My morning meditation was fruitful today. I hope that writing this down will help me maintain the awareness I think I have right now.

The practice of my techniques seemed very deep today. I was able to visualize my guru floating in my spine and working in my chakras. I have attempted this visualization for years but today it just seemed to go to the next level for me. It was really a very beautiful experience.

As I watched him inside of me as a tiny yogi in my astral body my mind desperately tried to tell me that it was unfair to give all of my burdens to him. It wanted me to feel bad for who I am now or have been in the past. My ego doesn’t want me to be free, because it’s afraid it will loose control of my life. It was trying to make me feel guilty for accepting the help of my divine guru. A battle raged inside of me because it’s so easy to feel that the egoic fears I have are my own, and that they define who I am. But at some level the yoga teachings have convinced me that this “little self” is not at all who I am. We all must be more if we are part of a human race that the likes of Jesus, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Yogananda, and other great ones would incarnate here solely to remind us of the true purpose of life here on earth.

For a time I overcame much of my inner resistance and felt that I allowed my guru to work inside of me more than ever before. It helped me to remember that what I visualize in the form of a man called Paramhansa Yogananda, has not the limitations of ordinary man at all. There is no limit to what God can do through a true avatar. In chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says,

“O Bharata! whenever virtue declines, and vice is ascendant, I incarnate Myself on earth. Appearing from age to age in visible form, I come to destroy evil and to re-establish virtue.”

Continuing my practice after I finished my techniques, I enjoyed for some time a deep state of peace and stillness that seemed both effortless and timeless. But then my mind began thinking of a project I’m working on. I could see it, and at first it seemed positive and productive in some way, so I allowed it to continue. I gave my ego-mind an inch, and it proceeded to drag me for a mile!

Oh how many times must we play this game to finally overcome the inertia of negativity? Thoughts that in most of my life seem fairly normal, were noticeably negative now because they erased my peace. Then I remembered the homework I suggested to the raja yoga study group I lead. It’s the practice of harmlessness, (ahimsa) or ridding the consciousness of harmful desire and energy. I couldn’t reason my way out of what I was thinking and what I saw in the situation that had grabbed my attention. There was no mental way out of this.

Then I found my answer as I do many times in my meditations, over and over again. God didn’t send me here to fix the world and all of its troubles by focusing on all the negative details and thinking them over. Intellectual reasoning’s are hopelessly limited. It’s feeling that made me realize where the thoughts had taken me. Feeling revealed more truth than any reasoning I tried. And what feeling brings me back to my center? For me the feeling I seek comes through gratitude. Gratitude for those who took the time to teach me how to meditate, gratitude for my God given awareness, and even the ability to reason. And gratitude for the freedom to embrace that state of mind, which uncovers the experience of divine joy and inner peace in my heart.

By remaining as much as I can in a state of gratitude, I’ll be more kind, patient, and divinely loving. The more I can be a channel for divine love, the less harm I will cause to myself, and others.

Today this will be my practice of ahimsa.