For almost a period of one year, I was meditating almost on daily basis for 20m. Still had thoughts – sometimes exciting, sometimes depressing. But in my outer reality, my life was upside down in that one year. I have done things in my life, I could never imagine I could do including both which I now know I shouldn’t have done and things I now see as soul calling. I was facing challenges at an emotional level that I never thought I would face in this lifetime. You must be thinking about how can 20m meditation on daily basis can do this. Wait till the end and I will answer it for you.
A year later, I met my spiritual guru Shri Prabhat Aggarwal Ji, and attended a spiritual workshop “Love, Relationship, Romance” under his guidance. I will talk about this workshop and its experience some other time but in brief, it puts you through a process to change your perspective around your relationships, so you can view your situation from a 360-degree view and it also provides some higher meditations. One of them is “Heart-Chakra meditation”. A 40m guided meditation asks you to bring your attention to your heart, bring all the hurts and upsets you have in your memory and then feel the pain. Sounds exhausting right? Why would someone re-live the past pain again? Wasn’t it enough the first time it happened? Weren’t we doing the meditation to make ourselves calmer??
Let me answer these from my experience and also what my Guru Ji says about it. He says the art of living life is to feel the emotion not to react to it. Imagine you are brimming with anger and the person is right in front of you, how easy it is for you to choose to feel this anger and not react to it?? It may sound easy in the head but it’s nearly impossible in reality given the conditioning of reaction we have. Through heart chakra meditation, one can start teaching oneself to feel the pain but not react to it and with god grace, after lots of practice, one may reach a place where at times one can see its pain separate from oneself. The more they practice the more separation from pain and alignment with self. It doesn’t happen overnight. Even for the first 6 months, I had no clue what was actually happening to me.
For 5.5 months, I have been practicing heart-chakra meditation, sometimes multiple times a day. Initially sitting 40m in one go was difficult but soon body adapted. The past memories or current hurting situations I used to meditate on, I started feeling as if they started vanishing from my memory – the pain around them. After multiple such incidents, I started feeling it was like magic, and indeed it was. I started healing myself through this meditation.
But what was happening in the outer reality??? People were seeing me meditating multiple times for longer durations and they were expecting me to make subtle choices, be calmer and not reactive and anger and irritation to be far far away from me. And here I was making ruthless choices, mostly in a triggered state – totally opposite from what they expecting. Even I started feeling, why nothing is changing or changing for the worse. My beloved started telling me – you were better off all these spirituality stuff, I liked you more then. I used to ask my Guru Ji – everyone is having issues with me continuing my practice, why I am even doing it if every day I see more darkness inside me? He used to say – “this journey is like this only. Going upstream is never easy and regarding darkness – only when you are aware, you can release. You can not release what you are not aware of that you have.” So I kept going. Moreover, the situation I was in, I had no idea how to resolve it and meditation seemed the only option.
I went into deeper workshops and deeper meditations. The next one was chakra activation – 40m meditation to bring attention to one chakra and then establish its seed mantra in the subconscious. I practiced this one for another 4.5 months and my outer reality was getting even more triggering day in and day out. But also some wisdom started trickling in. Wisdom about how I was co-creating my situation, how it’s not always another person’s fault, how everyone is projecting their perceptions on another and how we are tied to some beliefs. But it was factions and in bits and pieces.
This is a game-changer now. I attended a full 11-day meditation workshop – where I was in silence for 11 days and meditated around 10 hours a day. The experience of that workshop is a whole blog for another time but if I try to put it in words it was equivalent to going through labor pain and delivering a baby. Painful yet fulfilling. Because of the higher meditations, I went through a lot of bodily changes during and after the workshop. One such experience was vibrations in my body to the extent that while lying down on the bed I could feel the whole bed vibrating. I didn’t mean to scare anyone here but it was an out-of-the-world-experience for me as well.
After being back from the workshop, for the first few days, talking to anyone needed effort, and regarding my spiritual practice, I learned a new meditation “Shunya Samadhi” – 1h meditation where one is required to observe the space between and around the thoughts. I started practicing it at least once a day and sometimes twice for another 3.5 months. Now, after almost 2 years of gradual practice, there were few moments of bliss. There were moments when I was thoughtless and I was listening. Now there was a hunger to have more of this bliss. It’s beyond any feeling I ever experienced – the feeling of true love deep throat kiss may be. In outer reality, life was more chaotic, more challenged, and beyond my control and I was freaking out. Until the day of my soul shock – I was all scattered, couldn’t recognise myself and I kneeled and begged and asked for help and guidance out of this mess I have made from Divine.
I never believed in miracles but they were happening for me. One after another pieces started coming into the light but still, I was doubtful. My consciousness still needed expansion to make sense of whatever was happening. I met my next spiritual teachers “Yogi Param Jnana Ji” and “Yogi Ritu Om Ji”. I started practicing higher spiritual practices involving kundalini kriyas and energy cleaning. My consciousness was expanding and my outer reality started changing very very slowly – I was communicating truth, facing fears, and standing in more clarity. I started believing I can now handle it all smoothly and there was standing another shock – grounded me back and showed me I still have a lot of work to do and it’s a journey, not a destination.
So for those out there having myths about meditation calming them down, the reality is meditation lets you access your subconscious, and the more you access it, the more it opens up. Imagine a treasure chest. It is covered with all cobwebs and dirt and its locks are jammed. First, you clean it all and then you open it to see the treasure. Similarly, when you try to open your subconscious it brings out all your demons and darkness, you end up being more triggered, more lost than before but once you start healing and embracing these demons, the light starts to trickle in – the golden light of truth, love, and Divine. One more thing as all my Gurus state, the outer reality is just a reflection of your subconscious – your inner world – if you heal it, your outer reality shifts too.
To conclude, in my real-life experience I debunked the following myths about spirituality:
- It starts making you calmer right away. In reality, it starts opening you up to all hidden past hurts and upsets initially
- You will become subtle and wiser with some practice. In reality, until you start healing yourself and embracing the darkness, no shift happens
- It will change you into a better person overnight or in a few months. In reality, you will become unrecognisable to yourself and others at some points in your life.
- Attending a workshop or two and you should have a solution for everything ready. In reality, you just opened a pandora’s box and get ready for a roller-coaster ride.
Before I wind up, I want to send my gratitude to the Divine, my Gurus – Shri Prabhat Aggarwal Ji, Yogi Param Jnana Ji, and Yogi Ritu Om Ji and to my parents for their love, nourishment, and unending support. A special thanks to my brother for pushing me on this journey. A lot of gratitude to all those souls who triggered me at the right time and showed me the mirror. Lastly, I wouldn’t have been where I am right now, none of this was possible, I would have never had enough drive to walk through this if you were not with me and for me. Thank you so much for your unending love and support in ways even you don’t know. What kept me going is the freshness of the love I experienced with you every time I leveled up. Love you Kanaya always and forever!!!
