Making a Circle

Next month I am going to be 40 years old. It feels like in my life I’ve made a very big circle. As I become older, I feel more and more that I am not changing but coming back to how I really was when I was a child. I don’t mean that I am becoming a child. I mean I am coming back to the connection that I had with myself as a child—coming back to my own essence, my own being.

I remember when I was about five years old, I used to love observing the adults around me—observing life. I remember the silence of my consciousness. No noise of the mind. I remember my intuition telling me that this was right and this was wrong. I remember listening and trusting myself. I remember just being myself.

As I became older, it all started to change. Adults around me had very strong opinions on how I should be, how I should act, and what I should do. They had their own colouring of who I was, a better version of myself. I was told my intuition was wrong and they were right. They told me I didn’t understand and they knew better.

Then I became a teenager. Friends started to become more and more important. They also had an opinion on how I should be. How I should dress, behave, and what I should like or not like. “Wow,” I thought, “these people really look like they know what they are doing. They seem to be very confident in life. Maybe I should listen to them.”

And so my own voice, my own intuition, became a stranger to me. The voices of others became my voice. I totally lost connection to myself by the time I became a young adult.

Just to be clear, I am not blaming anyone here. This is on me. What I understand now is that getting lost is part of the journey. And although adults around me had very strong opinions about my life, I was the one who got lost. Because it was needed, it was a step on the path.

Kundalini Yoga and Shiv Charan Singh, my Kundalini Yoga teacher, crossed my path after I graduated from the University. It is said the teachings cross your path once. You either take that chance or you pass it by. I took my chance.

Kundalini Yoga and what Shiv Charan was teaching made complete sense to me. I agreed with what the teachings presented not because somebody made me agree with it. I agreed with it because it echoed exactly what I felt inside but did not have the words to express. Kundalini Yoga and meditation gave me the words, the language, to talk to my own soul. They reminded me how to talk to my own self, because I forgot.

The word ‘yoga’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘yuj’ or ‘jog,’ which means to yoke or join together—to unite. So yoga is a science of how to join together with your spirit, with the Universal Spirit. It is not a sport. It is a state of jog, a state of being united with your self and the Life that breathes in us all. It is really a manual on how to come back to your self.

And so this process of uniting me within me began. I have been on this path for about fifteen years now.

We are so good at going outside of ourselves, paying attention to so many things and people, directing our consciousness outside. And we are so bad at spending time inside of ourselves, with our consciousness and our breath. Why? We forgot. Forgot our essence and our being.

And where is this essence anyway? I knew I was lost. But I had no idea how to get back. It turns out that if you just close your eyes, most probably you will just hear the noise of your mind. When I began to meditate, all I heard in my mind were the voices of others. My own voice was whispering to me very quietly. In meditation, we clean out the mind, the fears, the noise, the old patterns. And we train the mind to stay stable, to listen, to focus. To get to self, we first have to get through the forest of the mind. And then maybe, the self, the heart, is still waiting for us there.

It takes time to lose the connection to ourselves and it also takes time to get it back. For me, it took years of meditation before I began to trust my own voice again. Before I had the courage to say no thank you to all other voices. And when a moment of doubt comes, I come back to the breath and the mantra.

I check in with myself. I tune in with myself. I hold on to myself. I connect with myself. The practice of Kundalini Yoga gave me all the tools so I can stay tuned in, and stay connected with my own essence. It is all right here and now I know it.

The Mul Mantra is the meditation that I practice daily. This mantra keeps on giving and helps me to transform myself.