Day 9: Art of Non-doership and Self-Distancing

Surrendering doership is an important yoga practice. You have the right to do your duty, but the results are not dependent on your efforts. There are numerous factors that come into play in determining the results. The witnessing power within you is your true self and your doership feeling is the ego. Mindfulness  is the art of non-doership and self-distancing from the ego. Ego has two components attachment and aversion. Self-distancing is creating distance from the ego and it is becoming a distant observer of what’s happening.

Self-distancing and non-doership

When you use more first-person words “I or me” you become more in self-immersion mode and in reactive mindset. When you use more non-first-person words like “you, they, she, he, others” you become more in self-distancing mode and mostly in procative mindset and ego-decentered mind with wiser and less biased judgments. 

In self-distancing and non-doership mode, you work without getting caught up in the emotionally arousing details of what happened to you.

In self-distancing mode you focus your energy more on the quality of your actions and less on the end the results of your actions. While in self-immersion mode you focus more energy on the end results of your actions and less on the quality of your actions.

Mindfulness helps you to create self distancing and engage you with your higher cognitive functions for self-control to resist your reactive temptations. Lack of distancing or higher self-immersion makes you more emotionally reactive.

However, better self-control is strongly associated with  higher self-esteem, better interpersonal skills, and better emotional responses. When you think or observe an event from a third-person perspective, you will see everything unfold from a distance and you will be able to operate in an responsive mode rather than reactive mode.

The concept of mindfulness, non-doership and self-distancing overlaps. They focus more on the present moment experience rather than on the emotional content of the past experiences.  These three concept allow people to reflect on their feelings more constructively. These three interlinked techniques reduce negativity and enhance positivity and they provide greater heart-rate-variability.