There is only one response to Grace and that is gratitude and surrender. Nityananda said, “Surrender everything that keeps you from Śiva,” and that’s an absolute requirement for true spiritual growth.

Here’s a secret: It’s not what you’ve surrendered that qualifies you; it’s what you haven’t surrendered that disqualifies you. And it is only gratitude that makes our choice to surrender a real possibility, because only from gratitude do we gain the capacity to face the perceived adversity we live with day after day. With gratitude, we can actively look for the changes in ourselves that are required, and we can dissolve all our resistance to making them.

When those poignant moments of inner transformation are made available to us, we won’t change if we’re not grateful for the opportunity to have some part of us that binds our awareness to be removed, and to be freed from that. Our tendency to fight and struggle reflects our resistance to growth. Those are defense mechanisms we put up ag...

Jīvanmukti is a beautiful Sanskrit term that means “freedom in this lifetime.” Let us understand, celebrate, and explore how this state can be realized in our own lives. If someone said to you, “Unconditional freedom is the divine right of every individual; to live in that state is to live in Divine Presence,” how would you react?

If we want freedom, we must feel, “That is my right. I believe that.” Unfortunately, for most of us, this is not something we truly believe is our right—and therefore we do not seek it. We are not prepared to become a professional at spiritual work in order to achieve it.

Realization can be described as the complete immersion into Unity, a state in which the only experience is one of unconditional joy and love. These words hint at the nature of true freedom, but words cannot express the reality of living in God’s Presence. My teacher Rudi once said that so much of the challenge to our realization is our inability to imagine it.

If you try to imagine extrao...

Helen Keller lived most of her life in physical darkness. She was deaf and blind, and only learned to communicate with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Yet, despite the restrictions she faced, Helen found the light of consciousness within her.

In Keller’s book, Light in My Darkness, she wrote:

As I wander through the dark, encountering difficulties, I am aware of encouraging voices that murmur from the spirit realm. I sense a holy passion pouring down from the springs of Infinity. I thrill to music that beats with the pulses of God. Bound to suns and planets by invisible cords, I feel the flame of eternity in my soul. Here, in the midst of the everyday air, I sense the rush of ethereal rains. I am conscious of the splendor that binds all things of earth to all things of heaven. Immured by silence and darkness, I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold — when death sets me free.

In an earlier book, The World I Live In, she wrote:

There is in the blind as i...

Like the continual flow of a waterfall pouring into the basin below it, the liquid light of the Goddess Kuṇḍalinī perpetually articulates Herself as the flow of life, breath, and awareness in each individual - simultaneously filling that individuated expression of Herself with Universal Consciousness.

The purpose of Rudi’s fundamental practice of the double-breath is that of clearing the suṣumṇa, internalizing our awareness and our energy, and creating a flow within us. By bringing this vital energy to the base of the spine and allowing it to rise, it clears the suṣumṇa, which is the outer dimension of the central channel. Its efficacy creates the subtle capacity to feel the different dimensions of the center channel that rise to the center of the head, to the crown, and above. The single-breath exercise is the maturation of that extraordinary practice, and it may not be as easily accessible to you if you’re new to our practice. Doing the single-breath does not mean that we don’t do t...

Discipline is our devotion in action, and if we truly love God and want to be happy, then work and discipline are a joy. The living of that realization is unconditional love, devotion, gratitude, and the stillness of surrender, masterfully interlaced with an in-depth inner practice, selfless service, conscious choice, and disciplined action — all revealing the effulgence of the Heart we wish to live from every day of our life.

Nondual wisdom teachings always begin by articulating what is called the darśana, or “view” of the tradition. The key to nondual Tantric practices is exactly what the description implies: nonduality. This means there is no distinction between Spirit and that which It manifests. Conversely, there is no loss of that Spirit as manifestation disappears. In the picture, above, you cannot tell whether the woman is manifesting into form or dissolving into non-form. It’s a graphic way of expressing that everything in creation arises and subsides within the Heart of God,...

My last blog discussed the statement from the Śiva Sutras that said, Consciousness is everything, and the flip side of this precept is that everything is Consciousness.

To continue understanding what this means, let’s look at the term Chit-Śakti, which is the power of Consciousness. It signifies that Consciousness is not inert but contains an inherent power, and the most exalted power is the capacity to know Itself as Consciousness. 

Because we are not separate from the Divine, this means we also have that same power to know ourselves as Consciousness. That knowledge is present even as we also know our limited aspects, including all our problems, tensions, thoughts, and emotions. In fact, the suggestion is that every one of those are energies, and that every one of them are portals back to knowing our highest Self. 

Śiva and Śakti, Consciousness and energy, are one, not two. This leads us to the secret of nondual practice: that we can use Śakti to know Consciousness. We can penetrat...

One of the most important wisdom teachings within the nondual Tantric tradition is the Śiva Sutras. They are a compendium of the declaration that Consciousness is everything, and that we have the means of knowing that, called upayas or practices. 

Weaving through that entire ancient text is the understanding that Kuṇḍalinī is the means. It is the arousal, awakening, and liberation of Kuṇḍalinī within an individual that enables that person to know that Consciousness is everything. Kuṇḍalinī is the power of Consciousness that has expressed Itself as us and therefore has the inherent ability to know Itself within our own awareness.

The Śiva Sutras begins with a bold statement: Consciousness is Everything. Then, one of the first sutras continues: Consciousness, or Chit-Śakti, is the energy of Consciousness Itself, the capacity of self-awareness. 

Consciousness has two, non-separable aspects—Śiva and His power, Kuṇḍalinī-Śakti, through which He generates all things. All that is manifeste...

Life must be consumed whole, with all its pain, joy, and sorrow.
—Swami Rudrananda

Students sometimes ask if our practice involves spiritual bypassing. They are unclear about how the energetic processing of experience fits in with what might be called the “human” aspect of their lives. My response is that, through our sādhana, we learn that nothing is to be rejected, and that emotions are both a level of consciousness within us and energies that we can learn to process.

The intention and eventual fruit of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana is the liberation of kuṇḍalinī — the freeing of our individuated awareness from its perceived separation from its source, Consciousness. We seek to know ourselves as that eternal pure Consciousness. This is inherently possible because there is no distinction between us and God, except in our experience, in the propensity for viewing life from a limited understanding and not seeing a higher one.

My teacher Rudi explained that most people fail to engage the fullness ...

The paint-by-numbers image says, “Your life, a Divine Masterpiece.” It's depicting Consciousness (Śiva) and energy (Śakti) as the very powers that paint life, expressing you as the embodiment of Life Itself. 

What's being conveyed on the canvas is that as we're each walking through the terrain of our own life—with all its valleys, mountains, and sunshine—and every element is part of the perfect life that has been given to us so that we may come to realize we are the Divine made flesh.

The very Life that Consciousness is expressing as you is creating within Itself the perfection of Its own fullness. Yet we often lose sight of that fullness when we insist that finishing the painting means that it should look exactly how we envision it to be. When we try to mold life to fit our image of the ideal, we forget that we are the expression of Consciousness, which is already displaying Its own perfection and joy. 

The Path Through Life 

The miracle of life is that it has chosen to express th...

Pure Motive – Part Two

There is a basic question at the foundation of any genuine spiritual life, and it's not the one most people think to ask. It's not what practice should I do, or how often, or even how do I practice correctly? It's simply: why am I doing this at all?

The nondual tantric tradition posits that genuine transformation depends not only on the techniques we use, but on the intention and orientation behind them. There is a world of difference between practicing for control or attainment, or to escape one’s problems, versus practicing with devotion for clarity and revelation.

That difference is not a small one and the reason we practice matters as much as how we do it.

When we practice in order to gain control over our emotions and circumstances, or even our spiritual progress, we are subtly reinforcing the very thing we are trying to transcend. We’re strengthening the ego's conviction that it is in charge, or that it should be. We’re not dissolving the illusion of co...