By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

You don’t have to become somebody or something. You are already radiant Consciousness. All you need to do is uncover it. Yoga practices essentially subtract away the stuff that gets in the way. They remove the blockages until your own capital-S Self is revealed. 

This is why, at the beginning and at the end of programs, I bow to your own Divine Essence. I chant: “OM svaroopa svasvabhava namo namah.” Namo means “I bow to,” and namah means “I bow to.” So I translate namo namah as “again and again I bow.” 

To what do I bow? To svaroopa, your own Divine Essence. Yet while I am bowing to you, I am bowing to my own Divine Essence. Because there is only one Divine Essence. The One Reality is being each of us and all of us at the same time. 

It is like light that shines through a window with many panes; the reflection on the floor looks like different squares. Yet there is only one light. The one light takes on all the different shapes so it can shine in all the different forms. The One Reality has become you, me and all that exists. 

In this phrase, I love the word svasvabhavah. It comes from Abhinavagupta, a Kashmiri Shaivite sage who lived a thousand years ago. He wrote…

— Excerpt from Yoga: Embodied Spirituality, pages 17‒19