“Read a little. Meditate more. Think of God all the time.” ~ Paramahansa Yogananda
Happy Sunday!
This Sunday has been different as I have not pressured myself to go deep, to find a lesson to write about. This is because my novel writing has been flowing very well so I wanted to give myself time this day to let that continue.
So I thought I would write, to record in this blog, the good story about how I came to know Yogananda.
It started back in 2012. I was on my journey of awakening; books, teachers, and validation from spirit were all new, filling my days with joy, as I wrote about in my writings called ‘2012 My Year of Miracles’. I had begun learning yoga at the start of this journey and as I reached the warmer months of spring I wanted to start doing yoga on my front porch.
I was playing around with some CDs I had for relaxation music and meditation that I would play but they weren’t feeling right for me. I found some instrumentation, such as piano, was too cerebral and wouldn’t let me flow with the signals from my body. I found myself having to play with the CD player too much to skip over songs I didn’t want. What I did want was music like my yoga instructor would play, Indian music with chanting and singing, that is what I wanted for my practice.
One day I was out with my brother, taking Mom to the doctor, when he told me about Pandora. It sounded like just the thing to try to get a good selection of the music I wanted. So when I got it loaded on my iPad I checked out how it worked. I set up an ‘Adele’ channel and then a ‘James Taylor’ channel and they both gave me a good mix of similar genre’ to those artists that I liked.
I decided to give it a try for my yoga music. I typed in ‘yoga’ and a list of available channels came up to choose from. One caught my eye, ‘Yogananda Paramahansa’. I thought this was probably a type of yoga. I listened and it was perfect – just the music I wanted for my yoga practice.
I used this channel for about a year, twice a week for my practice at home. I was once again out with family one weekend when my brother started telling my sister how great Pandora was. As I knew B. had just started doing yoga, I added how it was great for giving me the music I wanted for my yoga practice. I said, “There is this great channel I use called ‘Yogananda Paramahansa’.” And, she then asked me what that meant. I had to answer that I didn’t know.
Needless to say, after feeling foolish, I went home and looked it up. I was surprised to learn it was a person and not a practice, position, or meditation. I read of him on Wikipedia and then went to a page that had some beautiful images of Jesus, Krishna, and other Indian gurus. I learned of Yogananda’s book “Autobiography of a Yogi” and ordered from Amazon.
I read this book in spring of 2013 and I would say it taught me the big lesson of each human having the potential to reach Christ Consciousness. That the miracles Jesus performed were capable of being performed by any human who sought to reach such heights as several of the Yogi’s Yogananda wrote about were able to achieve.
We are all beloved of God.
So why is Yogananda on my mind again this week? Curiously his guru Sri Yukteswar has come up twice lately in things I have been learning about. I have been delving into understanding the power of living from the heart. First Drunvalo mentioned this Yogi bringing to him the ‘Unity Breath’ meditation for preparing to enter the heart. Then, this week I was watching some new ideas in cosmology investigating that our Sun might be part of a binary system. This documentary was called “The great year”. In it was said that Sri Yukteswar predicted that our Sun had a twin.
I am thinking that Yogananda’s Guru now has something to teach me. We will see where this goes.
Namaste’
“Be afraid of nothing. Hating none, giving love to all, feeling the love of God, seeing His presence in everyone, and having but one desire – for His constant presence in the temple of your consciousness – that is the way to live in this world.” ~ Paramahansa Yogananda