Personal experiences
On a foggy Fourth of July morning, 2007, the San Diego Sahaja Yogis set up a booth at the Standley Park Fair in Clairemont. We finished setting up by 8:30 am and were all set to spread the message of Sahaja Yoga to the crowds that were starting to trickle in. There were only a couple of us, as it was still early in the morning.
At about 9 am, a little girl in a brown dress and a bright, neon-yellow windbreaker walked up to our booth. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. We observed for a minute or so as she read the poster set up in front of the booth. Then Keona asked her if she would like to try meditating. The little girl said she was open to it. We went through the experience of Self-realisation with her, and she seemed to enjoy it immensely. We asked her what her name was and she said it was Emily.
Emily left the Sahaja Yoga booth, but twenty minutes later she was back. She just stood by our booth, smiled at us and waved as we were giving Realisation to other seekers. She did this about four or five times during the day. Since this was a Fourth of July fair, there were lots of other attractions for the children – face-painting, drawing contests, a balloon parade and many other events. Emily would go away from our booth, but kept returning as if the tremendous vibrations kept pulling her back.
About two hours later, she came back, this time with her mother. And then she came back with two friends, and soon a small crowd started forming in front of our booth. At one point, our entire booth was filled! We had about six children and seven mothers and other ladies crowded into our little tent, and the more the people saw this, the more they were interested in what was going on. We had to borrow extra chairs from our tent neighbours and the organisers, and people were spilling out of our allotted space to get their Realisation.
Everyone got their Realisation, and we had a long list of names of people interested in starting a new Sahaja Yoga meeting in that area. The vibrations were tremendous because the children all had their Kundalinis up in no time! And little Emily joined them a second time to sit down and meditate with us. It was the sweetest experience to see this little Angel with light in her eyes and a big smile on her face enthusiastically telling everyone about the Sahaja Yoga booth. She kept pointing people to our booth even when she was in line for the rock-climbing wall or the face-painting booth.
Towards the end of the day, she came back to the booth, hugged Keona tightly and just smiled. She said she would love to come back to meditate some more. We told her mother that she was a very special child, a Realised soul who recognised the significance of the work we were doing. We asked her mother to please bring her to every meeting once we started.
We haven’t stopped talking about our little Angel whose innocence did Shri Mataji’s great work for us that day like a little Shri Ganesha, Shri Hanumana and all the Shakti powers rolled into one!
Viraj and Keona Talpade
San Diego, USA
In Sahaja Yoga we learn to witness our own “Dialogue with God” which becomes actually the fragrant and colourful “Contact with God” through this beautiful world that is breathing in and out the Paramchaitanya, the ever-present power of God. We become the thoughtlessly and joyfully aware children of the Adi Shakti. We are part and parcel of this on-going Divine Plan, complex, diverse and simple. We are spreading the Fragrance of God while longing for the force of gravity that is keeping us grounded to the Divine Mother.
In the last few days I was introduced more deeply than ever to the amazing beauty of the Canadian sky, the canvas for the breath-taking, colourful and playful nature of Mother Earth. I was watching in awe – sometimes in the mornings, sometimes during the day, sometimes in the evenings – the display of ethereal arts. These were moments when one could say, “That’s it!” Meditation started simply by a glance at the Sky, just because God was there, present in the upper Present.
All these days I have wanted to share these simple joys, found above, of clouds and horizons and celestial objects, sometimes soft, surreal portals of Divine Creativity. It was almost like taking a peek into the Adi Shakti’s work of creating the world, witnessing Genesis again and again, in a variety of versions.
Another lesson-experience from the sky was that sometimes Oneness feels not completely self-sufficient if it is not also collective. It triggers the built-in need, based on Love, to gather all the people and pull them in so that the One becomes the Whole. In a complete collective of Love it becomes merely Existence, because each single time the need to share was there. And in a way, I was given the answer to the question, “Why the Creation?”
“Whole world is created because there was love,” Shri Mataji has said. “Sahaja Yoga means ‘We are One’. We are all Sahaja Yogis but not separately – together.”
Ioana Popa
(Photograph courtesy of Tanya Andersson)
One lady had been to only two or three Sahaja Yoga programs, but she had been meditating and footsoaking and giving her eight-year-old son footsoaks for two weeks. Her son has always had poor behaviour at the Steiner School he attends, and she is in regular communication with his teacher.
The teacher spoke to her recently and said, “I can’t believe the change in your son. What are you doing to bring about such an enormous change?” From being an unruly, disruptive influence in the class he had become a positive influence, even saying to his classmates, “You don’t always want to do things, but sometimes you need to do it, anyway”.
She told the teacher that the only change was that her son was footsoaking, and that she herself was meditating and footsoaking. The teacher was very impressed and asked her to bring some Sahaja Yoga literature along so that she could find out more for herself and for her students.
Footsoaks can also be very positive for the elderly. Some time ago my mother (aged 87) went downhill in her mental capacity. She was so worried about forgetting what to do and who was coming and so on, that she spent most of her time standing in front of the calendar trying to work out what day it was and what she should be doing.
Footsoaking was only part of the changes we put in place for my Mum, but I am convinced that the biggest factor in getting Mum back to “Living in the Present” was the footsoaks. Mum is not a Sahaja Yogi and she doesn’t meditate, but she recognises the benefit of footsoaking. If several days have gone by without our doing a footsoak, she reminds me. It is an amazing and simple tool to get us back in the present, to suck out the negativity that builds up from everyday life and to keep us in balance.
Maxine Whitnell
The following is a beautiful talk by Baba Mama, Shri Mataji’s beloved brother who brought the creative arts, especially music, to the forefront in the Sahaj family. He encouraged and inspired Sahaja Yogis to greater and greater creative heights. One can say he was the embodiment of music in Sahaja Yoga.
You believe that God is omnipresent, omnipotent and all-pervading. In fact, you believe that He is in every atom. As natural corollary of this belief you must also know that God knows what you want or what your need is. If the first proposition is true, then second proposition has to be true. It would follow, therefore, that those who know that God is omnipotent and all-pervading are bound to accept that God is all-knowledgeable and therefore is aware of all your problems.
In spite of this fact, we always go to God with certain expectations. Expectations can be of various types, but are basically self-centred or are pertaining to people or relations you are attached to, and then you pray to God that He should grant you a particular relief, or a job promotion, or some benefit to you or your near ones, etc. When you go with this frame of mind, then most of the time you are disappointed. Hypothetically speaking, if your expectations are symbolized in A and what you get is, let us say, B; then A minus B is your disappointment. And then you have to attribute this disappointment to someone. The pessimists will attribute it to their bad luck and will always curse themselves for not being worthy of God’s favour. The optimists will straight away blame God Himself, and they say that this God is not good and that we should shift to some other God. In this way you keep on shifting from God to God, but disappointment is always there. This may even make you anti-God and an atheist, ultimately. Now take a case where you do not go to God with any expectations. Therefore, the expectations are zero, and let us say that you get B as the reward. Therefore, B minus zero is B which is always surplus.
You should also distinguish between your expectations and desires and pure desires. Pure desire is always for the benefit of the other, and therefore you are entitled to carry pure desires to the Divinity. I once remember, I was travelling with Shri Mataji from Sydney to Canberra, and it was very hot and the air conditioning of the car was thoroughly inadequate. Shri Mataji was sweating and I was fanning Her with a newspaper, but I somehow felt that the heat was oppressive and that the weather should give some respite to Her. Reading my mind, She asked me a question as to what I was thinking, to which I told Her frankly that I was unable to see Her suffer because of heat. So She told me that I should make a pure desire and the weather would change. So I closed my eyes and made a pure desire that the weather should change. Within five minutes, dark clouds gathered from nowhere and it started raining, and the intensity of heat was thus reduced, and Shri Mataji said, “See, if you make a pure desire, then it will always be fulfilled.”
Coming back to expectations, I may mention here that once you are connected to your Divinity through your Self-realization, you should feel assured that you have been admitted into the Kingdom of God, that you are His subject and therefore He is duty-bound to look after you, irrespective of what you expect of Him.
Baba Mama, 1999