Anything Fully Experienced Turns to Joy or Bliss.
An introduction by Krishnarajji, dasa at Oneness University, India.
Becoming awakened doesn’t mean you don’t face challenges and difficult emotions like fear, pain, etc. All these are experiences that are very much a part of the mind. This is how the mind begins.
The objective of all spiritual processes put us into a state of consciousness where you do not resist. How well can you experience, how quickly can you pay attention to your feelings, and turn the experience of hurt and pain into joy?
When you move to gratitude, you feel stillness inside, and there’s not much need to resist or fight with anything. Things look more still, perfect and calm – this is bliss. This is your aim: to help people reach a state where there is a constant stillness and calmness, while experiencing life’s situations and emotions. Stillness is NOT the absence of thought.
Move into a position where you can watch the experience, and observe the mental activities. When there is resistance to what is happening inside, the process of trying to move away consumes a lot of energy. It makes you feel low, and that is when you cannot experience reality as it is. This is when you go on accumulating more charges, end relationships and create many problems in your life.
Your most important focus in life is to ask the question: How can I pay attention to these experiences?
Freedom is about experiencing what is inside, not about finding a way where all life situations are perfect without adversity.
Nine steps for Handling your Experiences, by Sri Anandagiriji
1. Become conscious that you are suffering. You need to admit it . When a charge surfaces, when you are not feeling all right, the force of habit and social conditioning is to tell yourself that you’re feeling fine. When you are in pain and suffering, you need to acknowledge and accept it. When you are in fear, there is no point in saying, I’m feeling fine. Admit you are feeling low.
2. Become aware of the habitual questions of the mind that take you away from the discomfort. The mind throws up these questions: Who caused this suffering? Why did they do it to me? Why should life be so cruel to me? This makes us interested in finding the cause and then blaming somebody or something, and takes us away from experiencing what is going on inside. If you get stuck in these questions, you cannot concentrate. What habitual questions are you asking? Once you’re suffering, the important part is how you deal with it. Who caused the suffering is irrelevant.
3. Ask the right question. Right questions are driven by a vision to experience your emotions. So the question must be: how do I deal with the pain? How do I experience it? How do I become free? This takes you right into the experience instead of being distracted by the wrong questions. Liberation comes from the attention to the feeling in your body and your hearts. As you pay attention, this is where the process moves deeper. Who and why are irrelevant. You can feel immense focus building up as you ask the right question of: how do I become free of it through the experience?
4. Become aware of the habitual response of blaming, fighting with the situation, or losing all motivation in life. Moving into depression and self-hate. All these are old habits, how you have trained yourselves to deal with it. You fight with yourselves or others, feel guilty, blame others, condemn yourselves or others. Attention is then moving outwards. The mind constantly prompts you to believe that liberation is elsewhere, through someone else or by situations changing. Doing this is a habit and brings you entanglement.
5. Once you know this is a habit and there is no sense or logic in it, break the habit. This requires a firm resolve. You need to become clear in yourselves and re-program your responses. Make the decision: I am not moving away from this experience come what may. I’ll do anything and everything required to pay attention to the experience. This will break the old habit pattern. This is not a one-day affair. Every time you get in touch with charges and you keep repeating your resolve, you will be more able to engage. It takes practice.
Eventually you will have a breakthrough and the process will get easier. Even if you fail 100 times, keep your resolve. That is your ultimate goal. No moving away, no other alternative. Body posture will also help you to reprogram this new habit, by physically anchoring yourself, by sitting erect as you make the decision. Close your eyes and breathe deeply and close your left palm with the right palm on the right thigh. As you inhale, then hold your breath, make the decision: I am experiencing this feeling completely. Then exhale. Do this 7 times.
6. Invoke the divine presence, because this is also a matter of divine benediction. You need the intense focus and extra bit of energy. It’s important that the spiritual energy or kundalini is activated by divine grace. The brain must be pushed into concentrating all its attention. This is like focusing a magnifying glass lens onto cotton in the sunlight. That is what is happening in consciousness. Your emotions can undergo a transformation. You can ask for a blessing from AmmaBhagavan by touching their picture or ask for a Blessing from another facilitator.
7. Allow yourself to go through the whole experience. Just see what you are feeling physically and go with it. There is nothing to make sense of, it is just an experience to go through.
8. After you complete the experience and feel a sense of silence, joy or gratitude, make the affirmation: “Suffering is not in the fact, but in my perception.” Repeat this 7 times. With the first hand experience through the first 7 steps, this teaching will be deeply lodged and the next time the teaching will be inside you and you will effortlessly begin to focus inward.
9. Conclude with expressing gratitude to the divine and/or to AmmaBhagavan.
Spirituality is not so much about experiencing higher states and mystical happenings, but about re-programming your responses. Your responses determine your destiny. If you respond out of old habits, you break up your relationships and cause disease. If you respond through acceptance, experience the feelings, and see the transformation, you are creating a new golden age.
Teach yourself this new response and keep doing it. It will become faster and faster. It’s like kick-starting an engine that has not been started for a long time. If you follow these 9 steps, you are retracing your mind back. If you become a master in this and it becomes a new habit, and your suffering is transformed into bliss, imagine how much confidence you will feel.
