Swami Chetanananda's Blog

Opening Deeply to Life

Posted on August 28, 2013 by admin

In the entire universe, everything is energy in one of two forms: conscious energy and structured energy. As energy becomes increasingly structured, its range of awareness is decreased and it becomes more dense. Conscious energy can be called Shiva. Structured energy can be called Shakti. All phenomena are structured energy in various degrees of density that arise and subside in the one infinite field of unlimited conscious energy.

Breaking down our own density, dissolving tensions, and allowing our creative energy to grow automatically brings growth. Growth is characterized by change, which affords us the opportunity for an expanded range of motion–physically, emotionally, intellectually, and energetically. Ultimately, it gives us access to the dimension of our existence that is conscious energy and in which all knowledge of past, present and future is inherent.

CC image courtesy of Jeff Pioquinto, SA on Flickr

The conscious effort to grow is really very simple. It is to open within ourselves every single day and to awaken the energy channels, and their junction points, the chakras, and allow ourselves to absorb the experiences of our life as energy. We take everything in our field of experience as energy into ourselves and break it down. We break down all of our thoughts about it, attitudes towards it, and judgments about it. Taking it all in as energy is opening to it, being nourished by it, and learning from it at the same time.

We have to learn from experience at a deeper level than it is manifesting. If we are taking in something on the level that is manifesting, we are only building resistance to it. It’s only when we can detach ourselves slightly from the circumstances in which we live that we can begin to understand it is all nourishment. We can take it in and be grateful for our life, as it is.

It is our life as it is that has the potential to nourish us. It is not our life as we want it to be, or we wish it was, or it should have been. All that stuff has nothing to do with anything. Our life as it is has the potential to nourish us if we can reach into ourselves, open ourselves more deeply than the circumstances we are relating to are manifesting, and draw this energy, this whole experience, within ourselves and be nourished and taught by it.

I hear lots of people talk about the inner teacher, but I have yet to meet one person who had a clue what they are talking about. It is just some garbage that people throw out as a way of saying , “I already know everything and I don’t need to hear anything from you.” The inner teacher is that part of us which has the capacity to open more deeply to our life than it is manifesting on and take it in as energy and be nourished by it. This is Rudi’s fundamental teaching.

Simply put, if we can make contact with our own energetic mechanism, consciously open that mechanism and the chakras and set everything in motion, the tensions will start to dissolve and break down. We will start to experience within ourselves a sweetness and a gratitude that will allow for us to heal from all of the strain patterns and trauma that we have experienced in our life. This deep and profound healing can only take place when we take responsibility for opening ourselves, taking in the nourishment, transcending and dissolving every kind of tension, and simply being grateful for being alive.

Posted in Energetic Mechanism, Growing | Tagged conscious energy, rudi's teaching, structured energy | Leave a comment

Cultivating Creative Capacity

Posted on July 5, 2013 by admin

My guru, Rudi, completely appreciated the creative capacity of life itself as demonstrated through human beings. He appreciated human beings who were able to rise above the limitations of their circumstance and find, even in the simplest ways, some creative capacities that they could begin to demonstrate. Those capacities were ones that they could cultivate and grow for the sake, ultimately, of liberating themselves from their own constraints. Rudi’s teaching was an expression of the appreciation that he had for that capacity.

One of the main things I learned from Rudi is that what we are trying to come to understand is the most fundamental basis of our existence. Underneath this physical body and this mind there is a subtle body. You could also call it an energetic mechanism. There is a creative capacity, a power, an energy, which has organized itself for the purpose of expressing us. Rather than wasting our lives, struggling with our desires, it would be wonderful if we could begin to commit ourselves to the realization of this creative capacity, and connecting to it, cultivate that awakening and follow it where ever it is and wants to take us, because none of us get the life that we think we want.

We all have the life we have. That life never becomes someone else’s life. It’s always going to be our life. Without a conscious effort to connect to that life and discover what that life has in store for us, without surrendering our resistance, and our doubts and fears and tensions and coming into contact with that vibrancy of life, and realizing the fullness, the abundance, the unimaginable possibility that it has for us, we spend our lives struggling over what amounts to a pile of rabbit pellets.

You can think of 99% of the things that you worry about as a pile of rabbit pellets, because that’s about how important those things actually are. And at the end of the day, the first heavy rain is going to wash it all away. It will be as if it never existed.

Rudi was all about the energy. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in his own, or anybody else’s imagination of what their problem was. He was only interested in people who were willing to commit themselves to, and work to connect to, to cultivate their awareness of, their own subtle rainbow body and the creative energy of this living event, which is our essence, and to grow the voltage and the volume of that creative energy to the degree that it could hold and express the entire range of subtle frequencies.

Posted in Energetic Mechanism, Growing | Tagged cultivating creative capacity, SwamiChetnanand Quotes | Leave a comment

Be Delighted

Posted on June 6, 2013 by admin

My perspective on Rudi’s teaching is that so much of what he was talking about was really about detachment. What he meant by detachment was that we are not engaged in all of the petty drama craziness in any issue we have to relate to in our day or in our life. Rather, we are taking the energy of all of our circumstances and absorbing it deeply within ourselves, for the purpose of awakening our energetic mechanism and bringing about a continual change of state within us. That change of state should bring us into the awareness of the vastness and the potential that is present within us. It should bring us into the awareness that our essence and the essence of life is unconditional love.

Everything other than love arises from the absence of alignment in love. In that absence of alignment, the ego, and its agent, desire, hijack the power of love. The ego and its agent hijack the energy and transform it into fear and greed and anger.

But this experience of detachment, which should liberate us from desire, doesn’t mean that we have to suppress our desires. Suppressing anything is not a good thing. I think, generally speaking, suppression is the basis of all pathology. Rudi’s work and tantrism in general would never support the idea of suppressing anything, Rather, it’s about transformation–transforming our desires into the experience of inspiration and the realization of unconditional love from within ourselves.

It’s perfectly wonderful for everybody to enjoy their life. You can experience delight in any of the ways that are appropriate to you. It’s fine. I’m taking this line from Rumi slightly out of his context, but I would say “Ours is not a caravan of despair.” Be delighted…and bravo for that.

In your experience of delight, remain in the awareness of your own energetic mechanism. Relate to delight as nourishment and quite consciously absorb it more deeply into you because certainly in the environment of delight, tensions dissolve much more easily. Energy becomes nourishment more easily, and your whole physical mechanism will allow for transformation to take place. It will happen much more efficiently than if you’re constantly under pressure and stress and fretting and worry about this thing and that thing.

Posted in Energetic Mechanism, Growing | Leave a comment

The Vedas and the Sense of Wonder

Posted on April 23, 2013 by admin

The Vedas are an extraordinarily old and beautiful piece of literature that articulates the values and the hopes and fears of people who lived a life very different from ours. Although the archeological sites along the Indus Valley of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro demonstrate to us that at least as early as 6000 years ago, cities of over 25,000 people were organized in South Asia, the people of the Vedas did not know anything about the level of urbanization we experience today as a matter of course.

The people of Vedic times lived basically from the earth, from the land, and saw the sun rise in the morning and set in the evening. Without any kind of scientific instrumentation, they observed very carefully the phases of the moon through the centuries, and they observed the movement of the constellations in the sky. They observed very carefully the impact of these movements on their individual lives and on their environment. They developed predictive systems that served them so well that this Vedic culture is the only traditional culture that you can still see traces of walking through the streets of Mumbai or Delhi or Chennai. It had richness and depth and strength that gave it great longevity.

The relationship of these people to the earth and their awareness of their environment was extraordinary enough that they understood that the light of the stars and the light of the planets and, most importantly, the light of the sun and the moon had a tremendous impact on their environment. They understood that the whole cosmos was available to them to observe as one totally integrated dynamic system.

They marveled at the power of nature and the variety of ways in which this power manifested. To the degree that they appreciated it, they personified it and paid their respects to it.

So, for the people who lived in the time of the Vedas, their first duty as an authentic human being living an authentic life was to live in alignment with the earth and the powers of all the various energy sources that demonstrated themselves in their environment as Life. While it is not explicitly articulated in the Vedas, there is the intuition that the light in the sky and the light on the earth and the light of fire and lightning was all one. That energy was one and the source of all life, and intrinsic to life was a quality of illumination that made everything visible.

Lots of Western scholars have found the Vedas to be pantheistic–to be filled with the worship of lots of different gods. But that is not my reading of it at all. My reading of them is that the Vedas articulated a sense of wonder about the natural world, a sense of wonder about all naturally occurring phenomenon that left these people in awe and at the end of the day caused them to feel it was essential that they live in alignment with those forces and to acknowledge and express their gratitude for the abundance that those forces made possible in their lives. Their technology for living in alignment, for becoming aligned and staying aligned, for putting themselves in touch with the health and well-being and abundance that was the natural manifestation of the balance of the natural world, was ritual sacrifice –Vedic ritual.

The Vedas are about the forces that give rise to the elements that compose life and the technology by which human beings will live in alignment with that vibrancy, thereby coming into contentment. The Vedas also appreciated that human beings and in fact all forms of life, all living beings emerge out of the natural vibrancy of life itself. As the natural vibrancy arises and meets all of the forces of the natural world, there is a condensation of energies that come together as five sheaths. Those five sheaths come together as living being and also as human beings. It is the coalescing of these five sheaths into a human life set in motion in the world that become integrated through Vedic ritual and aligned with the natural forces of the world. This alignment allows the person to experience the fullness and abundance that is intrinsic to life itself.

Posted in Ritual, Vedas | 1 Comment

Nothing to be Done

Posted on April 11, 2013 by admin

Spring is a time to be completely grateful to be able to connect to and feel what we are—that we are connected to the earth and connected to the seasons and the air that we are breathing. So many people just have no clue about any of this. Not only that, people live in their tiny little patterns of tension, which they have no understanding of, and no sense of what is possible for them in their own lives, the richness that is available to them, if they could only like take a breath and actually feel it.

How simple is that? To just be able to take a breath and feel it. And then take another breath and feel that. And another breath. And feel that. If we just remembered to feel the breath that we’re breathing then all of the things that we get entangled in every single day, all the stuff that we want that we are not getting, and all the stuff that we don’t want, would just fall away. We would feel what is really alive in us.

Our lives are so filled with paradoxes that, for most people, the circuit breaker gets thrown in the family about 18 generations ago and it never gets turned on again. It just genetically stays turned off, because basically there appears to be many, and in this appearance of many, it appears to be complicated. But, in fact, in the appearance of many, there is only one, and in the appearance of all complication there is utter, utter, utter simplicity.

There appears to be so much that we need to do, and yet there is nothing to be done. If we could only understand that while there may be actions that we have to carry out, there may be some things, some cleanups that we have to do, there really is nothing that has to be done. In the release of all of this accumulated stress of the complexity that we have to deal with and the alienation from the many and the struggle with the things that need to be done, if we could just release all that, we would have the energy to simply be aware of our breath.

As we become more relaxed and in our bodies, we will be able to feel the extraordinary vibrancy of the breath within us, and we will experience the subtle breath within our breathing. Attending to, having the energy to hold our mind present in our bodies and in our breath and the subtlety that is within our breath, we will become aware of this profound and sacred potentiality that is present within us, present within our life, present within and around us everywhere. It only requires our attention in order for it to begin to coalesce into a creative energy that expresses itself into some unimaginable transformation in the field of our experience.

So, everyday for just a little while, however long is appropriate to you, sit down and really relax your body and bring your awareness into it. Bringing your awareness into your body, become aware of your breath. With the awareness of your breath, take some time, be aware, bring your mind back over and over again until you have the sense of the vibrancy that is within that breath and the sophisticated pathways by which that breath is articulating your mind and your body. You will understand that this body is not yours, that this mind is not yours, that the many don’t exist, that the complexity is a delusion, that the struggle is suffering, nothing but suffering. Suffering is nothing but your imagination, and relief from it all is available whenever you are ready. Fortunately for everybody, this is not rocket science. This is utterly simple and available to anyone who chose to engage it.

Posted in Energetic Mechanism, Sadhana | Leave a comment

Throw Away the Wish List

Posted on March 29, 2013 by admin

Every single day, the thing we have to remember is that life is not about our wish list. We’re not in this world to get something. We’re really not. If we live from our wish list, we’re going to be miserable. Somebody once asked Jay Rockefeller if he had enough money; his response was “Almost.” The thing about getting close to our wish list is it’s always just beyond our grasp, because it’s an illusion, because that wish list comes from the dark. It has nothing to do with anything.

In the book Incognito, David Eagleman points out that because of the lag time between our having an experience and our brains actually absorbing the experience, we never actually live in the present. He also talks about how there are huge holes in our visual field. There’s big spot in our retina where there are no sensors. Our brain is wired up to ignore the big hole in our visual field; we don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s prominent. But we never see it, because our brain is taking the data that it does get and building an image out of that data that is a complete image. Furthermore, if the brain has already absorbed a particular set of data points, unless we focus directly on a change in that picture, it will continuously feed back to us the same picture.

So essentially, our brain, based on its fundamental programming, is constructing a view of reality, even of our concrete physical world, and building an image which has nothing to do with anything. If it can do that with a concrete physical world, think what it does with our subjective part of it! Then we react to that discovery with surprise and disappointment, never noticing that that’s exactly what we’re relating to, and then we go through our life endlessly reacting to our reactions and being buried in all of the tensions of that.

The most fundamental part of the spiritual practice that I share (and really, any spiritual practice) is to wake up every morning and open our heart to the reality of our life. Not what we wish it was, and not what we regret that it isn’t, and not what we think it ought to be. But open our heart to the reality of our life.

Opening our heart to the reality of our life, we can take in the tensions—-not an easy thing for us to do, especially in the beginning—-and break them down and really find love within ourselves for the people that we share this experience with. We understand they are in our life, and have been in our life for many lifetimes, representing what we haven’t digested and what we haven’t surrendered that is actually nourishment that has come to us and needs to be. We can deal with our life day by day, finding within ourselves a simple joy and a simple gratitude for things like the opportunity to consciously take a breath and feel it; gratitude for a glass of water and how that feels being absorbed. There are so many unbelievably simple things that we ignore that, if we paid attention to them, we would discover are really nice. But we’re so trapped in our desires, we’re so hung up in our wish list and our struggle with it, that we end up condensing our creative energy instead of flowing with it.

We have to take responsibility for opening our own hearts and loving our own life. In that effort, the effort that we have to make to open ourselves and love our own life, we will begin to feel worthy, really deeply worthy of love, and other people will experience that love in our life and love us, too.

It’s not about doing it tomorrow. It’s about doing it today. It’s about doing it now. There is no other time but now. We have to open our hearts and love our life, throw away our wish list and have the courage to see what magic and what blessings are waiting to reveal themselves to us. Doing this will allow us to find a total transformation in the quality of our experience.

Posted in Growing, Sadhana | Leave a comment

“I Will Do Your Bidding”

Posted on March 13, 2013 by admin

The Bhagavad Gita, which is a very important and beautiful and very ancient text on human spirituality, begins with Arjuna on the battlefield looking at his family. They represent the disappointments of his ancestors and the accumulation of tension in that system over how many eons that human beings reincarnate. For each of us, in a real way, our family represents the fundamental obstacle that we have to engage and transcend in order to become completely awakened. Our family is an intractable situation, in which, for the most part, people lack any real respect for one another. Family is the context in which the old saying, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” functions most fully.

Arjuna is called to battle with his family. It’s going to get ugly. He says, “I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. Whatever I’m working for is not that important.” Krishna says to him, “You have to do it, because first of all, because, if you don’t, you will be enslaved. You will totally lose any kind of freedom whatsoever. Secondly, you’ll lose your dignity and self-respect. And, thirdly, you’ll lose any respect anybody else has for you now. You have to do this.” This is a metaphor for each of our personal lives.

Krishna goes onto explain that nobody escapes work. The modern translators use the term “action.” Nobody escapes action. The discussion is then, “Should I be acting? Should I be a man of action? Should I be a man of inaction? Should I engage the world? Should I be completely removed from the world?” Krishna says everybody has to work. Nobody escapes work. We have to do it. It is in working that we develop the capacity to extract from our life the nourishment bound up in the tensions that we convert into energy. Working is about moving our energy and sustaining ourselves. We sustain ourselves by doing physical work to move the energy.

Before Krishna sends Arjuna out to war to do this extremely intense work, in the eighteenth chapter of the Gita, Krishna reveals his cosmic form. Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna as the life of the life of every being, not just human beings. He shows that he is the life of the life of all deities and all devatas, the life of the life of all angels and devils and ghosts and spirits and human beings. Arjuna says, “Oh, I get it.”

Krishna also says, “Don’t worry about the outcome. Don’t worry about what’s going to happen to these people. The fact of the matter is, who lives and dies in this upcoming battle is already written. This is not your business. Your business is to do your duty, and all the while, understanding and being devoted to the divine cosmic form and awareness of the breath of life, which is our foundation, our home and our ultimate end.”

So, if you have some interest in spirituality and some feeling within yourself to grow closer to the truth to become closer to yourself, what you need to do is shift your focus beyond the ordinary world that you walk around in. You have to shift your struggle from the fight with your husband and your kids and the bank and the mortgage. You have to establish yourself, your mind, your commitment firmly in your intention to experience the breath of life. You have to sustain yourself in that awareness, even as that awareness sustains you in an experience of total well being no matter what kind of chaos is going on in the world.

Krishna explains to Arjuna that in every aspect of our life, in every day of our life, through every circumstance of our life, rather than getting tangled up in all of the superficial tensions of the circumstance, we need to hold ourselves with dignity and grace in the awareness of the grace that allows us some dignity. Whatever our circumstance, if we live in contact with the breath of life, aligned with that purpose within ourself, that highest expression of creative energy, flowing in that and allowing that to flow in us, cultivating our awareness of the flow itself, we will become ultimately aware of our own truly divine and completely transcendent nature.

After Krishna has revealed his universal nature to Arjuna and Arjuna’s own universal nature to himself, Arjuna says, “I will do your bidding. I will do what you ask.” This may appear to mean he’s saying, “Well, I’ll take orders from you.” That’s not at all what he means. He’s saying, “I will live in contact, alignment and flow with my own universal divine nature, which is nothing other than the supreme deity, which is the essence of all there is.” When he says, “I will do your bidding,” there is no other that he is referring to. There is only the ultimate reality, which has a billion names: Buddha, Shiva, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Devi, Durga, Kali. It doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you smile while you’re calling it.

Posted in Growing, Sadhana | Leave a comment

Growing Is a Conscious Choice

Posted on March 5, 2013 by admin

The first thing I learned from my teacher, Rudi, is that we are in this world to grow. That is really the only reason we are here. Any other activity that we are engaged in is an unconscious expression of our creative energy, which is responding to the limitation of our circumstances, not the potential that is invested in us.

I talk sometimes about the disappointments of our ancestors. You may or may not believe me, but my own personal experience is that 99% of what each of us do in this world–99% of our longings and our desires and our efforts–is really a reaction to an empty space inside us. That space is empty because our parents could not fill it. They could not fill it because they had a similar empty space that could not be filled by their parents, and so on down the line. This isn’t anyone’s fault. This is the human condition.

Awakening our creative energy changes our understanding of ourselves and our experience. It allows us to find within ourselves, anytime we consciously engage it, a sweetness and a richness that is forever within us. That sweetness and richness, once awakened and cultivated, becomes a power that uplifts and transforms our understanding of ourselves and the experience that we have of our life.

It is our wish to grow that we consciously engage and take ever more deeply inside us. By doing this, we rewire our whole nervous system and the mechanism that is beaming out to the universe. I bring this up because the idea of making a statement to the universe seems to be a popular notion. If we’re going to make a statement, we should state that we want to grow. This wish to grow is an open statement that you make. Any other statement that you make to the universe—“give me money, give me fame, give me whatever, give me this, give me that, give me, give me,”–is really coming from the same empty space as the disappointment of our ancestors. It is not coming from a place that is connected to the fullness of our spiritual potential, which is the only part of us that can actually reach out and engage the universe. If the ultimate reality is joy, then it is only from that joy within ourselves that we can connect to and communicate with the ultimate reality. Everything else is tension, and it will be heard on a lesser frequency.

This wish to grow, the understanding that we are in this world to grow, is consciously cultivated. It makes us perfectly clear about the fact that we are in this world to grow, which transforms our whole life into a conscious endeavor. That doesn’t make it easy. It doesn’t make it free of challenges. It makes it an endless opportunity for learning and for expansion, and endless opportunity for fulfillment on a deeper and deeper level, until there is no tension to be dissolved and we are nothing but pure joy.

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Removing the Wrapping

Posted on February 15, 2013 by admin

When we are born, it’s as if we come out and are immediately wrapped in a tight plastic coating. If you have ever stood at a meat counter and watched the guys in the back cut the meat and put it in a plastic wrap that’s really tight, you’ll have an idea of what that’s like. We are wrapped in a tight package of tensions that I call the disappointments of our ancestors. This ligamentous sack has in its wrapping all of tensions of our parents, and their parents, and their parents, as well as of our culture and society.

All of this wrapping becomes the limitation of our ability to see what is happening in the world around us or even to connect to it. For the most part, we go through our lives, living in this sack and seeing the world through a set of tensions, which we both react to and are constrained by. We never figure out what is going on among human beings, this planet or anything else.

We live in this sack, which profoundly limits us, until somebody comes along who can take the sack away—someone who can cut the plastic off, who can open the package, and who can begin to energize the life that is constrained in that wrapping and bring it more completely to life. That’s basically what I do, and what this experience of eyes-open meditation that I am sharing with you is. It is cutting away at the wrapper. This meditation practice is an energy exchange that liberates life from the limitations imposed upon it by generations of brutality. Slowly, or as quickly as each of you can possibly take it in, you can have the wrapping of your family’s tensions removed from you and the life inside you brought to life.

With those tensions removed, the life inside you, which is extremely fine, can begin to extend itself in all the three worlds: the physical world, the mental and emotional world, the spiritual world, and the energetic world. It can, just like the dawning of the sun, begin to illuminate your purpose in this world. It can show you the connections that you have to the people around you. More importantly, it can show you the refinement and sophistication in your environment that is impacting you every day–those things that you are not aware of and that you don’t understand. Slowly, you can become anchored in the life that is truly alive within you and begin to relate to the totality of your environment in a way that can continuously nourish and nurture and uplift you.

You can begin to appreciate that even the painful circumstances in your life are taking place as an expression of deep tensions and deep constraints within you that are beginning to breakdown and dissolve and release you from their hold. You have the opportunity and the power to completely transform your life into, not an easy experience, but a completely positive experience.

When you get to a hard place, reach deeper inside you to bring out more positive qualities. Every hard place that you bump into is a tension in you, a part of your life that has been compressed in you for a very long time that is rising up out of you and expressing itself on its way out the door. Every hard place that you meet represents an opportunity for you to reach deeper into yourself. In doing so, that hard place will reveal a finer quality and a stronger power and a richer experience that is available to you.

So, take responsibility for the quality of your life and be committed to growing it, and come to eyes-open meditation and learn about the tools that are available to you to make this change within yourself. Then sit here and understand what I am doing is taking away your tensions and bringing powerfully into the environment a dimension of energy that most human beings will never experience. Connect to that and take it in to yourself and hold it in yourself. Let it nourish you, and then move through your day with love and light and express as much as you can every positive quality that is alive within you.

Posted in Meditation, The Teacher | 1 Comment

What Do We Have to Renounce?

Posted on February 5, 2013 by admin

In yoga, and in the traditions that embrace yoga as their methodology for self-recognition and self-fulfillment, the discussion of renunciation plays a significant role. Most of the lifestyles taught by the traditions that embrace yoga are very ascetic lifestyles. Sannyas is conceived of as, in a way, the pinnacle of this asceticism, the ultimate renunciation.

So I want to give you my short take on renunciation. What is it that we actually have to renounce?

I like to tell a story about going to India and going to the Ganges with my Brahmin friend. He always likes to do a ritual there for his ancestors. In the ritual, we wade up to our belly buttons in the river. Then we do a little chant and take water in our hands and offer it to the river. That’s such a simple sweet thing for me to do because we are offering water to the river. Yet it’s silly. First of all, offer water to a river? Second of all, it’s not our water. It’s the river’s water. It was never our water. It was always the river’s water. What that tells us is that basically, if you think about it, what do we really have to offer?

If the water in my hands belongs to the river, the water in my body does, too. Whatever minerals there are that compose this tissue belong to the earth. It’s not mine. When I am out of here it’s going to become earth again.

This isn’t my body. It is a body. Even this mind is not my mind. Most of the thoughts that go on in my head are not mine. (This may not be easy for you to grok, but trust me on it. ) Whatever stuff I have, when I go, it’s eventually going to become water and dirt. It’s nothing.

So what is it that we have to renounce? Well, actually, we do have something: our ego and the tensions that comprise it.

Our ego is just a bundle of tensions all glommed together that we call us. These tensions completely limit our understanding and the richness and the range of our self-expression. If there is one thing that is very important to renounce, in order to discover the largeness, the vastness, the sweetness, the richness of the life that is alive inside us, the only thing we have to renounce are our tensions. Of course, this is easier said than done. It’s much easier to renounce vegetables and alcohol and meat. We can renounce all of these things, and that’s easy. But renouncing our tensions isn’t so easy.

Renouncing tensions allows our creative energy to flow. In the flow of that creative energy, qualities and capacity, talents and skills that are alive within us emerge. Ordinarily we never have the opportunity to be in contact with them. We are usually too busy wasting our energy, struggling with this tension and that tension, wrestling with our egos, to be in touch. The richness that is available when we release those tensions is absolutely amazing. Renouncing tensions and allowing our creative energy to flow makes every miracle that is possible in the world happen. Every miracle that is possible in your life is awakened.

We are not here to deal with each other’s faults. We’re here to practice opening our hearts to everyone, even the people whom we think we don’t like and that we think don’t like us. We are here to take in every experience and every person, and dissolve the tensions and take the energy of that experience and learn from it. What we can be learning is to release tension and allow ever-growing love in our life. It is that ever-growing love in our life that blesses us in every way that is possible.

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Swami Chetanananda