I was sitting in the Dhyanalingam, the meditation shrine yesterday and as I opened my eyes a thought struck me....how am I ever here? My mind goes back to last August when I first found myself at the ashram to take a program that was being offered here. At that time the terms Guru and Ashram had practically no meaning to me, other than words that had been distorted and people had attached their minds to in ways that they had become bound to them rather than ever being liberated. "Giving up life itself" is how I looked at it.
There was no one in this world that I would ever follow in any way, that i would ever bow infront of, for I firmly believed each one of us was equal, each one of us was divine itself - just that we needed to find that divinity inside of us. I even remember the anger inside of me when I would hear people talk of their unbounded love for their guru. I used to think to myself, why don't you have unbounded, unlimited love for humanity, for human beings...what good is it to love just one person a guru, who you want something from. In fact the resistance in me was so strong, and I was so sure of my own logic that even now after so much has happened, I many times find it difficult to accept that today i am here, in this space.
My first program at the Isha centre completely shook the very foundations of how I understood life. In fact when I came for the program, my life had started falling in place, I had gotten a job that i was so excited about, things were finally getting on track. That one experience, that one moment however, changed my very perception of how i viewed myself and life itself. It was an experience that at the time left me confused.....how could it be? how could this really be? I had known life, I was sensitive and understood myself well, but i never realized that i had never experienced a totally different dimension of life itself. Until then I had not known anything of myself other than my thoughts and my mind. I had heard that we are not the mind, but I had no experiential knowledge of it.
The past year also saw alot of movement in my life.....things i couldn't imagine possible were happening, the way people viewed me underwent a huge transformation, and I could feel the presence of an energy within me all the time that gave me a strength that cannot be easily worded. If i had never known miracles, that's probably when i started encountering them in my own life. I felt like 10 years had been compacted all to fit into 1.
My ego that I had carried for so long, without even realizing how it suffocated me, started falling apart infront of my eyes. I had looked at myself as someone who was a little more intelligent, a little smarter, a little more benevolent than others around me....that's when I was put into situations that tore me apart in ways that left me bare naked. I came face to face with my own nonsense and I didn't like it at all....but when it broke I got freed, I became lighter and less judgemental. People around me suddenly were not different anymore.....acceptance (the word i usually avoid using) had become key.
Now all that I had earlier had in thoughts.....became a reality. Earlier I knew that everyone was the same, everyone had divinity within them, i wanted to love everyone for what they were and not be prejudiced.....but now it started happening.....that little pause between reaction and awareness....
So many layers of resistances.....peeling them off layer by layer....each layer brings a new lightness, a new freedom.....action as work we are involved in, reflection within oneself, silence to hear the universe - required to peel off these layers....
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