Join me for an all new darshan session where I share divine energy with the intention of establishing you in oneness and expanding your experience of fulfillment, peace and love each month.

Darshan means “to see” or “to reveal.” What is seen and revealed? Your divinity, your oneness, your essential Self. In darshan, I share a state of oneness – the highest vibrational frequency and the most powerful force for transformation.

These sessions are offered as a blessing, without charge or requirements of any kind.

As you may know, I write a lot about mindfulness – mainly to end your resistance to life and end your suffering. What you are about to read is possibly the most important teaching for your enlightenment. And I am not going to suggest you practice mindfulness. I am going to suggest you go beyond mindfulness.

Most of us spend our time identified with our body mind and emotions. We literally think we are our body, our thoughts and our feelings. Of course this is not the ultimate truth. We are Consciousness, the soul, Atman-Brahman. But we live in the awareness, ‘I Am That’ body, thought and feeling.

‘I am that’ means you are a body, mind and emotion. That limited identification tends to lock you into an ongoing experience lost in a very limited, dissonant, ever-changing experience. Mindfulness has the power to take your attention into the present moment, without judgment. That’s the classical interpretation of Mindfulness. That is immensely beneficial because it takes your attention from ‘I am that’ to ‘I am’. ‘I am’ is one step closer to the soul but it isn’t the soul. ‘I am’ is awareness of yourself now, with the past and future left behind. But it doesn’t eliminate the layers of false identities that are subtler than the body, mind and emotions.

So I had no spiritual framework other than Nature and my parents’ unconditional love, which I eventually recognized as God in its purest form. I remained suspicious of the rigidity of religion, as well as its patriarchal structure, for many years. The word God to me exemplified all of that. It wasn’t until I read Mary Daly’s book Beyond God the Father in my 20s that I began to open to a spirituality beyond religion. Mary asked her readers to imagine God as a verb not a noun—an active verb, neither male nor female. That fascinated me and enabled me to break through to infinite possibilities around the idea of God. The words Source, Divine, Goddess, Great Mystery, Universal Consciousness, Spirit all held meaning for me. I liked having many names for God, which is really unnamed energy anyway. It’s humans who want to name it.

Meditation is about re-connecting. Mindfulness is about creating spaciousness and present moment awareness. Together they create the foundation for transformation to unfold.

Meditation is a journey from an outwardly focused life where the senses are always keeping your awareness focused outside, to bringing the awareness inward and leading it to the Self, a state of pure awareness. Meditation allows the realization of the authentic Self and the essential nature of who you are. Meditation is knowing the Self, realizing who you are and immersing yourself in the light of the Self. Self-realization is your natural state of awareness. It is restoring connection.

Mindfulness is bringing yourself back to the reality of the present moment. It is disengaging from the past and future that capture your awareness, causing you to live in old or future illusory realities and allows you to rest in the now. Now is the only place power resides. Now is the only neutral place from which to make conscious choices, receive what the universe is offering you and seize possibilities. Now is the only place transformation is possible. And mindfulness creates the space for awareness to blossom. You can only move from reaction to response when there is some degree of spaciousness. You can only change your energy to change your life in the present moment.

I find that in this culture, every time I say I have a guru, I feel like I am holding up a red flag to people, because they say, “Well, I wouldn’t want that,” or, “Why don’t I have one?” or something else, so all I’m doing is creating suffering every time I mention it. It’s hard to have something you treasure so much, that you can’t share with people for fear of the impact it’s going to have on them. But I see that what I have to get rid of is my own reactivity to that issue. I am a member of this culture also, strange though it is.

The words that come to mind are that true surrender is no surrender, and the way it was put to me by one of my teachers in the old days, Baba Hari Dass was, “You can’t rip the skin off a snake. When it’s time, the snake sheds its skin.” If it’s a situation where somebody says,“Surrender to me” and you say, “Should I or shouldn’t I?” forget it. It’s not gonna work anyway, because even if you say, “I’m surrendering to you,” that’s ego saying, “I’m surrendering,” which is not surrender. There is a point where your surrender becomes just so obvious and absurd, that you’d be a fool not to – it’s not something where you decide, “I will surrender.”

It’s very interesting that my relationship to my guru is not one that my rational mind shows. In fact, the whole thing was very abhorrent to me in the beginning. When I met Neem Karoli Baba, the whole idea of a Hindu guru was absolutely absurd. I didn’t like Hinduism. It was day-glow paint and calendar art and I didn’t like it, you know… I liked the cleanliness of Buddhism. I mean I was really, you know, a Southern Buddhist. And here I meet my guru, you know, a big fat guy in a blanket, and what the hell is this all about? The fellow I was with was lying down touching the man’s feet and I’m sitting with my arms crossed standing there thinking, “I’m not gonna touch his feet.” You know, I mean, it was just, that symbol of the whole thing, and I wouldn’t do it.

An hour later it was all I wanted to do.

The world we experience every day is full of excitement and drama, all of it compelling. We are here on Earth to immerse ourselves in those diverse experiences and emerge on the other side with new awareness and wisdom. We may not know it consciously, but our souls are guiding us on our earthly journey. It is a journey through the polarities and extremes of life back to the center of all creation, which is infinite peace and oneness, which is God. To know peace in the midst of every experience—chaos or celebration—is to live in alignment with divine Source energy. It is why we are here (and where we came from), all of us in our uniquely diverse lives: to come back home to peace and radiate it out from the core of our being. More and more, we are coming into conscious realization of this extraordinary process and the transformative power it holds.

You know people always ask me how do you have a conversation with the universe? Is it prayer and meditation? Of course, both of those are regular practices of mine and they are important (in my opinion) but neither is particularly good at the dynamics of what we know is a conversation. You know one person talks then the other one talks back.

Praying is good but it’s more talking “at the Universe” than with it sometimes. How many times have I been on my knees (AHEM in the past mind you) saying Dear God, Spirit, Universe angels and whoever else runs the show – please, please make this go away (you know when you’re unhappy with your crappy result of manifesting) I promise wholeheartedly I will never do “it” again!! (eat the whole cake, kiss the wrong guy, chase the wrong results). I came from the school of bargaining prayer. If I do this please can I have that?? I will be a good girl if you remove my mom’s Cancer, don’t let my dog die, watch our house be taken away.

Eventually, prayer for me was centered on gratitude and allowing, forgiveness and radical acceptance. I learned to pray for the willingness to be willing (to let go, to surrender, to let go some more etc.)  and sometimes the Universe would answer by giving me a break or by testing me until I was ready.

I always felt the partnership but it took ages to get the conversation part of it practical.  

You have been conditioned to attempt to control life, to mold it into shape, to be the master of conditions and to be in charge of your life. So you are constantly trying to fix and change what is in order to assert control to create an outcome. This process arises from fear and lack of trust. You fear that if you lose control life will spin further out of control and all that you have built and struggled to create will disintegrate before your eyes. You fear the future because you have no trust or belief in the fact that life is looking out for you, unfolding and happening for you, for your evolution, for your expansion and for the expansion of your happiness and awakening.

You watch life and see that, when left alone, life falls apart. If you don’t take care of your house, it becomes shabby and derelict. If you don’t take care of your body, it becomes dirty and disease ridden. If you don’t put energy into your business, it goes into bankruptcy. So you assert control and, to some extent, it works.

But if you feel deeper into this idea of control you will see that it reaches beyond giving energy to something in order to make it thrive. It is true that if you give energy to something it will thrive and this is beneficial. It is the attachment to an outcome that creates the problems and suffering.