Sat Nam,
I have returned few days ago from a residential Kundalini Yoga Level 2 Teacher training in Conscious Communication with ik Saran Dhian. The level 2 modules are a wonderful way to deepen our understanding of Yogi Philosophy as taught by Yogi Bhajan. They are called transformational courses as they will “take all that you have learned before and polish it, and let you apply it. it is a a time to clear inner conflicts, along with any mental emotional blocks that might inhibit your full linkage to the Golden Chain and to the radiance and responsibility that comes with being an adept teacher” (from the L2 manual.)
The focus is no longer on becoming a teacher and simply acquire knowledge, but working on allowing the change within us to take place through humility, vitality and courage. In the words of Yogi Bhajan: “learning is painful, as difficult and as tragic as tragedy can be. Learning is training the subjective to read the objective.”
My yearn to find my true self allows me to cope with the emotions that this kind of courses tend to stir. It was a great week, I met 12 wonderful souls and shared with them 6 intense days. I left deeply shaken by our last morning session. We talked about the power of prayer, we recited our own prayers, we expressed our gratitude to the divine as we recognised gazing in each others eyes. As I said my goodbyes and caught my train home I knew something big had shifted and I am still getting rather emotional everytime I think about it. In those moment I had the realisation that for all my life as I was blaming people and circumstances for my suffering, I was also denying myself the experience of God and with it my own essence. It might not make much rational sense but I know it as a truth.
This is also the reason why this lecture of Yogi Bhajan resonate so much with me, and explain the longing I carried with me for all this years, a longing I could never satisfy as i kept looking in the wrong place. The answer was right here within me, the self that I kept sabotaging, the self I was ashamed of and was never enough. The self I could really only appreciated with a renewed relationship with the Divine.
Expert from a Yogi Bhajan lecture – 15/1/1989 (full lecture Soul mate)
“Maya lives as God lives, but the intention and the intuition given to a man is to see through that shadow the reality. It is very amazing how the darkness is dark and you are asked to see through darkness the light and that is the final test of the soul. Now I realised today that people are lonely, they are lonely because they don’t have a relationship, there is a yearning for a relationship… this longing comes in us naturally, i was looking deeper into myself for where this longing comes from, why do people want to mate? If is a natural performance, a natural guidance and natural thing, then why is it that everywhere is said: this is right and this is wrong, why can’t we be free, mate whenever we want just like animals do? Actually is very funny, this mating call comes from the soul, soul feels lonely about God, Soul has a friend called mind, Soul asks the mind: ‘bring my lover to me, bring my mate to me.’ The mind who has not got Guru Shabd , offers alternating ways, it could be your woman or a man or could be something to do. Some people are compulsive buyers.. there is a compulsive factor in you. So the mind sets a pattern and it initiate that same pattern again and again, some people who cannot handle themselves take drugs, some people get into sexual trips, some people go into perverted trips, a lot of people do a lot of things. The source of all trouble is the same: The call of the soul for mating.
That’s why when soul wanted to depart from God, soul asked God, I shall be going from you, I do not know when I shall come back and merge in thee. That’s not fair, I am a part of you. I am a part of your infinite reality. You are putting me in the ribcage, in the bonds of the five tattvas. You are giving me seven chakras, not the ultimate chakra, aura will be around me, it will not be me. At that moment God gave soul, the mind, and gave mind the intellect. Intellect is not with animals…the intellect plans its hunting. It never plans its serving.
“I was wondering why Guru Gobind Singh made Siri Guru Granth as Guru. It gave shabad, if the mind will catch up shabad, and at that moment when you feel lonely in the very base bone of you the yearning, the urge, the longing comes from your soul, do you want to satisfy it with a maya, or do you want to satisfy with the Guru shabad, that is the decisive factor in life, that you have to decide, nobody else can decide it for you.”
I had scraped the surface of this issue at the end of the level one teachers training, when I found myself sobbing at the dinner table, listening to the story of Guru Angad Dev ji, a story of longing. Bhai Lehna found it hard to live without the sight of his Guru, his absolute devotion and total surrender touched Guru Nanak so deeply that he choose him as his successor him over his own children. He called him Angad which means limb, Bhai Lehna had interwoven his life to that of his Guru, embodying his teaching, to the point that in Guru’s Nanak’s eyes he had become an extension of himself.
That is what it means to merge with the Divine. To stop seeking what we miss outside of ourselves and learn to bow to the divine within through the power of prayer, that core that plug us directly to the infinite. Then we can be ready to receive whatever comes without judgment, as we see it as all expression of the one.
So that is the theory, the test is in the practice. Have I opened my heart enough to accept and bow to the divine in me? Time will tell, but I have all the tools to make it happen. Sometimes it is just enough to turn up for a daily sadhana.
My deepest gratitude goes to my teachers who are helping me in this journey and keep stimulating in me the courage to be 🙂
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