Category Archive

In honor of the 38th anniversary of her Guru Swami Muktananda’s mahasamadhi, Rohini reads her devotional poem to Baba and leads a short meditation.

Rohini explains how and why so many people who think of themselves as undertaking spiritual practice (sadhana) actually don’t want to change. Instead, they want the Guru to magically transform the world around them to accommodate who they think they are, so they don’t have to do the actual work of inner transformation that lies at the the heart of real sadhana.

Rohini explains how our wrong identification with our intellects contributes to our inability to connect with the groundwater of reality we share, and ultimately with each other. She clarifies how nondualism articulates this perfectly.

Rohini draws on one of her poems and Swami Vishnu Tirtha’s Devatma Shakti to discuss the nature of the mind, clarifying how it is not who we truly are but merely a vehicle for the Self. She then answers questions about the right attitude toward shakti and how to approach meditation as a way of deepening one’s spiritual practice.

Rohini clarifies how spiritual practice does not unfold in a sequence of steps, but that all three of its aspects–being with your experience, whatever it is; letting whatever comes up from that experience come up; and functioning appropriately on the physical plane–are in fact simultaneous, and independent of the intellect and its processing activity.

For Gurupurnima, Rohini reads three of her poems before reflecting on her Guru, Swami Muktananda, and on the importance of the Guru as person and as principle.

Drawing on Jnaneshwar’s commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita as well as two of her poems, Rohini explains how important it is to Love the world as it is and avoid the two temptations of trying to make everything positive as we understand “positive” or, at the other extreme, devaluing everything in the manifested world as temporary and not worth caring about. Both those illusions are attempts to avoid honest discomfort, and are devoid of Love.

Rohini clarifies the real problem at the root of our individual, social, and global predicament, and explains how to solve it, beginning with our own practice.

Timelapse of one of my recent paintings, ‘Autumn Spanda.’ Oil on canvas.