My guru's gifts for Gurupurnima are waxing like the moon.

An unexpected intimacy

My Guru speaks in my heart:

Why do you keep pretending we are apart? 
That we will ever be apart??

I am here, and so are you.

It's just how we roll.

*

You keep forgetting. Stop that.

*The ashram is the guru, the living shakti of my Shree Guru.

Can you feel the love of home?

That magical feeling, of floating over the last hill before home.

The place that I love best, near or far, goes with me everywhere, here in my heart.

My home is always here... watching myself roam. 

Can you feel the love of home?

So quiet

I am so quiet, so still. I feel no need to react to anything, to act on anything.

I know that this comes from grace, and how long it stays is determined by grace.

So quiet. Centered. Senses pulled within. A constant meditation.

Grace.

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.

Grace never forgets you

"Through dhyāna, meditation, you allow yourself to become more subtle. As the kundalinī energy moves through you, you get rid of whatever you don’t need.  

Then meditation doesn’t just happen at a given time, it happens constantly. As you go about your daily actions, you are recharged.  

This is a very high yoga. Once it catches you, it never lets you go. Even if you forget grace, grace never forgets you. It will always be following you."

~ Mahāmandaleshwar Swami Nityānanda 

What I WANT to do

No. Not what I'm supposed to do.

What I WANT to do.

Grace comes and goes

Evening arati in Varanasi

GRACE. Not because I try. Not because I do. It flows to me on God's time, Guru's gift, Shiva's delight, Kundalini's exhilarating freedom.

I've felt like a mess all my life. I have tried so hard, above all other activities, to grip and change and channel my life, to repair it, get it on the right track. A lifelong obsession.

Sadhana is portrayed as improving the mind and body with yoga, meditation, mantra repetition, chanting, reading sacred texts. All that is uplifting, that creates merit, nurtures the virtues, clears the mind.

Sadhana is most certainly not a waste of time. But it isn't going to fix me. Fixing in all its forms is a tangle of samskaras filling my life all the way back to the beginning of at least this life.

All I know is because I tried as hard as I could all my life, trying this and this and this and that, a seeker desperate to "fix" my broken life. Because I gripped as hard as I could for so long, I used up this ability as my youth slipped away. Now I have to lay around a lot. Gripping and building and gathering is a no no. It's an instant samskara stirrer.

Photo by Nilmoni Ghosh

IT SEEMS I am always different from other yogis. My sadhana seems to be the mirror opposite of every yogini I meet. I don't focus on this. What matters is what my guru wants for me, how she makes me free. 

I did meet one woman like me at the ashram and we became fast friends. She was a yogini of many years, and never sat for meditation. She did open eyes meditation. I did both.

We wore black all the time because we liked to. We skipped morning chant and slept instead. We drove an ashram vehicle to go get steak and eggs, watch a lot of movies, shop at Target and go to a bar (she would drink and I as designated driver would smoke Shermans). We both had TVs in our rooms and signed up for this brand new thing called Netflix. DVDs came and went in the ashram mail room. 

It was just the way these ashramites rolled. My friend and I went a lot of places in and outside the ashram together. We were the yoginis that partied. 

Does he still wave the lights, my rock star of brahmins?

FIXING IS NOT a conduit of grace for me. I'm a mess. I am not accomplished. I was born with high-functioning autism for a reason. It took a long time for me to give up on this obsession to fix my life. Even just cleaning my house, eating better, not watching Breaking Bad is not going to fix me. It isn't what's wrong with me.

WHAT'S "WRONG" WITH ME IS PERFECT.

I'm not supposed to be in control. I know because I'm not, and this has never changed over decades of trying my best.

This voice of fixing gets in the way. The one that thinks I can get to grace by a certain set of actions. Foolishness.

My sadhana is to make that little quarter turn into the NOW. That's it.

When I do this, I realize my life is perfect, it's the lila I've got going on.

All I have to do is stop, get out of the way of grace.

Grace comes and goes in either case.

This is not a concept to follow. It simply is. I didn't decide it. I found it.

Grace comes and goes.

The sun rises over the Ganges, the place where it is experienced that two worlds are one

Grace. Ease. Comfort.

Shambhavi Lorain Chopra

I feel so quiet. So calm. A feeling of ease that melts away fear and obsession.

Has this feeling been here all along? All my life I have been struggling and pushing. Trying to accomplish something to make my life livable, worthwhile. Most of it feeling like a miserable failure. Waiting.

Then I became a sadhini. I tried to DO everything in my sadhana, more and better. The rajas that burns away rajas.

Photo by Lis Oslo Norway

Today the gift of grace fills me up. Stop that. Grace has it... always has it.

These last few days I am so relaxed. I'm not reaching and contorting, working myself over all the time. (Please let this last!)

Today the "do" is to open to grace, over and over, endlessly.

Grace. Ease. Comfort.

Every moment love. Every moment worthwhile.

I live an almost solitary life. But there is really only one.

Ani Rigsang of Pemoko

Returning

I stopped along the wayside of my sadhana, and found that I was making the decision again of whether to stop living for the world of the senses, and live now for the reality in my heart, that I am returning, I am at the end of my long journey. Lifetimes...

I am contemplating this decision.

With a bittersweet feeling of coming around that last bend and finding that path straight to home, no wandering, standing there, a contemplation is needed, a need for all of me to be as one as I step onto this road.

An elegant, soulful decision.