By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

When water becomes ice, we call it by a new name — ice instead of water. But we know it is still water, only in a different form for a while.

Using this analogy, I’ll liken you to a snowflake. The close-up photos of all the unique crystalline shapes are fascinating. So are you. Yet you came from God and are made of God’s own energy, Oh, Shiva.

But you have a different name. While you are called by a name, you also think of yourself as a human being. You think of yourself as separate from and different from God. Like a snowflake is water, but in a unique form, you are God in a form.  Oh, Shiva.

You have a right to know who you truly are. It is your birthright, your Divine inheritance. But you have to do some work to uncover your inherent Divinity. You go through a very structured process, with predictable and tangible results that serve as landmarks along the way.  

In order to become you, Shiva took on form and structure. They create the way your body works and the way your mind and heart work. When you use them to shut down, there’s a way to reverse the process. There’s a way to open you up, to open you to your own Divinity.

It’s like with a garden hose. When you pull it out from the corner, turn on the water and go to grab the nozzle, sometimes there’s no water coming through. So you go look for the kink in the hose.

When you unkink it, water flows.

In the same way, Divine energy flows through your spine. Yogis of yore mapped this for us so we could understand how to live in this world without getting lost in it.

In the world but not of the world.

That you live in the world without getting entangled in it, without clinging, without neediness and fear.

This was Jesus’s prayer for how his disciples should live, as reported by St. John in chapter 17, verse 16. Praying for his disciples, Jesus said:

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world…

They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.

I call it Embodied Consciousness. That you know your Divine Essence while you participate in the world.

This approach to spiritual development is not a process of transcendence. You don’t rise above the world, you live in it, but in a new way. You don’t surpass others, you become more real while in the midst of them. You don’t need to levitate or dematerialize and rematerialize – you have a real body, a real life, real relationships and real work to do in this world.

It’s Divine. It’s cosmic. You are cosmic. The yogic map of your body describes how energy coalesces into matter, swirling in on itself in a downward…