You say you will respond differently this time. And then, under pressure, you do exactly what you always do. You withdraw. You flare. You go quiet. You over-explain. The pattern lands before the thought does.
The groove beneath the reaction
In yogic psychology, there is a word for this: samskara.
Samskara refers to the impressions, grooves, and residues left on the mind by past experience. Every encounter, every emotion repeatedly felt, every pattern of thought that runs its loop leaves a trace. Over time, those traces deepen into channels. And the mind, taking the path of least resistance, flows through them again and again.
The word itself comes from the roots sam (complete, together) and kara (action, that which is done). A samskara is not simply a memory. It is a shaping. A completed action that continues to act.
How samskaras form
Samskaras are laid down through two primary forces: intensity and repetition.
A single overwhelming experience can imprint deeply. So can a pattern of smaller experiences, unremarkable in themselves, that repeat across years. The child who learns early that anger in the room signals danger does not make a conscious decision to become hypervigilant. The learning happens below the threshold of choice. It becomes the operating system.
Early life is particularly formative, not because childhood is uniquely traumatic, but because the nervous system is more porous then. The impressions go in cleanly, without the buffer of a developed prefrontal cortex to contextualise them. What we learn to expect from the world, from those who hold power over us, from our own emotional states, takes root at a level beneath language.
Later experience adds to this. The relationship that confirmed the fear. The professional failure that calcified the shame. The praise that taught you to perform. Each experience either reinforces an existing groove or begins to lay down a new one.
What neuroscience now confirms
The yogic understanding of samskara maps closely onto what contemporary neuroscience describes as neural pathways: the electrochemical routes through which the brain habitually fires. Neurons that fire together, wire together. A thought pattern or emotional response that is repeated enough times becomes, quite literally, a physical structure in the brain.
The field of neuroplasticity demonstrates that these structures are not permanent. The brain retains the capacity to form new pathways throughout life. Old grooves do not vanish, but new ones can be deepened until they become the default route.
This is not a metaphor. It is physiology. And it is, in essence, what the yogic tradition pointed to thousands of years before the language of neuroscience existed.
Recognising your own samskaras
You do not need to excavate every wound to begin working with your samskaras. What is required is a quality of attention, what the tradition calls sakshi, or the witness: the capacity to observe your own patterns without being completely consumed by them.
Start with the reactions that feel automatic. The situations where your response is faster than your reflection. The emotional states that seem disproportionate to the immediate trigger. The relationships in which you consistently find yourself in the same dynamic, regardless of who the other person is.
These are the fingerprints of samskara. Not failures of character. Not evidence of brokenness. Simply patterns that have, until now, operated without being seen.
The act of seeing them, of naming them with curiosity rather than judgement, is itself a form of practice.
Abhyasa: the mechanism of change
If samskaras are grooves worn deep by repetition, then new grooves are laid down the same way. This is the teaching of abhyasa, translated variously as practice, sustained effort, or disciplined repetition.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are clear on this: abhyasa is practice maintained over time, without interruption, with dedication. Change does not happen through a single insight, however profound. It happens through the patient, consistent return to a different way of responding, sensing, orienting.
In practice, this means working with the body as much as the mind. Samskaras are not held only in thought. They live in the nervous system, in the musculature, in the breath. Somatic work alongside reflective practice is what allows change to move from the intellectual to the lived.
This is the work at the heart of the practice at karishmaerraballi.com: not the extraction of insight, but the gradual, sustainable rewiring of how you meet yourself and the world.
Where to begin
Understanding samskara is the first step. It reframes the question from “What is wrong with me?” to “What has been shaped in me, and what do I want to shape from here?”
That shift in framing changes everything. It makes the work possible. It makes it something other than punishment.
If you are curious about beginning this process, the individual mentorship and somatic work offered through this practice is designed precisely for this: meeting the patterns at depth, with care, and finding the practices that allow something new to take root.
Explore the services available, or read more about the approach and background behind this work, to understand whether it might be right for you.
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Karishma Erraballi works privately with a small number of next-generation leaders, family businesses and individuals on the inner work that external preparation cannot do. To understand the patterns. To change the ones worth changing. To feel steady within themselves.