A few years ago I visited Kauai’s Hindu Monastery, located on the leeward side of the island. Founded in 1970, it is a traditional Saivite Hindu monastery that was, at the time, home to twenty-one monks living on 456 acres of beautiful, fertile land, surrounded by sloping hillsides and graced by the Wailua River. The monastery is part of the Saiva Siddhanta Church founded in Sri Lanka in 1949 by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Its spiritual heritage goes back to 200 B.C. and originates from the Nandinatha Sampradaya, a denomination of Hinduism that is known as a highly organized and orthodox Hindu order that integrates a deeply religious and traditional Hindu lifestyle of devotion and service with the practice of yoga.
At the entrance to the monastery is a six-sided pavilion lined with benches. Attached to the post at the opening hangs a sign with an invitation to write down your problems and set them ablaze in an urn filled to the top with sand. Beneath the sign is a bin with paper and pens. The urn sits about five feet off the ground on a pedestal at the center of the structure. Several pieces of paper, rolled up like small scrolls that have not completely burned up, stick out of the sand. Some words are still visible and the smell of charred paper lingers in the air. From the onset of my visit, I saw and smelled that fire is very important here. Within the temple I would later see this practice take place again and again during the puja, a form of Hindu worship. It is called Vasana Daha Tantra.
The process is very simple. You write down any troubling issues that are creating fear, anxiety, worry, and self-doubt. You should also offer a statement of gratitude acknowledging that you know your prayer and request are being heard and that your vasanas – or habitual tendencies – will be healed. You then place the rolled up piece of paper in the sand and light it.
The purpose of this ritual is to rid consciousness of unwanted vasanas. There is no simple translation for the Sanskrit word vasana, but it entails the impression of anything in the mind: present consciousness formed from past perceptions, knowledge derived from memory, thinking of, longing for, expectation, craving, and partiality. The belief is that all of these habits - which often manifest in OCD like thought loops - rob us of our energy and of a clear conscience.
People are burdened by countless vasanas and the older we get, the heavier they become. It is as if we are walking around with the same heavy weights hanging from our bodies as the ghost of Marley in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, chained and tormented, damned to live out our lives in pain and suffering for our past transgressions. The thought loops that they create lead to suffering, distract from our spiritual journey, separate us from our authentic self, and from the Divine.
If we want to be stable, centered, and content, we need to consciously let go of our fears, resentments, regrets, hurts, addictions, and essentially anything that is robbing us of a peaceful mind. Vasana Daha Tantra is an uncomplicated and private way to resolve and eradicate emotional conflict, and clear the conscience.
The primary purpose of letting go is to develop interior awareness and quiet the troubled mind so that it can return to its natural state of peace. If you want to practice letting go of thoughts and feelings that are holding you back and stealing your peace, consider looking into creating your own Vasana Daha Tantra practice to help you let go of something that you should have perhaps never been holding onto in the first place.