Curated Resources: Surrender
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From the Book: SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, by Sri Shambhavananda
How can I learn to surrender?
Surrender doesn’t mean, “I give up, I surrender.” It is voluntarily let- ting go of your thought patterns. If, when you sit down to meditate, you take a breath and you think, “I have to do this and I have to do that. I don’t know what to do about this or that,” you are not surren- dering.
Surrendering is taking a breath into the heart chakra, and asking to surrender. As you exhale you relax, and you don’t allow the mind to drag you around. The best way to deal with the mind is not to analyze it, and not to have an in-depth conversation with it, but to release it, to let it go.
The mind only has the ability to torture you because you feed it with all sorts of issues, most of which are illusions. You think that some- thing is going to make you happy, or something is going to be this or going to be that. Your mind is simply dragging you through one thing or another. The solution lies in one-pointedness. Focus all of your attention on the breath, on a mantra, on Ganesh, on a murti, or on your guru. When you first start to do that your mind may
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go crazy. It will throw many things at you, and it will shout at you. Your job is not to do battle. Instead stay surrendered and focus on what you are doing. You can strengthen yourself all during your day. When you are driving, don’t be thinking about things that are what you want to do, how this is, or how that is. You should practice being present with driving, washing dishes, cooking, or teaching yoga. Be- ing present will strengthen you, so that you can surrender these deep, deep patterns of thought that we all have.
Please talk about being surrendered and present. How can I do this when so many things are grabbing my attention? How do I draw my attention back to my practice?
What’s happening to you is basically the nature of samsara, that
is, the outer world. We all experience patterns in our unconscious minds. We drift this way or that way, and then something grabs our attention. The battle that takes place when we sit down to meditate is dependent upon how much energy we have accumulated and how consciously we use it.
What we are looking for when we meditate is peace of mind. Peace is the most incredibly valuable thing in the whole universe. Our minds are always active. They try to define us through our experiences. Though that may be useful to a degree, it is not the truth. The truth of who we are and what we are lies beyond the chatter and the noise of our minds. When we move beyond the chatter we will find clarity and a real sense of being present. We will begin to have a deeper un- derstanding of our existence. Not anybody else’s! (If you don’t under- stand yourself, you’ll never understand anybody else.) We will come to a place that is quite extraordinary, very peaceful, and very blissful.
Every time you sit down and try to quiet the mind, or discipline the body, you have to make a choice. You always have to make a decision about how you are going to use your energy. If you’re a good medita- tor you will accumulate a great deal of shakti. Also, you’ll attract a number of strong samskaras. You will be forced to make conscious
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decisions.
How do you do that? Students are always asking, “Well, how do you surrender, Baba? How do you surrender this stuff?” It is fairly simple. You sit, take a breath, and feel your heart. When something floats into your mind, if you grab it, it will take your peace and quiet away. The next thing you know you’re back into your thoughts. “What’s for breakfast?” “Oh, I’d like to have an omelet.”
When that happens, you take a breath, you draw all of your attention into the heart chakra, and you don’t accept or reject these thoughts. You don’t judge, “That’s bad, that’s good, I want it, I don’t want it.” Instead, you keep yourself focused on your chakras, on the internal and not the external. When you become clear and centered on your point of focus, the mind’s interruptions will simply drop away. This is how you surrender.
Many of the events or thoughts that punish us and make us suffer only exist because we feed them with our attention. When we do a lot of sadhana, we get a lot of energy. However, if we let our passing thoughts take us over, we will lose part or all of that energy. It’s pos- sible to be so unconscious that we totally cut ourselves off from ever having a chance to grow, because we get swallowed by these giant samskara dragons that fly through the air of our inner karma.
How can I work harder and get better at surrendering all the pressures I feel?
Working harder to surrender means that you let go. You let go, you relax, and you become expansive. You may think, “I have to sur- render harder,” but that doesn’t work. Mostly surrender is being able to empty out your mind. If you can’t empty it out, then you can at least observe it coming and going and not attach to its thoughts. We sometimes have great thoughts come bubbling up from the uncon- scious. We think they are brilliant, but they are only old samskaras. You let them come up, you let them go, and that’s how you find your
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true self. If you attach to the emotions, the illusions and the desires that bubble up, then that’s how you continue down the same road. I never had in myself a plan for my life except to grow spiritually. Then I opened up to what I had to do to survive in the world.
When I first came to Boulder a little after 1970, I had to pay my rent and buy groceries, so I started Rudi’s restaurant with a small group of people. We did it collectively as a group and we were very suc- cessful. That was the arena my life put me in, so I tried to do a good job. However, it wasn’t who I was, and it wasn’t my total focus. It was what I was doing to function in this world. It gave me the ability to meditate and to teach. You can’t meditate all the time in this culture. You have to pay the rent. You can be a homeless person, but that is harder than working. I did all these things for many years to support myself and the ashram. It made me strong, and it made me function- al in the real world. Those qualities are also necessary to function in the spiritual realm. You need discipline, focus, commitment, and you need to move through your struggles. You need to figure out how to work with the obstacles in your life, such as health departments, building inspectors, and everything else.
Lately, I am realizing how good I am at avoiding emotions. I have been doing that for a while.
Avoiding is not enough. You have to learn how to detach from and surrender your emotions. Avoiding them is not wrong. We all have emotions. We all have reactions that we can’t control. We all have feelings that we don’t understand. But the best thing to do is to wit- ness this play of energy that goes on in your mind. Witness how you are busy redefining everything each moment as things happen. This redefining absorbs an enormous amount of time and energy that you should spend searching for your true self. Search to find out who you really are. We all have things happen to us that we attach to and that we allow to define us. Those things become the basis upon which we live our lives. Some of the events are painful. Some of them are pleas- ant. This is the dualistic nature of samsara.
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We are dragged from one extreme to another because of our attach- ments. People think that detachment is a numb, dull state. It is not. When you separate from the things that pull you around emotion- ally and physically you will find a very good state to be in. As you become more centered, you will learn to engage in life and the world without paying the price that you normally would pay. You will begin to address the problems that arise in your life with a much broader vision than is possible when you are totally drawn into your sams- karas.
I have been wondering if surrendering our emotions might take away our enthusiasm for life?
Surrendering your emotions doesn’t mean that you disengage from what you are doing. It just means that you aren’t controlled by the tension or the drama of the situation. It doesn’t mean you unplug. People think that being detached means being indifferent, stoic, or similar to a zombie. In truth, being detached gives you the freedom and ability to see the situation clearly and to act in a very conscious way. It alleviates the suffering, imbalance and confusion around you. If you haven’t alleviated that in yourself, then you can’t help anyone else.
When you are balanced and a little above the fray, then you are more easily able to prevent, or direct and manage, the situa- tions that arise in your life. If you are coming from a place of will and are trying to engage horizontally, you will be less effective.
Do you understand what I am saying? If two people are fighting, and you get in the middle of it and tell them to calm down, then you are feeding into the situation. On the other hand if you are very balanced and calm in yourself, then you may be able to influence the outcome. You don’t run away from the situation.
When I talk about the witness state in meditation, I am referring to the ability to observe the comings and goings of your mind and emo-
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tions. That doesn’t make you asleep or less conscious or less engaged in life. It allows you to see the patterns established in your life and to improve yourself.
When I am out in the external world I can get really rattled and unclear.
I think it is important to stay in yourself. When I go to airports and places where there are thousands of people, I see that they are all projecting a certain kind of image. That is how people identify each other. I don’t buy into any of it. I just sit in myself and I simply ob- serve from my witness consciousness without making judgments. I stay in my heart center without analyzing.
Typically everyone wants to analyze everyone else. It is a real skill not to get caught up in that activity. I practice all the time. I don’t live a sheltered existence. I get up and I do my practice and I go to a health club and I work out. I do water aerobics. I lift weights. I am involved in my life in the world, but also from my center. I don’t allow anyone to capture my attention in such a way that I judge them or get caught up in their lives.
I have trouble dealing with certain difficult people in my life.
It has always been my experience that difficult people are a source
of a lot of growth. They help us test our detachment and our ability to surrender. There is no time I can remember when I didn’t have dif- ficult people in my life. Even before I started doing this practice there was always somebody making my life difficult. However, once I es- tablished a practice, I began learning how to deal with the emotions people created in me. As I saw the folly of my attempts to analyze, to correct, and to remake them in my own image, I became quite con- tent to let them be however they were.
Sometimes when you become detached from the difficult people, it causes even more conflict, because they are used to stealing your
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energy by doing things that annoy you. It’s called the annoy practice. “Let’s annoy somebody until they get mad.” My advice is to stabilize your mind and understand what it means to surrender. I have had annoying neighbors, annoying bureaucrats, and annoying bank tell- ers, but I simply do the practice, go inside, get centered, and open my heart. Opening my heart doesn’t mean that I go out and hug the per- son who is annoying me. It means I don’t allow myself to get drawn into their business. It does not always work, of course, but that is the ideal. That is the effort that we should all be making.
I work in health care, and I have a hard time not getting caught up in the problems of my clients.
I think that is a real problem. Those who are health care workers and counselors have compassion and do good work, but they sometimes externalize their energy. The goal is that when people need you and you can help them, you do it with detachment. Detachment doesn’t mean, “I am going to help you, and I am going to make you better.” Rather, you are there and you do what you can do and that’s it. Then you let it go. Hanging onto and worrying is attaching you to their particular issues. Real compassion is the ability to be fairly neutral, yet to provide something as extraordinary as we are able. Often we become attached to our own doership, and that’s not always healthy. If we are looking for some kind of return, it can be found in our own growth.
I’m not sure how to work with the issues around attachment.
In terms of relationships, we become attached to others when we think they will add something to our lives that we don’t have. That
is a romantic ideal. Ultimately when you love someone, you have a relationship, and you develop an attachment, you are actually open- ing up to something that already exists inside of you. The person you love acts as a catalyst to bring out what you have inside.
Some relationships are healthy, and some are not. For example, an
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attachment to one’s guru is healthy because he will never let you
get attached. But many people form attachments to people, places, and things because they see them as the source of their happiness- -a source of their fulfillment. In the Vijnanabhairava, a Kashmir Shaivism book of practices, it is said that in a moment of great joy and great happiness we should go directly to the source of that hap- piness. Many people think they are happy because of some external event or object.
Actually, the source of our happiness always comes from inside. A beautiful sunset might make you feel extraordinary, but the sunset was not the source of your happiness. The next day’s sunset may not impact you the way yesterday’s sunset did. What happened was that the experience of the first sunset opened something up inside you where the source of true happiness resides. If you can find the hap- piness in yourself, you will be able to share it with everybody. The people who are a part of your life will all benefit from being around a person who has found some inner peace and some inner joy.
Most young, immature relationships are all about guilt, attachment, and desire. Two people meet and they glom on to one another. Their relationship becomes their whole world. After they have known each other for a while, it’s not the whole world anymore. They start to un- derstand that their love is something special, but it has to be worked out. It has to be developed. It isn’t magically going to be that special all the time. A really good relationship with anybody--parents, girl- friend, boyfriend, husband, wife, guru--takes time and it takes effort. It takes a willingness to expose yourself and a willingness to seriously work on changing.
No person is the end all and be all, or the solution, to all of your problems. Certainly an ashram, a sangha, and a meditation practice can help you attain the realization of what’s possible. None-the-less, the same old stuff is still happening: things breaking, things not working out, and people freaking out. In spite of that, I have found a wonderful state of peace in my heart, and I am able to be there
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almost all the time. This is an extraordinary gift in this world.
If you turn on the news you will see people being beheaded, racism, and all this craziness going on. Many people become glued to that, and it begins to define their reality. I can watch it and totally accept that it exists out there in the world, but I also never lose that special place inside of myself. That non-attachment doesn’t mean not feeling or not loving. When you find something that opens you up, you are naturally attracted to it ,and you want to try to keep it in your life. The one way to keep it is through surrender.
I’ve been hit smack dab once more with the realization that I’m viewing the world through a very delusional kind of lens. This has warped my perspective and is now causing me to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. How can I just rip this bad habit out of me?
Let’s see! Meditate. It is very healthy to have a realization about how you create your own illusions, and to become aware of slipping into them. But the remedy for it is the practice that you do on a regular basis. It’s just like anything else. If you want to get good at something, you have to do it every day. Not just when it’s fun. Rudi used to call it spiritual work.
If you focus on your practice instead of your problems, then you will develop the clarity of mind to catch yourself before you get yourself caught up in a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this stage of my life, after many years of meditation, I work to flow with my life, not being dis- tracted by anything, and neither accepting nor rejecting things that come my way. That is what meditation really is. It brings clarity of mind and the ability not to grasp, but to let go and to be in the pres- ent. It is a lifelong discipline, and as you get better at it, you become freer. You waste less of your own natural resources.
I had a very strong experience of separation the other day in meditation where I found myself floating a little above my body.
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Afterwards, I walked around all day, and, every time my foot hit the ground I noticed, “Oh! There’s the ground!”
So what’s the problem? May we all exist in such states! That’s very good. The subtle body and the physical body are usually locked together. However, when you accumulate enough energy from
your spiritual work, they separate. Then you may feel as if you are slightly out of your body or that you are floating above your body. You are moving into a dimension where the opportunity to elevate your practice is great. The opportunity to step off a cliff also occurs simultaneously. You have to be careful. You have to be sure you are grounded. Nonetheless, this experience is a very positive sign in your sadhana.
Remember, though, you won’t lose the body. It is still there, even if it seems to disappear during your practice. Nothing is required of you except to exist in this state of being, to relax, and to allow yourself to expand. It is okay to use the circular breath, very gently. Don’t try to force, push or expend energy. Just be in that space.
When I experience separating from myself I immediately panic and snap back into my everyday self. It feels like the faucet was turned off.
The only way to solve your issue is to practice. You need to get over that panic. You have to keep approaching that experience until you get comfortable with it. We have such a strong tendency to cling to our definition of self that, when we get beyond the borders of the mundane mind, it freaks us out. You have to learn how to be com- pletely present and very open. That state of separation is a very good place to be. It doesn’t involve your will and your control issues, so significant progress can be made from there.
Can you talk about the separation between the astral and physical body?
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The separation has to ascend, and it only comes when you reach a certain volume of energy that is ascending as you circulate it. As it goes up you attach your awareness to it. At first you feel as if your body is expanding and your chakras are expanding. All of a sud- den there is this pop, and then there is another you in energy form. Really, it has much to do with your ability to get out of your head. I used to try to do it, and it never worked. But then I would just take a breath and go.
When this separation takes place, your awareness and your en- ergy field become very expansive. When you are totally locked in your body all you feel is the physical pain and the resistance. That’s why many times I am able to sit for a really long time and my body doesn’t bother me until I come back. It’s a very peaceful state. It isn’t stressful. It doesn’t feel like it requires much effort. It is like a soap bubble.
Sometimes I have a hard time making the transition from sleeping to waking, and I am sort of shaking and vibrating. Do you have any suggestions for me?
You should do a little practice. What I don’t do when I wake up in the mornings is think, “Aaargh, I’ve been working out a lot and boy am
I sore.” Instead, I take a full breath and then as I exhale I really try to become more present here. I don’t jerk myself awake and run out of the room because I am late, or I am not going to make it somewhere. I always try to make the transition as consciously as possible. The shakiness and the vibration you experience have to do with separa- tion. You have to come back from where you were and ground here.
At night, sometimes I separate from my body and wake up unrested. Am I doing something wrong?
You are doing something right. Actually astral experiences are sometimes very exhausting. You are burning a certain type of energy and chemicals that can really affect you at first, but after a while it
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becomes easier to overcome those effects. For the most part we are so identified with our bodies that we seldom experience the perspective of being outside of them. Our consciousness, the energetic or spiri- tual side of our nature, is vast and not limited to the body. However, we are accustomed to being under the control of our physical experi- ences or needs. Thus when the separation occurs, it may be a little scary or even exhausting.
Sometimes in meditation I find a special place where I separate from my normal self.
Yeah, scary isn’t it. Just stay with it. It’s the undiscovered territory. During the process of growing spiritually, I have often found myself opening a door, and I am in a dark room. I don’t know where the walls are, and I can’t find a light switch. I am not even sure where I am. But I do not run around frantically or try to go back where I was. I open up more to the space and then the lights slowly come on.
Often when we reach a new space on our spiritual path, we try to bring along many concepts and habits that we have used in the past to define ourselves or to define our limitations. It is better to sit there and be present and allow the new level to unfold. Our minds and our thoughts have a tremendous hold on us. We are very attached to the accumulated experiences of our lives. Some of those experiences provide us with good information, but many of them are based upon previous tensions from our current and past lives.
To be able to sort all that out--fear, anxiety, anger--we have to learn how to let go. The negative tension is heavy; thus it drops away, and what we are left with is the pure Self. We are not losing anything of value. It may seem that way in the beginning because we have been strongly identified with this image of ourselves that we have created. However, when we go into meditation and are deeply focused inside, we become very present and conscious of each breath and every mo- ment. In this space, baggage that we carry can be dropped away. This process may create anxiety about letting go of the baggage that we
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are attached to, but if we get rid of the baggage, we also get free from some heavy karma--heavy psychic tensions that bind us. The Inner Self within will soar and expand. We will energetically experience
a lightness and a buoyancy, and will feel deeply nourished. We will partake of a very deep, deep spiritual feeding that will replace that lump of tension that we were carrying around.
I have been feeling very challenged by many issues in my life. How can I deal with this?
I can honestly say my most annoying, biggest challenges usually brought me the most growth. What does that mean? It means I had to work very hard to get above some of the people and things in my life that at the time seemed unjust, uncalled for, and unnecessary. That hard work helped me to jump light years ahead of where I was, whereas when things were going the way I wanted them to, I put less energy into my growth process.
Rudi referred to the challenges of life as fuel--fuel to burn, fuel to heat up this inner purification that takes place when you begin a spiritual practice. He said our tensions create natural resources. We have mountains of fuel inside to use and the way one burns these tensions (this fuel) is through the process of surrender. Surrender means not rejecting, but releasing, our tensions, and this process cre- ates a chemistry. We sometimes experience changes in our psychic systems that feel like heat literally starting to burn up our tensions. We don’t even have to know what they are. We are able to create
such a tremendous flow and heat that we are performing a massive purification. There were times that physically I was so hot in winter weather that I would wear a tee shirt because I was burning up so much stuff from deep inside. The difficult things in our lives hold the greatest potential because they symbolize a big chunk of locked up energy in our bodies and nervous systems. We don’t have to go look- ing for trouble. Trouble usually finds us, but we have to know how to handle it when it shows up.
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Can you talk about resistance?
You will recognize resistance in thoughts such as, “I don’t want to
do this or that. I don’t like him or her. I don’t want to give up sugar. No, I want pizza.” We all have many different levels of resistance to just about everything. Many of us have developed strong likes and dislikes. A good yogi, however, neither accepts nor rejects. If you
can imagine living without accepting or rejecting, you will begin to understand the concept of surrender. To be able to surrender you are required to dissolve the mental constructs that you have created. You will then be able to use the energy that was holding on to acceptance and rejection to move your resistance through the chakras, refine it, and turn it into surrender. When you surrender, you are consciously releasing your attachments, definitions, and illusions.
The ability to identity or feel these things and release them creates an inner heat that begins the purification process. That inner heat will move through each of the seven chakras and create the fire of yoga that will purify much of the debris you have within your chakras. The goal is not to suppress your attachment and resistance. It is to devel- op the ability to expand beyond them and to release them.
You have to let go of you. We construct a personality that is a mental and energetic construct defining the world we live in. We have iden- tified and defined who we think we are. The process of growing spiri- tually and evolving as a human being has to do with developing the ability to move beyond our contracted definitions of self. To succeed requires focus and discipline. Pranayama and mantra, for example, are tools that we use to move beyond this container that we live in.They are tools that help us expand. We use them just as we would use a pump to put air in a tire—but we are the tire, not the pump.
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VajraPani is a guardian or protector deity who devours negative energies
Saraswati is the goddess of music and the arts
Sacred Journey
A Guide to Meditation in the Shambhava School of Yoga
Compiled by: Swami Kripananda
Shoshoni Yoga Retreat Prakasha Press
Dedicated to Sri Shambhavananda with immense gratitude
Chapter 11
THE PRACTICE OF SURRENDER
“Ultimately all experience can be considered as food that can be encompassed and digested. If energy cannot be drawn from a situ- ation, it must be considered an illusion and transcended. When we can either digest or surrender everything that we attract, then we are free. “
-Swami Rudrananda (Rudi)
“It is important to understand that most of the karma that you go through doesn’t have to manifest if you can surrender. Surrender doesn’t mean giving up and not doing anything or not caring. Sur- render is the ability to take the forces and energy of the mind, body, emotions, and all the dramas that are a part of your life, and to let them go so that you can be detached enough to experience the inner energy.”
- S. Shambhavananda
Surrender is a word you will encounter a great deal as you be- come more familiar with Shambhavananda's tradition. In a yo- gic context, surrender is not just a concept, but is a practice in and of itself. In fact, Shambhavananda has said that being in a surrendered state is the state of meditation. He often emphasizes that surrender is not waving a white flag and saying, "I give up". It is not being a victim and it does not mean burying or pushing away thoughts or situations.
Surrender is an active process for dealing with the tension and resistance that you feel. It is a conscious energetic process that
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Philosophical Foundations of Shambhava Meditation
takes place inside of you. Shambhavananda describes surrender as the ability to expand beyond a tension in the moment that it arises and to then release it. He says that surrender "brings about a transcendental state because you gain the ability to rise above your own tensions and limitations."
Surrender is a natural process and one that can’t be pushed, or forced with the will. Most simply, surrender is the ability to breathe into an inner knot of confusion or tension and release it. Shambhavananda says: “when you can turn inside and gather the energy, focus and the consciousness to release those things that bind you, clarity will come. From deep surrender comes serenity. Serenity brings wisdom. You will see things clearly.”
Swami Rudrananda (Rudi) taught that surrender is an ongoing and constant part of the process of spiritual growth. He taught that surrender needs to be total—you can’t just surrender what you think you want to let go of. Ultimately what you let go of is the ego, the identity and world you’ve created, so that you can experience the next level of consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo, a great modern yogi, once said that complete and total surrender is the only means to access the flow of divine grace from the higher realms. He says: “If part of the being sur- renders, but another part reserves itself, follows its own way or makes its own conditions, then each time that happens, you are yourself pushing the divine grace away from you.”
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Shambhava Meditation Practices
Ham Sah Meditation
“In the practice of ‘ham sah’, the mantra takes place on its own, and the goal of the mantra is the Self. It is That which repeats it, it is That which is its goal, and it is That which is attained by repeating it. When the mantra, the repeater of the mantra, and the goal of the mantra become one and the same for you, you attain the fruit of the mantra.”
- Swami Muktananda
“The technique of meditation that we use is the ‘ham sah’ practice, which is very simple and extremely profound. It is a method to rec- ognize the pure state of consciousness that already exists within you. You are not looking for something you do not already have.”
- S. Shambhavananda
The ham sah mantra is considered the natural breath mantra. It is going on all the time, whether we are aware of it or not. It is the sound the breath makes as it naturally flows in and flows out of the body. Muktananda describes it as the “utterance of supreme Consciousness, the universal energy, that creates the universe out of its own being and that, when it resides in the hu- man body, is known as kundalini.”
The mantra “ham sah” means “I am That”. “That” refers to the consciousness that dwells within us as the Inner Self. The ham sah practice is described in the Vijnana Bhairava, a great scrip- ture from the Kashmir Shaivite tradition as follows: “The su- preme Goddess, whose nature is to create, ceaselessly expresses Herself upward from the center of the body in the form of exha- lation and downward in the form of inhalation. By steady fixa- tion of the mind at the two places of origin, there is the situation of plenitude.”
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Chapter 15 ! Meditations on the Breath
The Practice
Sit quietly and comfortably and take a few moments to relax your body and mind. Notice your breath as you inhale and ex- hale. Don’t try to alter or modify your breath, just observe it. As you relax during the inhalation, you will begin to hear the sound of ham as the breath enters your body. As you exhale you will hear the sound of sah. The ham sah mantra is always present, whether you are aware of it or not. The process of meditation is to become consciously aware of this breath flow.
The inhalation and exhalation are similar to a swinging pen- dulum. As the pendulum swings back and forth there is a mo- ment when all motion stops, and the pendulum changes direc- tions. Similarly, with the breath, between the inhalation and exhalation, the breath stops and changes directions. If you fo- cus on the point of stillness between the ham and the sah, you will find that not only does the breath stop, but the mind stops as well. The breath and the mind are intertwined in this way.
This moment of silence, this moment where all mental, emo- tional and physical activity ceases, is the gateway to the Inner Self. It is the experience of the pure consciousness that ex- ists within you. As you sit in meditation, you might also no- tice that in between one thought and another thought there is the same instant where all activity stops. Focus your awareness on these still points between thoughts and between breaths.
When you begin the practice you might notice that your mind engages in some kind of activity: thinking about yesterday or to- morrow’s agenda or some other distraction. When this happens simply bring your attention back to the practice and don’t worry about the distractions. When your mind becomes less agitated,
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Shambhava Meditation Practices
you begin to experience pure consciousness, or the witness state. You begin to identify with the witness of all experience and activ- ity. This witness is perfectly quiet, perfectly content, and dwells in perfect truth and bliss. This is an experience of your true nature.
Surrender Meditation
The Practice
Begin by finding a comfortable seat. Elongate the spine, relax your shoulders, and rest your head comfortably on the neck. Take a few deep breaths and try to create a feeling of relaxation and openness. Then draw a conscious breath through the nose, letting it wash over your forehead, down through the throat and into the heart. On the exhale, really feel yourself relax.
Again breathe into the heart, letting the breath drop very deeply into the heart. Allow the breath to expand beyond anything you experience, any thought, any tension. Allow it to become big- ger than the tension you feel, as big and as light as you can. As you breathe in, breathe in your wish, or intention to be free, to grow consciously. As you breathe out, just let everything go, not holding on to any feeling, thought or experience. Breathe in a complete willingness to be free.
When the breath expands beyond your tension, the pranic en- ergy of the breath can work to break up or dissolve the tension you’re holding on to. So allow the energy to do something to help you. Allow the dissolving to take place. When you exhale, let everything go. Keeping your awareness inside, continue to take soft breaths into the heart, allowing yourself to expand be- yond tension. Keep experiencing greater and greater spacious- ness, and then release.
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Excerpts from Faith Stone’s book, Rudi and the Green Apple
• “Life has been a very good teacher for me. Whenever I think I’m so great and the good things in my life happened because of me, at that moment everything falls apart. When I surrender and let God do the driving, everything goes smoothly. I think the happiest people in the world are those who live a life of ser- vice whether to God,
their fellow men, or even to benefit moth- er earth and animals. When a person lives selfishly, always, “me first”
or “what about me?,” then happiness stays far away. When we live service (the yogic word is Seva), then satisfaction and happiness are close by. Service, Krishna teaches us in the Bhagavad Gita, must be done without thought of reward. “To action alone thou hast the right, never the fruits thereof.” Pure service, selfless service, just being of help – that is enough.” p. 73
• “My memories of Rudi’s store are of incense and Gods. Everything about Rudi had a feeling of being freshly washed and alive. His store had lots of green plants growing, and vitali- ty was in the air. Large clay tiles lined the floor. Antiques of Buddhas and Gods ranged from very small to very large. The store was not overly large but it had a feeling of spaciousness. I think it was more an expression of Rudi’s vast field of conscious- ness. He often sat behind his large comfortable desk where he could see the door and greet anyone coming. The phone rang constantly with either business calls or calls from students from Rudi’s ashrams and centers around the country. Rudi’s mother wandered in and out of the back room making tea or doing lit- tle things. Sometimes Rudi seemed like an eight-armed Bodhisattva as he
was able to give his attention to all the vari- ous things going on simultaneously. He seemed to be in the eye of a hurricane; still and calm, while a whirlwind of activity took place around him. Commenting on this, he said that he was able to take care of so many things at once because of the diver- sity. If you only have one small thing to care for, then that one small thing seems difficult or paramount – but when you are taking care of a myriad of things, they balance each other out. If you can surrender to the energy and allow the force to flow through you, it takes care of everything. Surrender, letting go, and letting God work through you was a primary theme in Rudi’s teachings.” (p.97)
• “While holding the breath in the heart center, Rudi taught us to ask as if the wish were coming from deep within your heart, as though your heart were talking, “I consciously wish to sur- render negative psychic tensions,” “consciously” means, I wish to feel it and gain awareness of the process. “Surrender” means to let go voluntarily of any tightness or blocks to spiritual growth. As I do this, I feel my Inner Self waking up. At this point I often feel a deep yearning for God. Sometimes I feel an ache in my heart, the heartache of wanting to be completely united with God. Other days, I must admit, I simply feel thick and resistant. It’s different every day because each day is new. Regardless of whether it’s easy or hard, you continue. Rudi often told us how important it is to work consistently, not only when it’s easy, but also when it’s the last thing you want to do because then your growth becomes strong. You grow in all kinds of weather, so to speak. You don’t need a greenhouse or very specific favorable conditions. Certainly life is not like a greenhouse, and we need to be prepared for anything that may come our way. Consistent spiritual practice gives us great inner strength.” (p. 123)
A Seat By The Fire:
Spiritual Discussions With Sri Shambhavananda
USING LIFE FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH
and samsara is that as you accumulate enough energy to feel good, the thing that makes you feel good will suddenly be taken away from you, and then you feel bad again. Some cycles are very short and some cycles are very long. The whole point is that you just set a steady pace and you keep going. What comes from a dedicated spiritual practice is tremendous growth. Rudi wouldn’t accept his own limitations or anyone else’s. He was also willing to take on things that most people wouldn’t even get near. His energy made it possible for him to go in and change people in profound ways. Someone like that is always a little intimidating.
CHAPTER 4:
FROM DEEP SURRENDER COMES SERENITY
In spiritual work, surrender is the ability to rise above one’s emotions and tensions, and experience a state of pure openness and pure consciousness. From that inner surrender, your true nature will begin to reveal itself.
– S. Shambhavananda
Can you talk about the meaning of surrender?
Spiritual surrender has nothing to do with being a victim, turn- ing your will over to someone else, or manipulation. Surrender is the ability to let go of the manifestation of attachments that arise in your mind. These manifestations are the source of your suffering. Surrender is a process that takes place inside of you. When fear, anger or any strong emotion arises, if you can let those feelings go, you are surrendering. In the moment when tension arises, your ability to expand beyond it and release it is surrender. You can take the same energy that you use to get angry and use it to grow spiritually. Surrender brings about a
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transcendental state, because you gain the ability to rise above your own tensions and limitations.
The way we react to a situation often has to do with our limit- ed self-image. We are concerned about how others view us. We have formulas for reacting to situations that protect our self- images. But a spiritual person, someone who wishes to evolve spiritually, won’t get into that process. That person will stop the reaction, let it go, try to open the heart, expand and encompass the situation, and grow above it. People who are limited and bound and confused generally just react. They isolate them- selves and they justify their position, or they think of all the smart replies that they could make to the person who embar- rassed them. This is the way the mind and the emotions nor- mally drag people around. Surrender is the ability to let go of these reactions and exist at a higher level.
When you are sitting with a guru, with Rudi or someone like Swami Muktananda, the initial thing that happens is that your legs hurt, and then your back starts to hurt. Then you get fid- gety. Then your mind gets nervous. Then you start thinking of things that are totally irrelevant. Then your mind begins to wan- der. You start looking around and analyzing and judging peo- ple, and you see a crowd and you want to get away from them. A process like this can go through your mind. The way a yogi approaches a situation like that is by observing each distraction as it arises, surrendering it.
Can you describe what it’s like to be in a surrendered state?
Surrender is like being in a meditative state. When you sit for meditation, you get your body in a certain position. Your med- itation posture affects your nervous system, and your nervous system affects your subtle body and your mind. You try to find a point of balance in sitting where you feel almost weightless. Then you follow the breath with mantra, and you start to lose the awareness of the body as a physical entity and start to
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relate to it as an energetic body, first through your nervous sys- tem and then through your subtle body.
To experience this state, you need to let go of outer stimula- tion, noise, your mental thoughts, the pain in your leg, or what- ever it might be. You do that by turning your attention inward and putting it on the mantra or breath. You turn your attention towards the navel center and draw your breath down to the navel. You will reach a state of total balance. Your mind will still have thoughts, and you still will have physical sensations, but it will be as though you were standing on the bank of a river and watching these distractions just float by. You don’t jump in and grab them. That is attachment. Surrender is allowing the thoughts to come and to go. You don’t have to follow them or analyze them or have a conversation with them. Just let them arise and subside.
By following this process, you will become aware that there is a consciousness inside of you that is observing all of this activ- ity, yet isn’t a part of it. Surrender is the only way you can make the transition from being a part of the outer activity to that sep- arate state of awareness. Surrender is the ability to let go of thought constructs and the identification with the physical world that you have. When you do that, you go right into a state of conscious awareness.
As you develop the ability to spend time in a surrendered state, you will feel the chakras where lifetimes of obscurations are held. You are holding these obscurations in your physical body, nervous system, emotions, and your intellect.
Should the experience of surrender occur naturally as you meditate and do your practice, or do you use your conscious mind to make it happen?
You can reach for it, but you can’t become obsessed with it, because it is like chasing a soap bubble. You grab it and it will go away. But if it lands on you, let it sit there. Hatha yoga can
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tune up the nervous system and discipline the body enough to let it find that point of balance. As you become familiar with the state of surrender, you can reach it more easily. It is a nat- ural state. It is not something that you are trying to induce. It is something that is there all the time, no matter what.
A little practice will bring you that experience. Once you start to gain that inner awareness, you don’t need anyone to con- vince you of anything, because you will go after it, you will rec- ognize it. When you are in that space you don’t have to go any- where, you don’t care about what time it is, you aren’t nervous. When you find that place, it is a very wonderful experience. I guarantee that if you can practice going there and bringing that state more into the activities of your life, you will start to live in a different world.
How do I know when it’s time to hold on and when to let go?
Surrender is not a powerless state. Surrender is the ability to consciously release those things that bind you. Surrender is the ability to breathe into an inner knot of confusion, a knot of ten- sion inside, and release it. When you understand the concept of surrender spiritually, you have a very powerful tool for unravel- ing much of the confusion that exists around the major issues in your life. When you can turn inside and gather the energy, focus, and the consciousness to release those things that bind you, clarity will come. From deep surrender comes serenity. Serenity brings wisdom. You will see things clearly.
As people get older, they think, “Oh what do I care.” Surrender is more than that. Surrender is the ability to understand the nature of your existence, the life that you created. It is not fatalism. Many people think that their problems are due to someone else. We have created our own awful lives, through our own unconscious actions. Whether we remember them or not is not the point.
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Anything that you become obsessed with, other than spiritual work, has to be examined. It is okay to be obsessed with spiri- tual work. If you are obsessed and a fanatic about spiritual work, it will totally destroy your ego, whereas if you are obsessed with other things, that usually isn’t the end product. Usually you get way out on a limb and it breaks. Some people have very strong samskaras, or obscurations, and life has to grind the samskaras up a little bit more. If you can surrender, you can grow quickly.
Is it true that we can push too hard in our effort to surrender our tensions?
Yes. Pushing too hard can build tension and make you out of balance. The practice, done correctly, should be a very easy and natural progression.
If the spiritual practice should be easy and natural, why am I feeling so much tension?
What happens is that when you begin to turn your attention inward by doing mantra repetition or pranayama or yoga, a number of things will begin to arise. Some of them will be emo- tional and some of them will be physical. You need to work to release them. If you are not able to release them, they become obstacles, and the result of those obstacles is pain and confu- sion and anger and fear. So, once you have established a prac- tice, surrender becomes a very practical and useful tool to dis- solve tension, not to create it. Sometimes people quit meditat- ing because they feel they are getting negative reactions and they think meditation has caused them. Actually, they are expe- riencing their own condition. They were never in touch with that before. They have just been numb to it.
kundalini yoga is very much like watering a seed. You water the seed with devotion, with mantra practice, with meditation, and the seed will grow and sprout. Our patterns are, in a sense, the soil that we have created through all of our actions. The soil
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can be rocky or clay that doesn’t take water well. It takes some effort to get the seed to grow. If you don’t like to suffer and you don’t like pain, learn how to surrender.
What do you mean when you talk about getting above something?
When you come into a situation where there is a conflict, some- thing is invoked in you, whether it is anger, or fear, or some other reaction. Technically, a yogi would use the breath to dis- solve that block in the chakras. As you circulate your energy, your consciousness gets bigger than the tension. You feel liter- ally as if you are rising above the tension.
When people approach you with anger, fear, or desire, you can use that stimulus from the outer world to go very deeply inside and find where those qualities exist in you. Your energy will start to get lighter. The energy of someone who is angry or depressed is heavier. That person can’t bring you down because you are functioning on a different level. Then you have the opportunity to be of service. Sometimes that service is quite unseen and mysterious, but you can still be of great benefit to people.
Even when my guru yelled at me, I was smart enough to know that what was going on had nothing to do with the external world. He was releasing blocks in my psychic system that allowed me to go further in my spiritual practice. My guru would smack me and I would fall down and come back up for more. Because he was reworking me inside in a way that nobody that I ever met could do, and the growth and the capacity it gave me, the mechanisms that it developed in me, were extraordinary. You don’t normally get this kind of experi- ence. You can read philosophy until you are 10,000 years old, and it doesn’t give you this kind of experience. That is why find- ing someone who is enlightened and who actually has the goods–who doesn’t have just the container and the packag-
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ing–who actually has the goods–is very beneficial. It is a rare opportunity!
Could you speak a bit about a connection between surrender and wisdom?
Yes. Through emptiness comes wisdom. As long as your mind is attached and your intellect is involved in form and name, your wisdom will be polluted. Surrender is nothing more than simply letting go of name and form, the mind, the emotions, even the body, and experiencing your true nature that exists inside of you. When you keep letting go of all the form that your life has and all of the names that you have given to everything, you will experience this state of pure being, this state of pure con- sciousness. And from that state, there is nothing but wisdom. When you start to get into the contracted “I,” into the small “I,” into the “me” with an agenda and “me” with my needs, then you are in a contracted state and you are not functioning from a place of wisdom. Surrendering is letting go of illusion and discovering the reality that exists within you. All of the con- structs of the mind and emotions are just manifestations of the illusion that exists to give form to your karma. If you can truly surrender the illusion, it dissolves.
As I develop more will my psychic abilities increase?
That will happen according to your own karma. Because you are so interested and want it so much you will probably keep it away. Desire has a tendency to create obscuration. Sometimes the door will open only when you have surrendered your desire. This is the way spiritual things work. If you want something don’t grasp it, just open and surrender. Using your will and grasping just creates more karma and generally creates more obstacles.
It has been my experience that when I pursue my spiritual prac- tice wholeheartedly, everything that I need for my next stage of development is always there and always obvious. When you
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say, “Well, this is what I need,” you are basing this assumption about your needs upon layer upon layer of accumulated ten- sions. That can only create more of the same tension and obscuration. When you arrive through meditation to a place of clarity and deep, deep, surrender to God inside, then the next step is fairly simple and very obvious. It isn’t something that you have to reach out for.
As I see negative patterns within myself, I find that I have a tendency to become attached to the negative patterns and I get caught in a vicious cycle.
Surrender! When you recognize certain qualities in your self and you interact with them psychologically and emotionally, things get very sticky. The very qualities that you are trying to eliminate just stick to you. It is best to be grateful that you have recognized a negative pattern. Then, in that moment, wish to improve this negative quality you have discovered. Then let the whole thing go. Don’t think, “Well, I want to improve this neg- ative tendency, and that means I have to do this, that, and the other thing...”
Don’t analyze the negative patterns. What is required is that at the moment you recognize a personal limitation, simply release it. Suppose you were holding a suitcase and you looked and realized, “Oh, this suitcase contains garbage,” and you let the suitcase go. That is surrender. But what we often do is say, “Oh, what kind of garbage is it? I shouldn't have thrown that away! That's too valuable!” We then start sorting through garbage and deciding that some if it is not so bad after all. To try to psy- chologically, intellectually, or emotionally resolve the realiza- tions that you have during meditation is not the solution.