Imagine a projector in a movie theater shining it’s light onto the screen in front of you. You don’t see the projector, or the light streaming through the air, you only see the shapes on the screen. We react to the actors, and the drama projected in front of us— and it seems like a miracle, but the actors we watch the most keep getting more and more lines in this movie of our life. Good, bad, or ugly— the roles we identify with on the screen keep getting bigger and bigger parts. The Shiva Sutras tell us that this is because the projector is not behind us, but within us. And these actors are reading the very lines that we are writing for them, in real time. In this way, we see that we are writing this movie of our lives, and if we want to breathe some fresh life into it, this Sutra teaches, we must step back from the re-acting process and let this movie start to develop more naturally. As we learn to step back from the screen of our mind and senses we can allow our lives to play out in a more natural way. This doesn’t mean the movie stops, far from it, in fact yogis tell us through the generations that this is the only way to finally let the movie of our life play out to it’s highest fruition. Welcome to Shiva Sutra 3.11, The Senses are the Spectators.

If you had 3 wishes what would they be? Tonight, Maha Shivaratri, the greatest holiday of Shiva in the Hindu Tradition, gives practitioners just this opportunity. The opportunity to practice, and the opportunity to wish?

The age old story of the genie in the lamp serves to teach us one simple thing— whatever ‘thing’ you wish for will eventually become your greatest obstacle. The Shiva Sutras, and the yogic tradition teach us that our greatest wish is not for a thing, or an experience, but for the tools to grow spiritually. Lineage teacher Swami Rudrananda said that when he went to India, the enlightenment he found was not a heaven realm where everyone sits around drinking tea, but rather his ‘enlightenment’ was the gift of learning how to work, how to practice— The greatest boon we can ask for is a practice, a teacher to guide us in that practice, and a community to practice alongside. These are three greatest wishes, the three jewels in the yogic and buddhist tradition, and here’s the astonishing part: If you are reading this, then you have already received this gift, you’re staring right at it now— Because the sole purpose of the ashram is to teach you how to use the gifts of the yogic tradition to propel your spiritual growth.

In this guided meditation we utilize the teachings of the Shiva Sutras to fan our sparks of awareness into flames of recognition, bringing our mantra from the level of the mouth to the level of the heart while cultivating spiritual focus on our breath in between.

In this guided breath meditation we cultivate the heat of awareness by counting down from 60 to zero with a few stops along the way, slowing down our counting, counting with our breath, and eventually arriving at the ability to watch our breath with a higher degree of focus and sensitivity.