Grace and Stillness

Śaktipāta can be defined as the descent of grace and knowledge, and Kuṇḍalinī is the mechanism through which that descent works within us to reveal higher consciousness. As Kuṇḍalinī rises in our psychic body, it peels away the layers of obstruction that obscure our true nature. But we must remain diligent in our spiritual practice, so that as Kuṇḍalinī exposes some pattern in us, we don’t allow that energy to feed back into and reinforce that same pattern.

This type of inner limitation is simply energy repeating itself in the same dimension. When we become aware of a deep pattern in ourselves and choose to not act on it, we no longer reinforce the very energy that created and sustained it. Instead, when we pull the energy back into the central channel (the suṣumṇa), the pattern gets dissolved.

This is how our own energetic patterns can become our nourishment, our fuel for rising above the level in us in which that constriction exists. Like a squirrel gathering nuts, we internalize all this energy because we have one single purpose in mind: to discover inner joy.  

The Power of Stillness 

Stillness of action generates a dynamic power that we can use as fuel. If we no longer spend our energy by projecting it outward, it is available as a potent force that can power the ascent of our consciousness. We’re managing and channeling our own energy, consciously feeding it into the suṣumṇa, and reinvesting Kuṇḍalinī with the energy it needs to continue to expose, dissolve, and move up through all of the barriers to that ascent.

The obstructions in us are then converted into more fuel to further power the ascent. This is how we create the pathway for Kuṇḍalinī to rise unimpeded, back to its Source, infinite Consciousness.

Everyone wants to know God, but the most valuable insight is to recognize our limitations to that objective so that we can be free of them. When we are still, we can be aware of the level of consciousness we act from, or are about to act from. We can have knowledge of what we really need to be free of, and we can then use our will in service of that freedom. 

Stilling our action is not merely a question of arresting specific activity but of recognizing that we do things from a feeling of being incomplete. We demand that life be as we wish it to be in order to feel whole, and we attempt to exert that control through our actions. Neither the action itself nor the recognition of its motivation, however, can change whether we feel complete.

Uncovering that truth reveals our limitations, but it also allows us to change. We see the level of awareness from which we engage our lives. When we are still enough to really look at that, we can understand that we don’t have to act or not act in order for our level of consciousness to change. 

Get Off the Merry-Go-Round

The experience of saṃsāra, the repeating cycle of birth, life, and death (i.e., reincarnation) in conditional reality, is embedded within human beings, and it is fueled by self-serving, willful action, which creates karma. Experiencing life through that filter, there is always misunderstanding and some sense of failure in it. Yet we keep trying to experience life on that level.

Why not find a different consciousness? Really reach inside, and let go. This is the point of meditation: to make contact with a place inside that’s flying above saṃsāra. We find that place and we open to it, connect to it, feel it, breathe it, and allow it to breathe us.

It is both difficult and extremely simple to make the choice to be still enough to recognize what dimension our awareness functions in. Then there’s no more struggle. We do, however, need to engage in the spiritual practices we have been given, which allow us to stop the action of repeating our patterns and then consume and transform the energy that underlies the impulse to act.

Thought and Action

The energy of action pertains not only to what we do, but to what we think. The most powerful actions we perform are those driven by thought. Unfortunately, we say and do many things we don’t mean. While thoughts may be dangerous, the actions we take driven by our thoughts are worse, because they can cause real damage to our lives.  

When our patterns come up, not acting on them is like letting all the air out of a balloon. It’s gone; the energy has been released from it. The same pattern may come up again, but not acting on it is always the first line of defense. If you can still your action, you can understand the pattern, and not just what you ordinarily do in the pattern, but where it arises from in you. In what level of constriction of your own consciousness is this pattern still embedded?  

In stillness, we can learn everything about ourselves. We can understand that our consciousness is compacted within lifetimes of constriction. That is a vital insight. We’ve all had that experience of mental and emotional pressure building up in a difficult situation, and instead of walking away, we act on it. But that action has now just reinforced and re-entrenched the same pattern, whereas if we had gotten still we would have had the opportunity to use our discriminating awareness to see the dynamic from a different perspective.  

Disciplined Self-Awareness

This very willingness to pull ourselves out of emotion, to be disciplined enough to not act on thought is critical. We can only do that through developing the capacity to recognize when we are expressing pattern, tension, and self-rejection. Only then do we have the choice to not act.

This is the path of consciously managing our actions. While stillness is the solution to all problems, it’s difficult to reach into stillness if we’re creating noise, if we’re caught in tension, or if we’re trapped in our mind and emotions.  

We recognize we function from ego by being aware of our actions, particularly the effect they have on our own and other people’s state. In this way, our actions have a purpose, which is the discovery of the source of action, and the consciousness from which it arises. Then all our actions have inherently built within them the intention to truly know ourselves.

To find that knowledge within our actions requires a degree of stillness and self-reflective awareness as we move through life. The intention to observe our actions as the means to knowledge eliminates the idea that there’s any separation between what we want to know and what we do. In this way, every action we perform is fueled by the intention to know our highest Self.