The Meaning of Inner Work

Posted on May 14, 2012 by admin

My teacher, Rudi, used the term “ inner work” in reference to spiritual practice, which could be understood as making an effort and working for an accomplishment. But Rudi, in talking about “inner work,” was not talking about that at all. There is a kind of an effort, but the effort is a natural introspection that arises from our cultivation of the awareness of our own energetic mechanism. By awakening the channels, the senses automatically naturally rotate within, and that rotation brings us into contact with our own essence. So, in effect, what we are doing is not making an effort, but cultivating an awareness. This awareness doesn’t lead to an accomplishment—it leads to a realization, or layers of realization.

In our physical engagement with our spiritual practice, we realize our ignorance. Dealing with our ignorance, we realize our physical capacity. Realizing our physical capacity, we can begin to understand our creative potential. Understanding our creative potential, we encounter our attachments—our hopes and fears. Encountering our hopes and fears, realizing our hopes and fears, and dissolving them, brings us into contact with a deeper layer of resistance in us. Realizing and dissolving that deeper layer brings us into contact with what Rudi called “nothingness,” what the Buddhists call “emptiness,” what the Shaivas call “consciousness,” which is sometimes in all those traditions referred to as “the Void.” Our practice brings us into that dimension of unmanifest, pure creative energy, which is without beginning or end, without any limitation whatsoever. It is pure awareness that is also self-aware and unimaginable possibility.

This unimaginable possibility is not an accomplishment, because it’s already inside you. It is a realization because, turning your attention inside and becoming sensitive, you come to a realization of the depth and the range of what is going on inside you.

If you get lost in the idea of an accomplishment, you will get on a treadmill and go around in circles for a hundred million years. That’s why so many times I have said surrender is the key, because this is not an effort of effort, this is an effort of awareness. It is the cultivation of an awareness of what is going on inside you right now and realizing the cosmic implications.

In this realization, there is tremendous relief and a great sense of joy. There is no amount of shedding of worldly engagement that can any way bring any pressure on us or any tension to our mind. The process is a process of continuously becoming enlightened—lighter and lighter, more and more light. The experience of all of the tensions which we have accumulated in this life, and all of the tensions that we have brought forward into this life from the family system that we have been swimming in for thousands of years, is dissolved.

If you work with the idea of making a big effort, what you will end up with is a complete desensitization to your own energetic mechanism. It does not take a big effort; it just takes a conscious awareness to open all of the chakras and activate all of the channels and begin to experience a simple sweetness and a joy. That simple sweetness and joy is like Drano: it dissolves all the clogs. How fantastic! How unbelievably fortunate that we have the opportunity to dissolve our clogs as we are growing our own happiness and cultivating the innate capacity of the breath of life within us to awaken, in all the lives that we are connected to, a similar experience of joy and a dissolving of tension.

a juicy orange slice

CC photo courtesy of *Saipal on Flickr

Even though my title is a “teacher,” I don’t teach anybody anything. I will share with you my own experience, and also I am sharing with you the blood of my blood, the life of my life. I am making my entire energetic mechanism available to you, if you have the ability to access it. I make it available to you so that you will have the extra energy that’s necessary to awaken your own energetic mechanism and begin a transformation process in you. But I won’t teach you anything; you will have to learn this yourself.

In order to learn, you have to have a passion for growing. To be alive, you have to have a passion for something. If you don’t, you’re wasting your time here in this world. I suggest you begin to have bit of passion for growing, which is the only reason we’re in this world to begin with. Out of that passion, you will develop a curiosity and a hunger for an understanding of the life that is flowing in your body, and the life that is vibrating as your mind, and the life that unrolls itself from within you in the form of your life experience. To grow, you have to have some curiosity about that, and some commitment to understanding it. Then, paying attention, you will realize.

This is really what life is all about—realizing. This is where the nectar is in life, in realizing. It’s where the juice is. It’s where the joy is. It is the most important thing we are in this world to do.

Posted in Consciousness, Energetic Mechanism, Growing, Meditation, Sadhana, The Teacher | 2 Comments
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Patience and Concentration

Posted on April 26, 2012 by admin

It’s very important to have a deep commitment to your practice. It’s so important to understand, to somehow get, that there is unimaginable depth within you. You then have to honor that depth through your practice by dissolving the tension of your day and the tension of your life, by dissolving and working through the disappointments of your ancestors. You finally come to the place where you really can completely open your heart and your energetic mechanism to participate in the profound abundance that is the essence of life itself.

This just doesn’t happen quickly. It’s like growing a tree. Growing anything that is great in its dimension and its stature just doesn’t happen quickly. You have to be willing to walk into the unknown within yourself every day and open within yourself every day. Every day you connect to something deeper and something deeper and something deeper, which will eventually open into a profound depth. In our culture now, they tell me, we have a 2-minute, an 8-minute, and a 20-minute attention cycle. That’s pathetic, it’s just pathetic, and it’s happening all over the world.

Waxing moon

CC Photo courtesy of ClaraDon on Flickr

In contrast to that, the accomplished people of south Asia a couple of thousand years ago understood the micro movements of the breath in conjunction with the moon. They got that there is an integration going on within our breath that is coordinated with the motion of the moon in the sky. They understood this perfectly, and we don’t even have the slightest clue.

How many of you can concentrate long enough to catch hold of the shift that goes on ordinarily in relationship to your breath? Well, that’s just not what’s going on for us, and in a way it’s very sad. What peace and what joy and what richness of creative expression might flow from you if you can be patient and concentrate long enough to really experience the circulation of your breath and the creative energy within you, and come to some authentic contact with that which is truly alive within you?

Through spiritual practice, and in spiritual community, we clear away all the tensions, all the self-rejection, all the inner struggle. We do this to come to understand the extraordinary and simple energetic event that we are. Then, moving beyond the tensions, we are giving that energetic mechanism space to really grow in the field of our life. Growing it brings us to a completely mature understanding of exactly what we are and what this life is.

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Creating the Space in Our Life

Posted on April 9, 2012 by admin

Nityananda once said that not everybody can be the guru at the same time. Somebody needs to be a disciple. What he meant by that is that each of us is called in our life to a unique experience that is un-comparable to any others. Our experience cannot be judged by promotions or by our financial circumstances. Ultimately, it cannot be judged by any circumstance other than the depth of our connectedness to the power of life itself within us, and the understanding that we have from the depth of that connection about the nature of life itself.

All spiritual practices in every tradition are about making contact with life of our life, and from this contact with the life of our life, understanding what we’re doing here and understanding what life is. This isn’t a cerebral exercise in any way. It’s not about figuring out anything, it’s not about analyzing anything. There is no knowledge to grasp. It is about making contact and holding that contact. It is about making the space within ourselves and the field of our experience for the life of our life to expand and to demonstrate its own rhythm, its own inherent motion and its own natural truth. In this way, because we hold that space, we hold that contact, we simply come to know. There’s nothing to figure out. It’s a knowing that arises out of contact, alignment and flow.

White Picket Fence at the Ocean

CC Photo Courtesy of Shayan on Flickr

Spiritual practice is about clearing all the garbage out of our heads and our hearts, and clearing all the tensions out of our life. For boys, it’s clearing away the boy things, their egos and ambitions, their contests and their triumphs. For girls it’s about getting rid of their girl things—the fence around the nest and so on. It’s about getting rid of all of those things, so that the life of our life has the space to really breathe and to really move, and, in its breath and movement, to teach us. It is not teaching us something intellectual or cerebral at all, but teaching us the feeling to hold in our hearts. It teaches us the space to hold in our minds and the rhythm with which to move in this world that is free of the delusion of accomplishment or acquisition. It establishes us in an unbroken appreciation for the unimaginable possibility that is available and expressing itself in the space that we establish and hold through our practice.

This requires a conscious effort. There’s no pill we can take that’s going to do that for us. There’s no chemical at all. There’s no book we’re going to read that’s going to explain it to us. It’s impossible. It is the conscious effort of making contact with the life of our life and holding that contact in the space of our heart, which should be ever-expanding.
This isn’t so easy because it’s hard to remember for boys to remember that we’re not our boy things. It’s hard. It requires vigilance, and the same is true for girls and their girl things. So, with vigilance, we release tensions and allow our creative energy to flow, and in that flowing it fills the field of our experience with so much richness, beauty and joy it elevates us beyond all of the insanity that permeates the whole planet. And by holding that space, we have the possibility of doing good to others and completely changing the world.

Clearing the junk out of our hearts and minds and the tensions out of our life is not so easy. It takes work, it takes commitment , dedication, and practice, practice, practice. That commitment and dedication and passion for growing and practice, practice, practice through the days of your life will allow the power of life itself within you ever more fully to fill the space of the field of your experience. It will completely release you from all of the entanglements of this life, to become completely established and absorbed in the ultimate truth. That’s the coolest thing we can possibly accomplish in this world, and I hope you do it. The reason that I sit here everyday is to support you in your effort.

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Our True Responsibility in Spiritual Practice

Posted on April 2, 2012 by admin

When we engage in an authentic spiritual practice, we have the responsibility to change ourselves. With that personal responsibility, there is a requirement of additional thoughtfulness. Otherwise, what tends to happen is that as we are empowered by our contact with creative energy, our egos get energized. Then what our sense of personal responsibility does with that power facilitates change in us, but that change gets expressed in conventional pathways. Our commitment to our own lives collapses into a kind of self-centeredness that is aligned with the conventional values of our culture.

I can’t think of a time when the circumstances I have felt personally responsible for haven’t turned into a disappointment. Any sense of commitment we have to worldly endeavor almost always gives rise to some profound sense of failure. The fact of the matter is that maybe it isn’t a failure. Maybe it’s just that the possibilities that are available to us in the world from our ordinary states are intrinsically limited. That kind of endeavor isn’t a place where we should be looking for fulfillment in the first place. In the beginning, middle and end, fulfillment exists only in us.

Bhaje Cave, India

CC Photo Courtesy of Sonam Pablo on Flickr

I used to think that sadhus went into caves in the mountains for long term retreats in order to have some kind of spiritual attainment. Now I don’t believe that’s why they went on retreat. It’s my opinion that they went on retreat to get away from people so that their natural awareness of the profound abundance at the core of their being would not be disturbed by all the insanity that goes on in the world.

The solution to all of our personal problems and issues is present within ourselves. We truly need do nothing other than establish contact with our own deepest resource, align ourselves with that deepest resource every day, and flow in that resource in our daily lives as it flows within us. Contact, alignment and flow are the essence of a fulfilled life. That is what we need to take personal responsibility for.

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The Purpose of the Havan

Posted on March 12, 2012 by admin

In the Vedic period, the havan (also called the homa, the yajna, and the agnihotra) was the practice by which people re-established their alignment with the natural order of the whole universe. In this practice, they aligned themselves internally. They then aligned themselves with all the forces that operated in their environment for the purpose of sustaining balance and harmony for the benefit of the whole: the individual, the family, and the community.

The fire ceremony had two aspects to it. One is regular and private to the family. I have friends in Kerala, in South India, in whose house the fire has not gone out for more than 1,000 years. That, to me, is just amazing.

Swami Chetanananda at havan at The Movement Centert, July 2010The second function of the havan is public. As an example of that, the oldest continuous yajna that I know of happens now in South India, but not very regularly. The people in the village where it happens claim that the ceremony has been going on for 8,000 years without interruption. The altar has three fire pits and is constructed in the shape of a bird, using 10,008 bricks which are specially made for the occasion–one brick for each line in the Rig Veda. The whole community builds the altar, covers it with thatch, and they meet for eight days, dawn til dusk, and chant the mantras together. They offer ghee, grains, nuts, and fruit into the fire. There is a very specific aesthetic quality to the whole experience because there is the fire, the offerings, the chanting and the smoke. All of the senses become completely engaged, and the ordinary, discursive, wandering mind becomes disabled.

For each of the sensory domains, the resonance of the experience permeates us and is intended to elevate us to a different level of experience of our own lives. So this practice, the ritual offerings, the mantra, the whole aesthetic sensibility, is intended to lift the practitioner and those attending into an ecstatic state in which a vision of the higher context in which each of us functions as human beings is accessible to us. It is a vision that we do not ever encounter in our ordinary lives.

In other words, the whole point of yoga is to achieve a state that transcends thought and feeling and makes accessible to us the direct experience of where we come from and why we’re here. That experience is so intimate that it transcends even the most intimate of our personal experiences.

A secondary aspect of that experience, seeing the larger context, we become aware of the more sophisticated reality in which we operate. We begin to understand that we are not the only sentient beings that are present here, and further, although we imagine we might be, we are not at the top of the food chain. In having the ecstatic vision of our own ultimate reality, we also encounter the spiritual beings that have a profound influence on all of our lives.

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I Bow to My Teachers…and I Also Bow to My Students

Posted on February 25, 2012 by admin

I want to talk today about something very simple: the practice of bowing.

Whenever I come to meditate or to teach, I always bow. I bow to my lineage gurus, and I bow to all teachers who have made themselves available, who shared the benefits and insights of whatever difficult work they have done, to uplift the lives of people. Bowing to such people in profound respect is an important part of the tantric tradition. It is not in any way a demonstration of subservience.

Swami Chetanananda BowingBowing is important for two reasons. The first is that the goal of our work is to have the palpable experience of the interconnectedness of the total unity of all. One of the reasons that a teacher is crucial is that if we can establish ourselves in the awareness of the interconnectedness between us and one person, then it is possible for us to take the leap from that experience of interconnectedness with one person to the experience of interconnectedness with all people, and from all people to all life forms, and from all life forms to the very living conscious field in which experience asserts itself in the first place. So, we’re not just bowing in respect for our teacher’s realization, their willingness to unconditionally accept and love us, and their allowing their own energy to be the nourishment for the awakening of our potential. We are also bowing to express our unity, which is the basic nature of reality.

In bowing to our teachers, we also bow to the work, the conscious effort that is necessary and appropriate in our endeavor to release ourselves from all of those limiting patterns that we were born into. Those patterns filter all the input and all the energy that we take in, and filter all the output, so that our understanding is always somewhat limited and our self-expression never truly meets the mark that we hope it would.

There’s one final thing about bowing that is also important. When I bow to my teachers, I am expressing my devotion. Devotion is the chemistry that unifies all the disparate aspects of my life and allows me to experience all the different ways in which I am called to express myself and the understanding that I am here to grow spiritually.

So, I bow every time I come to meditation. I bow to remember to reconnect to the wisdom aspect of our spiritual endeavor, which is the understanding that we are all completely interconnected. I also bow to remember the devotion aspect of my spiritual quest. That experience makes me feel really, really grateful, grateful for my teachers, grateful for my students, grateful for my life, and grateful for life itself. So please know that I don’t just bow to my teachers every morning. I also bow to my students.

Posted in Devotion, Meditation, Sadhana, The Teacher | 3 Comments
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The Tradition of Initiation

Posted on January 25, 2012 by admin

In the Vedas, a person who performs Vedic ritual sacrifice was called a Brahmin. Brahmin means “twice born.” The Brahmin is twice born because he receives an initiation that qualifies him to perform the sacrifice. It’s the beginning of his education and the beginning of a commitment that he makes to peel away the layers of the tensions that bind us together as a person. Those are tensions that we have accumulated through so many lifetimes, and that have manifested in this lifetime as the disappointments of our ancestors we’ve inherited. The desires that we manifest, the aspirations that we have, the areas that we go into in our lives, both constructive and destructive, are really an expression of the deficiencies in the nourishment of our upbringing. Those deficiencies are not there through anybody’s fault; they’re just what is.

In the Vedic times, for Brahmins, this initiation lifted them out of the family circumstances they were born into and immediately liberated them from the disappointments of their ancestors. They were born again into a different circumstance called a guru kul. The guru kul is the family of the guru, the family of the teacher. The tradition recognizes that the guru kul makes available the nourishment that wasn’t provided in the birth parents’ home. That nourishment dissolves the tensions that limit a person in every dimension of their life. It makes it possible for them to become completely spiritually developed and mature, totally fulfilled, and liberated in life.

Swami Chetanananda in Open Eye Meditation The central part of the initiation experience is when the guru takes his own conscious energy, his own awareness power, and plants it in the student, so that the energetic mechanism of the student acquires the nourishment needed to start to break down all of the accumulated tensions. As those tensions are broken down, the vital force within the person is awakened and expanded.

This was the critical moment in Vedic initiation, and the practice continued through all the various traditions in India. The Vedas were followed by the Upanishads, and then the six classical philosophical systems, including yoga, which ultimately matured in the Tantric tradition.

The Tantric tradition was unusual in its complete maturity because it asserts that there was only one consciousness in the universe. Even though there are many minds, there is only one consciousness. It is that one consciousness that the teacher is established in and through which their life force is transmitted to the student. That is called “shaktipat” in the Tantric tradition. The term means “descent of grace.” In the Tibetan side of the Tantric tradition, in Dzogchen, it’s called direct transmission.

This experience that I share when I teach open eye class is not different from the Vedic initiation. It is the transmission of the understanding that there is a singular dynamic awareness from which all phenomena arise, and that all phenomena are interconnected. So this interconnectedness, the understanding, the experience, the awareness of this interconnectedness, is what is being transmitted as shaktipat, or initiation. It is the continuing awareness of that connectedness that represents a leverage on all the tensions that we’re walking around with.

So, no matter what our condition is, no matter what our experience is, no matter what kind of confusion we’re experiencing, we have a reference point we can always go to. This experience is also an energetic resource we can draw on to lift ourselves out of whatever limited state that we have fallen into.

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Winter 2011 – Spring 2012 Lecture Series

Posted on November 30, 2011 by admin

I’ll be giving a series of Saturday morning talks at The Movement Center, in Portland, Oregon. The first is on Saturday, December 10, from 9:30 am to noon, and the topic is “The Energetic Mechanism, Yoga and Well-Being.” I will explain the energetic mechanism that underlies all of our physiology, and relate that to asana, pranayama, health and well being.

Other talks in the series will be on “Indian Religion and Spirituality,” and on two important texts from the philosophical tradition of Kashmir Shaivism: “Shiva Sutras: The Yoga of Supreme Identity,” and “Pratyabhijnahrdyam: The Secret of Self-Recognition.” The dates for those talks will be Saturday, January 14, 2012; Saturday, April 14, 2012; and Saturday, May 12, 2012.

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Why Do We Meditate?

Posted on October 3, 2011 by admin

I have thought a lot lately about the object of meditation and why we are meditating, or what we would be meditating on if we were actually meditating like we think we ought to.

Typically, I would say that the object of meditation is growing the flow of creative energy, and that wouldn’t be wrong. But I think that there is another answer that is, in a way, deeper. That answer is that the object of meditation is the breath of life.

The breath of life is three-dimensional. First, it is the breath that keeps our body alive. It is also the breath which is the essence of our mind and our individual existence, our ego and our personality and all of that. Finally, it is the vitality of Life itself–it is the life of the universe.

In the past several months, I’ve changed the way I work in meditation, and I’ve changed the way I think about it. I used to refer directly to my energetic mechanism and skip everything else between my attention and that. But I’ve changed that now. I’ve come to understand that when they talk about the goddess in Eastern religious traditions, they are really referring to the breath of life. This means that the body is the divinity; it is the deity manifest in the material world. Mind is also the deity manifest in the intermediate realm between material and pure spirit. Beyond that breath is the deity itself. All three dimensions are present within the breath.

So now when I practice, I refer to my body on a regular basis, and I stay very much in contact with my body, recognizing the body as the deity in the material world. It’s important to take care of your body–to eat properly, sleep properly, and to move it every day. It’s also important to take care of your mind and to nourish it with sensory experiences that are pleasing, to have the experience of beauty and the unique ways that you appreciate it. Those experiences help release tensions in us by putting us in touch with what is rich, juicy and delicious about life. In this state, you will have access to the true religious experience, a sense of profound gratitude for your life.

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The Inheritance of Karma

Posted on May 25, 2011 by admin

Each of us comes into the world as a manifestation of the life of our mother and father. All mothers, whether they know it or not, are reaching into themselves when they have a child and pulling out a chunk of their own life. Each of us has received our life from our parents, and as we have received that life, we also received the resonance of the life they have had, which is received as a resonance of the life their parents had. All of this adds up to a frequency, a vibration that manifests our physical bodies, our intellect, and our emotions.

CC Photo courtesy of Jim Epler on Flickr

All of the attitudes and opinions and things we think we know that we don’t, we receive from our parents. All the limitations that they have experienced intellectually, emotionally, and spatially, become a limitation in our life. This is our karma.

Most of us understand karma to be like cause and effect, sin and retribution. We think of karma as payback for our mistakes. In fact, karma is not like that at all–it is the disappointment of our ancestors that we have inherited. It is their frustrations and, in many cases, their physical traumas, as well as their heartbreaks that live on even today in our life as our attitudes about ourselves and our limitations in our ability to take in information and to express ourselves fully from a deep and fine place.

It’s because of our karma that the functioning of our creative energy is suppressed. We become locked into a pattern of understanding ourself as a separate, disconnected, alienated and not entirely loveable physiological mechanism. We don’t understand what resources are truly available to us as a human being, and our lives become filled with frustration. The practice of yoga is about restoring the full function and range of motion of our creative energy, undoing the limitations our karma imposes.

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