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 think freedom is. We have set ...

Each of us must ask, with honesty and humility: Why do I engage in spiritual practice?
Is it to escape pain — or to awaken to joy?

For most seekers, the journey begins in suffering. We are pushed by life’s pressures such as loss, confusion, or loneliness and start to search for peace. Yet as practice deepens, something shifts within us. We realize that the path is not about running from pain but about discovering the joy that has always been our true nature.

In the beginning, pain can seem like an obstacle needing to be removed. But in truth, pain is a doorway. It reveals our longing for something beyond what the senses and intellect can satisfy. This desire to know the deeper Self is the Divine calling Itself back home, within our own awareness.

Pain can be seen as Grace wearing a disguise. It invites us to stop searching outside ourselves and to rest in the awareness that is already whole. Suffering is not punishment but the Divine Self reminding us: You have forgotten who you are...

There’s a timeless question asked in the movie The Wizard of Oz:

“If birds fly over the rainbow—why, oh why, can’t I?”

This expresses a yearning that resonates with anyone who’s ever felt limited by their own experiences, their own perceptions, their own self. It conveys our desire to transcend the boundaries of ego and awaken to a deeper, freer sense of being.

But this longing isn’t about being in some distant dreamland. It’s about right here, right now—in the context of our own daily lives.

The Spectrum of Light

A rainbow is light, refracted into a spectrum of color. And that light, in its essence, is always there—even when we can’t see the full arc.

In the same way, consciousness is the spectrum of all experience. Sometimes we perceive only a fragment, a faint glimmer of color, and mistake that for the whole. But the full spectrum is always present within us, waiting to be seen when we stop limiting our perception of it.

In Sanskrit, this inner radiance is known as prakāśa—th...

People often feel that life is presenting them with more than they can handle. My teacher Rudi said this: “Bite off twice as much as you can chew and then chew it.”

When you come face-to-face with something bigger than you think you want to bite or bigger than you think you can chew, the tendency is to say, “No, I don't want to do that.” But the dynamic is being presented to you by your own Self. That deeper intelligence is offering you some rocket fuel—the very energy that you need to consume and transform into Śakti so that it can make you bigger, create a bigger consciousness in you.

It is only the mind, your thoughts and ego, that says, “That's too big for me.” There’s a classic analogy of how a python can swallow a deer. The python dislocates its jaw big enough to swallow its prey. It doesn't get it halfway in and say, “this doesn't taste very good,” or, “this is too big.” It just relaxes its jaw, making it wide enough to accommodate whatever size it’s trying to devour.

So, for...

This discussion was adapted from Nathaji's September 6 Satsang. You can watch a video of the event here.

Every spiritual journey begins with a moment: a quiet whisper, a sudden shift, or a deep question that emerges seemingly out of nowhere. For some, it is subtle—a fleeting thought like “Is this all there is?” For others, it is a dramatic awakening. Regardless of how it arrives, this moment is often described as Grace, a spark that ignites the longing to know our true Self.

In the tradition of Kuṇḍalinī awakening, this longing is not seen as random or accidental. Rather, it is the Divine calling us inward, reminding us of who we truly are. This journey of discovery is not about rejecting life as it is, but about recognizing that every breath, every challenge, and every moment carries the potential for liberation and joy.

The Call of Grace

Spiritual traditions across the world describe an initial spark that draws us inward. In nondual Kashmir Śaivism this is known as śaktipata—the ...

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 turning our awareness and energ...

Unconditional joy is the result of freeing ourselves from the most entrenched veils of duality.

If liberation is what we seek, how could it be anything less than joyful to remove another layer of non-liberation? By doing that, we are fulfilling our obligation to God, our duty to reveal the highest in ourselves. But our work of loosening the grip of the ego requires the complete dissolution of all self-absorption, because experiencing individuality in that manner is the opposite of revealing the highest. 

It takes as much work to sustain a state of awareness as to attain it. Sādhana doesn’t stop: We don’t just get enlightened and go on vacation. That kind of thinking demonstrates the inherent capacity of the veils of duality to cover back up what looks like apparent freedom. The state of jīvan mukti is hard to attain. It is the complete dissolution of any separation, any difference, any thought that “I am the doer.” Even a person who is deeply established within will, at some point, ...

On attaining the bliss of Consciousness, there is permanent perception of Oneness with Consciousness even when perceiving the body and so on. This is liberation while alive.

This sutra from the Pratyabhijñā Hṛdayam (The Heart of Recognition) by the Tantric master Kṣemarāja describes the state of a liberated yogi. The highest Consciousness is available to each of us, but if your liberation is not the most important thing to you, you will not have it. If you are not prepared to surrender yourself completely, you will not live in freedom.

Spiritual freedom is not found outside the context of our own lives. We can—and must—be free even while we have a body, a job, and relationships with others. In fact, freedom is understanding and experiencing that everything in our life is an integral part of the manifestation of our own consciousness. Nothing is separate from us. This is called jīvan mukti, freedom while alive. 

Attaining it is the very purpose of our life. We are liberating ourselve...

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 Psychic Body

To under...

We never want to deny any pain, resistance, or misunderstanding that arises in our spiritual journey—but let’s not marry it. The practice of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana is, in fact, the consuming and transforming of all energy that is blocked. Although we might want to try just accepting what we see in ourselves, we must be willing to move beyond our mind and emotions. We use our self-reflective capacity to recognize the level of consciousness that’s having a particular experience, and then we reach into a place deeper than that.

When we do this, we create a vacuum that can consume whatever we feel stuck in. Now we don’t have to relate to the pain or find its apparent cause—we simply internalize the energy of that experience and process it through the psychic body. Any block (mental, emotional, or physical) is just energy that is not in motion. We want to free all energy so that it is in motion. By consuming the energy of that block we remove it, and this is what enables us to find a deeper lev...