Take it as a mantra—“I enjoy whatever is there”—to slow down and start noticing what has been arranged for us, right now, in this moment, for us to enjoy. We start enjoying the moment we stop thinking and reacting.
A friend of mine told me what he has found, after practicing Sahaja Meditation for several years.
He said when we strive for perfection, we end up worrying about the results, instead of just doing it. Just do it.
We can generate a lot of internal worrying by setting very high standards for ourselves. We are putting trouble in ourselves. By trying too hard to be perfect, we get agitated, and then, after we have tried and not attained perfection, we can fall into guilt. “I didn’t get it right.”
He said that now, in a state of meditation, it’s possible to just do things, and not worry about will happen.
My mind wants to fight with everything. My mind is in a constant battle with reality. My mind is never satisfied with the way things are. But in a state of Sahaja Meditation, my mind takes a break. It gets out of the way. Then, into my awareness floods glorious reality — intense, unfiltered, wondrous.
In meditation, I know some things to be true, without analysis. The things I know to be true are usually “inspired insights”. They are new understandings that make me a more compassionate and forgiving person.
For sure I would never marry, for sure I would never amount to anyone of any value. Now, celebrating eighteen blissful years of marriage, now, with people who (I still find it surprising) esteem and value me, not for my accomplishments, but for my character, I continue to evolve. My appreciation of the gift I live every day grows every year: the gift I continue to receive from my teacher, who I love, Her Holiness Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi.
–Mark Taylor
Since then I have slowly, sometimes through discomfort and difficulty, changed. I have tried reaching out and expressing the pure love in my heart to other human beings. I have been amazed that almost every human being likes being loved, and accepts my love. I have discovered, slowly and reluctantly, that I indeed have something to give to others; not opinions, arguments, or entertainment, but steady, self-assured, limitless compassion.
Something at my core had changed. I didn’t even know what the good feeling I felt was, I didn’t have a name for it. The good feeling filled me up, it intersected with new insights and understandings about myself and the world. These insights weren’t fed to me; they came from my own inner quiet. It took me a few months to finally find the word that had been missing from my vocabulary my whole life. I had felt love for the first time. Pure, never-ending love. Love that just flows, gives, nourishes, forgives, redeems. Love that loves for love’s sake, not for any reason. Love that is never earned.
But somehow, there I was, on a stage after a public program, introducing myself, awkwardly, having never been in the presence of nobility before. I remained on the stage, near Shri Mataji, and watched and listened. I was absolutely certain, upon meeting her, that anything she said to me would be completely for my well-being. I had no doubts about her. I felt I had met the first completely genuine person in my life.
I spent the next two-and-a-half months in her company, and then returned home to Canada. My mom noticed that I was different. The inner change, brought about by the simple meditation practice I had learned, had begun, gently and below my own radar. I was no longer bitter. My resentment was gone. My sulky, teen-angst attitude was history. When a new age organization I had been giving money to for the past two years called me up and tried one of their mental hooking tricks, warning me that now I would be “playing small” if I didn’t continue to give money to their business of manipulation and brain-washing, I just laughed. I was way, way beyond the weak, vulnerable sucker I had been.
March 21st is the 86th birthday of the founder of Sahaja Yoga Meditation, Her Holiness Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi.
I can’t imagine what my life would look like if I had not met her in Bombay in January 1982. Up until that point I was a person barely hanging on, convinced I was a loser, unlovable. I was never going to forgive my parents for not being perfect parents. I was never going to let anyone in, never say the truth to anyone, out of fear of rejection. I would, in a despairing, cynical, pessimistic way, continue to look for psychological or new age solutions to my misery, all costing more money and all leading me further and further away from sanity and true self-knowledge. I would be ready to try anything, no matter how outlandish or costly, rejecting the idea that I could ever be a conventional, normal person. I would continue to be a self-indulgent, guilt-ridden, life-long “seeker of truth.” And of course, smug, superior, above everyone else, while inside I would be hollow, a joyless hypocrite. That was me, up until I met Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi.
–Mark Taylor
In my Oxford Dictionary of Current English, the original Greek meaning of “ecstasy” is “standing outside oneself.”
Ecstasy is boundless joy. That is only possible when we lose the confines of our separate selves and start to feel we are part of a larger whole.