The process which takes you from tamas to sattwa has a name, and that is sadhana. Generally, when we use the word ‘sadhana’, people identify it with a spiritual discipline, a spiritual practice. However, sadhana means attainment of perfection in that which you do.
When you were learning to write ABC at school, you had to fill many pages by writing each letter repeatedly. After three or four pages of writing ‘A,’ you had to write ‘B’, and so on. You were given lined pages and you had to write in between those lines. That is sadhana for a child, and the result of that sadhana is received. If you write properly, you get plus marks, you get a gold star, and if you do not write properly then you get a red ‘x’. The sadhana of a child gets results then and there. The more you write, the more flowing you become, the more clarity there is in the writing, and the letter is recognized the more easily. The result of any sadhana you do well is attainment of maturity. Through sadhana you get plus marks in life. Those who do not do sadhana get minus marks, become lazy and stay ignorant.
Another form of sadhana is found in the story of Arjuna, friend and disciple of Sri Krishna. When he was young, he was an avid archer. Once, while he was eating his dinner at night, the candle blew out and there was pitch darkness in the dining room. Arjuna kept on eating and suddenly he realized that his hands were going automatically to his mouth; they were not going to his nose, or to his eyes, or to his ears, but straight to his mouth. He recognized that even in absolute darkness, if the senses are trained, they will follow their course of action.
With this in mind, he started training himself to shoot the arrow at night without seeing where he was shooting. Of course, this sadhana had its own problems, but he overcame them all and became the greatest archer of his time. The story indicates that if you train your senses and your mind, then there is nothing that you cannot achieve; everything is achieved naturally and spontaneously.

Training regulates the behaviour of the senses and the mind. This is the kind of training you lack in your life. This regulation of sensory and mental behaviour is known as sadhana. Sensory education takes place at the physical level, the sensorial level and the interactive level. It is an interactive process: you and the world. Mental sadhana is practised to pacify mental agitation and to develop concentration and focused awareness. Emotional sadhana takes place in the form of bhakti, intellectual sadhana in the form of jnana and spiritual sadhana in the form of pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and absorption.

Spiritual sadhana takes place in form of developing an understanding of your own nature and managing the problem areas in the mind. Sadhana means a process that leads you to mastery and perfection. It is also a type of discipline, as without discipline no sadhana can be achieved or fulfilled. Therefore, the main subject and focus of sadhana is the preparation of the mind.
The mind is always being directed outward, and this mind has to be retrained. Sri Swamiji says never to fight with the mind, but to always guide it. If there is a fight at home between husband and wife, there is disturbance; there is emotional pain and suffering, intellectual confusion and conflict. That is happening between two people who may be a couple, may be friends, may be parents, that is it. If you fight with your mind, however, the mind lives with you twenty-four hours of the day. The mind is with you in the same bed when you go to sleep; it follows you around when you eat, when you shower, when you brush your teeth, when you work and when you visit your friends.

April 2011, Ganga Darshan, Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati