You get belief from experience, sadhana stabilizes it

There is a confusingly large amount of material to learn or do when you want to start on any spiritual journey. Personal factors like interest, time available in a day, deciding on priorities, anxieties relating to what will happen if I do or don’t do a particular ritual or meditation, loss of interest in doing the same thing every day are all important issues. This little note is written to reduce confusion and give a simple regime to follow for you. Interest increases when you are starting on something new, and it keeps increasing the more you do it and the more you understand it. For example, suppose you decide to do everyday an early morning ritual starting 5 am. You start getting interested and soon you will start at 4.30 am, 4 am, 3 am and finish the whole thing by 6 am. It gives an immense satisfaction. After some time however some break occurs, like going to some other place where it is not possible to do it the same way. Then you start feeling guilty; want to get back into routine. When you are able to do that, you get back some of the lost passion, but not all of it. Over a period of time, may be an year or two, it may not be according to your expectation. You start wondering, why is it that I was passionately enjoying it, and why I am not getting the same passion or satisfaction for it now.

We have to understand that nothing stays the same forever. Except perhaps that any given situation always changes, and that it also passes away. The expectation that something will be the same for ever is what went wrong. For example, when you are free from tensions and fresh after a luxurious bath, meditation flows easily without any effort. Exactly the same meditation will not go as smoothly as it did when you are angry by being insulted, are in doubt, afraid, feel ashamed, trying to avoid someone or some situation, feel inferior or superior, or feel oppressed on the basis of color or looks. All such negative emotions limit the effectiveness of the ritual or meditation. It is not the fault of the ritual or meditation, but it is our not recognizing or accepting that the result can and will be different each time. Therefore consistency in passion for a ritual or meditation is not to be expected. It will be good some times and not so good sometimes. Just accept however it is. So, is it possible to get consistent results in experience or can it be stabilized? Can an undying passion exist? What are the conditions for that? We will come back to these questions later. I have talked to many people as to what they really want. After some false starts, they all come up with statements like “I need a reliable connection to a higher power which does not judge me. It should put a protective shield around me and help me whenever I need.” Or, “I want to see the Goddess. Teach me how to do that” Or, “I am stuck in this environment or karma. I have no freedom. Teach me how to free myself”. They are all the same; people feel lack of a loving power and hence helpless, so they need love and power to overcome their destiny. Only a power which is not confined by time, space or energy (matter), the Power of the mother Goddess who created the trinity can rewrite your destiny. How can I see Goddess or experience a divine connection to Her? What is the minimum I have to do? Which has to come first; belief or experience? Without experience you are not going to believe it blindly. But to get an experience you have to put in some effort. This means that with a minimum effort, a jolt, an experience has to come first. Belief, motivation, effort, commitment and faith flow easily once the experience is had. There are two important meditations just for gaining the first experience with minimal effort. They are called

1. Kundalini
2. Yoganidra.

Each lasts about 30 minutes. They are best done together in sequence. They admit many variations in using them and building up the motivation, to get deeper. The first meditation which stills language but allows feeling the coherence in the entire body is called Kundalini. This first meditation has to be done with the body moving as it likes with your awareness being focused on its movement listening to the chant of a Devi/Guru mantra. The movements are slow and sinuous like that of a snake relaxing every part of its body. You may crawl on ground to feel your deep connection to earth and ground negative energies, or rise up to dance like a snake. Let go of all inhibitions to touch all parts of your body. It is just like you are taking a bath with water which flows over every part of your body and you are massaging it gently. The purposes of this 30 min meditation are to experience:

1. Total relaxation and fluid state of your being,
2. Heal naturally all disorders coming out of censoring feelings
3. To heal with your love by feeling others limbs as your own limbs
You can do this alone in privacy of your home to make you supple, or feeling the person to be healed in a trance like massage healing and enhancing love in both of you, or by forming human chains lying down. There is no relaxation greater than that of a child who has fed milk, resting in the lap of its mother. Human chains of lying down allow you to feel both as a child of the mother behind you and be the mother to the child in front of you.

After the first meditation you do the second. It is called Yoganidra. Its idea is to still the body but keep language and thoughts alert. It names and relaxes each part of the body to relax it, and covers the whole body. After sinking the body into ground, the spirit rises from it to soar and experience astral travel, going beyond limits of physical body. You can identify with the astral spirit to dream of other places and times, and when you come back it is as if the body comes back to life, with memories of your experience. Or, you just relax and tell your spirit what to do, letting it go out of your body to report its findings to you at an appointed time. You will understand that you have a body that survives the physical body, which can know and can find another body to be reborn into. If you make a steady and deeply emotional commitment to achieve something before going into this meditation, you are bound to get it. Thus you can achieve what you want. These two meditations and some experimentation on their variations give you the initial jolt of experience, challenge your prejudices and motivate you to go deeper into spiritual sadhana. They are simple enough but sufficient to give experience which brings belief, motivation, commitment and faith. To stabilize the experience, you must make a serious effort to deepen your sadhana. If you wish to follow a well proven Sri Vidya sadhana, you can learn by downloading them from devipuram.com. The courses given there can help you. They shorten the steep learning curve by structuring the courses into five levels 000, 100, 200, 300 and 400. They do not force you to be a vegetarian or non-vegetarian, to leave your family or to retain it. They are neutral to these ideas. Their essence is to overcome mental limitations which are the basis of the ideas of I and mine. The mental limitations (ashta pashas) are that you are

1. Angry because of an insult - ghrina
2. In doubt and depression - sanka
3. Afraid - bhayam
4. Feel ashamed - lajja
5. Trying to avoid someone or some situation - jugupsa
6. Feel oppressed because of caste or power or money or knowledge - kulam
7. Feel inferior or superior on the basis of color - jati
8. Need to conform to norms of society - sheelam
They are well known as ashta pasas in Sanskrit; ghrina, sanka, bhayam, lajja, jugupsa, kulam, jati and sheelam How you react to such limitations depends on your habits like
1. Food
2. Life giving breathing
3. Reactive negative thinking
4. Believing that higher powers don’t exist
5. Enjoyment can be sustained

Proactive habits overcome reactive mindsets to improve the quality of life for everyone. Food is important because you are what you eat: eat wisely. Breathing clears the vitality, prana. Negative thinking prevents you from learning how to progress, clearing it clears the mind. Putting the body to sleep but allowing experience to go beyond limits of body makes you understand that you live in separate bodies, and that physical death is a comma, not a full stop. It is called Vijnana. Confusing pleasure with peace keeps you hankering for transient pleasures; it also limits your freedom to remain a passive witness to both pain and pleasure. Ananda is also a kosha. Sadhana means an attempt to clear the eight bondages making up ego, and being careful in living to overcome the habits by wisely implementing decisions to allow the ground reality of God/dess to reveal its glory. Most important, invite love into your life. Make your home an ashram for love, laughter and light and play. Love adults as if they were children. Play with children, they are such great teachers. Play with elders as if they were in the prime of youthful exuberance.