After many years of practicing Sahaja Yoga Meditation, I am still free to meditate or not, as I see fit. Whenever I sit down and take a few minutes to get into the state of meditation, I notice a difference. My day goes better.
However, when I sit with other people and we all get into a state of meditation together, I notice a much bigger difference. Then I feel like a run-down rechargeable battery that has been fully recharged.
Sahaja Meditation is based on our experience, like a taste or physical sensation. Some people are content to read about, say, chocolate. But some people want to actually taste the chocolate and see for themselves.
The state of meditation is a state of complete enjoyment. The physical sensation we feel and enjoy in Sahaja Meditation is complete inner silence and physical relaxation. From this enjoyment, this experience, we develop our understanding about the meditation and about ourselves.
Looking at the glory of nature helps to relax the mind and the body.
The Hudson River, viewed from Yonkers, New York
Our hearts work better when we’re relaxed, too. Practicing Sahaja Meditation seems to create an immense amount of power to do good. This power gets unleashed as acts of kindness, generosity, patience, and spending more time with other people listening instead of speaking.
The power manifests quietly. It’s expressed in the wordless gesture of reaching out a hand and holding the hand of another human being and feeling the absolute purity and dignity of the other person flowing in. It shows itself not by the individual acts of expressing love, but in the accumulation of them: In the inexhaustible, ongoing, ever-flowing quantity and exquisite quality of those acts. Giving love to other people then generates more of the power, the energy, within the one who is giving it.
I suspect that our brains work better when we’re relaxed. When we get outside, away from our computer screens and cubicles, and sit and look at a lake, our brains have a chance to relax.
I think that in that relaxed state is when we will discover answers. Problems will find solutions. Riddles will be solved. Eurekas will happen.
We relax when we feel good. We feel good when we’re loved.
It has taken me a long, long time to accept that, even knowing what was really going on inside of me, my friends still want to spend time with me. They still respect, cherish, and love me. After a childhood of emotional impoverishment, I find it an ongoing daily miracle that today I am so loved, respected and adored. After being so closed up and judgmental in my younger days, I can never fully take for granted the transformation in my personality, that I really am capable of giving support, compassion, and wisdom to other people.
All the little steps up, out of the darkness, are all milestones. Any one of them is amazing. Taken together, I am not able to fully articulate the result of all those little steps, but it’s something like ecstasy and bliss. In the state of Sahaja Meditation I am silent, peaceful, content, and secure.