The paint-by-numbers image says, “Your life, a Divine Masterpiece.” It's depicting Consciousness (Śiva) and energy (Śakti) as the very powers that paint life, expressing you as the embodiment of Life Itself. 

What's being conveyed on the canvas is that as we're each walking through the terrain of our own life—with all its valleys, mountains, and sunshine—and every element is part of the perfect life that has been given to us so that we may come to realize we are the Divine made flesh.

The very Life that Consciousness is expressing as you is creating within Itself the perfection of Its own fullness. Yet we often lose sight of that fullness when we insist that finishing the painting means that it should look exactly how we envision it to be. When we try to mold life to fit our image of the ideal, we forget that we are the expression of Consciousness, which is already displaying Its own perfection and joy. 

The Path Through Life 

The miracle of life is that it has chosen to express th...

Pure Motive – Part Two

There is a basic question at the foundation of any genuine spiritual life, and it's not the one most people think to ask. It's not what practice should I do, or how often, or even how do I practice correctly? It's simply: why am I doing this at all?

The nondual tantric tradition posits that genuine transformation depends not only on the techniques we use, but on the intention and orientation behind them. There is a world of difference between practicing for control or attainment, or to escape one’s problems, versus practicing with devotion for clarity and revelation.

That difference is not a small one and the reason we practice matters as much as how we do it.

When we practice in order to gain control over our emotions and circumstances, or even our spiritual progress, we are subtly reinforcing the very thing we are trying to transcend. We’re strengthening the ego's conviction that it is in charge, or that it should be. We’re not dissolving the illusion of co...

As we consider our path from limited, individual awareness to unbounded awareness, it’s helpful to understand the idea of “pure motive” as a means of awakening to the Divine within us. There is a description of the means of spiritual growth at the heart of the nondual tantric tradition that I find myself returning to, both in teaching and in my own practice. These are called the upāyas, and within them lives a distinction that changes everything: the difference between effective method and pure motive.

Effective method is what we do. Pure motive, śuddhabhāva in Sanskrit, is why we do it. It is the unwavering intent within us to discover the highest in ourselves. And while the methods may shift and evolve throughout our lives, that pure motive is the thread that runs through all of it.

In the Śaiva and Śakta Trika tradition the upāyas are described as four distinct paths. At the highest level is anupāya, the path of no means: the place of spontaneous, absolute revelation where no tech...

The fundamental issue I have witnessed in my fifty years of teaching is that people don’t truly believe it is possible to be free. I teach that we are not our minds or our emotions, and that we can live outside of our egos and the perpetual sense of need. But more often than not, students cannot believe this is a real possibility in their own lives. This fundamental disbelief prevents us from discovering the place in us that is free from the mental and emotional fluctuations inherent in limited consciousness.

Consider the image of Viśvarūpa, the Divine Puruṣa. Puruṣa is the individuated expression of the Divine, and the most succinct expression of kuṇḍalinī. The higher states of awareness are depicted in the image, but all dimensions of Consciousness exist within the Divine Puruṣa — from Pure Consciousness, to pure disbelief.

Although Puruṣa includes all levels of individuation, including our minds and emotions, we can choose where to place our attention. Emotions are actually the se...

Sādhana is the intent of freedom that transforms confused understanding into wisdom, contraction into openness, judgement into insight, and mind into heart. All hesitation is incinerated in the fire of commitment.

In the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, the term “liberation upon seeing” has two meanings. One is that liberation comes when we truly see our misunderstanding and limited perception — and our willingness to live in and defend that confused state. But it can also mean that liberation occurs upon seeing the guru as Awareness.

What is so powerful about those two statements is that they are not actually different. In fact, the entire interaction with a teacher is to create a mirror that reflects back to us our own misunderstanding so that we can know it for what it is. Left to our own devices, we don’t have such a mirror and remain trapped in our opinions, confused state, and contracted heart. We are unable to see beyond that.

The Relationship with Pure Awareness

Within most Bud...

A lineage is an unbroken transmission of a living spiritual force that is passed from heart to heart. It flows from one generation to the next—from a teacher to the student he wishes to initiate as a lineage carrier. Although this force manifests within a teacher, this living energy is greater than that which is carried within any person. A lineage carrier serves that force. 

As a lineage carrier in this tradition, I feel a deep gratitude to every teacher who has gone before me. They have passed down an enormous wealth of knowledge and have provided the practical tools to enable generations of seekers to gain their liberation. I am honored to do my small part in perpetuating this vital teaching given to me by my teachers.

Swami Rudrananda: His Practice & Teachings

I was blessed to have Rudi as my teacher. He called his practice “the work,” and developed a powerful set of techniques, including a unique “open-eye class” for śaki transmission, an integral part of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana. A...

It is solely by penetrating into the source of all life that we really understand Unity. Otherwise, we will always be trying to understand universal awareness through a limited lens. In terms of our practice, this means we must be willing to surrender our limited perspective about the very viewpoint we function from. 

The totality of every experience of life and death on earth is still a very thin band, relative to the realm of manifest Consciousness. From God’s perspective, earth is a speck on a speck on a speck! Only we insist on overinflating our experiences—evaluating whether the minutia of life is good or bad—when the highest reality is that all of life is an expression of the Divine’s choice to manifest for the sheer joy of it.

If everything unfolds for that one simple purpose of expressing joy, then everything that unfolds is contained within that purpose. We think we are born, live, do, and die, and therefore have control over life. But who has control over when they are born...

There is always the natural pulsation of life, which is expanding and contracting, arising and subsiding. This is described in Tantric texts as the Fivefold Acts of the Divine: the ongoing cycles of creation, maintenance, and dissolution, along with concealment and revelation.

God has chosen to hide Himself within creation, and it is Grace that allows us to see through to the Source of all manifestation. We are all born, we live for a while, and we die. That is the cycle of rebirth, repeated over and over again. What changes are the acts of concealing and revealing. Which of those dominates our awareness is the key to whether we achieve liberation in a particular lifetime.  

When individuals contract, they are, in effect, concealing their true Self. Although human contraction is essentially the same process as God hiding Himself, it happens from an already limited place within us and therefore has a different effect: suffering. When Consciousness expands and contracts, It expands, un...

A key element of practice is learning to tune into the psychic body with awareness, not the mind. —Ācārya Amrita Devi.

Our practice of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana fuels that inner vital force so that it can rise through the central channel and connect back to its ever-present Source, the Heart of Consciousness. God created us out of the absolute abundance and joy of His very being, and it is through opening our heart and directing our energy into the central channel (the suṣumṇa) that we contact that fullness. Kuṇḍalinī is the essence of our heart, and it connects us back to God’s Heart.

When we tune in to the psychic body, we are using our awareness, our capacity to feel, to reach into a deeper part of ourselves. The mind can never find the openness of consciousness from which to connect to the central channel. We must therefore learn to feel our heart and the energy of openness, and then use that to move past our body, breath, tensions, contractions, and resistance.

If we use a finger to to...

People resist change because the ego wants life to appear a particular way and we cling to what we know. We want to remain in this comfort zone, even if it isn’t always that comfortable!

My experience as a teacher is that people often leave a spiritual practice when they come up against something that needs to be profoundly changed within them. Instead of surrendering their tensions and making that change, students begin projecting that there is something wrong with the teacher or the practice. I have watched this for forty years.

You have to be conscious and aware. This is why Rudi spoke about “work” and “tests.” We work and work, and then we are tested to see if the deepening awareness we made contact with is really our own. Higher awareness is only ours if we can express and exhibit it in the face of any condition. Everything is Divine. It is a question of whether we recognize it.

Change Requires Flexibility

My teacher Rudi told a wonderful story about a train ride he took in In...