How does one sustain a shift in the inner journey?

The morning after awakening...
Sunday, 9pm. The session closes. Something has shifted — you feel it in the chest, a loosening that wasn't there three hours ago. This time, you tell yourself, it will hold. By Wednesday, three meetings deep, the old reaction is back in your throat before you notice it arrive. The Sunday version of you feels like someone you chanced upon.

How is an insight from inner exploration really sustained? Many AIP (Awakening Inner Presence) participants carry this question. What happens to the insight gained on Sunday, when the struggles of life feel so real by mid-week?

It is easy to call this being human, or to beat oneself up for slipping back into old patterns. Patanjali names this movement of the mind chitta vritti, the fluctuation of the mind-field (Yoga Sutra 1.2). The "I" is a conglomerate of parts — body, mind, emotion, breath — all ever-changing, and the patterns run deep. Deep in the mind, deeper in the emotions, almost stuck in the body. These grooves have a name of their own: samskara — impressions worn so smooth by repetition that we slide into them without choosing. So how does one really change?

The Yoga Sutra does not only diagnose; it offers two methods — abhyāsa and vairāgya. Abhyāsa — to apply oneself, again and again; the Vyāsa bhāṣya calls it the effort to abide, sustained over time. Like any art or sport, it needs time, commitment, and a place to practice. Inner Presence too needs a container — a cohort journeying together, holding one another. That holding is as much the abhyāsa as being authentic with oneself.

Vairāgya, its quieter twin, is the loosening of our fixation on the outcome. Not indifference, but the willingness to keep practicing without demanding that Wednesday feel like Sunday. Much of our suffering after an awakening is the fixation itself — the insistence that the insight should already have fixed us. Vairāgya lets the practice breathe, so abhyāsa does not relapse into one more thing we are failing at.

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From : LinkedIn Post by Ajay Viswanath (Institute of Indic Wisdom)