Excerpts | Recognizing

As you read this book, you might wonder 'Who am I?' to have the audacity to write a book of spiritual experiences and realizations? I am no famous spiritual practitioner, world healer or philanthropist whose celebrity status warrants an autobiography or memoire.

I am just an ordinary person with an ordinary life who looked for many many years for a path that felt right to me, and who was incredibly blessed to find one. For the last thirty some years, I have practised what I was taught and told, inwardly and outwardly.

May the following chapters support your own journey of understanding and recognition. Ultimately, the details of my journey are irrelevant; the book only exists to support you in your journey. The challenge is that you follow the practices that resonate with you in order to experience your own truths and make your own discoveries. p, 17

The Song of Silence

Yesterday, I sang the strains of words, of thoughts, of actions

I tried to prove to you that I exist

to me that I was not invisible.

Today, I am given the gift of stillness,

And the song of silence calls me home.

When the lights settle into place, they dance in and out of form.

It’s true, I am invisible and always will be

I am the food for which you hunger

I am the drink for which you thirst

I am the nectar that soothes the spirit

the form of the formless

the Śivā in Śakti, the Śakti in Śivā

I am the pearl at the end, the beginning of the spiral

the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end

I am the hub of the wheel, the song of the heart

the silence that lights the sky

that flies through the night

the void from which it all began

the silence that sustains, the silence that destroys

I am the silence that embraces creation.

Everything is within, the stillness of my heart.

Although I have lived most of my adult life with others, I have often felt incredibly lonely, as if I didn't belong. I have learned such feelings, a consequence of the malas, are universal, almost required. I now see my struggles had little to do with the ‘truth’ of reality, but only my mind’s limited and self-sabotaging ideas of it. Over time, I have come to a certain compassion for myself and others who have the courage to wrestle with the perennial questions of Who am I? What is true? What is reality?

Only in the last few years have my revised understandings of my Self and the world helped me reach a more expansive understanding of my role in this non-dualistic reality, where I am neither separate nor special. I simply AM, in a very simple, and at the same time, a very profound way.

Living what felt like a double life for many years in both the ‘external’ world ‘out there’ in the world of my senses and in the ‘inner’ world of the Self felt very disorienting. It felt as if it were torn between my duty to my profession, family and friends as a householder and also the ‘inner’ world of my heart.

Over the years, I have been given breathtaking inner guidance and experiences. This inner journey, while incredibly delightful at times, involves constant reflection, self-inquiry and contemplation that is sometimes difficult. It is so easy to get derailed and stuck in a web of false perceptions and beliefs, rules and assumptions, from which my limited, worldly mind tries to make meaning and even control, as it attempts to create an illusion of safety that I can hold on to, when such mental inventions are neither safe nor true. It has been challenging to step outside the mental mazes with which I have bound and imprisoned myself, thinking, misguidedly, they would make me happy. Fortunately, my journey is not finished. p. 17-8