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:

Decide Already

I recently wrote a poem for a blogger friend Vineet.

Read it here.

Do also read his other posts. They are quite funny...especially the one about out of office responses.

---Megha

Over the past month or so I have been struggling. I am a very critical person and tend to criticise every thing, animate and inanimate :-D ...including myself. Sometimes it's very difficult for me to live with myself. So I decided to stop thinking so much and not be critical of things and that has definitely made me a happier person. But it is difficult to do....to not think, for me.

Out of the blue, yesterday, I went to a talk by Sadguru Vasudev who happened to be visiting Seattle. I've been to many talks and have heard many sadhu's and saints speak and when I sat down in the hall after a long day in the lab, I was not in a very receptive mood.

Still Sadguru Vasudev was the best I've heard so far in the sense of how he applies yoga practically to the problems of todays world. He talks of uncluttering the mind (which all the great sadhu's tell us to do) ...but somehow he says it in a way that seems more achievable to me. And I slowly began to listen to him.

I have always believed that a persons joy should be independent of all external circumstances. A persons happiness should not depend on their spouse, children or other relatives, neither should it depend on ones job profile, salary or vacation time. While a good personal life and a good work life can bring immense joy, we should not be dependent on these things entirely.

He gave an example yesterday where he asked us to remember how many time we had been genuinely happy in the last 24 hours. GOOD QUESTION! Then he said that when we were little children, we were probably always happy and that somebody had to actually do something to us to make us sad. Joy, was a natural state of being. Then by progression, it means that by the time we are 30, we should have been exploding with happiness......but this didn't happen. Why were the equations reversed? Where did our mind change?

We can be happy whenever we want, wherever we want. This isn't other peoples decision...it should be yours. Choose to be happy inspite of the chaos. Just thought I'd share the thought. He has many videos on youtube also, so check them out and see if you feel the same.

I'm planning on taking his "Inner Engineering" course in April, if I can sort out my commuting issues....otherwise I'll have to petition them to hold a workshop near my area.

Getting to the center isn't a problem but coming back home is, since not many buses run directly to my place(University District) from where it's going to be held (i.e. in Factoria) that late at night.

So people in Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond/Renton area, if you are going or if you know somebody who's going, please let me know. I would very much appreciate a lift just to the nearest transit center and I only need it while going back home.