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...

Life must be consumed whole, with all its pain, joy, and sorrow.
—Swami Rudrananda

Students sometimes ask if our practice involves spiritual bypassing. They are unclear about how the energetic processing of experience fits in with what might be called the “human” aspect of their lives. My response is that, through our sadhana, we learn that nothing is to be rejected, and that emotions are both a level of consciousness within us and energies that we can learn to process.

The intention and eventual fruit of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana is the liberation of kuṇḍalinī — the freeing of our individuated awareness from its perceived separation from its source, Consciousness. We seek to know ourselves as that eternal pure Consciousness. This is inherently possible because there is no distinction between us and God, except in our experience, in the propensity for viewing life from a limited understanding and not seeing a higher one.

My teacher Rudi explained that most people fail...

Discipline is our devotion in action, and if we truly love God and want to be happy, then work and discipline are a joy. The living of that realization is unconditional love, devotion, gratitude, and the stillness of surrender, masterfully interlaced with an in-depth inner practice, selfless service, conscious choice, and disciplined action — all revealing the effulgence of the Heart we wish to live from every day of our life.

Nondual wisdom teachings always begin by articulating what is called the darśana, or “view” of the tradition. The key to nondual Tantric practices is exactly what the description implies: nonduality. This means there is no distinction between Spirit and that which It manifests. Conversely, there is no loss of that Spirit as manifestation disappears. In the picture, above, you cannot tell whether the woman is manifesting into form or dissolving into non-form. It’s a graphic way of expressing that everything in creation arises and...

Kuṇḍalinī is the river of liquid light that flows in you and flows in me. . . the energy in all things. —Swami Khecarantha

Kuṇḍalinī is the individuated expression of the Divine. It is like a river of liquid light that flows in you, me, and in all things. The gift of our human incarnation is that we possess the capacity and consciousness to know ourselves as divine. Through our practice of kuṇḍalinī sādhana, we awaken an awareness of our divinity that typically lies dormant.

People often observe that when kuṇḍalinī is aroused, it amplifies our inner dynamics — including the impurities of consciousness and emotions like jealousy, greed, and anger.

Nondual Tantra teaches that all experience arises from a singular source and that they all are dimensions of Consciousness, expressed by kuṇḍalinī śakti. Śakti is the energy behind the scenes that feeds and sustains every aspect of human experience — even those dominated by ego, emotions, and thought-constructs.

The...

Rudi was a tsunami of śakti that swept its way through our lives and consciousness, washing away ego and misunderstanding. Like a tsunami, he left as quickly as he came, leaving behind the gift of unfolding freedom. — Swami Khecaranatha

The only true gift of a guru is that of unfolding freedom in his or her students. The singular purpose of our relationship with a teacher is to give us the support we need to establish our own direct connection with God. That support creates a conduit to śakti, the power of the grace that is freeing us.

The possibility of the unfolding of freedom is always activated by God, but for most people a relationship with a teacher is required to power it. Once the longing to know God propels us to find a teacher, we discover in that connection the energy necessary to fuel our journey. The teacher is an energy source that we can tune in to because we may not have the mechanism, the sensitivity, or even the awareness to dial into that resonance on our...