Swami Chetanananda's Blog

The Breath of Life

Posted on February 3, 2011 by admin

The Breath of Life is the fundamental manifestation of the vibrancy of consciousness itself. That self-sustaining, self-organizing capacity of pure being is totally potent and has present in it an unimaginable possibility. The Breath of Life has an existence that is independent of and transcendent of each of us. It permeates us and exists within us for a time. When it leaves us, it doesn’t end, and it is in no way diminished.

CC Photo courtesy of oddsock on Flickr

The object of our meditation is to cultivate an awareness of the Breath of Life, which is the essence of our life. At the level of the individual, it is known as kundalini. It is the ground of our physical existence, the vibrancy of our mind and emotions, and the field of experience in which we move. We work to be in contact with the Breath of Life, the abundance from which the whole universe has poured forth. In practicing meditation, we are committed to becoming aware of that abundance and animating it in the field of our experience.

To be in contact with the Breath of Life, the kundalini energy circulating within us, is to appreciate that it is not our breath we breathe, but the Breath of God. When we are in touch with the Breath of Life within us, we recognize that our body is a blessing–it’s not ours. Our mind is not ours–it is with us in a place and for a time. It has an intention, and it’s important that we are mentally aligned with that intention and committed to expressing it in our life.

If we are in contact with the abundance at our core, the quality of our life is transformed, and every life we come into contact with is blessed. We come to appreciate the interconnectedness of all human beings and the whole planet. We understand that there is a profound possibility, and that saves us from boredom and clears away tension, misunderstanding and confusion from our heads, hearts and bodies.

If you’re interested in hearing more on this subject, I’ll be giving a talk on Breath & Circulation of the Energy in Meditation on Saturday, February 19, at The Movement Center in Portland, Oregon.

Posted in Meditation | Tagged abundance, kundalini | 3 Comments

Revisiting the Vedas

Posted on January 20, 2011 by admin

I’ve been reading the Vedas again recently for the first time in a very long time. The Vedas are not actually religious texts–they have a more humane perspective. There is no dogmatism. They are about the miracle of consciousness and the wonder of the phenomenal world, and the writers had a very refined and sophisticated perspective on their environment.

The Vedic peoples understood the complexity of their environment and the limitations of their senses. They grasped that a unifying element underlies all experience, and that everything is part of one pure being, a presence that pervaded them as well as the natural world. They appreciated that there are forms of life that are more subtle than our senses can perceive.

The Vedas mention a number of gods and goddesses. These gods and goddesses are not anything at all like our conception of God. They are a physical reality connected to daily experiences. They are all interconnected in the dynamic system that is the whole of reality. They arise and subside as an expression of pure being, which is the most refined expression of that dynamic system. The Vedic gods were not intended to be objects of worship in the way that we are used to worshipping. Instead, they were seen as beings with greater longevity and more power than we have.

CC photo courtesy of khandu.rahul on Flickr

The people of the Vedas had a sensibility about the whole of reality and a humility in the face of its immensity. Unlike us, they did not attempt to quantify their experience. They didn’t consider it appropriate, because the universe was understood to be permeated with mystery that was indescribable and unfathomable. In their experience, the entire environment of the earth was alive.

The people in the time of the Vedas appreciated the vibrancy and the vitality and the vastness of the the abundance that is the essence of life. Having the experience of that abundance is something we should strive for, and you’ll read more about it in the next post.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Vedas | 1 Comment

An Attitude of Service

Posted on December 20, 2010 by admin

Having an attitude of service is both practical and grounding. It is an expression of our contact with the abundance within us and the circulation of the energy that is our everyday experience.

In serving, we are cultivating a skill: to look at people and see them as they are, to listen to them, and then to support them. We endeavor to understand what they actually need and how that is different than what they want, because all people usually want the same thing–more. Everybody wants more, but we don’t need more. So we have to distinguish between what people want and what they really need, and try to respond mostly to what they need, while adding enough of what they want into the mix that they don’t get hostile.

CC photo courtesy of familymwr on Flickr

In supporting the people around us, we become richer in all the things that are important. There is a greater flow in our life, a greater range of emotional, intellectual and creative self-expression going on around us as our capacity to genuinely and skillfully share increases.

Service is the integration of our realization into our everyday life. It transforms the office in which we work. It transforms the family in which we live. It transforms our neighborhoods, it transforms our country, and it transforms the world. It seems to me that if we can bring our attention to our breath every day, and feel the flow of life moving in us a little bit, and start to feel the power that is present in that flow, what starts to happen around us is a wonderful personal experience of sweetness that not only makes our life meaningful but also changes the world in a real way. As that sweetness grows, our boundaries, our tensions and the distinctions between ours and anybody else’s dissolve. Life flows in us, and we flow in it. That’s service.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged service | Leave a comment

Cultivating an Intention

Posted on December 9, 2010 by admin

CC photo courtesy of magnetbox on Flickr

I’ve talked about the importance of intention and how powerful it can be. It is only powerful when you cultivate it. If you keep it on the shelf in your refrigerator, it’s completely useless. Think about what it means to cultivate intention. My advice is to make it as big as possible. Have a strong, clear, big intention for yourself. In strategic planning terms, have a big hairy goal. Be visionary.

After you’ve got an idea of what your intention is, don’t hold it too tightly, because your intention is going to evolve. It WILL evolve, if you work it. That’s good.

To cultivate your intention, sit someplace comfortable, relax your body, and then take your attention into your heart and state your intention. State it with conviction. Your heart is going to say back to you something like “No way.” You can expect the ego to give you every kind of lame excuse, rejection or wimpy acquiescence there is. All of these demonstrate resistance to the intention that lives within you. Everybody has it. Don’t feel bad about it. It’s just the way we are.

State your intention, and whatever the response, take a breath, relax again, and state your intention again with conviction. Keep doing that. Relax, try to feel yourself go deeper and say it again, until you feel that the intention has reached the bottom of you. You want it to go as deeply into you as it can go. When you have reached the bottom, you heart will be open and the statement of your intention with conviction will be a source of tremendous joy to you. You’ll feel “Yes! That’s right! This is it!”

When you have reached that depth of contact with yourself and clarity about your conviction, you will find that it is not difficult to express this conviction in the world. It does take work. Everything takes work, but it’s not hard. It’s not suffering. It’s a work that is permeated with joy and that tends to express itself in elegant ways.

Posted in Growing, Sadhana | 2 Comments

Attachment and Moving On

Posted on December 1, 2010 by admin

CC photo courtesy of Kretyen on Flickr

In most eastern spiritual literature, attachment is talked about as a problem. I don’t exactly agree with that–I think that eliminating attachment is not necessary. What IS necessary is letting go when something is over. Being connected is not a problem. Staying in places that are no longer alive is a problem. Living with habitual tendencies that are no longer fulfilling your responsibilities or nourishing you is a problem.

The really sneaky thing about attachment is that there are so many attachments inside us that we don’t have a clue about until we grow a little. When we’re kids, we have one set of attachments. When we’re teenagers we have another. When we get into our twenties, a whole other set of attachments rolls out. That’s true for our whole lives. Attachment is going to come out and keep biting us.

Traditionally, the issue of attachment was dealt with by going into the mountains or a forest and just not dealing with people at all. Early Buddhism was about getting away from people, and much of Indian meditation is about solitary meditation. That was fine, when it was possible, but in our culture, if you’re going to go out into the forest and remove yourself from any contact with people you’re probably going to starve to death. That’s one of the reasons we have spiritual communities. Within the context of your interactions with human beings, you can become a very discriminating person, and that’s a positive thing.

So don’t think automatically that connectedness and attachment are bad things. Let’s think about not holding on. When it’s time to move on, you need to develop some awareness and ability to do so. You have to develop the strength to be able to simply move on when it’s time. That will deal with the whole issue of attachment.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Teacher as Energy Source

Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin

A guru or teacher represents an energy source, an energy source that we pull into ourselves to expand ourselves and dissolve the shell of karma we’re born into. It’s very much like the way things work on an atomic level: the more energy an atom captures, the greater the distance between the nucleus and the electrons becomes. Eventually the state of the entire system changes, and the atom changes into a different state.

The energy source of the teacher is experienced within the traditional process of initiation. In an initiation, we experience our connection to that energy source and have a strong enough experience that we have confidence and conviction that it will benefit us. Having the experience of a change of state, we enter into a new process, the expansion of our own energetic mechanism. Instead of living in the shell of the disappointments of our ancestors, we live in the energy field of our teacher and the teachers before him (or her).

It’s not necessary to understand a teacher. It is necessary only to experience the energetic connection and keep it clear. For the most part, my experience with my guru, Rudi, was that he was operating on too many levels for me to really understand him. Swami Muktananda was far too complex for anyone to really understand him. Anyone I’ve ever studied with who had anything profound was operating on a number of levels at the same time and was often impossible to comprehend.

CC Photo courtesy of eyeliam on Flickr

Historically, in spiritual literature, the thing that has always gotten students in trouble is trying to understand. There’s a wonderful story we grew up with in Catholic school about St. Paul walking on the beach lost in thoughts of the Trinity. On his walk St. Paul encounters a boy with a bucket who is running back and forth filling his bucket with water from the ocean and emptying it into a hole that he has dug in the sand. In this encounter St. Paul comes to realize that just as the boy could never empty the entire ocean into a hole, so too can a human never understand the infinite mystery that is the Holy Trinity.

In fact, in working with a teacher, the more you try to understand, the less you’re getting it.

Posted in Devotion, Energetic Mechanism, The Teacher | Tagged karma, Muktananda, Rudi | 1 Comment

Opening Our Heart

Posted on November 12, 2010 by admin

The understanding of the intention our life has for itself can only be known when we are capable of opening our hearts and through that access point getting deeply in touch with our life.

Each of us has had an experience of our heart chakra. Even if we’ve never had the experience of a profound opening in our heart chakra, we have had the experience of what is referred to as a broken heart. That’s a very powerful experience. Most of us, when we have the experience of our heart being broken, say “I’m never going to allow myself to be hurt ever again.” We live to protect ourselves from any input after that, and having our attitudes toward other people be shaped by that experience makes our life quite complicated.

CC Photo courtesy of nganguyen on Flickr

I talk about opening our hearts because opening our energetic mechanism to new energy is going to enhance the quality of our life experience on every level of our existence. Opening ourselves and understanding about energy and flow is going to make our bodies healthier and give them a greater range of physical motion. It is going to make our minds clearer, our intellect more acute, and our emotions much more vibrant and clear.

Our heart is also the main access point to the deeper dimensions of us. That access happens when we take our attention inside and cultivate the sensitivity and develop the capacity for that awareness. We have to learn what it feels like to open our heart, to breathe into the center of our chest and feel it open. If we practice enough, eventually we can get to the point where we take our attention there, take two breaths and feel a release to the degree that we can be in love with life instantly.

It’s worth it to work on accessing that place and cultivating an awareness of the intention our life has for us. Being aligned with that intention takes so much struggle and strain and tension out of our lives. It makes everything we do an expression of love.

Posted in Energetic Mechanism, Sadhana, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Intention Is the Foundation of Our Spiritual Life

Posted on November 4, 2010 by admin

Our intention is the foundation of our spiritual life. When we have an intention that we hold in our heart and live from every day, we are focused and we have the capacity and potential to succeed in our lives. Without an intention, we are ungrounded, unfocused, and consumed by the tensions and pressures that we encounter.

There are layers and levels of intention. Some of you might think, “Okay, now I need to have an intention and I’d better think one up.” That’s great, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you found it difficult to hold to after a while. In developing an intention, you don’t want to think one up, but rather to come into contact with and be aware of the bigger intention that your life has for itself–an intention that’s bigger than your mind and bigger than your ego and comes from a profoundly deep place with you. It may take you a while to get in touch with this place.

CC Photo courtesy of victoriapeckam on Flickr

The most important thing about intention is that it should come from a place within you that is true and enduring, so that the recognition of your intention will sustain you through all of the different seasons of your life. There will be some rich and full and vital and vibrant times in your life, and there will be some cold, hard, challenging times. Having an awareness of the intention that your life has for itself will allow you, in all the seasons of your life, to appreciate the unity and perfection of your life as it is unfolding.

If your intention comes from a deep place, you will be sustained by its truth and its power. You will develop a capacity for discrimination that allows you to navigate the short term challenges of daily life in a way that is completely in harmony with the long term, larger challenges. You will be able to find in your days and your months and your years and in your seasons and cycles an integration that is continuously nourishing, even when it is frustrating.

Posted in Growing, Sadhana | Tagged intention, spiritual life, spirituality | 3 Comments

Painting Our Own Canvas

Posted on November 1, 2010 by admin

One of the core texts of Kashmir Shaivism, the Pratyabhijnahrdayam, describes a sadhana for recognizing the ultimate reality. That sadhana is to absorb all of the objects that we encounter in our life into ourselves. By absorbing all of those objects, those energies, those processes into ourselves, we begin to appreciate that there is nothing outside our own consciousness, which is consciousness itself. By observing that we are connected with all of the objects that present themselves in our lives and having the experience of the feeling of the contact that each object in our life brings up within us, we begin to understand that there is total interconnectedness between objects and their energetic nature and ourselves. Slowly we assimilate all the objects into our own consciousness, and we begin to appreciate that our consciousness is unbounded and infinite, and has no beginning and no end.

Our attitudes, opinions and judgments deny us the opportunity to absorb our experiences and to resolve the residual resonances of those experiences within the circulation of our own creative energy because we are constantly building walls within ourselves. Until all experiences are assimilated and all the residual vibration of all the limited experiences resolves, we still have some karmic experience to pass through. So we should be taking down walls instead of building them.

CC Photo courtesy of moriza on Flickr

Rather than spending any time getting engaged with all of your judgments and attitudes, take these kinds of tensions as a reflection of some circumstance within yourself that is appropriate for you to dissolve. Allow the experiences that you pass through in your day to be part of the learning process that we call life, so that you will be nourished and your understanding of the ultimate reality that you are will expand and expand.

This experience of the truth of your own individual consciousness is available to you, and it begins when you start to practice genuine love and respect for everybody in this world. You have to realize that each person is here to, and has the right and responsibility to paint their own canvas. Whether we appreciate their art or not is irrelevant. There is enough work for us in painting our own.

Posted in Sadhana | 1 Comment

A Simple Matter of Love and Respect

Posted on October 22, 2010 by admin

The proliferation of experts in the media who bombard us with opinions these days is a reflection of the way we operate in our own lives. Each of us tends to have an opinion about everyone else’s problems. We also tend to have the opinion that if they just did what we said, everything would be fine. We believe that others need our opinions.

It’s interesting to see the way the world works, because it’s populated with people who are frozen in their opinions and attitudes in relation to everyone else in their life. This network of frozen-ness extends throughout the whole world. Every person thinks they know better than everyone else. That’s one of the main reasons the world is in the sorry state it’s in today.

CC photo courtesy of Gwar on Flickr

Swami Muktanananda always used to say, “I welcome you all with love and respect.” He used to talk about the highest sadhana (spiritual practice) being simply to treat everyone with love and respect. To do that, we have to come to a place within ourselves where we don’t have any judgments, attitudes and opinions about anyone. We allow them the space to work out their own tensions and to be nourished as they do that. In creating this space for each other, we are accessing that space and making it more available for ourselves.

Our opinions and our attitudes and our judgments of others also obstruct us. They are an expression of the most limited aspect of us, which completely undermines the opportunity we have to experience the finest place within us. That finest place is also the ultimate reality. It would be a good thing to free ourselves from the burden of our attitudes and judgments and opinions because, at the same time, we are freeing everybody else of them.

Posted in Sadhana | Tagged love, respect | 3 Comments

Swami Chetanananda