Paramahansa Yogananda
(Continued from Part 1, yesterday.)
“The most important thing
about the unmothered child
is that internally there is a light
that will never go out.”
Warming the Stone Child: Myths and Stories about Abandonment and the Unmothered child, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
So—my first path to Light was psychological. Healing emotional traumas. And learning that, tiny as the spark may be, I had a Light within. What this Light was and where it came from, I did not know.
After many years of learning to become my own self, and not a parrot of other’s thoughts and ways, I arrived at the point where I wanted to meditate. I’d learned about constantly going within to look at and fix things that weren’t working in my life, but I wanted something deeper.
I wasn’t searching for God. In fact, I come from a family that abhorred the very word “God” because they’d had Spirit drummed out of them by Religious rules and regulations. My mother via a Catholic convent school, and my father via three weekly attendances to the Methodist church.
Pop would sometimes mutter, “Methodists never had any fun. You couldn’t drink, smoke, dance or play cards. You weren’t allowed to DO anything.”
My parents rejected “Religion” as a result of unhappy childhood experiences with it. The sorrow for them is that they entirely missed out on “Spirit.” The Light in all things.
However, my parents’ rejection of dogma was a great boon to me because I wasn’t raised in a Religion. I was baptized Episcopalian and attended church and Sunday school intermittently for a couple of years, but that was only because my parents felt I “should,” not because they believed it would do me any good whatsoever.
My freedom, therefore, from Religious doctrines meant that when I set out to seek Cosmic Truth, in the form of ancient texts like the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, Dhammapada, etc. I could read them with an open heart and access some of that wisdom without prejudice.
I didn’t know where to go to learn how to meditate, but a friend, providentially, almost thirty years ago, handed me a copy of AUTOBIOGRAPY OF A YOGI by Paramahansa Yogananda.
I devoured it from cover to cover and consider it one of the greatest books ever written. Yogananda could take the most abstruse wisdom, or complicated Cosmic Law, and convert it to fun and simplicity itself.
Happily, at the back of the book, there was the offering of a Home Meditation Course by Yogananda. I immediately applied and spent several years receiving lessons every two weeks.
I do not claim Yogananda as my Guru. That feels too lofty for me. I do claim him as my Teacher, although I am an undisciplined student. Nevertheless, by following Yogananda’s suggestions as best I can, I feel I have been unceasingly blessed and Divinely led for more than a quarter of a century.
Yogananda once said, “I amthe soul. I havea body.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it? We simply have to realize ourselves as Soul. As Light. As immortal. As One with All There Is. Or more accurately, re-realize! (No small feat for a 3D Human.)
By constantly praying, meditating, blessing, affirming, envisioning and steering my thoughts to their highest expression, my life has transformed. I did not seek God, or Cosmic Light, but I found it. Gradually. Naturally. With no one shoving it down my throat. As a logical realization from going within, going within, going within.
Linda Dillon once told me that because so many in our generation have done the inner work continuously and deeply, those that come after us won’t have to. I find that heartening. I also believe, that those that come after us won’t be born in the Third Dimension. They will be born in Higher Dimensions where traumas are not inflicted, and one can evolve in a realm of happiness, as opposed to one of suffering.
Part 3: Light is there for me, even in the darkest of places.