Co founders Devadhara Healing & The Creator's Child Spiritual initiative.
Most of us focus on the question - is there life after death? And that is important. And yet perhaps the more important question is implicit within that. And it is this…is there life before death?
Try this. Just take a fruit you really love. Melon. Chickoo. Whatever. Now close your eyes. And just smell it. For two minutes focus your entire being on smelling it. If you've done it with just a little bit of your being you'll find it so sensual as to rival the orgasmic.
Yet how many times have we ever really experienced that kind of richness? How many times have we tasted when we tasted, laughed when we laughed, smiled when we smiled, touched when we touched, lived when we lived? Once? Twice in the last 10 years?
The richness and depth of sensation that can make a humble chickoo outrival caviar is ours. But all too often it passes us by. Lost as it seeks to penetrate the dull condom of our inattentive beings, scattered foci, and congealed latex of plans, plots, future moments.
The scent of life.
Now many who are driven say they'd love to take time to enrich themselves but simply can't. The international head of an ad agency network, confessed his schedule was so hectic that he had to make it a point to read. In a year he managed with great effort to read 10 books. No matter how busy you are here's an exercise anyone can manage.
“My soul must have small pockets.
Such tiny things
fill it up.”
One of the easiest and most potent steps in recovering the great richness of life, is simple. Three times in a day just focus on a sensation for a minute. Then after that intense focus just let your mind drift with that sensation and daydream. It's a simple act but with deep psychic significance as each sense is linked to a chakra and each shading of that sense causes a nadi to tremble.
As a suggestion one could start the first month with smelling different items, (nice and not nice), then go on to taste, then sight, then touch, then sound…Then for a month take an object and slowly add sense by sense.
Try just being there and you'll see a marvellous change in the world. It's not just packed with surprises but dense with them.
“Sometimes taking Buffy for a walk,
I just see grass flowers in the breeze
and the heart gets so big that a god could easily fit in,
the kind with size zillion feet.”
The winged feet of thought.
One area that most of us humans are proud of is our ability to think. But if you really spend a little time with your thoughts you may come to a different conclusion.
Try this experiment. Just walk 100 feet down a road. The catch? Do so without thinking. Just walk.
“Whew! Tough isn't it? ”Unless you've been training your consciousness you'll discover how irresistible the chain of thoughts that swirl within you is. Sometimes Victor Hugo's image ‘of a dog chained to its vomit' describes the circling of our thinking.
A manager on the fast track said “I like it, but I can't go to Pecos (a cool hangout in Bangalore ), it's for losers.” Little does he realise how he has become a prisoner of the trappings of success. It's not he who spends his money, it is his money that's spending him. Di Caprio in a published interview spoke of how his fears of success allow him but a broken sleep. Equally restricted is an artist who believes all great artists have to struggle and is deeply anguished by the lack of recognition. “Why?” He asks. The answer is not up there.
But if thoughts seem unmanageable, it's only because we've never really spent time with our thinking. And often the more powerful a thinker one is, the less one has spent with one's thoughts. All one has to do is become familiar with the ripples of consciousness that form us and our world and the same clumsy objects that trip us become wings. There is an incredible width of technique to discover this. Here are 3 that are relatively safe.
For thinkers. Just observe your thoughts and the gap between your thoughts. The point where a new thought rises like a whale from the depths of your being has been termed unmesha by the ancients, it is the moment when you sense and are sensed by the underlying ripple of consciousness that forms you. As over time you observe your thoughts you begin to root in your inner silence.
For the active. Stamping your feet in tiny and light steps, slowly revolve in a clockwise direction. The first circle should take at least 10 minutes. Then intensify the speed. Now start shouting, screaming as your dance reaches a frenzy. Suddenly stop. Lie down. Go into the inner silence.
For dreamers. Day dream for 10 minutes everyday. All you need to do is connect these elements in your inner journeying. A fire. A lake. A green sapling. A mountain. Bird song. A star.
The carnival of feeling.
“I am afraid, I'm going to explode and I'll just tear somebody to pieces.” Says a friend searching for a fight.
One of the most beautiful concepts of dealing with emotion is one that compares the many emotions with colours that compose white light. One has to make friends with all, blend them together. So anger is as vital as love. But how about fierce surges of feelings that threaten to overmaster you?
Here's a beautiful technique to deal with them – scan your body from top to bottom and just gently note the points where your muscles are knotted, where the emotions are stored. Hold that pattern in your mind. Give it awareness. Don't try to change it. At some point it will transform itself and dissolve into a surge of light.
Transforming relationships.
Many times what leaches the joy of living are the people we have drawn to ourselves.
“I feel as if he was crushing me. Suddenly I started getting breathless. One day I just quit my job, or I don't know what would have happened.” A real life example of a secretary who fell ill after working for a driven boss.
Necessarily there will be a range of actions one could take. In this case the friend just walked away from the situation. The trouble is her mind didn't. And she has had to spend two years recovering from the experience.
A psychic technique that can help in dealing with tangled relationships – imagine dark grimy ropes connecting you to the other person/organisation/situation/cause. Now imagine a golden hand descending from above and touching that rope. The frayed and grimy rope falls revealing a beautiful, brilliant golden white cord between you and the other being. Do this each day for 21 days. If you are in a negative relationship, it may be transformed, sometimes dramatically.
Prisoners of wrong choices.
“I am in the wrong place. Every step each day feels so heavy. I am successful but it gives me no pleasure. I feel like screaming…”
Many of us are prisoners. Trapped in jobs and careers we simply don't want to be in. For example, Vinita, a film person tried to please her parents by becoming this successful executive at agencies like Lintas, O&M... Yet after awhile her lack of true involvement led to her quit her jobs suddenly on whims.
“Because I do not hope to turn again/ Because I do not hope” cries Eliot. And yet perhaps how can one not? Sometimes what makes it worse is we don't even know where we should be.
“There's a rainbow
that's fallen to the ground
It's dusty,
it's dirty,
its tattered and torn
Hey brother, could it be yours?”
In most cases, in our childhood dreams lie clues of who we wished to turn into…For those trembling on the brink of the old and the new, I suggest a few soul remedies from Bach's flower therapies, sweet chestnut for those who believe they are in an absolute crisis. Walnut for stepping into the unknown. Honeysuckle for letting go of the past. These may be available at better stocked homeopaths, but aren't homeopathy, have no side effects, barring an intensification if they work. Since they are designed for self medication I suggest all who explore consciousness pick up a book on it – an excellent one being Mecthchild's book.
The dying of the light.
Now there are many today who are convinced that when they die, they will be completely extinguished. The frantic, often glorious frenzied desperation that sometimes accompanies such a viewpoint is often mistaken for life.
“Do not go gentle into the good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light” roars Dylan to his father, in a poem I once used to love. Today, it seems so like a child refusing to fall asleep because then the goblins will get him.
Tarun & Celia Cherian, Are Spiritual Guides. Aura Masters. And Founders of Devadhara Healing. They help sufferers fight the incurable, the lost find clarity and seekers touch the ultimate, through their spiritual initiative – Creators Child.