We all know the value of sincerity in our daily lives. When a friend sincerely thanks you, or someone sincerely enjoys your cooking, for example, you can feel it in your heart. This kind of sincerity is also a cornerstone of our practice, as it is required for our work to truly penetrate the obscurations that limit our experience of our true nature. When we practice with sincerity we can move mountains of tension, without sincerity those mountains don’t move anywhere. In Sanskrit the term is called “akrita”, unartificial, and is described as the combination of natural effort and intense desire, what a powerful force! In the practice of ShambhavAnanda Yoga, we interact with this notion as “the wish to grow”, and seek it in everything we do with an ‘open heart’. Let’s jump in and begin our exploration of sincere, unartificial practice from the heart, and find out why it’s so important, and how we can find more of it!
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If you had 3 wishes what would they be? Tonight, Maha Shivaratri, the greatest holiday of Shiva in the Hindu Tradition, gives practitioners just this opportunity. How will you use your wish?
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To unpack Sutra 3.8 we find ourselves climbing through 3 levels of awareness. The first level, that of our normal life, the second level, that of a mindful life, and the third level, that of a spiritual life.
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A guided mantra meditation that skillfully grows our inner awareness and enhances to keep our attention on our mantra at deeper and deeper levels.
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A guided breath meditation that utilizes a counting Pratyahara {concentration) technique to help you arrive at true breath awareness.
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Discipline is the wish fulfilling tree, the bestower of grace, the redeemer of imperfection and the source of our spiritual growth. Reflect on anything significant you have ever accomplished in your life, and you’ll see discipline was there, walking with you step-for-step. So let’s take a moment together to see how the yogic tradition describes and cultivates discipline, so that we may can take our resolutions into the realm of realization.
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A discussion of the experience of putting your spiritual growth ahead of your limited perceptions of daily life through the lens of Shiva Sutra 3.8. The experienced practitioner recognizes that this type of work is not a negation of reality, not a pushing away of what feels ‘tough’, but an expansion of awareness, an unfolding of our practice that empowers us to use our life as fuel for enlightenment.
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