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!"