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Ever catch yourself doing something like biting your nails, chasing success like a madman, or reaching for that second (okay, third) coffee and think, Why do I keep doing this?
It almost seems as if some invisible hand is guiding your actions, and usually not for your best interest either. These deeply ingrained habits sorta steer your life for you, and some of them have been there as long as you can remember. Maybe you’ve tried to give them the kick, maybe you’re not even aware of them, but if there’s anything you’ve learned, they’re a force to be reckoned with!
While some of these deeply ingrained patterns might even be beneficial… just think of that unwavering drive to be a better person, or that obsession to step deeper into your spiritual growth. However, without awareness, even good things can trap you. This leads to stubborn habits that cause you to go in circles, usually without having any idea why.
That, my friend, might be a vasana: A Sanskrit term that’s rooted in Eastern philosophy, most notably Yoga and Buddhism. While vasana might just be a code word to you, the wisdom shared by these ancient philosophies can help us understand why we’re unconsciously dictated by certain behaviors, and help us free ourselves from these karmic traps.
What Is a Vasana?
In simple terms, a vasana is a deep-seated pattern that was formed in your mind, shaping how you think, feel, and act, usually without you realizing it.
Think of it like a behavioral groove that was created through repetition. You began responding to a certain situation, and creating a default response which may not have been in your best interest. Over time, it became difficult to distinguish what’s just part of your personality, and what is an unconscious pattern.
You might mistake a vasana as a personality trait or a part of your character, but if it’s doing you harm in some form, then it’s probably a vasana. The good news is that you can work your way out of vasanas with awareness, reflection, and patience. So this might actually be a good thing, because it means that personality trait you hate might just be a karmic secret agent that you can pluck out.
Generally, this is the gist…
You had an experience at some point in your life that caused an impact on you mentally, emotionally, or behaviorally. This could be a particular traumatic event that happened during childhood, causing you to develop a coping mechanism, maybe like shying away from commitment, or gravitating towards substances to take the edge off.
When an event triggered a deeply unpleasant emotional response, you acted. One time, no problem. We all find different ways to cope with different situations, especially when we’re young and don’t yet have the wisdom to deal with these things properly.
However, it’s usually not just one time.
As you realize that this coping mechanism relieves the pain, or stress, or whatever it is that you were experiencing, you do it again, and again, and again. One action doesn’t form a habit, but when you reinforce that action, it creates a groove in your mind that you get trapped in.
Over time, you continued that particular behavior as a way of dealing with someone, but then over time, you forget why you do it. You’ve built a highway in your consciousness, where you now default down a particular path… because you can. In this sense, a vasana is like wearing a path into your psyche until a particular course of action becomes normal.
The truth is, unless you’ve done a lot of healing (and usually not the healing you think you’re doing), your actions are controlled by these grooves. We each have many of them, creating the highways of default behaviors. It’s the reason we have typical reactions to situations, or why we do things unconsciously.
Thatโs why even when you know something isnโt helping you, it can still feel impossible to stop. Whether you’re like me and just need that cup of coffee every morning to feel in control of the day, or maybe you tend to replay similar patterns in your interpersonal relationships.
You’re not really in control, the vasana is.
Until you even out these grooves, that vasana will act as a big fat spiritual block, preventing you from growing, expanding, and transforming your life experience into something new.
Are Vasanas the Same as Habits?
Habits are often surface-level. You can usually change a habit with a bit of willpower or some lifestyle tweaks. Vasanas go way deeper. Theyโre the root system under the habit. You might cut the weed, but the roots are still alive, and that same pattern will just pop up again in a different way.
Here’s the thing. If we don’t address the vasana, even if we overpower the habit consciously, those roots are still there. What this means is that the energetic imprint will manifest in different ways. If you force yourself to stop a bad habit, you’re suppressing it, and it probably won’t do you a whole lot of good in the long run.
Sure, the habit might stop, but the vasana may pop up as illness, or better yet, another habit to replace it.
For example, you quit sugar, but now youโre obsessed with fitness. You stop being a people pleaser, but now youโre terrified of disappointing your spiritual teacher. You finally stop chasing toxic relationships, but you feel weirdly empty without the drama.
This is one that I’m guilty of too. For some reason, drama would always ignite that spark in relationships. I would feel generally dissatisfied when things were going smoothly, and feel the fire when they weren’t. For some reason I was addicted to the hurt because it made me feel something that I thought to be real.
I would always be disappointed when I prematurely ended a good relationship, or better yet, self-sabotaged it to feel that spark. Strangely enough, it was that feeling that made me feel alive.
Now, we could spend a lifetime dissecting this vasana and going deep into the karmic issues that caused this, but we’re not going to. Fortunately, I value your time way too much to blabber on about my sob story.
But the point is that the behavior is a manifestation of something deeper. Cutting out the habit doesn’t cut out the roots. It just grows in another form, perhaps as a feeling, perhaps as a behavior, perhaps as a physical illness or aspect of your shadow self, because you’re not addressing the root cause.
Are Vasanas Always Bad?
Some vasanas are neutral or even helpful. If you grew up in a loving environment and developed a strong sense of kindness or discipline, those impressions can carry you in beautiful ways.
Although we often associate vasanas with sneaky habit that traps up in a spiritual growth rut, they’re neutral. They can benefit us, and they can harm us, depending on what they are.
But hereโs the catch. Even the good vasanas can keep you stuck if theyโre rooted in fear, identity, or ego.
Letโs say youโre always helping people. Great, right? But if thatโs driven by a deep fear of being unwanted, then your helpfulness becomes a trap. You might burn yourself out trying to earn your place in the world. You might sabotage your joy to appease others.
The point is that we need to be conscious about these deeply ingrained habits and seek to understand where they came from. With awareness, we erode the highways, and give us the freedom to make better decisions without that sneaky invisible hand pushing us in a certain direction.
Where Do Vasanas Come From?
Vasanas are usually karmic, the residue of past life experiences that were never resolved. This means that you signed up to receive a particular lesson, causing an alteration in how you interact with the world. Because of this karmic imprint, you end up creating more vasanas and get embedded within these karmic imprints.
Think of it as baggage from previous lives, thus you carried it to this one. Our experiences here can sorta get muddled into past life experiences, but often if you have a powerful reaction with absolutely no idea where it could of come through, it’s probably related to a past life, meaning it’s your responsibility in this life to resolve it.
Let me tell you about a sneaky past life vasana I had when I was younger.
When I was a child, I had this massive phobia of running water. From the age of perhaps 5 or 6, I remember screaming my lungs out, panicking, and in a fit of tears every time my mother or father turned the tap on to fill up the bathtub and left the room for a moment.
Even though I was so young, I remember the dread. It was horrible. There was no rational reason why I panicked every time the water was left on unsupervised, but I remember thinking that I would drown.
No, I wasn’t in the bathtub when this happened, in which case maybe it would be ever so slightly justified (considering I would well hop in and out of the bathtub at that age, and turn off the tap). Likewise, a parent was always just in the other room, clearly aware that the tub was filling.
But that fear dug deep.
This carried on for years. Every time the tap was turned on, all hell broke loose. That deep, visceral fear haunted me for years, but there was simply no explanation. I was too young to understand at the time, and my parents were perplexed. No matter how many times they reassured me (and how many times the bathtub didn’t overflow), it made no difference.
Over time, as I got older, this fear began to subside. I can’t tell you whether it was because I played through that situation so many times and realized it, or was desensitized to it, or somehow worked through that fear as a child. But this is an example of what I believe to have been a vasana influenced by a past life, likely drowning, that triggered this intense emotional reaction.
Every time you react to something with a strong emotional charge, and especially if you avoid dealing with it consciously, you plant a seed. The more often that seed is watered (by repeating the reaction), the stronger the vasana becomes.
The good news now is that I absolutely love the water. I never feel more at home than when I’m swimming at the beach, thrown around by the waves, and truly feeling alive.
So, How Do You Deal With Vasanas?
The good news is that vasanas arenโt permanent. You can work through them, and you could say that it’s your karma to work through them. You will keep going in loops until you do, so you need to identify these unconscious, ingrained habits and pull them out by the roots.
Awareness alone is important. First off, if you never wonder why you do the things you do, or reflect on recurring patterns that tend to backfire, then you’ll probably keep on reacting the same way.
The result? You stay in a painful, self-perpetuating loop.
Recognizing when you’re defaulting into a normal, unpleasant reaction gives you a choice. You can either follow through with it because it feels normal, and probably gives you a feeling of relief, or you can sit with all the icky emotions that bubble up, reflect on them, and follow the breadcrumb trail back to Narnia.
Over time, youโll start to see patterns. And once you see the pattern, you can start to pause before reacting. There is always an underlying reason, and that reason can be tricky to identify if we don’t constantly bring ourselves back to question when we begin defaulting into a particular behavior.
Once youโve seen it, name a small shift you can make next time.
- โWhen I want to bite my nails, Iโll take 3 deep breaths and gently rub my fingertips together.โ
- โWhen I reach for my coffee, Iโll check in and ask, โWhat am I needing right now?โโ
- โWhen I feel defeated in my business, Iโll remind myself that my path is my own, not defined by anyone elseโs pace.โ
Even one small shift begins to loosen the vasanasโ grip.
Identifying and dissolving the root cause
Awareness helps to erode these ingrained patterns that are running the show, but there’s something more we need to learn from them before we can turn a chapter.
You might notice that some vasanas are tricky buggers. No matter how aware you are and how much you try to cut them out, they just keep popping their heads out of the water. Especially when you have no idea where they came from, finding a deeper theme might seem impossible.
Keep in mind that vasanas are often karmic. That irrational fear you have towards speaking with strangers, although you can’t find a link to why. That pattern of always being taken advantage of, no matter how much you try to do something about it. That way you somehow always screw up the good things going in your life, despite how hard you try not to.
Likely, what’s happening is that you’re dealing with karmic residue from a past life. So… you can’t figure out why it’s happening, because there isn’t a link. At least not in this life. This can feel like you’re trapped in a frustrating maze that you don’t deserve.
What I suggest is reflecting on these things as much as possible, meditating on them, and being super aware when a situation is culminating to a tipping point. If you continue digging into it, some emotional junk might come to the surface, bit by bit.
This emotional junk could be in the form of past traumas, painful memories, past decisions, and all sorts of things. They can be mental, they can be emotional. Certain things might come to the surface, making you feel exhausted, or defeated, or hopeless. In my eyes, this is good because your awareness, and invitation is bringing up something, from this life or a previous one.
When you set your intention to learn and just sit with that hurt, while of course doing your best not to default into a vasana, I bet you that some insights will come through. By processing these experiences, learning from the insights that come out of it, and applying any logical changes into your life, that’s when you get to the roots of it.
Vasanas are sneaky, but theyโre not permanent. They donโt define you, and they certainly aren’t you, even though they try to convince you that they are. The more ingrained a vasana is, the longer it will take to go. You need to do a lot of eroding here, and it’s a big fat highway. So don’t beat yourself up and just stay consistent, aiming to nip it in the butt every time it shows up.
One step at a time, youโre peeling back the layers. Underneath it all, thereโs a free, radiant you, just waiting to shine through.
