There is only one key to being absorbed into the Divine — and only one key in spirituality — and that is surrender.

The true essence of surrender is the surrendering of our will, and the greatest act of our free will is to surrender it. We all have the choice to surrender, but when we decide to make that choice is a critical point in our spiritual freedom. Make it early, make it late, but make it. We make it not because we are forced to, but because we celebrate the opportunity to give our life back to God. I believe that the joyous offering of ourselves back into our Source is the highest expression of free will.

Tantric tradition discusses the progression of our spiritual life in terms of the means of practice, called upāyas. The highest is śāmbhavopāya, which is the path of awareness, the path of will, and the path of Śiva. A concise way of combining these elements is that it is the path of Śiva’s will to express His own innate awareness in us, through us, and...

Surrender is the conscious offering of oneself back to the Self. — Swami Khecaranatha

Samvitti’s words, the ego appropriates the Self, succinctly explain how the limited part of us called ego perpetuates its own existence through the freedom of choice given to all individuals.

The ego binds us in separation and suffering — in an unwillingness and inability to know the pure joy of our Source, which is ever-present within us.

God’s pure, infinite Consciousness has within it every level of consciousness, even the limited level of ego. We are always part of that Unity, but because we are attached to our separate identity, we must surrender that self-image. This must be a conscious act of offering ourselves back to the very power of freedom that gives us the capacity to offer our selves back!

What does it mean to surrender something, and how do we surrender the mind, which is the agent of ego? There are three conscious acts of surrender:

1) Surrendering Something

As students, we have a responsibility to continually connect to the depth of refined energy that is transmitted through the teacher. This requires some discernment, because the energy that moves through a lineage is perpetually purifying and refining itself.

In any authentic practice the energy is like water running down a mountain, finding its own path. As it does so, it purifies its external connection, as well as the people that it is drawing to itself. This is a continuing source of nourishment for those who can connect and attune to the changing energy.

Unfortunately, as that shift takes place, everyone’s drama, resistance, and a myriad of reasons for not making that shift seem to arise and be perceived as valid. We must therefore be sure that our commitment to growth is expressed through disciplined action. It’s not enough to have the abstract desire of wanting to know God — we must cultivate the disciplined capacity within ourselves to not be caught in the...

Making contact with the deepest dimensions of the central channel activates powerful energies within us that will purify our entire psychic system. Due to that enlivenment, we may have to be patient and allow the rippling effects of that process to change us.

To understand why working deeply may cause some volatility in our lives, we first must explore the nature of the suṣumṇa, the central channel. The suṣumṇa is the core of who we are. Śakti, the dynamic power of God, expresses our life through the descent of kuṇḍalinī into this channel; it creates, sustains and nourishes every aspect of us.

Accompanying this individuation is a forgetting of who we really are. We experience separation from God and become consumed by our mind and emotions. We get caught in trying to control life by changing the conditions we face, which only reinforces the perception of duality.

The purpose of sādhana is to remember that we are not separate from divine Consciousness. The awakening and liberation...

The rising and expansion of awareness happens in three ways:

~ Actuating the ascent of our individuated awareness through the skypath of the central channel.

~ Soaring with ease on the updraft like the majestic hamsa bird.

~ Or, in absolute surrender, being inhaled upward into that infinite space by God’s in-breath.

In most spiritual traditions it is understood that breath is the means of contacting the highest Consciousness within. Consciousness is the place from which breath arises, and the pulsation of Consciousness gives life not only to our breath but to all manifestation. This is spanda, the subtle pulsation of the breath of God, the imperceptible movement of Consciousness into form. My teacher Rudi described the experience of being in a deep state of surrender as “being breathed.”

There are three ways we can use our breath to penetrate within and discover the pulsation of Consciousness:

1. Moving into the Skypath of the Central Channel

The central...

The soul’s pain of separation and the longing to be reunited is equally matched by the egoic fear of being dissolved. This is why it is so important that we remain aware of our power to choose, because we must consciously choose Oneness instead of separation. — Swami Khecaranatha

In the image, above, there is a checklist of how we can choose real freedom in our lives. Let’s look at them one by one. 

1. I am willing to give up my dubious freedom of following dualistic rationale, knowing that I am in fact losing nothing and gaining the possibility of everything.

This is a bold statement but is perhaps the easiest to mark checked! However, we must remember that any commitment we make is meaningless if we fail to follow through with action. In our search to know the highest in ourself, it is our actual unwillingness to live in the commitment that disqualifies our stated willingness to do so.

There is such extraordinary grasping and holding on to what we...

One of the remarkable things about humans is the superficiality we are willing to accept in ourselves, and the superficiality we bring to our search for depth. We must work to develop the psychic mechanism in us that can hold the structure of higher consciousness.

A student came to me recently and said, “I’m really a mess and haven’t meditated in a long time.” This is a story I hear repeatedly, and perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. We can get so absorbed by drama, tension, and the pressures of our life that we are pulled out of ourselves. We push, demand, and are consumed by struggling with our own experience.

All struggle is ego. To say this is not to deny that we face challenges. But we allow our engagement with these difficulties to make us forget that they are only a reflection of our own state, of our misunderstanding. The fundamental discipline is to not allow ourselves to be caught in struggle, and we do that by simply taking a breath and...

Pray for the fierce love of a guru, a fire breathing, eyes blazing, śakti throwing one.

This is the most succinct way I can describe my guru, Swami Rudrananda. He was always breathing fire and his eyes were ablaze with śakti, which he was continually throwing, even without moving. His energetic fierceness expressed his relentless transmission of the power to liberate that flowed through him. It was relentless, and it was intentional.

It was impossible for Rudi to be any other way because there was nothing left of him: he was just an open channel, an agent of the śakti that moved through him. There was a wide range of dynamics with Rudi – his personality, his incessant requirement of discipline, his absolute, unconditional love for us – that was all delivered through this extraordinarily intense, embodied person. By being Rudi’s student, I learned that the very point of having a relationship with a guru is to receive the liberating power that is flowing through...

Helen Keller lived most of her life in physical darkness. She was deaf and blind, and only learned to communicate with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Yet, despite the restrictions she faced, Helen found the light of consciousness within her.

In Keller’s book, Light in My Darkness, she wrote:

As I wander through the dark, encountering difficulties, I am aware of encouraging voices that murmur from the spirit realm. I sense a holy passion pouring down from the springs of Infinity. I thrill to music that beats with the pulses of God. Bound to suns and planets by invisible cords, I feel the flame of eternity in my soul. Here, in the midst of the everyday air, I sense the rush of ethereal rains. I am conscious of the splendor that binds all things of earth to all things of heaven. Immured by silence and darkness, I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold — when death sets me free.

In an earlier book, The World I Live In, she wrote:

There is in the...

Like the continual flow of a waterfall pouring into the basin below it, the liquid light of the Goddess Kuṇḍalinī perpetually articulates Herself as the flow of life, breath, and awareness in each individual - simultaneously filling that individuated expression of Herself with Universal Consciousness.

The purpose of Rudi’s fundamental practice of the double-breath is that of clearing the suṣumṇa, internalizing our awareness and our energy, and creating a flow within us. By bringing this vital energy to the base of the spine and allowing it to rise, it clears the suṣumṇa, which is the outer dimension of the central channel. Its efficacy creates the subtle capacity to feel the different dimensions of the center channel that rise to the center of the head, to the crown, and above. The single-breath exercise is the maturation of that extraordinary practice, and it may not be as easily accessible to you if you’re new to our practice. Doing the single-breath does not mean that...