Sometimes it feels like change is upon me. In fact I always feel like things are in a constant flux and I quite welcome change. But sometimes I feel like I've worked hard for some change and worked long and that yet it is not enough. I feel like I'm on the edge of a precipice of change and yet I'm about to miss it's happening and will get sucked into something else.
This is a poem about change, about going from death to rebirth  and about longing for a much deeper change within; from slumber to wakefulness.

Winds of Change

Winds of change blow down the streets tonight,

And although the night is warm and the skies are clear,

The rain that is to come will wash me down with it

Soon I lay my body down and watch the final procession

The pyre, I watch as paper turns to ash and I disappear

Into the trees, the grass, the stone and dirt

And soon enough I will rock myself awake

And cry innocent tears

Dance and sway and perhaps look like a madman.

How many lives I wonder

How many times have I done this!

Foolishly, How long have I been lost

And how long before I'm found again?

I've longed for lightening, the thunderous strike

Oh! How much longer before it rains

So this slumbering seed inside me begins to stir

Pulling life from the I in me until

I am not and never again will be

---Megha (13th Feb 2012)

As summer has left us here in Seattle and we're enjoying the wonderful winter weather! :D  I thought posting a poem about spring might be nice.

This poem about spring that talks about more than spring. It's not about hope but about knowing what is surely going to happen someday.

It's also about love. I imagined a love between the Sun and the Clouds and of how even though we might think of them as opposites (metaphorically) but in another world perhaps they could be lovers. Written by the Cloud

Spring

Soon it will be spring…

The trees will blush in the arms of the sun;

Just as I would in yours.

Leaves will curl out of their cold bosom

And bathe in the warmth….until they turn gold

Soon the sweet nectar of life will flow forth

As the sun and rain spin magic.

One eclipsing the other-back and forth

Jesting and mocking

Then embracing.

Like lovers, spent

Watch, as across the still sky

Sprouts forth a smile in seven colours, content

The trees will blush…Soon

It will be spring.

----Megha

There are times when we feel like we're making the same mistakes again....except we aren't. Times when we feel like inspite of our decisions being right, they feel wrong intuitively and the things we most want to get way from are the things that we also crave the most.

Life itself seems like a journey where even though we may have learnt much, we feel still like there is much much more to learn. We start at the beginning and no matter how hard we try, we just come back to the beginning realizing that life is too magnificent, too vast and infinite for us to grasp with our little hands.

Like the Red Queen's race in Alice in Wonderland, "...it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run atleast twice as fast as that!" :-)

This poem is a sense of my travels so far:

Travels

Having freed myself
Why do I now desire
Most deeply to be bound?

Having scaled the peak
Why do I now crave
To come back down?

Or perhaps I have fallen
Instead
Not risen, not freed
Still am I tempted
And no longer sure
Of what I desire

Have I woken or
Am I just dreaming yet
Another dream?
Searching searching
I thought I had found
‘Twas an obsession
And in it I am now ground.
Maybe in circles I have
Been walking
Thinking I’m going
But only returning

A wayfarer for lifetimes
It seems I have been
At each birth, only to come back
to the beginning

The empty pull inside me
Holds no bounds.
So I start over and over
On a path where
Beginning is End
and the End is a Beginning.

--Megha (09/13/2010)

A grave little poem to go with the grim September weather of Seattle. I really don't know where this came from, but somewhere inside, this is what it feels like. As usual I write from my experiences....but I don't know what experience would cause me to feel like this. Enjoy anyway! :-)

--Love,

Megha

End of Life

Looking ahead,
At Life in front of me,
A vast ocean I see.
Quiet, Serene, Deep and still Blue
Solemnly I sit at it’s banks,
Bathing in the racing darkness.
Waiting for a promised Ferry

Eloquent in it’s silence
It beckons me to begin
Without Ferryman or Light or
Even the Wind for my sails

My feet hesitate and
My steps are unsure.
For I know that when,
The black waters embrace
This skin, surely
I am to drown in it’s passion

There is no other shore to this Sea
There is nowhere to arrive
But a journey must be begun

The darkness is complete,
The waves hasten to
Tug at my shores
But I push them away for
Another day

The Moon rises and I wish
Upon all the stars
That my Ferryman may soon come
So my travels may end

---Megha (08/31/2010)

Learning to be Mad

In September of 2009, I went to McMinnville, TN along with 274 other people from all over the world to participate in an event that would potentially allow us to have experiences that are not so much in the physical realm. I arrived at the Isha Institute of Inner Sciences (iiis) along with 3 other participants a few minutes after 6pm (and late) on a Thursday evening. The days that followed were typical of any time spent with Isha meditators...full of surprises. Which is one of the reasons why I cannot speak of all the activities we did. :-(

There were about as many volunteers as there were participants. This place was buzzing with 600 odd people half of whom (the volunteers) were trying to make things happen in the most perfect way for us. It rained cats and dogs most of the time but that didn't deter them from bringing us food or the awesome hot teas that they are so good at making. As usual everything was so well coordinated that 3 days went by very quickly. I slept in a place consecrated by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev known as Mahima hall at night. It's a huge hall with a red dome with pillars only around the periphery and none in the middle. Even though I probably slept only about 5 hours each night, waking at 4:30 each morning I always felt well rested. There's something special about that place that every time I go there I don't need much sleep to wake up fresh as a dew!

For 3 days, we did things that would have made us look so crazy to the outside world. For 3 days we looked within ourselves and found ourselves not just inside but outside; in every person, stone and leaf. Even in the wind and clouds and the wonderful rain. My tears didn't stop flowing for 3 day...I wasn't sad, just overwhelmed by what I was experiencing. I felt so foolish for being the way I was and the way I had lived. I believed that looking inside means cutting off everything that outside provides because these outside forces are distractions. In the process I had really stopped living. As my tears washed off these imaginations and prejudices I had, something inside of me grew bigger and bigger to encompass everything that ever existed and allowed me to melt away completely. Unfortunately these experiences did not last long. This was just the jump that Sadhguru was providing so we could (as he puts it) see what lies on the other side of the wall.

I don't know what other people experienced and I'm sure all of us experience different things or even the same thing differently but all of us came out on that Monday with a fresh set of eyes and a sense of how one can live joyfully, without effort if we just remember the experiences we had and how much they meant to us. The programme is called Bhava Spandana... which literally translated means a reverberation of senses/emotions and it definitely made my resolve to continue on the path I'm on much stronger. Here's a poem about that experience

How Foolish

The night is warm

And the skies are clear.

But the streets are rife

With winds of change.

The rain that is to come

Will swallow us soon!

Completely drenched we will be

Like babies or madmen

Rocking or dancing or screaming in

Ecstasy or anticipation.

Ready to put our bodies down and watch

The Final Procession

As wood turns to ash, watch

Ourselves disappear and melt into

The sky, the sun, the rivers, the stone

Into somebody else and into nobody

Foolishly how long have I been lost

And how long before I'm found and gone again?

Oh! how much longer before it rains

And lightening strikes this slumbering seed inside?

Pulling life from the I in me until

I am not and never again will be.

--Megha (2/28/2010)

7 Months of Meditation

In March of this year I remember struggling with a lot of things in life. Mostly my emotions and my hyper-critical nature was making living with myself a little difficult. I wrote a post then about my encounter with Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and was planning on taking the "Inner Engineering" course. Well, so I did take it in April and have been meditating every day since then. It is now 7 months and no part of me wants to give up the 1/2 hour I spend on my inner wellbeing every day. I wonder where Isha was all my life and why it took me so long to find something that worked for me.

First off, I have done a few yoga courses and tried my best to continue with them but somehow it didn't work for me. I couldn't find in myself the sincerity or the resolve to do any of the practices I was taught. 7 days of Inner Engineering did not somehow transform my life, but it stuck with me. The Shambhavi Maha Mudra Kriya that I was taught seemed to be what my body and mind instinctively accepted. Somewhere inside of me something decided that this was it and whether I liked it or not and whether it was convenient or not, I would not give up.

I didn't always understand what (if any) transformations were happening to me and initially I thought I was just imagining somethings. But in the first few months I had the experience of falling in love with almost anything. The woman on the bus, the homeless man who smelled really bad, the trees, even the pavement...animate or inanimate, all I could feel was love ( and I wasn't trying). I'm not saying that my most irritating colleague suddenly became closest to my heart. All I can say is that I felt love for everything.

A lot of the times I struggled with a wandering mind...especially if it was the end of the day and I was very hungry and had to do my Kriya before I could eat dinner...sometimes all I could think about for 30 min was FOOD! It's bad.. I know! :D

At some point after a few months of practice, I became better at all the techniques and my back hurt much less than it did the first time. On more than a couple of occasions I had the experience of partial dissolution of the body, i.e. I couldn't feel my arms or legs or most of my body for maybe 10-15 sec. It felt so wonderful to not be so physical in existence.

I think everybody has their own set of experiences with Shambhavi. These are mine. It's definitely worth the time and effort.

Oh and of course VOLUNTEERING! Once you take a class, you can volunteer for upcoming classes and you keep learning and learning and perfecting what you've learnt. I'm a Virgo...while I don't believe in astrology to a large extent, still a few things are true for me:

1) I like work

2)I like to aim towards perfectionism

3) I like to be in the background and make things happen

Volunteering was wonderful for me. I could work so that I could give back what I received. Make the class as wonderful an experience for the new Meditators as it was for me. While volunteering, I'd feel as if all the volunteers were on single entity and we had dissolved to create what was happening in the class. I was nothing, a nobody and yet something had come out of me!

The last class I volunteered for was held in Olympia, WA ( a new center). 27 participants and only a couple of men. On the last day..the closing day, I remembered how grateful I felt on the last day of my class for the gift I had received... and then suddenly I was feeling what the entire room of women was feeling.

Now, I've grown up in a environment full of men, been a daddy's girl, haven't really had a sister and had more guy friends than girls. I just didn't get women and still don't completely understand them and here I was feeling all the feminine energy around me and tears rolled down my cheek for the last 10 min. WOW! Women are so wonderful! It blew my mind away! I wanted to go and bow down in front of them and say, " You women! You are just fabulous!"

I derive a lot of my descriptions in poetry from the world around me. My last poem "Decide Already" included some descriptions of images I see practically everyday. Just thought I would post them on the blog.

I can't show "cracked water on a frozen sidewalk" or "white trimmings on edges of leaves" because it's summer here in Seattle and in the images below, I'm sure the statue isn't very cold :D and of course the trees aren't very bare either....but here they are anyway!

Cold Statue on a High Pedestal

Bare trees behind a Purple Haze: