By Niranjan Matanich
My mind has tormented me all my life, as far back as I can remember. Everything can be going just right in my external world but my mind tears me apart. Thoughts of being a failure, incessant worry that things are going to go bad or reliving past things that were painful — I’m sure you’ve experienced some of this yourself. At some point things got so bad for me mentally that, out of desperation, I decided to try meditation. I had tried everything else. Drugs, alcohol, food, sex, sleep, religion and on and on. No matter what I tried I could not escape my mind.
In 2001 I started to meditate. I was given a mantra and a simple instruction to repeat it silently with my eyes closed. I was naturally drawn to the mantra I was given and it didn’t take long for me to begin to see a change. I found I was not reacting as much as I had in the past, I found that I had some space between my thoughts and within those spaces I began to feel ease. I began to feel that things were going to be ok and I even began to feel some happiness and joy. I didn’t know it then, but in those spaces I was experiencing the light of my own being.
Swami Nirmalananda says:
The light of your own being arises from its source….
only when you have cleared the pathway..your mind.
It’s like looking at a lake that is perfectly still. You can see the reflection of the surrounding scenery and, when you looking into the water, you can see through the surface into the depths of the lake. When the surface of the lake is disturbed with a lot of waves, the reflection is distorted and you are not able to see into the depths of the lake. This is how your mind is. The light of your own being is always there but you cannot experience because of the erratic nature of your mind.
When you begin meditating, you start clearing away all the sediment your mind has created. You begin to still the waves of your mind to see into the depths of your being. I practice meditation in the Svaroopa® Vidya tradition. Svaroopavidya is a Sanskrit word meaning the “experiential knowing of your own being.” It’s so easy to meditate in this tradition. It’s so easy to have an experience of your being, the essence which is behind your thoughts; it’s not theory, it’s experiential. It’s easy because the practices have been passed down through generations of teachers with full realization of what they give their students.
Over the years that I have been practicing meditation, I find that I’m living from the depth of my being more and more. I’m not saying that my mind never torments me anymore because it still does occasionally, but that’s not where I’m living from anymore.
OM svaroopa svasvabhavah namo namah
To your Inherent Divinity, again and again I bow.