“If you look deep inside, you will realize that most of us are not afraid of dying. We are afraid that we haven’t lived our lives.” – Paramahamsa Nithyananda

So as I think about this idea it makes total sense. To most of us I think death is the ultimate escape from the prison of the mind, the nonstop chatter of the ego. I wonder when we die – do we really escape the mind or just the body. Perhaps we will just be floating in the ether with our thoughts and nothing else…

Which brings me to my next thought – if we leave our bodies behind and have nothing but our thoughts – it could possibly serve us in eternity if we tackled the beast now, perhaps the body is nothing but a preparatory stage to help us realize the power of thoughts and therefore become super conscious of them. I heard an analogy this weekend that our stream of thinking is just that, a river that keeps flowing with no beginning or end and if we just witness our thoughts flowing by instead of jumping into them – only then are we free to choose.

As I mature – I notice I become more childlike, needing less. The ultimate goal of life is to live it – without the limits of incessant mind chatter. To use the mind as a tool and not a prison…How amusing it is when your focus changes to this aspiration that so many things that seemed so necessary begin to fade.

I went to Vancouver recently and took a meditation course where I got to learn several different techniques to release energy from the body. These techniques were developed by Nithyananda, a living enlightened master from India. If you’d like to learn more about him visit http://www.dhyanapeetam.org.

The course covered the 7 energy centers of the body known as chakras. Energy gets blocked in the chakras due to different types of negative thinking. For example the Heart chakra is blocked by our need for attention and begins to flow when we open to selfless love. Another example is the throat chakra which is blocked by spending our thought energy in jealousy and comparison and unblocked by realizing our own uniqueness. The meditation techniques I learned in class were very physical and different than the transcendental meditation I have been doing for over 5 years.

So tonight – Swamiji is here! I get the rare opportunity to see him this evening in Issaquah before he continues on to Vancouver.