“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never harm me”. How many times did we use this phrase as children to stand up to someone saying mean things to us? I learned that phrase so well. And yet there was never any real comfort in it in the moment. Only before or long after the event did …
Love Is Not Pain….
Love is the bottom line of life. But we are capable of twisting Love into pain. Why do we do this? We do it through ignorance of what Love really is. In order to get to pain, we have to twist Love so much. Love grounds and encompasses everything; pain is so paltry in comparison. Love is Self-illuminating; pain cannot …
Caring….
We all talk about being caring. And we usually refer to being caring for others. But if we haven’t learned how to truly care for ourselves, we will not be able to effectively care for others. The problem is, we may well have learned what care is from people who didn’t know how to care for themselves, and so did …
Our Real Story Saves Us….
Every moment of our lives is about having character and integrity; being truthful, honest. Being with our experience, whatever it is, means being honest with and about our experience, through and through. When we are honest about our experience, that constant honesty frees us. If we are honest about our stories, we can learn the right lessons from them. But …
Teaching Stories Are Right in Front of Us….
Our lives are teaching stories, for us and for others. They should first be teaching stories for us, but we tend to avoid that, so we provide wonderful lessons to be learned by those watching us. Usually, we can see from someone else’s life what the lesson is, but it is more difficult for us to reflect and see the …
Teaching Stories Are God’s Treasure Hunt….
Life is made up of our teaching stories. There is a reason we continually go over teaching stories. Each time we do that we have an opportunity to learn something we have not learned before. These stories are about people and events in the world, or at least on the material plane; they are designed to reveal the lessons we …
Diving into Sādhana….
Some people approach sādhana with a dualistic map. Some people approach with a nondualistic map. What is important is right effort—approaching with right effort. God created us and this world in Love; our misery is because of our wrong understanding. Our wrong identification with vehicles like our bodies, mind, emotions, thoughts. The more we differentiate in our identification, the further …
Sādhana Is Not Magic….
Sādhana is magical; it is not magic. This cannot be emphasized enough. In the course of spiritual practice, extraordinary experiences can be everyday events. I have seen this in my own life as well as others’. In my time with Baba, his śakti imbued everything, making everything miraculous. But there was and is no magic in this. What people want …
The Self Is Not the Point, Part Two….
In my previous blog, I spoke of how the shrunken self we believe ourselves to be is really just a bundle of thought constructs, or vikalpas. In order to free ourselves from that bundle, we have to turn inward, reflect, and be able to know and name our vibrations accurately. If we want to move forward in our sādhana, we …
The Self Is Not the Point, Part One….
In the Yoga Sūtras, ignorance means taking the non-Self to be the Self. Once we have done that, we lose our Subject in object. From there, we are attracted to certain things and repulsed by others based on the object we are now identified with. And finally, we cling to the life of that object, believing it to be who …