Courage and forgiveness

Today I had a reiki healing and Angel therapy session with nationally known clairvoyant medium, Rev. Ana Jones. It was something that I signed up for on the spur of the moment while walking by the Meridian healing center in Gaithersburg, MD. When I approached the reception, I noticed an advertisement announcing that Rev. Jones would be at the center in a few weeks offering healing. It felt right and so I signed up. Well it turned out to be quite fortuitous because of all the healers I could have approached, Ana was most certainly one that could understand what I was going through. It is not something I can even really explain without going into a very lengthy discourse, suffice to say that her husband was coming from the same spiritual path as I had. As a result, there were things I could talk to her about that most would not understand.

After the healing session had finished Ana shared with me some of the realizations and messages past on to her by her angelic assistants. She said that the most powerful presence in the room was of my guru and that the overwhelming message was that I needed to protect myself. “I had to be courageous and do whatever I could to protect myself,” she explained. She even mentioned that I should call upon the avatar, Nrsimhadeva, a well known incarnation of Lord Krishna and a universal icon of protection against evil. It was really amazing to hear her offer this advice although her own spiritual background was Christianity. She also told me that I needed to work on forgiveness. Forgiveness of my ex-wife; forgiveness of my guru; forgiveness of my father and forgiveness of myself. Her angels actually recommended I read a book called “Radical Forgiveness” by Colin Tipping.

She then offered me a meditation CD to use for assisting my journey of understanding and went on to explain that my experience on the spiritual path had been very similar to her husbands, in that in a very short time I had achieved a high level of realization, however, the ascent had left me feeling “short changed” in other areas of my life. For those familiar with my past, from the age of 19 until 33 I lived the life of a renounced and celibate monk. I had literally left home, escaped to the mountains for 6 months and soon after shaved my head and joined a Krishna ashram where for the next 14 years I owned no more than what could fit inside a 15 inch wide closet. I did not even have a bank account, medical insurance, or even a credit card until I reached the age of 34, after I had decided to move on from my monastic life and get married. You could say I lived a somewhat sheltered life with a laser-like focus on cultivating my intention on understanding God. The experience was certainly enriching, because it allowed me to travel the world, live somewhat stress-free, eat very well, and sleep like a baby. No mortgage, no bills, no screaming kids, no nagging wife, no concern really for anything bar the outreach work I did through the Food for Life charity.

So why did I give it all up? Unfulfilled desires. While focusing on my most inner needs I forgot to nourish the other vibrational levels of my existence. Yes, ultimately we are all spiritual beings, but we are also having a material experience and until that time that we completely transcend the bodily conception, we must address the needs of the mind, body and senses. Hence, in the traditional Vedic system of socio-spiritual evolution, there is the Varnashram institution which offers a gradual progression of the man from student life (monk), to marriage, to voluntary retirement (separation), and finally to the renounced order (sannyas). For all intents and purposes, I had gone from humble student (monk) to a “swami”-like existence in those 14 years. Interestingly enough, Ana’s husband had been a swami for 17 years and so she knew exactly what I was going through. When I finally decided that I needed to get married to fill the void in my heart, I was sincerely looking forward to the experience of connecting with another soul on all vibrational levels. In the end, however, it was a disaster from the beginning, and for next 9 years my heart ached for emancipation. To tell that story would take a book. The purport is simple: I tried and I tried, but in the end, I decided that she didn’t deserve me, and I didn’t deserve her.

So now here I am, having gone through the greatest challenge of my life thus far, I stand at the doorstep of a new beginning. “We are all eternal souls,” Ana explained, “and so no one or no thing can really harm us.” And then in my mind I completed her words, “yes, very true, but the fact remains that until we are freed from this bondage of material existence, we must deal with and learn from the experiences that are presented to us. All of them are meant to “heal” us on some level. The “why” and “how” is something we will only understand once we have fully awoken from this “dream” of material consciousness. In the meantime, it behooves us to keep the faith; be inspired by the great souls that came before us, and to stay focused on the goal – to return “home” back to Godhead.

Thank you Ana for your comforting words and thank you for the gift of the CD; but more importantly, thank you for being a messenger of light and love for the world.