The Resilient Mind - Stop Managing Your Time: Manage Your Energy - Sadhguru

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Sadhguru is the founder of the Isha Foundation located in Coimbatore, India. The foundation operates an ashram and yoga center that specializes in education and spiritual practices. An accomplished yoga teacher since 1982, Sadhguru is also the author of several New York Times bestsellers, such as Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy and Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny. He is also a frequent speaker at international events and forums.This episode is brought to you in partnership with Sadhguru. Follow his YouTube channel by visiting: https://www.youtube.com/@sadhguru/videosExplore tools from past guests of the podcast. Some links below are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you:💓 HeartMath: https://www.heartmath.com/resilient🧠 Muse: https://choosemuse.com/resilientmind🌿 Brain Ritual: https://www.brainritual.com/THERESILIENTMIND🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The more deeply you're entangled, the more time has a grip on you. You cannot manage time. But you can manage your energy. The sadhana is essentially designed to crank up energy if your energies are at a certain peak. What is 100 years for somebody is like 10 minutes for you. Once there's no sense of time, there is no burdensomeness in one's life.

Everybody intends to be joyful. They keep falling into pits because they don't have the necessary energy to keep it up. If you want to be ecstatic, every moment of your life, you need a powerhouse of energy within you. If you want to know life in a graceful manner, you must know how to combine this time and energy with imperfect unison in our lives.

Essentially, this is a combination of time and energy. If time runs out, before energy runs out, it's called untimely death. If energy runs out before time runs out, it's called vegetative life, because energy has run out still there is time. If you want to know life in a graceful manner, you must know how to combine this time and energy

with in perfect unison. Only then this life will be a fulfilling life. This while life will be managed well. A whole lot of people, especially the management gurus around the world, are always talking about time management. Don't try to manage time because time is slipping away for all of us at the same pace. You do something, you don't do something, you are a mystic, you're a mistake, it doesn't matter what you are.

Time is slipping away for all of us at the same pace. Don't try to meddle with it. I'm not saying you cannot master it, but if you want to just live well, don't bother about managing time. You cannot manage time. But you can manage your energy. If your energies are in a certain way,

what is 10 years for somebody is 10 minutes for you, depending upon the exuberance in which you keep, your energies at the peak if you keep it. What is 100 years for somebody is like 10 minutes for you? In terms of activity, what is what somebody can do in 100 years? Maybe you can do it in one year if your energies are at a certain peak. So there is a lot one can do with energy. It's almost a limitless possibility.

But don't try to meddle with time because do what you want. Time is slipping away at the same pace. As you're sitting here, as I'm talking about time, it's going away. Slipping away. You are, since we started the darshan, you're 20 minutes closer to death. Yes or no? Don't laugh, it's true. So all this yoga is, the current form of yoga that we are teaching you,

has nothing to do with time. has something to do with your energy. Time becomes a relative experience. In different people's experience, time may be different. If you're a joyful being, 24 hours may pass off like that for you. If you're depressed, 24 hours feels like a eon. In your experience, it may be different. But in terms of time, it is passing at the same pace for every one of us.

If you want to meddle with time, it's a different world altogether. Right now, all the sadhana is designed so that you can manage your energy at the highest possible level. People hit peaks. The problem is not sustainable. The idea of every day, every day, every day, everyday sadhana is so that energy you can manage at a certain peak always. When you become very joyful or when you become very angry, you are at a peak energy, you know. But you can't sustain it. You don't have the energy to sustain it.

It's not that you're not joyful enough. It is not that you're not loving enough. It's not that you're not angry enough. It is just that you don't have the energy to sustain it. If you want to be ecstatic, every moment of your life, you need a power of a, powerhouse of energy within you. If you don't know ecstasy business, try anger. Try to remain angry for one hour, let me see.

No, you will see two minutes of anger, poof. It goes. After that, you only bicker with people. Intense anger. Maintainting it for 24 hours, let me see. You cannot do it. Not because you don't have the intent. Because you don't have the energy.

If you don't have enough energy to maintain 24 hours anger as an experiment if you try, obviously you don't have the energy to maintain ecstasy for 24 hours. So it's a question of energy. It's not a question of intent. Everybody intends to be joyful. They are not. They keep falling into pits because they don't have the necessary energy to keep it up. So the sadhana is essentially designed to crank up energy.

to such a place where you are so exuberant, 100 years feels like one or two years or 10 years, maybe, doesn't feel like 100 years. In that sense, you have mastered time. But nobody has mastered time because it's slipping away at the same time. Time is a has impact on you or has hold on you only as long as you have a body. Right now,

because you sat with your legs folded, your ankles and knees are keeping time. How much more darshan? Suppose you had no body. You really had a no, you did not have a body. Well, this darshan is 10,000 years. What's your problem? If you just didn't have legs,

yoga would be so simple. Now, it happened one day. A whole tribe of bats were hanging from the ceiling of a cave. But then one bat alone was on the floor standing upright, all of them hanging upside down. They looked at him and asked, what the heck are you doing? He said, I'm preparing for the International Yoga Day.

It's coming for the world. The idea is to give you another perspective. because living in the logic of your mind, you drawn straight lines that you yourself cannot keep. You drawn straight lines in your mind to which your body does not confirm, your emotions does not confirm, your own thoughts will not confirm.

If you confirm it, if all your thoughts confirm to the straight lines of your logic, you will become a constipated consciousness. Such people cannot smile, cannot laugh, cannot live, nothing happens around them. Only thing is they think they are smarter than others because they have straight lines along which nobody can travel. Then people call you an intellectual. You see, one qualification is that you should not laugh, you should not smile.

You must be grave. Grave is the destination. You don't have to practice it now. You don't have to practice it here and now. Time, the nature of time, has hold on you depending upon how entangled are you with physicality of who you are. The more deeply you're entangled, the more time has a grip on you. If you're very deeply entangled, then you will see time won't pass for you.

life feels like very long. If you have explored the possibilities of life beyond your physical nature, suddenly you find life is too brief. If you live here calendar years, if there are hundred, in your experience it feels too little. Too little. I feel like I was born day before yesterday, but see, only when I look at the mirror, I realize, oh,

It's going. Otherwise, there's no sense of time. Once there's no sense of time, there is no burdensomeness in one's life. Because it's too short. Before you know what's happening, it's gone. So how deeply are you tangled up with your body, with your physicality, with the material around you?

That is what determines the experience of time, the cyclical nature of physicality, gets you into the cycles of time. But time is neither a cycle, nor is it a straight line. It is Kala. That means what we are saying is what you call as time and what you call as space are not two different things.

Only under the influence of large masses of physicality like planets and solar systems and galaxies, around that, time behaves in a certain way. The space also confirms to that behavior which is curved in nature, which means it is essentially cyclical in nature. So if you aspire to go beyond time, if you aspire to transcend the limitations of physicality,

if you aspire to move into the darkness of life, the word dark has gathered negative connotation in the world because of certain religious sentiments and certain distorted perception of life. People are talking about, almost every religion is talking about eternal life. And they talk about divine light. Okay?

Light cannot be eternal. So divine cannot be eternal. Because light burns whether it's this light bulb or the sun or the stars, all of them have a lifespan. They will die one day. They'll burn themselves out one day. This may be in terms of hours,

that may be in terms of billions of years, but every source of light will burn itself out someday because it has to burn itself out. That is the nature of physical space. Physicality in the existence is just that. It has to burn itself out. It looks like a perpetual machine. Solar system looks like a perpetual machine.

But it is not perpetual. Yes, in our experience, because our lifespan is only so much, something that's so big looks perpetual to us. But in reality, anything that's physical cannot be perpetual. There is only one thing that is perpetual, which is utter darkness of the space.

Because it's cool. It doesn't burn. It doesn't, it is not in cyclical motions. It is simply there. What is its nature? It's color. That means it's dark. If you don't get it,

because dark means you don't have visual operators to look through darkness. You must experience this. We built something like this, but now it's gone because we're living in a very, stupidly sensitive society. We wanted to build some dark rooms for those who want to do sadhana where it's utterly dark. It must be so dark after some time you don't know whether your eyes are open or closed. Yes, there should be no sense of light for a few days. You will see, you will become super aware simply because you're in a dark space.

That's the idea of closing your eyes. But it's not working for most people. See, your eyelids are like a lens cap of a camera. If you put on the lens cap, camera should not shoot. But if there is a camera which shoots through the lens cap, the damn camera is a problem, isn't it? Right now, this is what is happening. If you close your eyes, the world should disappear. No.

If you close your eyes a whole, the world is playing from inside out. Now, this is a nuisance. Because once you put the lens cap, it must be gone. Just look at the freedom of this. If you close your eyes, the world is gone. How fantastic it is. Good? You want to engage with the world, you can open your eyes.

You want to shut it off, close your eyes. That's the idea. But now if you close your eyes, there are more images going on than if you open your eyes. All kinds of things are being seen. Just now somebody called me and I said, Sad Guru, two days ago you appeared in my dream. I said, that must be a nightmare. Sadd Guru, you were saying something. He said, please, I don't say anything in anybody's dream.

Because I myself have no dream. If I close my eyes, I'm dead. I myself have no dreams, nor am I entering anybody's dreams. What did you try to say, Sad Guru? She's ignoring what I say right now. What I am saying right now, no, no, no. What did you say in my dream? If you can ignore what I say now,

why can't you ignore what I say in your bloody dream? because dream takes away your sense of time and space. That is the beauty of the dream, that people are attached to their dreams because that's their only moment of freedom, unfortunately. Because people's understanding of time is such. It happened once. Shankar and Pili got himself to pups

and decided to take them for a walk. A friend came by and asked, oh, you acquired two new dogs. What have you named them? Shankar and Pill, I said, This is Rolex, this is Timex. What kind of names are these for a dog, Rolex, Timex? Why?

No, no, you don't understand. When I went to the kennel that told me this is a watchdog. So this is the advantage of a dream. You can make anything into anything. You are not bound by time and space. You can go where you want. You can come back where you want. You can have me say what you want.

What more do you want? It's a great dream, isn't it? You can make me say whatever you like. Here I am sitting and saying all things that you don't like. So if you want to explore... If you explore the nature of energy, energy means light, light means ultimately material, if it slows down. If light slows down, it becomes material.

If it goes at a certain pace, it becomes light. All this, this world that you perceive through five cents organs, to perform well in this, a little mastery over your energy will make you look, wonderful things people will clap their hands you will like it you're effective in the world everything if you want to explore the other side of this then you will get nothing you will have to lose yourself entirely so when one is doing sardana one must know this demarcation what are we aspiring for

Right now, if you want to just function well in the world, you want to shine within yourself and outside of yourself, there is one way. You don't care about how you are in the world, how you look, what you seem to be, but you just want to go to the very source of everything. There there are no rewards. The only thing is you have to lose yourself entirely.

So there is a certain amount of misunderstanding about this. When we say renunciation or when the world talks about renunciation, what they're talking about is this is a mixture without understanding what is the goal that we have set for ourselves. People are mixing things up. Renunciation essentially means to keep a little distance from the material. The idea of keeping a distance is so that you have a better perspective of everything. When I say a better perspective, for example, you know, people have lived on this planet for millions of years.

For thousands of years, the argument whether this planet is round or flat was going on endlessly, this argument would have continued forever. But once man began to fly, when you went up and looked down, it's very clear. planet is round. When we went and stood on the moon, 100% clear that it is round because of the distance. So essentially, on one level, renunciation just means a little distance that you're not tangled up with material. Nobody can be free from the material. Your very body is material. The very planet that you live on is material. The food that you eat is material. It's just that you don't want to be tangled up. You want to keep a certain distance.

This distance is not because you don't like the material, because you want to have a better perspective of everything. Not because you want to give up something. You can't give it up because you can, the only way is to give up your body. You can't give up the material. You're wrapped in it. But if you keep it. a little distance, you have a far better perspective than when you're all tangled up with it.

To that extent, renunciation is fine. So it's not, the word renunciation is always understood as giving up something. Just a little distance because you're interested in knowing it better. You don't want to be just lost in it. You want to know it better. So that requires that you have some distance or some space between you and that. But if you want to explore the other, it's a different dimension altogether. I think a time has come when in Isha Ysha Yuga's center we need to intensify that dimension.

Namaskaram, Satur. What is the significance of playing Talavadya or the bell during Nada Aradana in Dianalinga? When we say Talavadya, we are talking about keeping the beat or the time in the music. it's not used like that because we have not put up bells which we won't do. We are using the thala as a bell. If the material, the metal, is properly done, there's a whole science about bell making, which unfortunately has gone very bad these days.

One place in Tamil Nadu, where they used to make bells, I think we have gotten every type of bell they've made, of bell they've made and they're as lousy as they can be. We have to sieve through hundreds of bells to find something which gives out that essential sound that's needed. Like someone said, bell in music or among sounds is like laughter in speech. If the metal is made properly and the shape and size is made properly, it gives out a certain sound.

Today we know with modern physics that the entire universe is a reverberation of energy. So is this body. We are trying to find those sounds which will create the right reverb of attention and involvement. When we say involvement, you can involve yourself mentally, emotionally, physically or energy-wise. The idea of Nada-Radana is not for you, why there are no words in Nader-adana is we don't want you to get emotionally involved with Diyama Linga. We want you to get energetically involved with Diamalinga, because that is the significance of who he is. Your emotions are fine if it gives you a direction, your emotions are fine. We are not against it. But emotion is not the highest way of involvement.

Ennegedically, if you can merge with the situation, it's best. So, Nada-Adana is without emotion, without words, without meaning, just sounds. Each one of you will respond to a different sound or to a different pitch of sound better than the other. Everyone will have different shades of sounds. So sounds are used in a particular way, but it has been used. found we can actually experimentally or what you today call it scientifically which is a very narrow wavelength or narrow band of things which we call as scientific unfortunately even according to the narrow band of physical science of what you call as modern science

even there we can prove how a bell or a tala what it does to your system it will do incredible things most important of all Why we've set up a kund, a chandra kund and a sunyakund, all this is, and many aspects of the kreya that you're doing, if you're doing Shakti-Chalana Kria particularly, is to activate the energy system and also get your neurological system to a certain level of sensitivity. Right now if you sit here,

most people will not feel the smells, the coolness of the breeze, all these things on a moment-to-moment basis. It has to get freezing cold for them to feel. feel it. Or it has to get really up their nostrils. You have to pump something up their nostrils for them to feel it like this, because their neurological system is not sensitive enough. So one aspect of taking you into an energized water where the Rassalingas are energizing the water in a certain way is to activate the neurological system. One reason why early morning all the yoga practitioners are taking cold water bath, not warm water, is to activate the neurological

system. If your nervous system is very alert, then your ability to experience everything is greatly enhanced. Modern life, as you know it, which is an onslaught on your sense organs in many ways. See, in nature, if you had to see, let's say, red color right now. You had to wait for the springtime till things blossomed. If you want to see yellow, you had to wait for autumn. If you want to see white, you had to wait for winter. Now not like that, you go and sit in front of your television.

Every damn color in the universe goes on passing second to second. In microseconds, it is all changing. Now all these advertisements and movies, no continuous flow of video either. Everything juk juk juk juk juk going on, okay? It's an onslaught on your nervous system. So because of this, your sensitivity to life itself will come down. Your sensitivity of experiencing the subtler aspects of life will come down dramatically. You will see as people spend today, it's in the newspapers, that they're saying, those who are spending more than four hours looking at any kind of screen,

their sleep will be very disturbed and they will never know profoundness of sleep. That's one aspect of it, which some experiments have been done about. But those who are constantly before all these colorful things and blasting sounds and, you know, people wearing headphones and constantly listening to what they think is music, you will see your ability to experience the subtler aspects of life will completely go away. You will see you will want life to be louder and louder. I think you can see that happening around you, isn't it? Your colors must be loud, sounds must be loud, everything must be loud.

Life itself is becoming very loud because as nervous system diminishes in its ability to perceive, you want everything louder for impact. anything subtle will not have impact on you. So the sound of the thala, we very carefully chose. We sat down there in the temple, spent almost an entire night trying to select the right kind of thala in that place and where, where they must sit in the temple, which spot in the dome will produce the right kind of impact.

Those spaces also have been marked and I'm sure they are still sitting on the same spaces because the dimensions of the dome have not changed. We've marked it as to exactly where they should sit and how the sound should be. This is essentially to sensitize your nervous system. You take a dip in the kund, come and sit there, ting. Everything is little heightened so that you're more available.

If you want to become really available to why there's no television in the ashram is because of this. so that your nervous system is sensitive. If it sees sunlight, if it sees a flower, it sees something, if it sees anything subtle, it will immediately respond. It's not semi-blind. It wants everything flashing in neon lights. Otherwise, people cannot see. So it is essentially to find an entry into your neurological system

because right now your whole sense perception and your so-called intelligence is essentially an outcome of how sensitive your neurosystem is. To making that as sensitive as possible is also one part of making the experience of life profound. No coffee tea in the ashram, no alcohol in the ashram,

no television in the ashram. This is not to torture you or keep you in archaic times. This is just to see that your neurological system is as sensitive as it can be. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.