By Margie (Maitreyi) Wilsman

When Gurudevi Nirmalananda’s online Meditation Club launched in March 2020, I joined immediately.  More than two years later, I am still a dedicated member.  The benefits just keep coming from my early morning meditation with our beloved Shaktipat Guru. Our online Meditation Club meets every day of the week!  Gurudevi offers us a reading, we chant, and then she leads us into meditation.  An hour later she lovingly closes our Meditation Club session.

One of my Svaroopa^® yoga students jokingly asked, “Isn’t two years long enough?  Isn’t it time to return to previous enjoyments?”  “Yikes, just the opposite,” I wanted to shout!  Yet I replied calmly that my staying is due to the scientific learning principle that meditation teaches meditation.  I even repeated the principle:  Meditation teaches meditation.

This yoga student knows about my previous work at a university, training K-16 teachers of math.  Math is complex and multilayered.  So I could share that the principle holds when you are learning meditation.  You only get part way from book learning that is accompanied by short-term, occasional practice.  Even when you are someone for whom math comes easy, you never know how far you can go.  You don’t know how grand and glorious your attainments can be.  

You must continue with uninterrupted study, practice and devotion over a long time.  The same is true for learning to meditate.  You meditate consistently, devotedly and for years to learn to meditate.  Then you attain grand and glorious benefits that you could never have imagined.

My two years of daily early morning meditation with Gurudevi have shifted me 180 degrees inward.  More and more, I live life from the depths of who I am on the inside.  Now meditation is not just something I do when Zooming into Meditation Club.  Meditation is an inner state of beingness.  It oozes out, permeating my changed view of a good life.  

The changes embody the nature of my own Self, called Shiva.  Shiva is the cosmic reality of multidimensional universes.  Yet I still live in my same rural Wisconsin home.  I teach in the same yoga center where I’ve served the community since 2005.

After being closed for 22 months, I reopened recently.  During those 22 months, I shifted profoundly into experiencing my Divine Essence: Who I “Be” on the inside.  I am Shiva, the One Reality, the Cosmic Consciousness that existed before the world existed.  Timeless, infinite, formless, Shiva has taken form as me — and you and everyone else and everything.

Now, mystical experiences of my inner nature and realms don’t happen only during Meditation Club.  As I bump into conflicts, struggles and turmoil, I recognize them as normal and ever-existent.  I pause, shift and look for the Divine that is hidden beneath.  I realize that everything is yoga and provides a yoga lesson to me.  Then I can settle within, into the sacred silence of Who I “Be.”

Attaining meditation is my life goal.  Meditation is complex and multilayered.  You never know the glory and ecstasy of attaining meditation until you delve inside.  Then the layers blocking the way to Self-Realization unravel.  For this inner journey, Gurudevi provides support:  infinite Grace and Shakti-powered tools.  Meditation Club is one of those energy-charged tools I continue to use.