I will not pray unless I want to

“God does not require that we be successful 

only that we be faithful.” 

― Mother Teresa

I am not Catholic, but I have been praying the rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours for a few days now. I feel the need to pray.

Prayer for me is made of worship, and of self-sacrifice. I offer up my body and soul in prayer. I offer my time and my focus. I am focused on God; my love and longing for God, which has been so great all my life.

I remember when I was a girl, and standing in the street near my house, and asking myself: what do I want to be when I grow up? My answer was either a nun or a Playboy centerfold! I do not see these as being all that far apart. They both celebrate life and the source of that life.

Still, I thought. That must be why I have a huge scar on my stomach, God wants me to be a nun instead.

Later, when I found out Mormons do not have nuns, I was not devastated--but it was close.


As an adult, I have found Catholics to be pretty weird. But I am coming to understand them better by borrowing their prayers. They feel an unbroken line from, and are the keepers of the people and events of the Lord's time on earth. They think about these constantly, in rosary prayers to Mary and others, in the Stations of the Cross, in their Mass, and in their religious peoples' lives, their activities, the symbolism of their habits and the structure of their days.

I am trying prayer in a specific way. I do not pray unless I want to. A feeling of wanting to pray comes up naturally. No desire--no pray. Also, if I lose interest in the middle of praying, (which does happen occasionally), I choose to stop praying.

Today, I felt strongly that I didn't want to pray. I thought everything to do with praying was more than painful, a sort of jerking around in my collapsed, depressed state.

"I will not pray unless I want to. Even if I don't pray ever again."

The thought I might stop made me sad. I found myself clicking on "nun links" that now come up on my YouTube side bar. I began to feel the desire again, to pray.

Praying is a way to get around the part of me that wants to use control of my mind and feelings to "get somewhere," spiritually or otherwise. 

I have been seriously and continuously contemplating how to move forward in my sadhana--and to what end--for months now. I tried a lot of things, and mostly accomplished a bunch of trying. My life goes in a big circle. Everything I'm doing now will become the opposite eventually. When I try to do it, I get in the way of grace. I have to step back. 

Wrestling myself to the floor at 5am is not me, never will be. The life of a nun is not for me. Which is hard because I long so much for a completely spiritual life. I don't feel that my current life fulfils that purpose in me. I am still learning.

After I pray The Office and The Hours, and the Crown Rosary or daily rosary, my body has a serene feeling of energy all in-line and in a gentle, persistent flow. I feel lighter, my mind and ego at rest. 

"I feel that my karmas, my pain, my despair, all of it is dissolving in the sweet attitude and daily results of prayer."

In the question I have been asking over and over, should I go through or around my obstacles, I have always returned to this answer: go around. I'll never wrestle that mess to the ground. Or if I do, I'll only keep it down for two seconds. It's all an illusion. Why sacrifice everything to fighting an illusion?

I think I have found the answer. I offer my prayer, including the results. If I can desire to pray, and then pray, I create the shakti in my being that dissolves all that has burdened me, and chained me to the vagaries of the world around me.

And so, I desire very much to be freed, and also to be continuously apart from the world. God is what matters to me.

After I pray, I'm at a loss of what to do. Everything else seems course, and destined to pull my lovely state back into illusion and pain. I don't think I can pray all the time. Just as sure as the desire to pray will come along, the desire to stop praying will come as well. I'm not going to fight it out with this part of me. Making myself do something is sure to eradicate any possibility of doing it at all. I'm just that way.

Meanwhile, I do continue to repeat the mantra silently, and I am trying out experiencing this as worship, in addition to my main experience as identification and purification. It's interesting to me that this feels too intimate! When I think of God, I no longer think of God as "inside" or "outside" of me. I guess there's no way to worship God without worshiping myself. Which is the point of the mantra in any case.

"My discipline is to only do it when I want to!"

As Mother Teresa said, "God does not require that we be successful, only that we be faithful." The idea of being faithful thrills me. It frees me from the content. If I prayed, or not, if I felt like praying or not. These dark waters would suck me down right away. I go around them! If only I can be faithful, and pray when I desire to pray, today. Who knows about tomorrow.


So, today I did not feel like praying. I was sad. "It's all over," I thought. "Like it always is." I have been wrestling with this off and on my whole life.

As I say, I started clicking on "nun links" that were coming up in my YouTube sidebar, since I've been surfing around looking for prayers. And I found that watching just one of these videos brought up all of my desire to pray, and to live a life that is based upon what matters, which is God.

It's part and parcel of the thoughts of a young girl who found that the things that mattered to me were not reflected in the world around me.

Finding my place in the world has been the real struggle of my entire life. I wish that I could be a nun. Maybe I can be, after all. A convent of one.

At least for today.

Karmas

The karmas are being woven back together, almost fluid, the colors mixing. All distinctions of pain and concern are coming together in a gently flowing, living tapestry of "all."

I see it with my mind. I feel it with my breath.

Glass smooth

Memories that used to tear me apart are swirling glass smooth on the dark surface of my consciousness.

Be the awareness

Realization isn't about getting from point A to point B, from now to the goal. I am ever traversing everything in between, all in an endlessly varied order. God's will is unfettered. 

Maya plays. All of this doesn't look like God because of the magic of maya.

To continue to (pursue illusion and) swim with or against the current, to strive to control or change this in one way or another, causes karma and pain.

Accept grace. Look at the known (objects that make up the play) with the knower's eyes. Be the awareness.

Always perched nearby

I don't have to let this upset me. I don't have to let it affect me.

I am the fullest feeling of my own true nature, this: a silent stillness that scintillates with bliss.

My mind is not involved, though it is always perched nearby, thinking it is everything.

I find it challenging to blog about my experience, for it is by default understood by most readers as a choice--things and my reaction to things that happens because I want them to. This is understood as reality, everything that becomes in each moment. But I am so much greater, infinitely greater.

What if it all comes, then floats by? If I do not fight or follow, it is no longer about me. I no longer store up debts of consequences.

For my limited mind is not involved with my true nature, though it is always nearby, perched within it... thinking it is everything.

Completely alone

There is no "do." Except to breathe.

When all is pulled away, everything, a previously unknown "place."

Just be, just feel. Don't push, or pull.

Don't reach out to others, that always throws me way off. Be smart about it. Don't throw myself onto that fire, the one that burns me without be burnt. Endless pain.

Why do I go there? Stop.

Being completely alone is better.

HH the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924–1981)

The 16th Karmapa was a dynamic, world wide influence similar to other spiritual masters who expanded their lineage of spiritual paths and teachings into India, Asia and the West. These include Swami Muktananda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Parahamsa Yogananda, Osho and Lakshmanjoo.

The Karmapa lineage is the most ancient tulku lineage in Tibetan Buddhism, predating the Dalai Lama lineage by more than two centuries. 

"Mahamudra meditation aims at actualizing this true nature of mind, allowing the mind to settle in its uncontrived naturalness where there is, in fact, nothing to remove and nothing to achieve because it is pure and perfect in itself at all times. The essence of this practice, along with the complex tradition of philosophy, epistemology, ritual, and meditation, has been transmitted in the Karma Kagyu tradition until the present day."

(From History of the Kagyu lineage on Wikipedia)

"Yet despite this ignorance and its workings, mind’s true nature is always pure. It is buddha nature, unceasing emptiness and luminosity free from all afflictions and defilement." ~ Saraha 

More about the Karma Kagyu lineage and the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje here

More about the Karma Kagyu lineage and the 17th Karmapa Thaye Dorje here

More about the Karma Kagyu lineage controversy here

All opinions, loyalties and understanding are here respected.

"Beru Khyentse Rinpoche holds a distinct minority view, saying he believes both Karmapas are legitimate. He states' it is possible that there can be two Karmapas in order to benefit sentient beings because the Karmapa can manifest in many different forms' and writes that the 14th Karmapa highlighted that 'in many universes a hundred million Karmapas have manifested. The Karmapa is also the Buddha's emanation, thus until all the thousand Buddhas have come and their doctrine is not diminishing, my activity of the Karmapa emanations will not end.' "  ~ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmapa_controversy

Your sadhana is beautiful

Even Lord Shiva spends his time doing austerities such as meditation and japa mala (beads)

Sādhana (Sanskrit: साधन), literally "a means of accomplishing something," is the regular adherence to purifying, ego-transcending spiritual practices known as tapas, or austerities. Sādhana includes a variety of disciplines in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Sufi traditions that are followed in order to achieve various spiritual or ritual objectives. ~ Adapted from Wikipedia

I saw in my mind just now a summer blouse flying gently on a clothesline, the fabric playing upon itself in the sun.

A significant image that gives me pause. A clothesline figured prominently in a symbolic dream I had at age six about losing myself because of abuse.

I have arrived at the beginning, the circle of this lifetime closes, then opens... to all possibility.

What I have craved. Is now.

I had a gentle little rebellion. I was disappointed, and sad. 

Before... I had felt so clear and steady in my state, ready to go with equipoise established, with steadiness in everything large and small. I danced with the ripples of bliss that came up from within, that opened every place I touch with a familiar bliss...

Before... I felt I finally understood what life was, what it was to be finally reaching my potential as a spiritual being.

Then I felt I was back in the soup.

I don't want this, I thought. It's not worth it. Who thought up such an existence? To suffer delusions it has taken most of my life to throw off, then continue to seek this freedom which comes and goes as mere minutes between hours?

This is like having a tantrum because my billion dollar jackpot was a day late.

Listen... I have learned to stay steady inside. I've learned not to push, not to try to control. I am out of the way, a huge feat! And one with so many rewards.

Now, a moment of insight, of her strong shakti touching me inside...

This is it... she says gently inside. What a beautiful story, like one of your (written) stories. Complex, light and dark, joy and freedom from suffering done and karmas laid aside, fuel for the fire of a life of purification. It is all beautiful, and it all has meaning, the meaning you give it.

Your sadhana is beautiful. Your sadhana has the meaning you give to it.

A precious gift of grace

Bliss... bliss... When I'm not burning.

When I'm burning, familiar fears come up, and for the first time in this lifetime I can look at them without doing anything, without losing my state.

People and situations that were perplexing and painful just a few weeks ago are simply something appearing before me.

Shree Krishna, I offer the fruits of my actions to you. I am free. I love you so...

Exquisite nectar fills me with supreme joy. I receive wave after wave of bliss, remembering the wonderful memories where I felt the magic, I knew there was magic, and knew that I must have it, I must find it.

I have stepped back. The world of the senses doesn't pull and push on me near as often.

Equipoise. A precious gift of grace. She is giving us everything.

A beautiful being whose entire life is one of boundless love and service

My lifelong obsession

Photo: Raymond Eldstad 

I have discarded the lifelong obsession that I will somehow fix my broken life. 

I finally reached a moment where I stepped back and looked at myself. I noticed that I was in a great deal of pain. Familiar pain. Constantly unresolved pain. I was contorted by it, the last to know.

I freed myself. I whispered to myself, "I don't care." I no longer care about my life's work, a lifelong obsession to fix a ruined life. I don't care about the many past moments of failure and pain that flood into the my consciousness at the cost of now.

"I don't care" is the mantra to loosen caring too much.

My dance with this obsession is bondage, and letting go of an epic grip on my life is freedom. The details do not matter.

"I don't care." 

I visualize each painful memory when they arise—a slip of consciousness that I mistakenly thought was happening to me, the truth traded in for a kind of karmic coat check. As I focus my consciousness on the memory, I see it slipping away from me, burning in a sudden whoosh, or turning to dust, the pain rejected and spun off like dross. Consciousness disolves into consciousness. Immediately I feel lighter, slipping into the center place of bliss.

I am not the story, the places or the people. I am this inner place of bliss.

Needful fire

Have you ever stepped back, feeling a boundless dance of pain slip off, and asked yourself in that moment, "Why am I committed to this pain?"

In that moment you have seen your karmas burning, your investment in the currency of ignorance becoming the fuel for a needful fire. The karmas feed the fire. The fire leaps higher, burning more karmas. Sacred. Needful. Fire.

Consciousness.

How to live without creating more karmas?

YOU have stepped out of the dance, your duty and dharma keeping your place in it.

You have become still, watching.

Freedom.

Established in the truth

Severus Snape sacrificed himself to all that unfolded around him, remaining a part of everything sacred and profane. His unique service was to remain present in the events he was born to inhabit with no promise of outcome or reward.

I can turn my senses completely inward almost entirely at will now (with the support of grace, always). And I can sit like this while consciousness as movement surrounds me. It isn't a struggle, I don't have to regain the same amount of ground to get there.

I think of this as one, I identify with the One, and I am completely in the present, an eternal moment of bliss.

Give me an ocean and I'll turn this ship around. I've come back to the halfway point in the grand circle. When I search for the story in what is here, I notice, and stop. This includes the story of how I will become realized. Yup.

This just is. I don't want any of these karmas. The price is too high. The price is now, and now is where all that is most precious lives. The magical things I've dreamed of since childhood.

It is my guru's intention that I become established in the moment as Supreme Joy. Her grace carries me and I am amazed, shocked really, at how much she is giving me now.

Many need sadhana for attainment. This is a sweet path. But my sadhana is to be in the moment. To accept, all of this. I don't have to overcome anything.

Equipoise is freedom. Once I tasted this freedom, it all began to unravel, all of what I once thought of as important.

This is my form of discipline. It means almost always moving my previous activities–sadhana in all of its forms–gently aside. Don't struggle. Don't reach. Allow. Be.

This is not a mental exercise. I did not think it up, either. It is happening to me. It is real.

I am becoming established in the truth.

It is real

Happy, so happy, contentment that none can take away.

I know now it is the gift of my guru. There is nothing to do except love her and acknowledge her grace.

I can stop my mind analyzing. I can stop it slipping into the past or the future.

I finally realized the yantra I see when I close my eyes is something to take the help of when I open them. Sri Kundalini, the voice of my Lord, beckons to me. Be free... be free....

Sri Yantra

I have never gazed at a yantra before, but this one quiets my mind and centers me in the inner stillness, what is real. Then I look about and rejoin maya already in progress. I look at it at various times throughout the day, slipping back into meditation.

I want to be established in this, what is real.

Things that I have spent hours and years on, creating new karmas of concern, worry, perfectionism... I focus this clear consciousness on them and add the willingness to let them go, gently nudging them, slipping them off of me, off of my mind.

Nudge.... slip. I watch them dissolve. They seldom return. They slip away as I stay in the now.

If this takes more than a nudge, I stop. To push on it is a do, it creates story, my mind takes it up, and new karmas begin. No more.

Your words are pure nectar...

My guru's shakti. My guru's shakti. It permeates my subtle body as profound bliss and love. Sometimes I gasp when so much playful bliss pushes up through me... bliss, bliss, bliss.

My physical body sways slightly, completely relaxed. I breathe a little deeper. Every breath.

My guru's shakti. It is an infinite gift. She gives to me. She is giving me everything, all that there is to give. I don't know why.

I am giving her my everything. She is dissolving all that I no longer think of as me. I think enough has been dissolved that the bottom has dropped out. Lucky me!

It is the best experience, beyond any description or measure.

I no longer question, as I have obsessively questioned everything, all of my life.

I no longer question. It is real.

Brother Eknath, I touch your feet

I am free

Because I have worked every day for years to control my mind, I am steady in the midst of a coordinated attack.

I am so grateful. I was given an extreme circumstance to step back from all of my social media projects. The further I stepped back, the better I felt, the lighter an underestimated burden that began falling away.

I burned so much karma yesterday. I burned those things we all think happened to us (but did they? no). I am grateful.

I felt the decision to step away was right, (even with 8,000 likes and followers!), and then the very next tweet I received was so horrible and mean, it made it all so very clear.

Protecting the fruits of my love from those who do not love it is futile.

I will not play at this game anymore. Why would I play a game where I can be brutalized? This is not the part I want in the play in this world.

Playing is my job, and freedom my mentor. I send love to all on this new day. Love, and the shakti of my guru. Love and blessings. Sweetest nectar. Sparkling freshness and delight.

I am free.

I love you. Every one.
I will always love you.

A joke I sent to the person I sent my highly misunderstood tweet to:

"I'm on the phone with Damon [Lindelof], Shatner is on his way over for some coaching "keep your hands low," and Horowitz sent flowers *sobs*"

"Keep your hands low"

I longed for her

One of my other projects is a huge success right now, so I haven't posted for awhile.

I have been burning happy memories, all happy memories for weeks now. The feeling tone of the memory and a flash of a visual come to me. For just a second. So pleasant, a farewell. I am freed of that karma.

Then yesterday I had a memory from a past life. I have had many such memories before, but this one was special. No surprise, it was India. I was a man.* I saw the rich reddish-brown earth and the lush green everywhere. The special light.

And I longed for her, my India...

* I don't think a woman can be safe in India unless she has the protection of a man, so there are very few female sadhus, called sadhinis. 

Longing

My karma must be burned. I think that most of us must burn it. The grace of my guru fills my being with the constant heat required, and the impurities rise up on the flames and are burned.

My karmas and samskaras, my life of malas and of gunas, it all goes into this heat of grace and burns so high, higher because by their nature the karmas are made personal, I lived them as my truth, I became attached to them and then fought with them when I thought I had to become free of them.

The attachment is what is burned. The false belief any of that had anything to do with who I am, that it happened to me.

I did not see it coming... I have burned in so many different ways at different times, and I have become so much more free, and my mind so much more under my control.

I did not see it coming... my fire now isn't all about the past, burning the enslavement of limited understanding.

My fire has become about longing. All day, all night, my whole body aches for God. I see God physically manifest in the things that catch my eye and it rends me, I feel myself hit my knees inside again and again, over and over. I am crying, there is no relief.

I catch a glimpse of a photo of a man my age, someone from a TV series I watch, and in the photo he appears to be looking right at me. He is full of purpose, there is no hesitation. I am transfixed.

I am about to be possessed, my suffering's perfect answer, a match in this world at last. My fires answered, I will be sated.

Only in my mind. There is no relief. None.


I am burning, burning for you God. The belief in separation is a burden, a deep wound. It is unbearable; do not fault me for hiding from it when I can, however I can. Because to embody it is excruciating.

This is all about God, dear reader. Most of us end up this way. I hope this doesn't put your sadhana back by a lifetime or two. I can still laugh.

(You and I who are paramashiva, one without second... different mirrors of the same image).

Ow ow ow

Ow... ow... ow... ow... I'm on fire!

Anava mala and a whole lotta shakti. Conflagration. Incandescence. Luminosity.

Ow... ow... ow...

The grace of my guru

I chose to step back, my attachments falling away. I turned away from the world, still there, still my story, but not in my heart, not the story of my love.

God is here, in my heart. There is only this love. Doing is what happens. Love is what is.

I notice right away every time ego tries to take credit, to say this is me. And I am not often trapped by the habits of limited consciousness. I can feel the worst, the deep messy day of swirling feelings, and calmly await whatever is next. I have the freedom to not give up my freedom, over and over in many ways.

Over and over, when once it was days... now it is hours or minutes until I turn back inside to the welcoming bliss. I sink into the bliss and am absorbed by the one I love. I look at "myself" and all "around me" and it is all He. 

There are so few words to describe it; I walk about in this state, carried on this sure current of bliss and love. 

The karmas that burn are like a quiet festival of memories slipping by... slipping by.

There is only this love, and indescribable bliss. Bliss and love are dissolving me, my heart's desire. There is nothing possibly better than this fate: an infinitely moving act of love has overtaken me. 

There is no more waiting. Not because I am finished being dissolved by Love. It is because I have chosen my place in the arms of my Beloved, I share His bliss in all things.

How did this happen? There is only one way.

The grace of my guru.

Billions

I have learned a thing or two about burning. Lucky me!!

To burn is to be purified. The investment of belief and time in something is not usually removed without burning. Burning sets me free.

Guru's grace is the fire, the purifying kundalini rushing up through me, like a silent, temperature-less fire made of consciousness, the ultimate consciousness that is not bound in any way.

Sometimes I hear her, rising like bubbles through the akasha, then the little vision showing me that what rises is beyond water or air, but is consciousness rising as fire. Strange, that God would create so many layers and mechanisms behind the seen. At last I understand that God goes everywhere, takes shape as all possibilities, all Gods, all pathways home. It is pleasing to journey for a time beyond the seen before arriving home, to experience the play at every tattwa, every layer of the descending and ascending divine.

 

Purification comes in waves. I am finally learning to not ascribe attainment to any stage of purification, including feeling perfectly One with the center place, silent and unmoving, no now or here, only potential, only love and bliss. All that I am and all that I feel are mine through guru's grace. What it means about me is a senseless question, a moment of plundering by ego and mind.

(Hey! That sounds like an attainment!!)

I find that purification means I have to feel it again, experience what it was like to believe as I once did that it was happening to me, which created karma, a cosmic debt. I invested in delusion, in bondage. The way to get my investment back is to go through it again, and throw the yoke off.

Many around me are still invested in the play. God is at play in many forms. Then some of us feel the need to return to God, and the burning begins. I please God as He experiences as me every nuance of return to Self, every tiny step, every breath made of purest longing.


The fire is a very very intense version of "circumstances" which I bought into. What I believed in becomes fuel for the fire. To be free, I must burn off the debt, my investment in the play, experience it with such an intensity that I see it anew, laugh or cry, throw it off and leave the burden to be reabsorbed by consciousness.

I remember once a wise person said that we need to take our hands off the rear view mirror of life and place them on the steering wheel.

If life is the car, then holding onto the mirror is believing that I am somehow directing or controlling events. I turn the mirror this way and that and notice changes, believing that I am the source of change in the events around me. To place my hands on the wheel is to realize that I make choices, but I have nothing to do with how things go. They just do. I have the wheel, I may turn this way or that, but all of THIS is God and God doesn't invest power over the joyous unfolding of consciousness in little me.

OMG can you imagine how tiny, painful and drab life would be if little me was really in charge??

Life is inspiration and intelligence, free, free beyond any measure or understanding. It is wild and wooly and starts with an exquisite planet surrounded by space and the bodies of space that goes on for such distances that the light from what is there now cannot be seen here for about 3.8 billion years, and that's a long time and far far away... and all one tiny seed in the place of potential.

Perhaps we are all that old.

Sail on

I feel like I've been squeegeed off, a big life-sized wad of karmas slicked off by tapasya and guru's grace.

How do I know? I feel terror, and notice it. I feel confusion, and I am... confused.

I let go of objects, and gravity reaches out, a sudden, eloquent mess... great fun! I am laughing. I am cursing. I am not slipping on it.

My entire orientation has shifted.

I was oriented to winning, succeeding, feeling better, avoiding, controlling, finding out, living better, getting, having, holding on to.

Now I see those currents flowing by, but I am not letting them pull me along, pull me into them, lulled into mental "action" by the magic of maya, the delusion that I am acting, and being acted on.

I am a maze of shifting patterns, some smooth, some bumpy, shakti in flow, bouncing over all that old stuff like a waverider on a choppy sea.

Guru's grace in my sail.... I just keep saying yes to her grace.

When everything changes, again, and all the good happy sadhini yogini feelings go right in the drink...

I smile, and my freedom is far more important.

A minute, a second ago will yank me if I don't let go. It's better to let go, to sail on.