Break the circuit: Return to Awareness
Updated: 5 days ago
Break the circuit: Return to Awareness
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Universe is pure love, joy, consciousness, and bliss, permeating everyone and everything, and when you delve deep into the core message of any culture this message is more apparent. You may call it source, unity consciousness, pure unified field of energy, or God. This is the source of the underlying harmony in this universe, and we are all part of it.
Discordant energy is a static that arises between you and your natural state of peace; what remains once you strip this discordance away is pure awareness. The unsettled, reactive feeling that shows up before you snap, spiral, or shut down, it is arriving out this discordance.
The universe, embodying the energy of love, is always accessible, and this love neutralizes any discord we encounter. When all disharmonies are resolved, what is left is pure soul consciousness and bliss, with no sense of "I" remaining.
In Sanskrit, we call it Sat-Chit-Ananda.
Many people don't meditate, which causes conflicting energies to linger longer than needed. We often believe we are angry or disappointed and identify with the emotion. But, pure consciousness is always untouched and remains unaffected. We just have to find our way back to it.
Here is a technique I've been practicing — one that has worked for me more consistently than anything else I've tried:
When the urge to react rises in you, whether to a situation or an emotion, recognize it for what it is: discordant energy looking for an outlet.
How to do the technique ?
Stop the action you are about to take.
Take a few deep long loving breaths.
And decide to act in a way that is contrary to your immediate reaction.
** Some similar practices from scriptures are mentioned in the end
How does doing opposite work ?
This chosen opposite action should serve to neutralize the energy fueling your reaction, thereby transforming and transmuting the discordant energy.
Most people think there are only two options: suppressing the emotion or expressing it. But there is also a third option — finding a way to come back to presence.
By resisting and doing the opposite of your first instinct:
You will diffuse the energy.
You will come back to the present moment.
You might be thinking — why write an entire post about something that sounds like common sense? Pause when you're about to react. Do the opposite. None of this sounds new.
Fair. But here's why I wrote it anyway: it works — not in theory, but every single time I've actually practiced it. There's a real difference between knowing something and living it. Most of us have heard "just breathe" a hundred times and still snapped at someone five minutes later.
And it isn't just my own experience backing this up. What I've been calling "acting opposite to neutralize discordant energy" has a name in modern psychology too — Opposite Action, a core skill in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan. This looks like a well-established in clinical practice for emotion regulation for clinicians. It's taught, studied, and it works. I didn't need to invent something new here — I just needed to actually do the simple thing, consistently, and watch it change how I move through a triggered moment.
What are the after affects ?
When you practice this, the discordant energy is active in you trying to find expression and you are choosing to go in a completely different direction by choosing a opposite action. So, its perfectly normal to feel somewhat empty afterward before you return to the normal awareness. These kinds of gaps and/or void experienced in the perceptions are normal in any meditations practices and after going through psychic healing.
After years of meditation and experimenting with various methods of working with energy patterns, I’ve discovered this to be the simplest and effective practice on multiple occasions. Sometimes the deepest practices aren't the complicated ones. They're the ones simple enough to dismiss — until you actually try them.
Key points to consider:
Opposite action should be grounded in love, as this is the essential component for it to be effective. Do not anticipate that using opposite action with aggression will yield the desired results.
Do not forget, you are not attacking others in this whole process, you are only neutralizing your limitations.
First step is evaluating whether the emotion actually fits the facts of the situation and
remembering to choose a loving opposite action. Its to heal yourself with out harming your existing relationships or any aspect of your life.
Choose anything that feels like it would redirect your attention completely. Everything needs your conscious effort. It could be dancing to music, hopping, going for a run, or even a fast stride to snap back from your thoughts. Essentially, the goal is to come back to the present moment.
DISCLAIMER:
This technique is meant for everyday reactive patterns — small triggers, minor frustrations, habitual responses.
It's not a substitute for therapy, and it's not meant to replace speaking up when something genuinely needs to be addressed, or to override your safety in any situation that calls for it.
If what you're working with involves ongoing anger, trauma, or an unsafe relationship, please seek support from a qualified professional alongside (or instead of) a practice like this.
List of Emotions and the opposite actions
** Check back in a week for new updates to this list
When you feel compelled to | Some opposite actions to try as examples |
Argue | Become quiet. Decide not to speak for a few minutes. Listen. |
Dwell on the past | Bring your attention deliberately to what is happening now. |
Facing covert coercion | If you are able to identify that, 70% of the process is complete. Be upfront and verbal that you don't need them. It neutralizes energy in you and also breaks that pattern in others. |
Fear / Anxiety | Always facing them is the opposite action. |
Feel angry | Face it calmly. Choose to talk—with love. |
Judge someone | Search for good qualities in them or see where they are coming from. |
Keep pushing | Take a step back. Allow others’ light to express. |
React immediately | Take deep, slow breaths with love before responding. Evaluate if you need to respond, how much is required and useful. |
Run away from discomfort | Stay with yourself. Observe and not speak. Shift your attention gently, with a smile and love. |
Sadness / Depression | Choose a activity that makes you happy or anything enjoyable. |
Seek revenge | Use visualization, wrap the person in light in until the feeling passes. |
Send an angry message | Put the phone down. Watch TV or Talk to someone. |
Shame / Guilt | Anything you want to hide, openly confide in someone. |
The purpose is not to suppress what you feel. It's to break the circuit.
It is to interrupt the pattern long enough for awareness to enter. ✨
Other similar theories from scriptures?
Yes, it is mentioned in the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra. In this text, while Shiva shares the knowledge of the supreme with Shakti, he advises neither to express emotions nor to suppress them.
The following explains it:
When the mood goes against someone or towards someone, do not place it on the person in question, but remain centered.
Avoid Both Expression and Suppression:
Do not express the emotion: Expressing the emotional energy outward wastes your energy onto the other person wastes his.
Do not suppress the emotion: Suppressing the mood downwards traps the energy within, forming a burdensome psychological complex that eventually seeks an outlet for expression.
Take the third path: Do not do anything with the emotion itself. Use the trigger that made possible the active pathway to the emotion while it is alive to travel inward.
Both expression and suppression remain fixated on "the other" as the focal point, whereas this step bypasses both entirely. When you suppress you are not moving to the center, you are struggling with the expression.
This technique encourages you to trace the emotion back to its origin. Since the source is always within you, when an emotion—whether love or hate—is triggered, the source becomes apparent inside, revealing the path to address it. By concentrating on the emotion's origin, you redirect the energy back to its true source. The important aspect is observing it, being present with it, and making it your focal point, which ultimately neutralizes it.
Here are the other sutras that reinforces the same idea. The fact that they are pointing to similar action in every sutra, emphasizes that it had to work and we do not need to react and take action all the time to neutralize the feeling or emotion.
Sutra / Technique | Condition / action | Primary mechanism to focus |
Sutra 24 (Emotional Centering) | When a mood against someone or for someone arises, do not place it on the person or the object. | Tracing projection back to source: Uses the "heat" of an emotion as an inward path to the neutral energy center, to the source where the emotion is coming from. |
Sutra 9 (Physical Immobility) | Enraged in wrath | Total body freeze during wrath: Lie down as if you are dead or remain completely motionless so the physical body does not move with the emotion, severing body-mind momentum. Decide that you cannot do anything, so just stay there. |
Sutra 25 (The Sudden Stop) | Just as you have the impulse to do something, stop. | Interrupting impulse in mid-action: Suddenly freezing in the exact middle of an emerging impulse (anger, thirst, action) forces outward energy to rebound inward. It disrupts your balance and leads you to the center. |
Sutra 26 (Consider & Quit) | When some desire comes, consider it. Then, suddenly, quit it. | Fact-observation without judgment: Observing the desire in its total facticity without moral labels, then suddenly decide to drop it. Quit the action. |
Sutra 107 (Psychodrama Witnessing) | In moods of extreme desire, be undisturbed. | Outer vs. Inner polarity: Allowing the emotion to play out on the body's periphery (or in a private psychodrama/mirror) while anchoring in the undisturbed witnessing core |
All these work for a single reason: emotions and feelings are not YOU. They are fleeting moments, and this is not the first time we are hearing it. You have to find YOU through all these processes. It seems straightforward, yet even the simplest practice must be consistently applied over many years to reconnect everything within us to its origin.
~ Shiva Tejo
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