I recently had the experience of listening to a live youtube channel of a weekend event with Krishna Das in Yogaville in May, 2018. He has been chanting for many years and also plays the Harmonium.  There are several others who are a part of this band.  I love listening to his chanting and the musical instruments.  One of the musical instruments I deeply resonate with is the “violin”.  It just sets my heart on fire.

Tears of joy, sadness and even my deepest fears came bursting forth during this event.  I do not know what the words mean and I do not need to know but I do Know that I was transformed by this weekend event.  I still am contemplating whether to get a “Harmonium” or not!  I want to learn how to play it and chant with it!  I was so impacted by this experience that I looked at tickets for his next event.  I did not want to miss out!

Mahasati hand meditation is a practice that can be particularly useful during times of excessive stress or emotional upheaval, or when our minds just won’t shut the f__k up no matter how much yogic breathing or how many rounds of mantras we’ve done. And yeah, I speak from experience.

I learned this practice at my most rock bottom of rock bottoms. I was at a rehab facility, three days into a seven-day stay in detox from alcohol. My body was still squeamish, my brain still racing, my hope nonexistent, and my self-loathing at an all-time high. As I lay in bed aware of the physical battle going on between withdrawal and the benzodiazepines I’d been given to help relax me and keep me from having a seizure, my thoughts raced—I’d just lost my job, my car was about to be repossessed, I had a court date and jail time awaiting me, and last but (definitely) not least, I was going to miss my brother’s wedding, the one where I was supposed to be his best man. Yeah, I was in rough shape.

When you as an individual feel threatened, one of the things you do is feel power through a group identity.

You feel power through identifying with a country, “We’re Americans,” and all of what that represents. When the Jews faced the Holocaust, which placed the individual life so utterly at the whim of a dark force, the people, as millions of them were destroyed, increased their identification with the group rather than with the individual, because although that group was still vulnerable, it was less vulnerable than the individual.

It’s important that compassion exists in our hearts for whatever changes go down. We have to be able to deal with uncertainty, change, chaos and loss of power without the depth of the fear that makes us go into massive denial and massive violence to other human beings.

Some years back, I was talking with a woman in our community. She was a breast cancer survivor and she told me about a conversation that she had with a friend who also was a survivor. Her friend asked her, “What would it feel like for you to think that something good might happen, rather than something bad?” Her response was, “Totally weird and uncomfortable. “Good,” her friend said. “Try it now.”

From an evolutionary perspective, it really makes sense that we feel uncomfortable when we envision positive things coming our way. Our brains are designed to scan for trouble and fixate on what might go wrong in any given situation. This is described as the negativity bias and it one of our hard wired survival strategies. Of course, it is a very good strategy for avoiding real danger. But, in the absence of a true threat, it limits our capacity for enjoying, and celebrating our moments. We have such a short time on planet earth. When the negativity bias rules, we get very loyal to our anxiety, mistrust and vigilance. We cannot inhabit the fullness of our lives.

“Sure, honey,” my mother used to say. “I appreciate how you feel…” My mother was very empathic – in her way.

“Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.” ---Sterling K. Brown

Then: “But…”

“Sure honey, I appreciate how you feel but,” she would say, “-but, remember, there’s always somebody in the world who’s worse off than you.”

Well, it’s true. It’s true for every one of the 7 billion of us (except one person, pray for him). As a kid it was frustrating. It didn’t deal with the problem or my feelings. So, when I (still) hear those words in my mind, I relegate them to the “Cold Comfort” file. When my mother’s mother came to visit and I was crying, she would crouch down to be eye to eye with me and say, “Ohh, you’re crying – we have to get the Crying Towel…where is it? Can you find it? Let’s get the Crying Towel…” Cold Comfort. Another would be, “So far you’ve survived 100% of your worst days – the odds are in your favour.” True, but similar to yelling “Calm down!” at someone suffering from a panic attack.

The interesting question is, “How do I manage this temple for consciousness? How do I take care of my body? How do I do it without being trapped by taking care of it?”

You will see that the minute something is wrong with you, if you’re not very careful your consciousness will narrow, until you’re busy being your symptoms. The minute you start to cultivate these techniques of mindfulness, you begin to see the game that you’re playing, the life that you’re living, the way it’s unfolding, the roles you’re in, and you listen more deeply into your life, so that you hear what roles are. What you’ll learn is that you have a unique karmic predicament and that will manifest in certain ways at each moment, and to the extent that you push against the manifestation, it takes a lot of juice. Ultimately what you’re doing is dancing deeply, but lightly. There’s no clinging.

The statement, “Hold lightly, let go lightly,” is to be in it without clinging. And to differentiate, it’s interesting because when we love somebody we want to possess them, we want more of them, we want to collect them, we keep wanting to hold on while we keep getting these old moldering dead butterflies in our collection. You know – old loves that were a moment of love, and then we destroyed them through possessing them – and the letting go of holding your interpretation of the moment too tightly.

The American way of meditation is now firmly a part of our lifestyle, and millions of people who have taken up yoga and learned about mindfulness feel quite comfortable meditating. I’m saying “the American way,” because it took scientific research and the promise of improved health to convince the average person that meditation wasn’t mystical, in a society where mystical implies religion, or in this case Hinduism.

The acceptance of meditation has been a good thing, but I wonder if its true meaning has taken hold. The situation today feels much like it was thirty years ago, when being serious about meditation meant you were a committed Buddhist or otherwise found the time to devote hours a day to sitting in lotus position. Meditation still has a split personality, one side promising nice benefits like relaxation and lower stress levels, the other side requiring you to get serious about renouncing everyday life and its demands.

Is it possible to experience the clearest vibration our soul can achieve, while in our human form. Do we have the capacity to fully connect, such as in a Near Death Experience. Maybe we don’t need to die, to experience that magnitude of awareness. What if it’s as easy as our awareness slipping out of our body and returning to a state of Grace. When we are ready, we shift back to the human form.

I like to think we always have the capacity to experience our highest form. I imagine the state of Grace is free of fear and we are able to love ourselves and others and everything completely. I know Grace is always with us.

A young boy shared with me the age of his grandparents. He was surprised that his Great Grandmother outlived his Grand Father. He shared how those that cross over, watch their own funerals. The boy then began telling me about reincarnation. He shared how each of us have many lives. We were hiking through snow and bright sun, talking about reincarnation. I asked him if he has had past lives. His response was no. He believed he would certainly remember them. He thought if he had past lives, they would involve wars or fires. I am sure he has experienced many lives, possibly some as a great teacher. Our conversation will be long remembered by me and probably already life.

Like Sisyphus eternally pushing the boulder up the hill, we can spend many moments busily trying to manage our life. This two-part talk explores how we can awaken from our non-stop doing, including the incessant inner narrative, and discover the mystery, love and freedom that arises in Being.

I’d like to share with you two bits of wisdom from one of my favorite saints, Anandamayi Ma.

For those of you who have been on our circuit together for years, you may have many pictures of her by now, because we usually hand out pictures of her. The reason I like these quotes is because they convey two different planes of consciousness, one of them in which she exists ‘in form’ and the other in which she’s ‘beyond form.’ In each of these, when she’s speaking, she’s speaking from that place at that moment, and it gives you a chance to hear, which is not so frequent, from a true ‘free’ being on different levels of consciousness.

So, when she is in the level of ‘form,’ she has millions of devotees and beings in her presence. For me, it was like being with a wild deer or fox or something like that, just an intimate, non-human connection, non-social.

Spiritual partnerships are partnerships between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth. They are for intimate couples and anyone who intends to become emotionally aware, self-responsible, and inwardly secure.

Spiritual partners help one another recognize parts of their personalities that come from love– such as gratitude, patience, and caring – and cultivate them by acting on them consciously. They also help one another recognize parts of their personalities that come from fear -such as anger, jealousy, and righteousness -and challenge them by acting from loving parts of their personalities (such as patience) when frightened parts (such as impatience) are active.

This is a great story: Every month a disciple faithfully sent his master an account of his spiritual progress.

In the first month, he wrote, “I feel an expansion of consciousness and experience my oneness with the universe.” The master glanced at the note and threw it away. The following month, this is what he had to say: “I have finally discovered that the Divine is present in all things.” The master seemed disappointed. In his third letter, the disciple enthusiastically explained, “The mystery of the One and the Many has been revealed to my wondering gaze.” The master yawned. In his next letter, he said, “No one is born, no one lives, and no one dies for the self is not.” The master threw up his hands in despair.

After that a month passed by, then two, then five, then a whole year. The master thought it was time to remind his disciple of his duty to keep him informed of his spiritual progress, so he wrote to him. The disciple wrote back, “Who cares?” When the master read these words, a look of satisfaction spread over his face, and he said, “Thank you God, at last he’s got it.”