is the body’s ancient covenant with life — to meet threat with readiness, to tighten the sinews for endurance, to light the mind with vigilance.
No amount of quoting the highest scriptures can annul this reflex.
It is not ignorance, but biology.
It is the same current that helped your ancestors outlast winters, cross deserts, survive nights when predators hunted in the dark.
It is neither friend nor enemy; it is simply the body’s way of saying: I will keep you alive.
The mistake is not in having this response.
The mistake is in thinking it marks a failure of your practice.
Until the roots of awareness grow deep enough to transform the whole perception–response loop, this machinery will run.
And in the meantime, to deny it is to turn away from the truth right in front of you — the truth that the Self wears a body, and the body still listens to the drumbeat of the earth.
Yet above this pass, the mountains do not move.
The wind howls in the valley, snow swirls over the trail, but the peaks stand untouched.
This is the other truth — paramārthika, the ultimate view.
Here, the siege is not an enemy line but a passing cloud.
The Self is the sky it crosses: boundless, unmoved, unstained by any storm.
In this light, the pounding of the heart is only a ripple in still water.
The tension in the muscles is a passing shadow on the hillside.
The story of danger, of pressure, of being hemmed in, all belong to the dream.
And the one who knows the dream is not caught in it.
Both levels are true while the path is still being walked.
In one, you meet the siege as a human being with a body shaped by time.
In the other, you watch the siege from a place that has never been born, and can never be harmed.
Neither denies the other.
They stand together like two banks of the same river, holding the current between them.
To walk before full realization is to live on both banks at once.
One foot in the realm where the body breathes, sweats, and startles.
One foot in the unshaken Self that neither resists nor clings.
The work is not to erase one bank in favor of the other, but to learn the crossing — to move between them without losing your way.
Before realization, you bridge the two levels.
You acknowledge the body’s reactions without shame or judgment, and you use them as signals to return inward — not as verdicts that you have failed.
The aim is not to “feel nothing,” but to return more quickly each time to the ground of being.
Biology does not dissolve simply because we have read the truth.
In the rarest beings — sages like Ramana Maharshi — the nervous system has been so completely reoriented in the Self that fight-or-flight barely stirs, even under mortal threat.
For most practitioners, this is the fruit of the very last stages of the path.
Until then, working with the body is wiser than expecting it to vanish.
In the short term, clinical science offers tools to steady the system when the siege is immediate:
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Name the surge – Noting, “This is fight-or-flight,” shifts brain activity toward the prefrontal cortex.
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Breathe with the body’s rhythm – Lengthen the exhale (inhale for 4, exhale for 6–8) to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
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Anchor in the senses – Notice three things you can see, hear, and feel to interrupt spirals.
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Release tension – Stretch, walk, or shake out the limbs to discharge stored muscle contraction.
In the long term, the body’s baseline resilience can be strengthened so that storms land less heavily:
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Daily movement – Even gentle walking regulates stress hormones and boosts mood chemistry.
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Time in nature – Natural settings reduce cortisol and restore mental clarity.
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Restorative sleep – 7–9 hours supports memory, mood, and physiological repair.
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Balanced nutrition – Stable blood sugar and adequate hydration keep the nervous system steadier.
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Supportive connections – Healthy relationships buffer the impact of chronic stress.
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Intentional rest – Periods of genuine stillness — not distraction — give the system space to recover.
These are not evasions.
They are ways of keeping the body steady enough for the inner work to be possible.
When the biology is no longer drowning in its own chemistry, you can turn to the Self and ask the quiet question: “To whom has this come?” — not as an escape from the body, but as the natural return to what has never been touched.
When the ground has steadied — whether through a breath, a walk, a night of real rest, or years of tending the body’s resilience — the deeper work can begin.
This is where ātma-vichāra enters the siege.
The question is simple: “To whom has this come?”
In the moment of a surge, you are not trying to wrestle the body into stillness.
You are not denying the quickened pulse or the tightness in the chest.
You are turning toward the one who feels them.
At first, it may seem as if you are asking from inside the storm — the question barely audible above the noise.
But with practice, the asking itself begins to shift the locus.
The surge is no longer happening to me; it is happening in me.
And the “me” that holds it is not the same as the body that tenses or the mind that calculates the threat.
You do not force the storm to stop.
You witness its movement in the same way you might watch a cloud drift across the high mountain sky — knowing the sky has never been touched by the cloud’s passing.
Sometimes the cloud dissolves quickly.
Sometimes it stays.
The practice is not to chase it away, but to remain with the sky until even the presence of clouds feels natural and harmless.
In time, this question — to whom? — becomes less an act you do and more the ground you live from.
And then, even in the narrow pass, the air feels a little wider.
The siege is real, and it will pass.
Mountains know this.
They have seen storms fill the valleys, avalanches sweep the slopes, rivers change their course — yet they remain, holding the sky.
You, too, are this mountain.
The winds may batter, snow may narrow the path, the air may grow thin, but none of it reaches the bedrock.
To live from that ground is not to deny the weather, but to know it cannot stay.
Each time you return to the Self — whether through steady breath, a walk beneath trees, or the quiet question “To whom has this come?” — you clear a little more of the path.
Not so the siege will never come again, but so its arrival no longer robs you of the knowing that you are more than what it touches.
And one day, without quite realizing when it happened, you will find that the narrow pass has opened, the horizon is wide again, and the air is as spacious as it was in the beginning.
The storm will still come and go — but you will no longer wait for its departure to feel the sky.
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