You don’t have to go through rituals with the hope that something’s going to change. The Everyday Sanyasin is not involved with ‘pie in the sky when you die.’ The Everyday Sanyasin is taking what’s going on, using my Divine Heritage that’s within me, to discover how I can find my comfort, my ability to be with what’s going on, and to be creative with what’s going on in the moment.
If you start breathing more quickly, that’s an indication that you are not doing it gently. Slow down in the change that you’re introducing. Take a nice breath. Take a couple nice breaths and be at ease with it. Or if you think you need to, introduce a little bit of the quality of what gives you comfort into the visualization. The whole idea is introducing aspects that are going to expand your perception in a way that allows you to be open.
What’s interesting to meis that here in the West, and especially in America, we’re used to making big changes very fast. We think that’s what we’re doing. And yet to find in an internal visualization practice, in a Deity practice, my own resistance simply to changing colors. This is all just imagined stuff. It’s not like I’m changing jobs or getting divorced or getting married. It’s something internal. It shows me how the internal work is the most intense and the most profound.
It truly is because it changes how we deal with perception. It changes the filters, the organizing faculty. We called it the Bodhi in The Everyday Sanyasin. It’s from Raja Yoga and the Yogic Aphorisms of Patanjali. Actually, we’re changing the way in which we organize our perception. And it’s wonderful because basically, instead of you saying, “No, I can’t be warmer because it’s cold outside.” And, “I’ve been cold all my life because of this, this, and this.” Instead of getting into the story, or getting into majestic conceptualizations that hide the story, we’ve approached it from a very simple perspective. That simple perspective allows you to begin to embrace the colors and the qualities of the colors amidst this change in a manner that you can incorporate and integrate into your life.
It’s completely practical. It’s completely immediate.
Now I’ve got a different paradigm. I’ve got a different super-structure. My superstructure has inner warmth.” Now two things: remember as you’re expanding this mist out from you that you share it with others. It’s really good, in fact, if you can actually see them breathe in this warmth and begin to radiate it themselves. Even though you’re doing it in a visualization, this is the manifestation of your intentto share the radiant warmth that you’re discovering. It connects you with all of humanity while you’re doing that, yes. It also enhances the strength of the power that you’re cultivating within yourself. If I cultivate a power for myself, the strength of that power is limited to me.