Life is always giving us opportunities to grow and change, yet we are often unable to let go of the complexities that bind us. The same situations come up again and again - in our relationships and in the way we solve our problems. It is as if we are held captive by an inner "program" of our own conditioned responses, our expectations and our fears. How can that inner program be rewritten?

Our experiences - actions and reactions, thoughts and emotions, leave impressions, called samskaras, on our minds and hearts. These accumulate over time, coloring our view of reality and influencing our behavior. Habit patterns emerge, insuring that we react in the present as we did in the past and setting the blueprint for future action. In this way we become slaves to our past..

In Sahaj Marg, we believe that the mind can be used to remove or clean away these impressions, through the application of the will power. The root causes of behavioral patterns that keep us bound to the past gently and naturally drop off. When they are cleaned away, either during the individual evening cleaning, or during an individual sitting with a prefect or the Master, we are, in a sense, reborn, since the past progressively loses its hold over us. In Sahaj Marg it is believed that whatever progress we may make in meditation will be limited in its effectiveness unless the samskaras are removed, since we will still be subject to our own conditioning from the past.