One of the remarkable things about humans is the superficiality we are willing to accept in ourselves, and the superficiality we bring to our search for depth. We must work to develop the psychic mechanism in us that can hold the structure of higher consciousness.

A student came to me recently and said, “I’m really a mess and haven’t meditated in a long time.” This is a story I hear repeatedly, and perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. We can get so absorbed by drama, tension, and the pressures of our life that we are pulled out of ourselves. We push, demand, and are consumed by struggling with our own experience.

All struggle is ego. To say this is not to deny that we face challenges. But we allow our engagement with these difficulties to make us forget that they are only a reflection of our own state, of our misunderstanding. The fundamental discipline is to not allow ourselves to be caught in struggle, and we do that by simply taking a breath and...

Pray for the fierce love of a guru, a fire breathing, eyes blazing, śakti throwing one.

This is the most succinct way I can describe my guru, Swami Rudrananda. He was always breathing fire and his eyes were ablaze with śakti, which he was continually throwing, even without moving. His energetic fierceness expressed his relentless transmission of the power to liberate that flowed through him. It was relentless, and it was intentional.

It was impossible for Rudi to be any other way because there was nothing left of him: he was just an open channel, an agent of the śakti that moved through him. There was a wide range of dynamics with Rudi – his personality, his incessant requirement of discipline, his absolute, unconditional love for us – that was all delivered through this extraordinarily intense, embodied person. By being Rudi’s student, I learned that the very point of having a relationship with a guru is to receive the liberating power that is flowing through...

Helen Keller lived most of her life in physical darkness. She was deaf and blind, and only learned to communicate with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Yet, despite the restrictions she faced, Helen found the light of consciousness within her.

In Keller’s book, Light in My Darkness, she wrote:

As I wander through the dark, encountering difficulties, I am aware of encouraging voices that murmur from the spirit realm. I sense a holy passion pouring down from the springs of Infinity. I thrill to music that beats with the pulses of God. Bound to suns and planets by invisible cords, I feel the flame of eternity in my soul. Here, in the midst of the everyday air, I sense the rush of ethereal rains. I am conscious of the splendor that binds all things of earth to all things of heaven. Immured by silence and darkness, I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold — when death sets me free.

In an earlier book, The World I Live In, she wrote:

There is in the...

Like the continual flow of a waterfall pouring into the basin below it, the liquid light of the Goddess Kuṇḍalinī perpetually articulates Herself as the flow of life, breath, and awareness in each individual - simultaneously filling that individuated expression of Herself with Universal Consciousness.

The purpose of Rudi’s fundamental practice of the double-breath is that of clearing the suṣumṇa, internalizing our awareness and our energy, and creating a flow within us. By bringing this vital energy to the base of the spine and allowing it to rise, it clears the suṣumṇa, which is the outer dimension of the central channel. Its efficacy creates the subtle capacity to feel the different dimensions of the center channel that rise to the center of the head, to the crown, and above. The single-breath exercise is the maturation of that extraordinary practice, and it may not be as easily accessible to you if you’re new to our practice. Doing the single-breath does not mean that...

Life must be consumed whole, with all its pain, joy, and sorrow.
—Swami Rudrananda

Students sometimes ask if our practice involves spiritual bypassing. They are unclear about how the energetic processing of experience fits in with what might be called the “human” aspect of their lives. My response is that, through our sadhana, we learn that nothing is to be rejected, and that emotions are both a level of consciousness within us and energies that we can learn to process.

The intention and eventual fruit of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana is the liberation of kuṇḍalinī — the freeing of our individuated awareness from its perceived separation from its source, Consciousness. We seek to know ourselves as that eternal pure Consciousness. This is inherently possible because there is no distinction between us and God, except in our experience, in the propensity for viewing life from a limited understanding and not seeing a higher one.

My teacher Rudi explained that most people fail...

Discipline is our devotion in action, and if we truly love God and want to be happy, then work and discipline are a joy. The living of that realization is unconditional love, devotion, gratitude, and the stillness of surrender, masterfully interlaced with an in-depth inner practice, selfless service, conscious choice, and disciplined action — all revealing the effulgence of the Heart we wish to live from every day of our life.

Nondual wisdom teachings always begin by articulating what is called the darśana, or “view” of the tradition. The key to nondual Tantric practices is exactly what the description implies: nonduality. This means there is no distinction between Spirit and that which It manifests. Conversely, there is no loss of that Spirit as manifestation disappears. In the picture, above, you cannot tell whether the woman is manifesting into form or dissolving into non-form. It’s a graphic way of expressing that everything in creation arises and...

Kuṇḍalinī is the river of liquid light that flows in you and flows in me. . . the energy in all things. —Swami Khecarantha

Kuṇḍalinī is the individuated expression of the Divine. It is like a river of liquid light that flows in you, me, and in all things. The gift of our human incarnation is that we possess the capacity and consciousness to know ourselves as divine. Through our practice of kuṇḍalinī sādhana, we awaken an awareness of our divinity that typically lies dormant.

People often observe that when kuṇḍalinī is aroused, it amplifies our inner dynamics — including the impurities of consciousness and emotions like jealousy, greed, and anger.

Nondual Tantra teaches that all experience arises from a singular source and that they all are dimensions of Consciousness, expressed by kuṇḍalinī śakti. Śakti is the energy behind the scenes that feeds and sustains every aspect of human experience — even those dominated by ego, emotions, and thought-constructs.

The...

Rudi was a tsunami of śakti that swept its way through our lives and consciousness, washing away ego and misunderstanding. Like a tsunami, he left as quickly as he came, leaving behind the gift of unfolding freedom. — Swami Khecaranatha

The only true gift of a guru is that of unfolding freedom in his or her students. The singular purpose of our relationship with a teacher is to give us the support we need to establish our own direct connection with God. That support creates a conduit to śakti, the power of the grace that is freeing us.

The possibility of the unfolding of freedom is always activated by God, but for most people a relationship with a teacher is required to power it. Once the longing to know God propels us to find a teacher, we discover in that connection the energy necessary to fuel our journey. The teacher is an energy source that we can tune in to because we may not have the mechanism, the sensitivity, or even the awareness to dial into that resonance on our...

Śakti transmission is Consciousness looking back at Itself. Svātantrya Śakti is the autonomous power of Consciousness to forever manifest Its own fullness and perfection, expressing Itself as a matrix of energy called Kauliki Śakti.

Kauliki Śakti is Consciousness becoming the universe, individuating into kuṇḍalinī and into you and me. Because kuṇḍalinī śakti is everywhere, śakti transmission is not the movement of energy from one location to another. Instead, it is a contact between two points held within the dynamic infinite field of Oneness. That is where transmission takes place.

What is this energetic field of Consciousness? Max Planck, a German theoretical physicist, whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in 1918, said this:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only...

It is not by escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into the transcendent, but in finding that place where they come into union, the mystery that is inherently inside all of us is revealed.

Throughout the ages, people have asked these fundamental questions: “Why am I here? What is the relationship between me and the Divine?” It is our sādhana that brings us to the understanding that we were birthed out of the intimacy between Śiva and Śakti, Consciousness and energy. It is that dynamic interchange, that intimacy of love that creates and gives life.

When the eternal and the human meet, love is born; that is love doubling back on itself. By finding that place of union within us, we recognize that we, too, are birthed out of love.

Realization is living that union in our own lives, with heart wide open. It is the revelation of the mystery that is inherently inside all of us. How amazing that this could be true!

If we accept the premise that we were birthed out of the...