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 …
Honoring Baba with the Guru’s Words….
There is no better expression of gratitude than to live the Guru’s words. Muktananda says: The world is an extraordinary drama. The Shiva Sutras say, nartaka ātmā—“The Self is an actor.” The world is God’s theater, God’s play, and the sport God has created for His own pleasure. A person who understands this understands everything. For him there is no room …
Tools To Still….
No matter what the tradition, the goal of spiritual practice remains the same. It follows that every spiritual tradition draws from the same essential tools for practice. Teachers within a given lineage expand and refine its toolkit as time goes on. Below is a list of some tools from the kit I was given by Baba. If practiced appropriately, with …
Spiritual Practice Is Not a Drug….
There is a big difference between doing drugs, basking in śakti, and spiritual practice. That should be obvious, but it’s not. With drugs there is no self-effort, and the result is a counterfeit experience. We are continuing the small self’s delusion; we are on the grid. If we are lucky, we wake up where we started and have a great …
Avian Samadhi….
The winter was brutally cold. Weeks on end below zero degrees Fahrenheit, with wind chill minus 20 to 30. Even when the sun came out, it was bitter cold and dangerous to go outside. Our acre garden spent the winter covered in snow. No hellebores blooming through February for us. A couple of years ago we began feeding the birds …
Guest Blog by Ian Ralby: The Choice To Practice….
At the conclusion of the course on “A Spiritual Survival Kit” (see here), I asked for the chance to guest blog in order to share some reflections. Having grown up with my mother as both my mom and my teacher, I have witnessed her teaching and her students’ development from a fairly unique vantage point. I vividly remember when she …
Living Sādhana….
You can’t think your sādhana. And yet that is exactly what so many people do. They think good thoughts and believe that is sādhana. They wear “pure” clothes and eat “pure” food and act “purely”. They “believe” they are doing everything to succeed in sādhana. They are in fact going about it all wrong because they are approaching practice as …
L&Q(11-15-14) The Matrika Shakti….
Rohini explains the power of letters to bind and to liberate. For more videos and lessons, sign up for a free or paid subscription.
My Neighbor Elvis….
A beautiful autumn day with shifting light, and the wind speaks of the cold and sleep ahead. The leaves are turning, and caught in the waves traversing the garden. Beautiful and sad, a melancholy settles on the ground as everyone and everything scurries in preparation for what is coming. All this is very familiar. What is new is the disappearance …
The Guru’s Grace….
The five-fold action of God is as follows: Create, Sustain, Destroy, Conceal, Reveal. As human beings and therefore shrunken manifestations of God, we perform these five activities in a diminished form, believing we are powerful. We obviously create, sustain, destroy, and delude/conceal. Revelation or grace is harder for us, as individuals, to see or perform. Our “grace” is the grace …