What I Have Learned

If I distill what I learned from the teachings of yoga, I see one must be FEARLESS. One must come to a point in our lives where we live without fear. And to that end I believe that CURATIVE YOGA is a great start which offers a rich, rich resource. I often ask students to look at the lives of such great teachers as Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sri Paramahansa Yogananda, Vivekananda, Saint Theresa, Rabiya and many others. They were truly living sages, but at some level they also were men and women who practiced. These great adepts were not isolationists who just sat in Samadhi eon after eon and refused to enter the world. A sage ultimately becomes a vehicle to expand the greater good. And I believe that as we bring our practice into the world, fear and self-isolation or self-preoccupation begin to dissipate. We, by nature, become more generous and more inclusive. We try to light other lights, and in the process our own light becomes brighter.

Be a force of LOVE in which by ITS nature is self-giving, therefore receives more LOVE.

Secondly, play your part well, “the power of your resolve.” What are you resolved to accomplish in this lifetime? Make an absolute commitment to becoming self-realized and using that self-realization to help others.

Learning to love, using Wisdom to give, to be more generous and more expansive in our love. We should not aim to be martyrs of love—people who just give and give and give. Nor should we be people who are on the other side, just wanting to receive. Be a force of love in which you are able to receive it as well as live it as well as give it using wisdom of Self-Realized Masters.

Spirituality may be called a capacity; plainly explained, it may be called a depth. In some people naturally there is this capacity, this depth; and in some it may be made. In order to collect the rainwater, people dig the ground and make a capacity for the water to collect. So in order to receive the spiritual life and light, one must open within oneself a capacity.

The egoistic has no capacity, for it is his ego which makes the heart, so to speak, solid, giving no accommodation to the essence of God. The more one denies the demands of the ego, which satisfy its vanity, the more capacity one makes to be filled by the life of God.

There is no better way of training the ego than denying it what it wants for the satisfaction of its vanity. It is painful sometimes, and it often seems hard, to deny the ego all it demands, but it always results in great satisfaction.

Each of us is like an unlit match. All of the ingredients for that match are in the match from the moment it is created. Does it get lit? It’s a question of whether there is some catalyst. Let your practice be the catalyst, the process that awakens the flame in your match.

It is said: “He who chooses the Infinite is chosen by the Infinite.” Choose to merge with the Infinite. She will choose to merge with you. Don’t wait. Don’t put it off. Don’t think it is someone else’s business and you will get the breadcrumbs of their experience. Begin the journey. He who chooses the Infinite is chosen by the Infinite.