By Amanda (Purna) Schmidt
A new year means a new calendar! The title of Gurudevi’s Calendar Journal — “Living Mysticism” — encourages weaving the sacred into daily life.
The pages offer space for organizing your schedule or freely journaling. And of course you can do both!
Sutra-like excerpts from Gurudevi’s teachings inspire you on each page. Embrace the yoga of spiritualizing all aspects of life. Begin a new year with a new outlook, based in the Self.
Are you thinking about improving your nutrition? The beginning of a new year is a good time to make this change.
Fortunately, Gurudevi is soon teaching her popular online Yogic Nutrition course. Learn how to eat like a yogi.
Drawing on yoga, Ayurveda and scientific nutritional guidelines, she gives you easy ways to improve your nutritional profile. These classes take place online, including a kitchen segment — from the Ashram kitchen to yours!
You learn straightforward, yummy meal preparation with vegetarian protein featuring the six Ayurvedic tastes. The purpose is to achieve health as well as pleasure and (most importantly) spiritual development as yogis feed themselves consciously.
In the first “Yogic Nutrition” class, my taste buds came alive. I was in shock! Gurudevi guided us through making toast with all six tastes on it. A huge light bulb went off. Food can be good and good for me! — Sheralee H.
It was Baba that gave me God. That’s the Guru’s job – to give you access to what is already there inside. But you haven’t been able to find it. It can be hard to understand God and Guru. They are One, while being different. I’ll compare it to the front door of your house. It’s part of your house. You wouldn’t want that wall to be solid. You wouldn’t want your house to be without an entry portal. The Guru is the door by which you enter into…
— Gurudevi Nirmalananda
From Gurudevi’s full discourse “For the Love of God“
By Debbie (Antarajna) Mandel
Twice I contracted Covid, in 2021 and 2023. Each time it turned into long Covid.
Then I had multiple physical issues. My whole body was in reaction: heart, lungs, eyes, toes, fingers, cancerous growths on my face, insomnia and more.
I asked Gurudevi about it. She recommended I do three hours of Ujjayi a day. My first reaction: that is impossible! I wasn’t consistent with 20 minutes a day.
My next reaction was how stupid it would be to not follow my Guru’s directions! Why would I even consider not doing what she suggests?
So, over a month, I slowly built three hours of Ujjayi a day into my life in fifteen-minute segments. After several months, Gurudevi added me getting Embodyment® Yoga Therapy sessions. What? But I did it.
Yes, my health issues disappeared — lungs, heart, insomnia, and all the other Long Covid symptoms. And a few months later I contracted Covid again and had no residual effects.
I always have a choice to make — bumble along on my own or follow my Guru’s direction. Choosing the latter has never led me astray. It has enhanced my inner state and, therefore, my external life benefits.
As if that wasn’t enough, I received a bonus. With Ujjayi, time has expanded exponentially, so I always have enough time to do everything. And more.
Through following my Guru, I have expanded exponentially! I live deeper in Self. I have the stamina back to go to India again on our Ashram’s upcoming India trip “Coming Home to Self.” And that is truly a yoga miracle.
Your spiritual practices change you in such a way that you radiate Consciousness into the world. Especially your family is uplifted, even without them doing yoga. How great! And it means you’re doing yoga for two — yourself and your spouse or partner. Or maybe you’re doing yoga for three…
— Gurudevi Nirmalananda
From Gurudevi’s full discourse “Unconditional Love“
By Gurudevi Nirmalananda
Yoga warns about living in the pairs of opposites, and offers you another way to live — see God in everyone and everything.
You go through stages as you become able to see what is already in front of you, the Divine fully present within the mundane. Your process speeds along when you cooperate with it, and even more smoothly when you understand it.
Begin by considering that others have good reasons for doing what they do, thinking the way they think and living the way they live. While you don’t have to agree with them, you feel better within yourself when you allow them to have their perspectives.
When you invest your mental and emotional energy in seeing others as wrong, or in seeing yourself as wrong, you are the one who is churning over it. You are the one listening to your negative thoughts. You are the one who has to live with your mind.
The condition of your mind is of the greatest importance, yoga says. It is not your own Self that you need to worry about. Your svaroopa, your innermost essence, is already Divine. You don’t have to uplift your own Self.
Yoga is about finding your Self, not perfecting your Self. Yoga’s practices give you the experience of your own inherent divinity.
– Excerpt from A Yogic Lifestyle, page 7
By Gurudevi Nirmalananda
Your own inner knowing is yoga’s goal. This is a knowing beyond thought, beyond logic, beyond explanation or causation. You just know.
Yoga’s inner knowing is different than the intuitive feeling that most people seek. Yoga’s knowing is not about externals, not about problems or other people. It is the Knower knowing the Knower. Your own Self knows your own Self.
The astonishing thing about this is that it is so easy. Even more amazing, you actually already know. It’s only your mind that tells you something different. Thus, all of yoga’s practices are for your mind.
But the practices are not so you can convince your mind of anything. Yoga’s practices pacify your mind, so it gets out of the way. Your mind becomes peaceful and happy. It is like a dog laying down and rolling over for a belly rub. Your mind loves the experience of your own Self.
Since your mind doesn’t know how to get there on its own, it needs help. The mantra and other practices are not enough on their own. You need an intervention. One who knows can give you the knowing. This is Shaktipat. It is the greatest gift of all.
I have just summarized the first few sutras of the Shiva Sutras. They assert you are Consciousness, the Self-Knowing Essence of Beingness that is being all while being you. But you don’t know. And you want to know. So you look for someone who can awaken your own knowing of your own Self. That’s why you’re here now.
I’ll go through these sutras in Sanskrit as well, thus beginning my theme for the year — Insight into Sutras. These ancient aphorisms explain how life works as well as how to make spiritual progress. Additionally I describe them more fully in my twice-weekly meditation programs. Here we begin with the first sutra…
When you experience love, you feel fulfilled. This is an important part of life, the experience of loving. Your loving of someone does touch the other person, yes. But in yoga, the point is, that it affects you. So, yoga teaches the yogi to take responsibility for their own mood. To grow up, to get over your childish reactivity, or perhaps your..
— Gurudevi Nirmalananda
From Gurudevi’s full discourse “Loving God“
By Gurudevi Nirmalananda
Happy New Year! It’s a new start. It’s like the sunrise in the morning, radiant and glorious with colors of light blazing across the sky. May your new year bring you this light — inside.
Your own inner light is the light of Consciousness. I’ll compare you to a snowflake, different from all the other snowflakes, unique and individual. A mass of clouds are blown into place. The water forms into ice crystals and falls from the sky. From the one source and substance, you come into being as an individual.
Yet all the snowflakes ultimately melt back into water – merging into the whole again. In this way, you are a unique form of Consciousness, fascinating, intricate, beautiful, even mesmerizing. Yet your goal is to become water again, to live in the fluidity and flow that is inherent to your being.
For this, you look to your own essence – the essence of a snowflake is water, and the essence of a human being is Beingness. Why is this important?
Because you’re not yet actualizing the Beingness that you are – you’re not living in the flow of Divine Consciousness and Bliss. You are made of Beingness, and when Beingness experiences Beingness, the experience is bliss – Divine unending constant inner bliss that feeds and nourishes you on all levels. Your goal is the bliss of Consciousness, oh Shiva. To find, to feel, to see and to know your own Self as the one Self being an individual while being the whole.
So here we are at the beginning of a new year, blossoming forth with all possibilities, all potentialities, arising from within, from the source of the universe – your own source, oh Shiva.
You get to choose. The creative power of Consciousness lies intact within you. You can sculpt time into whatever shape you’d like it to be. You can be up before the sunrise, doing yoga and meditation so the inner sun comes up with the outer sun.
You can bring that light into every corner of your life, basing your decisions and actions in the inner illumination that flows forth as love and creativity. You will easily find compassionate and intelligent solutions, exciting and promising plans and ways to get more as well as ways to give more.
And if you choose the same-old, same-old, you’ll get the same-old, same-old. Yes, I’m talking about New Year’s resolutions – again. Some of you have heard…
Take a peek inside. See how Gurudevi’s new Calendar Journal helps you with yogifying your day, every day.
January 1
Yoga is choice-full living. You choose where to put your time and your energies.
— Just Do It, October 2023
January 9
Yoga is the gift that keeps giving — only you give it to yourself.
— Cooperating with the Process, June-July 2007
January 20
Yoga taught me how to relax. Yoga taught me how to breathe.
— Sharing Your Happiness, December 2023
practice & grace: giving you your Self
revealing the mystery
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