Dear Feel Love Now Community,
Below is a teaching from Swami Nityananda that was originally published in Awake Yoga Meditation’s quarterly print publication called Darshan, which was last published in 2022.
Past issues of Darshan are available here in PDF form. We are republishing it here with love to facilitate ease and grace in accessing these beautiful teachings.
In loving service,
The Karma Yoga Team at AYM
P.S. If you are interested in joining the Karma Yoga Team at Awake Yoga Meditation to expand your practice of selfless service, love in action, please click here.
Choosing the middle path
Lahiri says the love of the heart is the supreme power of humankind. We are invited to always respond generously, not grudgingly. Whatever comes up, work with it willingly and the heart will expand.
Invite the mind to merge with the love of the heart. As the Amrita Bindu Upanishad declares with much good humor, all else is just verbiage and argumentation.
“Invite the mind to merge with the love of the heart... all else is just verbiage and argumentation.”
If you are asking, “How can I practically use clarity and insight to access the Supreme?,” tune in and ask yourself which foods strengthen you. The body wants neither too much nor too little food. Eating just the right amount helps you access spiritual energy and enjoy bliss always.
Too much food yields sluggishness and heaviness, a feeling of torpor. You’re diverting energy into digestion that would otherwise be connecting you with bliss.
Trusting yourself
Trust yourself to eat the optimal amount so that it’s not too much or too little. When you build a campfire you don’t want too much wood because it overwhelms the flames, and you don’t want too little fuel because the flames go out. Trust yourself to neither punish the body nor indulge it.
This is part of the middle path advocated by the Buddha. Beware the thought demon inside that wants to go on a rampage and eat everything in sight! Indulge instead with the sweetness of divine nectar. In balance, the digestive fire burns steadily and is a vital part of upward flowing energy that connects you with divine nectar, immortality, the energy of life itself.
A practice to maintain balance and harmony
The classical Greeks had a word for the smell of earth after rain and that word is connected with the fluid that flows through the veins of the gods. That’s life!
The fluid of divine nectar is simply the energy of pure life! It’s the smell of the earth after rain. Connect with that energy as often as you possibly can.
I give my nervous system permission to reset.
I give my brain permission to reset.
I give the cells of my body permission to reset.
Reset at least once a day, or as often as you like, in whatever ways you can. Be in conscious contact with the rhythms of life that always move through us and help us respond. In contact with life energy, we’re always surfing, and life itself lifts us up as the wave lifts up a surfer. Life energy flows, helps, supports us always.
The more we connect with the earth, the more we can aspire spiritually and the more we can be of service right here. Pragmatically, this practice helps us maintain balance and harmony. It helps us be here in embodiment as long as we can in a supremely healthy, happy, vital, responsive way.
Working with divine nectar
Also called the Drop of Immortality, divine nectar is simply life energy which is of course already within us, flowing through us. Cool, kind, sweet, soothing light, one focal point of divine nectar is at the spiritual eye in the center of the forehead.
Allow that nectar to flow down through the chakras. Radiant, shining, blessed insight, pure life energy, immortality. Allow sweet, kind energy to pour through the entire body. This light allows us to unify ourselves where before we had created separateness. Divine nectar sweetens, connects, harmonizes, unifies.
St. Augustine says of the Divine, “In my deepest wound I see your glory and it dazzles me.” Allow your deepest wound to be held in this sweet, caring light. Silently say:
I take full responsibility for the deepest wound I have been carrying.
Anywhere I have created separateness, I fuse.
I allow this light of divine nectar and sweet healing to harmonize, to unify, to connect, to remind me I am wholeness forever.
I am connectedness always.
I am radiance.
I am good humor.
I am forgiveness.
I am kindness.
I am caring.
I am responsiveness.
I trust myself to listen to the body, to navigate this divine vehicle as a pure expression of the One.
I trust myself to listen to the heart, to work with spiritual honesty with the human feelings that I have, offering them into this light, allowing myself to gain wisdom and clarity and insight, allowing myself to let go of resistance, unwillingness, resentment.
I trust myself to work with my patterns of thinking, to choose to focus on being seated in the Kingdom of Heaven rather than the kingdom of sleep.
I choose to be awake always.
I trust myself to work to transform the deep, unconscious patterns that I have been carrying and have not been able to see.
I trust myself.
Even the deepest wounds are not separate from the One. Even in the deepest of wounds is divine glory and, when we know and feel that, we are always in the presence of the One. We are always awake and aware, always in contact with reality, always living the love of the heart, the supreme power of humankind.
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