What helps in these difficult times.
 
Which seeker does not know this phenomenon? These moments where everything falls apart. But also if you are not a conscious seeker, life is generous enough to let our un-useful toys be taken away from us; be it a partner, possessions, achievements or money.
Why is that and why is it generous?
 
There is a force in the universe that guides us towards liberation, towards transformation, towards a higher evolution.
Many people have different words for that force. I like to call it the universal or cosmic guidance.
Because it guides us towards the new, always optimizing, always wanting the best for us to manifest so that we can reach our potential as a human being and evolve.
 
So the first thing we need to remember, which I need to remember in times like that is :
This is GOOD!! Even though it does not FEEL good, I need to remember that it IS good. Something that I thought good and valuable is no longer serving me, that is why it is falling apart.
When our awareness is not stable in such times, it is easy to identify with the agony, the fear, despair or pain that shows up.
Moreover this is prime time for our inner judge to jump onto the scene and judge us for being in this situation. We start to blame ourselves and this is just another word for self hatred.
There is not greater pain that the pain we inflict upon ourselves in that way. Self hatred is the source of all pain!
Hence my insistence on getting to know your inner judge and learn how to level with this mechanism in us, so that we can stay rooted in our present awareness.

​Is that the real question? Or would it be smarter to ask
Who to be?
 
Being is always here, in a way we always ARE.
But where we are, and what and who do we identify with, makes a huge difference in the experience and quality of life.
 
To discover being is a revolution, it enables us to leave the prison of our personality or ego and live out in the open sky.
 
Even though being is universal, our experience of it is very personal.
If I have to describe mine, I would say that it a sense of vertical alignment, where the head, heart and belly centre are aligned in a vertical way. Connected to heaven and earth.
It is also means that I am fully present inside this body, inside every cell of it.
At the same time it brings an expansiveness, a spaciousness in a horizontal way. The mind is empty and quiet.
And may be the most important aspect of all is that the sense of separation is not here. This sense of “I” and “other”, this sense of loneliness and isolation is not here.
My sense of being an orphan of the universe disappears and is replaced by a deep experience of everything having the same nature and therefore it brings a deep sense of belonging.

I have always been different or at least I have always felt different.
Already as a child I was the over sensitive one, the one that felt and sensed things that other people did not seem to notice.
So I suffered, I was the black sheep. It did not require courage to be different, there was simply no other choice at first.
But of course, I adjusted very fast. Also that seemed beyond choice if I wanted to survive. I became a good girl, suffered in silence and trotted on from one boarding school to the next and then on to being a nurse.
I lost faith in God and religion and by the age of 26 I had received so many blows that I also lost faith in life.
A stroke of luck ( as always it was a boyfriend) brought me to Macrobiotic food, yoga and oriental healing. I started to feel healthy and energetic, that was good,  but I still wasn’t happy.
Another stroke of luck ( many of my customers in the macrobiotic shop started to show up in orange clothes) brought me to Osho.

I remember one of my first experiences of being very well.
I was participating in an awareness intensive retreat and spent the first 24 hours turning round and round in my mind, trying to answer the question: Who am I?
In the process my mind became exhausted and all of a sudden out of nowhere I was somehow outside of the mind.
I saw that turning mind as a very colorful carousel, a great carnival, a never ending movement of thought and emotion, sometimes fun, sometimes sad, sometimes angry or fearful.
I got fascinated with the watching of it. I remember cracking up again and again about the colorfulness of it all. What a show!!
 
And then probably some hours later, another shift happened. I no longer was interested in what I witnessed but in the witnessing itself.
It was as if my whole existence imploded into one huge pool of a unified experience which I later named Being.
 
Just to be here filled my body with a deep silence. My mind became crystal clear, it was as if I could see through the past and future, I became more aware of my body and it was as if it filled with substance. I remember that all of a sudden it felt like I had more weight, I was more grounded and certainly more Here and Now.
In fact it felt like here and now was the only option there had ever been, only I had missed it!!!
 
Great laughter arose when I realized that all my seeking and searching had been in the wrong direction. What a cosmic joke.
All I had ever wanted was here; right here and right now and my body seemed to be the vehicle for it all.
As the awareness intensive retreat took several days there were openings upon openings.
 
At some point I became acutely aware of the spontaneous movement of the universe. It was having its own rhythm, like the waves in the ocean. No one was making the waves yet they were moving. No one was pushing or doing and it all happened in utmost harmony.
It was a big opening and at the time it overwhelmed me cause it was so new and I was not used to being so big.
I saw perfection everywhere, even in war and sickness. I was baffled.
 
 
Over the years the experience of being deepened and became more present in my day-to-day activities. It lost its overwhelming-ness and started to feel more and more natural.
A lot of integration was needed so that the gap between being “in the mind” or being in my personality and being was not so big anymore.
Slowly my personality got infused with the different qualities of being and in that it became more transparent and porous.
 
Now when I stay connected to being, life is easy, everything flows, whatever happens, happens. I meet life as it comes without resistance. When there is no sense of separation there is nothing to resist!!!
There is connectedness. So there is a natural responding to whatever life brings.
 
When I disconnect because of one trigger or another, I bump into things and people, I sense walls, there is separation again.
My mind, who just before, in the experience of being, was a good servant to me, a great help in managing my daily life, bringing the practicalities together for me, takes back its central place as the boss, the one who runs my life.
All of a sudden I am not guided anymore by a vertical alignment but I am guided by thoughts, and their driven-ness.
 
And then, tension reminds me that I have left being.
When that happens, it is usually followed by a natural movement of sinking back into the body, and a discharge of the superfluous energy of stress, followed by deep sighs or even yawning and I am resting back in myself and can continue my daily activities in a connected way.
 
This is the dance of my life. As I learn to not resist the shifting back and forth in and out of being, the riddle dissolves.
 
 
Rani has been on the path of inner transformation since 1976.
For more than 30 years she has been sharing her experience in workshops and retreats.
 

Spiritual practice, its beauty, its traps and strategies  and its true place.

We asked Rani to write something for innernet about what she shares.. It is not a sweet story of bliss or emptiness. Rather a realistic view of reality as it presents itself to most seekers, pre- and post- awakening.


Everything happens by itself.
There is nothing to do and nowhere to go.  Don’t do anything! Just BE.
Who does not know these slogans?
And who truly understands the meaning of these very profound words?
Most people cannot hear them without the mind’s interpretation.
 
It is no wonder than that some new spiritual traditions speak so heavily against meditation, enquiry or any other kind of practice, because to the mind practice means : improving, getting somewhere or doing something.

Yet it is precisely practice that supports most of us who are on a path of wholeness, to “not do”.

How to support yourself in this act of self-love?
 
 
We come to a master or a spiritual life because we want to be free of the chains that bind us to our past. That hinder us to be spontaneous, alive and passionately present in our own life. Mostly we want to feel better and finally be happy.
 
Then we hear the teacher say it all the time:” Let meditation be on top of your laundry list”. “Make meditation your first priority”.
Why does it seem so important to have a daily regular practice of meditation? And why does it appear so difficult for many?
 
Every human being has a consciousness but unless it is nourished, unless it is awakened, nourished and supported it will not grow. It will remain only a seed a possibility.
An average person may have only a few seconds a day of consciousness, of being aware of himself.
A seeker seeks to be conscious every moment of the day.
So our consciousness is not something that grows automatically as we grow older. It is not part of our biology. Existence leaves that up to us.
We either expand it or not. We either spend time to nourish it or not.
 
In our society there is hardly anything that supports this endeavor.
We are constantly pulled out, the collective is full of fear and violence and we are constantly invited to consume.
 
Most people that I know, are pretty clear that they want to be more conscious and that it is a very good idea to support themselves on a daily basis. Yet many report that they do not manage.
They say things like:
“I don’t have the discipline, I don’t find the time, My partner does not let me, I don’t like to be forced”, and other things like that.
All sorts of excuses, that sound reasonable and with which they can convince themselves.
Yet they suffer all kind of troubles and difficulties that could easily be reduced or eliminated would they find the key to support and love their daily meditation.
 
What are those keys?
In the first place become clear about what it is that you really want and get a realistic picture of what it takes to achieve that.
We are dreamers and we love to hope that someday some miracle will happen and our life will change. But reality is different.
Some understanding is needed.
We cannot change ourselves but awareness WILL change us.
Presence will bring more space into all of our activities.
We don’t realize that WE are the miracle makers. If we don’t make the effort expand, the collective effort to dominate us takes over.
Now effort is a dirty word for many, which only points to misunderstanding.
 
If you would make the experience that if you take time every day to expand your awareness, that all your other goals will be achieved in an easier and smoother way, would you not naturally choose that?
We are intelligent beings, when we notice the difference between pain and no pain we will choose no pain. So we need to have an extended experience so that we know from deep within.
 
Here is a suggesting from one meditator to another.
Make an experiment, make a commitment that is realistic. E.g. set a time to sit every day for 15 minutes for the next three weeks or whatever is reasonable for you.
Do it first thing when you wake up. That is proven to be by far the easiest moment in the day, before you have time to listen to the objections in your mind.
Don’t look for bliss in meditation, just be present to whatever it is that is going on. It is not about feeling good (even though often you may experience peace and quiet) but about being aware of what is here.
 
 
A commitment, when taken from the right place, will hold you and support you in spite of the difficulties that may arise. Perseverance is needed, that is a fact we cannot skip which brings us to the next step.
 
Begin to observe what are obstacles to your perseverance and commitment (without following them).
We have an inner program that runs 24 hours a day which tells us what to do, which wants to keep us in place. Which is really objecting expansion and change.
This is the part in us that has absorbed the voices of our father and mother and society and has transformed them into what we call the inner judge or inner critic.
This is a fully mechanical mechanism that is part of the ego and not personal at all. In other words it is not our fault, nor the fault of our parents that it runs our life. This is how the system functions in this time and age.
Often this is running unconsciously so we do not recognize that there is a force within that tries to prevent us from change.
We don’t realize that first there was a voice telling us something like:
“You will never manage cause you never finish what you set out to do”
or “ Why would you meditate? You know it does not lead you anywhere” or “ You have something much more urgent to do”. That voice came before we believed that this is true.
This inner judge is the glue that keeps our conditioning and our beliefs in place.
It makes us feel weak, incapable and postponing.
It makes us sabotage our own dreams and plans.
It wants to keep us forever within the chains of the past, within the boundaries of the ego.
 
Usually we do not like to confront this inner tyrant and saboteur, we rather complain about someone else.
There are however simple ways to look it straight into the face and reclaim our birthright to be a free and unconditioned human being.
 
Meditation is a direct threat to our conditioning as well as a direct way to liberate our energy and be free.
And what needs perseverance now will eventually change into an unconditional effortless support from within.
But we have to start where we are.
It is really up to us.
That is the very good news!
 
Even the impossible is not impossible if resolution is there, and even the possible becomes impossible if one lacks will.
The world we live in is our own creation.
Osho
 
 
 
As rivers seek out the ocean, so man if he wants to, can find the truth. No peak, no mountain can stop him, in fact their challenge awakens his sense of adventure.
 
As the river finds the ocean, thirsty souls find the temple of God.
But the thirst must be intense and the work tireless and the waiting without end and the calling with the whole heart.
 
. Whatever is, observe it. Just be a witness. Just watch. If there is ego then watch ego. What else to do? Only watch and by watching the transformation happens.
 
Trust in matter and you will live in hell.
Trust in consciousness and you have the key to open the doors of the Kingdom of God.
 
Escape is futile. Only transformation can help, and transformation needs deep acceptance of your being as you are.
 

Passionately present in my own life.
 
Who am I?
This is the age old question that accompanies every seeker on the path. It is the koan that makes us take risks, jump out of our habitual ways of being and living, challenges the boundaries of our personality and makes us reach for the impossible.
 
We follow different teachings to show us the way back to ourselves.
We may travel to the other side of the globe to be with our master or teacher; no mountain is too high, no valley too low…
Once the question has arisen, the thirst is here and wants to be quenched.
Through all kinds of groups and practices of meditation, inquiry and prayer we reach great openings and experience states of freedom, often only to fall back into old patterns.
 
How come this happens again and again?
What is the mechanism responsible for this?
How come we do not manage to support ourselves unconditionally and wholly? How come we do not recognize the beauty of our soul to such an extend that we let nothing and nobody create separation in us?
 
How is it possible that even though our bodies grow older, many people, when asked, report that their inner feeling is rather like that of a child?
And that at closer observation it turns out that they often do not have a direct felt sense of their adult body but again a rather psychological sense of who they are.
How come we do not manage to be fully present and be here/now?
What blocks our access to our essence, our true nature?
 
One of the mechanisms that is probably the main obstacle to our embodied self realization is what has been called the Inner Judge or the Super Ego.
It is that part in our psychic structure that constantly judges, pushes and manipulates the experience of the present moment.