Category Archives: About Gurudevi

My Shaktipat Experience

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By Chelsea (Rajñi) King

With each Shaktipat experience, my ability to receive what Gurudevi gives is greater.  This time, I received a promise of the state that I can live in all the time.  For the whole weekend and beyond, this experience was tangible and accessible.

During chant and meditation on Friday evening, the concentration of yogic energy (shakti) was palpable.  I felt light, easy and upright.  My mind was mantra.  I wrote in my journal after meditation: “…aware of the One being me that is ME.”

The next day, during the first Shaktipat by touch, Gurudevi stayed with her finger on my forehead for what seemed like a long time.  I felt supported and like she was taking care of me.  After a bit, I felt a subtle arising from tail to top. Kundalini realigned my head on top of my spine.  The density of my mind dissipated.  

My mind felt lighter, with my body comfortable and relaxed.  Blissful and aware, I settled into a deep, easy state. Thoughts were floating in and out of my mind along with mantra.  My body felt fuzzy, undefined, blurry.  When I opened my eyes, I was aware of seeing from an unusual depth within.  Mantra continued inside without effort.

Later in the day, we received Shaktipat by will.  My experiences from earlier continued.  Kundalini was moving in me, supporting me from the inside as I sat upright and easy.  Again, I felt at ease physically, mentally and emotionally. Mantra spontaneously arose the whole time.  

These experiences remind me of where this path is taking me.  As well, they propel me further along.  Shaktipat is such a gift!

Shaktipat Retreats

Pleasure, Happiness & Bliss

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

At the end of a busy day, you look for something pleasurable to do. You may even have sought out pleasure during your day. Your choice of foods and drinks, maybe going for a walk or taking a nap, filling your ears with music or your eyes with beauty – pleasure seeking is a dominant theme in most people’s lives. Why?

To find out why, simply refrain from pleasure when you feel the need. Notice how you feel without a sensory indulgence, including any discomfort in your body as well as your emotional state. You may also find that your mind is crazy-busy. No wonder you want something to distract you!

Pleasure is a pathway to happiness. When you do something pleasurable, you get happy for a short while. When the happiness ends, you need another indulgence to trigger a few more moments of happiness. Like a frog, you hop from one thing to another, seeking brief moments of happiness. Bliss is better.  It lasts longer than happiness.

Mystical bliss is hidden in every pleasure… (read more)

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Leaps & Bounds

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Breakthroughs are not dependent on receiving Shaktipat.  Grace is not so limited.  Grace is part of life, always available. 

You’ve been lifted out of your small-s self so many times by Divine Grace.  Shaktipat is the form of Grace that awakens your inner meditative energy, so the upliftment keeps coming, again and again, every time you meditate.  It arises within.

While Svaroopa® yoga specializes in Shaktipat, you were uplifted and sheltered by Grace before yoga.  Your life has had many moments of Grace.  Like a child sitting on daddy’s shoulders, Grace shows you what you could not see.  Yet you still have to come down to earth and go through the process of growing into your own future. 

It’s easier to navigate to your future when you’ve seen where you’re going, and even easier when you have a GPS.  Yoga’s teachings provide both:  the description of your goal as well as how you get there.  They describe levels and stages that can help you understand where you’re at, and give you practices that help you make the next leap forward. 

That’s what I’m presenting in this Telecourse – the levels and stages of your upliftment.  It tends to happen in leaps and bounds.

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Sutra on Pain Avoidance

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Pain is part of life.  This is why most of your energy goes into pain avoidance or pleasure seeking.  Fortunately, yoga excels at both!   

The physical practices of yoga are incredibly pleasurable, though you may go through a learning curve before you discover this. 

Especially when you are in-person classes, your teacher can adapt the pose to your body’s readiness as well as give you a prop or adjustment that melts through your accumulated tensions.  Svaroopa® yoga excels at this.  Regular practice of yogic breathing and the poses protects you from future pain in a magical way. 

Yoga’s meditative practices focus on getting you past your mental and emotional pains.  Using the enlivened mantra of this tradition cuts through your inner turbulence and carries you deeply within.  You find your deeper essence, what yoga calls “your own Self.”  Once you’ve experienced the inner infinity of your own Self, you have a different perspective on life and its events.  It’s easy to agree with the book title, that it’s all small stuff. 

That’s the gist of this sutra, a concise teaching with a great promise: 

Future pain can and should be avoided. 

Heyam duhkham anaagatam. 

— Yoga Sutras 2.16 

My elders expected to be in pain as they aged.  When I tried to give them a few yogic tricks that would diminish or relieve their pain, they said, “No thanks, honey.  I’m old.  I’m supposed to hurt.”  The sage Patanjali disagrees.  He not only promises that you can avoid pain, but that you should.  Good news! 

How do you avoid pain?  While yoga poses and breathing practices help you with your body, meditation is the key.  This is Patanjali’s focus, getting you past your mind so you experience the greater reality within.  All the yogic sages throughout time have focused on meditation as well as how to bring your own Self with you into life. 

Instead, our sense of self gets locked into worldly definitions. When I was in my twenties, my parents said it was time for me to get my boxes out of their garage.  I had completely forgotten about those old possessions, childhood treasures. One box was full of stuffed animals.  As I unpacked them, I was shocked to see how meaningless they were.  Yet they had meant everything to me when I was 12.  What happened?  I outgrew them. 

So many things have come and gone in your life.  You’ve already learned how to move on.  Patanjali says you can use this ability now, right in the midst of whatever you are currently going through.  Recognize that the ticking clock is moving on.  It’s time to outgrow your old needs and dependencies.  It’s time to grow into a new you. 

It’s meditation that makes this easy because you experience the greatness of your own essence.  When you tune into your own Self, the profound depth of pure Beingness supports you from the inside.  Now, whatever is happening on the outside, you take it in stride. 

You are more than these events seem to make of you.  You are more than others understand you to be.  You are so much more. 

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Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Shaktipat Is an Invitation

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By Judy (Jagruti) Goodkin

Interviewed by Lori (Priya) Kenney

I felt like I was getting an invitation when I received Shaktipat from Gurudevi.  When she placed her thumb on my forehead, it was as if she said, “Follow me.”  In her Q&A session later, someone asked about discipline with yoga practices. Gurudevi’s encouraging response has stayed with me.  It feels like the time for me to be more disciplined.  This willingness to be more disciplined is powerful, both in daily life and my practices.

At a recent Swami Sunday, Gurudevi talked about the gift of Shaktipat.  She gives the gift, but we have to open it and look inside.  It feels like I’m truly opening Gurudevi’s gift of Shaktipat and looking inside.  I’m taking Gurudevi’s “Living Sutras” course.  The course is very deep, and I am experiencing much awakening within.  Ordinarily, I would have more resistance to course assignments.  Yet now I feel very open to them.  I am even adding more than is being asked for.  My awareness of what I need to do for my body and mind is greater.

I appreciate how the Ashram Swamis also help us process our Shaktipat experiences.  Each time, their answers help me greatly.  I asked Samvidaananda about Kundalini in my meditation.  I had been waiting for Kundalini to stop moving me so I could meditate.  Samvidaanada said, “The Kundalini is your meditation.  Just repeat mantra while that is going on.”  

When I returned home and meditated, I let Kundalini have her way.  I experienced powerful movements.  During these kriyas, I was grateful for Samvidaananda’s guidance, and I repeated mantra.  Within a week, my body settled down.  I still get kriyas in meditation, but they are gentler now. 

I’m so grateful for Gurudevi’s invitation.  Opening the gift of Shaktipat has me settling into a deeper place.  Everything I do feels more purposeful.

Shaktipat Retreat begins 9/29
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A Juicy Life

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Juice squirts out of the ripe peach I cut into, dripping down my chin as I bite into a chunk.  Yum!  It’s called rasa — the juice, the nectar or blissful essence.  Similarly, every chef will tell you that it’s the sauce that makes the dish.  In the same way, you want your life to be juicy, vibrant and meaningful.  Yogis get their rasa from the inside.

Meditation is the direct path to the rasa of Self-Knowingness. By delving into your own inner dimensionality, you tap into the source of life, the power of love, the delight of creativity and the peace of timelessness.  These fill you from within.

Yoga poses and breathing practices make this inner exploration easier. Svaroopa® Yoga poses target your spinal tensions, dissolving them to open up interior space in your body.  You breathe easier.  You get taller as you get happier.  You move freely as your joints glide due to the synovial fluid lubricating them more effectively.  It’s called rasa.

Your laugh is deeper and more frequent.  Your eyes shine with light, especially after meditating.  Your heart overflows and you act on your compassionate impulses.  Your synapses fire, making connections that give you…

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Yoga for Upper Back Pain

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

You’re hiding your heart.  When your upper back rounds over, it crunches your neck and can cause a lot of pain.  It’s all because you’re hiding your heart – not only from others, but also from yourself.  When what you really want is for your heart to be open.  Open and safe, that is.

If you are currently living in circumstances that require you to hide your heart, I support you in necessary self-protection.  But if those circumstances were in the past, it’s time to begin unraveling the spinal tensions that you installed when needed.  Are they needed now?

While yoga poses and breathing practices do help, it is the deeper inner experience that makes the biggest difference.  When you use poses and yogic breathing as the ancient system recommends, they dissolve deep physical tensions as well as mental-emotional reactivity.  As these dissolve, your deeper essence is revealed, called svaroopa in Sanskrit, meaning your own capital-S Self.

Svaroopa is your own Divine Essence, the source of all healing, creativity, love and joy.  As you settle inward, the past dissolves and you become aware of being aware. Your own Self knows your own Self.  In this inner Knowingness, your body begins a cosmic reset, dissolving the old patterns that don’t serve you anymore.

Now your heart is full, filled from the inner source. From that fullness, you have a new level of clarity about your life and your own being.  From that inner fullness, you have something worth sharing.  Now you’re ready for your heart to show, for all you really ever wanted to do was to share from your essence.  Yoga empowers you to live this way.

Yoga of the Heart
Therapeutic Yoga

Yoga of the Heart with Gurudevi 

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Online Beginning September 14

Gurudevi Nirmalananda walks you through the inner exploration of your own heart to its core.  This experience, plus the wisdom of the sages, empowers your ability to bring it into your life and relationships in the way you always wanted.

This online course gives you both the experience of your heart and the understanding of your experience.  Together, they mature into profound wisdom, in which you can base your life.

Gurudevi’s teachings are like seeds that go deep.  The roots grow, the buds come on, and then the flowers bloom.. — Loretta F.

Yoga of the Heart

Telecourse:  Leaps & Bounds

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Learn and grow in this multi-media course, with substantive articles and teaching videos, all for you to do at your own pace.  Gurudevi has created a sweet, yet powerful inner process that opens you to your Self.

This course helped me learn to embrace life’s inevitable challenges, learn practical skills for handling them and welcome the resulting spiritual growth. – Marlene G.

Her teaching audios in the original “Leaps & Bounds” were profound.  Now with her videos, the Leaps & Bounds teachings will have even more profound impact. – Ellan C.

Be filled up by classical teaching stories as well as verses from Sanskrit texts. As always, Gurudevi brings it alive with her personal sharings, making the process so understandable and accessible.

Leaps & Bounds
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Wonderful Am I!

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

When you know your own Self, jubilation bursts forth.  Glory and glee.  Gladness arises from within.  You can raise your arms to the sky and shout out loud, as Janaka did:

“Aho aham!  Wonderful am I!  I adore myself!” 

— Ashtavakra Samhita 2.11

He repeats this jubilant cry in verse 12, again in verse 13 and once more in verse 14, each time describing more about his expanded inner state.  It’s almost like the Sanskrit words explode off the page.

This is a significant upgrade from the way you usually feel.  The upgrade is what yoga is all about. First yoga makes you feel better: physically, mentally and emotionally.  Then it opens up a new dimension of inner experience, bliss arising from Source.  The bliss of Consciousness fills you completely, shining into every corner, illumining every shadow.

Freed from your needs, fears and memories, you are set in motion to shine your light into the world in whatever way will best serve others.  Best of all, you see the light shining in them, even when they cannot see it themselves.  This is enlightenment.  It is your destiny — if you so choose.

King Janaka was a seeker.  He yearned for Self-Realization.  He often invited forest sages in for conclaves, listening to them expound through day and night, though he had not yet attained his great desire.  When the young sage Ashtavakra arrived for one of these gatherings, King Janaka was not impressed.  Ashtavakra‘s body was bent (vakra) in eight (ashta) places.  He was a cripple.

Like most people, the king equated beauty and strength with higher Consciousness.  Plus Ashtavakra was only twelve years old.  But once he began expounding with the other sages, Janaka realized that this was the Guru he’d been waiting for.  Ashtavakra gave Janaka what he had been seeking, all at once, in a Divine moment while Janaka was dismounting from his horse.  I call it a giant leap into Consciousness.

The Ashtavakra Samhita is a dialogue between these two great beings.  Ashtavakra gives teachings, then Janaka describes them as his own personal experience, that he is:

Eternal, ever existent reality
Being God, being all
Having a body, not bound by the body
All-pervasive
All-knowing, absolute creative power, source of all
Possessing nothing, yet owning and being all.

When you know your own Self, jubilation bursts forth.  Glory and glee.  Gladness arises from within.  All you need is a Guru who can get you beyond the theory to the experience.  That’s what I got from my Guru – a giant leap into Consciousness.

This is why I call my new Telecourse, “Leaps & Bounds.”  It’s about the light of Consciousness shining forth from within, burning away all your limitations, and showing you the same light shining in all.  It’s a whole new way to see yourself!

Leaps & Bounds