DREAMTIME

Sitting here quietly,

I dreamt of You.

I opened my third eye

And you entered.

I saw you in the light in the leaves

Showing the subtle magic

That lies just under every surface.

You have so many ways to reach us.

Like..

Entering the dream space,

Moving through the secret door in time

That I know to find

To the timeless eternal now,

I wake up in the dream.

It’s like breathing underwater.

A miracle of suspension.

I am still

And the ancients speak.

My eyes soften.

My mind is granted understanding

But of what, it can’t say.

It’s just out of the way.

Wordless eloquent knowing

That carries the genes of peace.

Softly sharpens the blade.

And brings release.

The soul's Sat Nav - finding my teacher like a needle in a haystack

OK. As promised, the story of how I met my Teacher. An excerpt of a larger story. I am finding that such stories want to come out of me and one story leads to another to another, until it seems a book is writing itself.

So I will try to give you an abridged version.

1999. I had had teachers. Tibetan Buddhism is what had called me up to that point. There were some amazing teachers that I met and learned from. Yet, somehow …

I even searched for a true teacher for my soul in my dance teachers at WAAPA – yes, I did that for 2 years. But, amazingly, did not find them there.  When I realised that is indeed what I was doing it became clear it was time to get off that path. Anyway, I was making a nuisance of myself by complaining about it.

I then even kind of fell in love with someone who was also a teacher to me. That was enlightening, on several levels. But that too was not it.

Back then, in my 20s, I took a lot of teachings from my dreams. I wrote a lot of them down and I was amazed recently at how many of them I had recorded and how I used them as a kind of oracle. There was a lot of chaff there, a lot of trying to understand and creating fantasies.

One night, however, I had a gem of a dream. A clear one. A way-shower dream.

I was sitting in a room with a lot of mostly middle aged men. It was a committee meeting for the local Tibetan Buddhist community. Their voices were droning on, not chanting mantras but talking about business stuff. I sat there and felt distinctly bored. In Tibetan Buddhism white scarves are used in the wongkurs, the initiations. Sitting there in that dream, someone approached me very pointedly, consciously. This person had very blue eyes. They looked at me, said my name very distinctly (Jodie, back then), and handed me a rainbow coloured scarf. Then said, “See you in ….(garble garble)”.

I woke up. In my dream state eagerness to hear, I had missed the place name! I did my best to recapture it without my mind getting in the way but the best I could come up with was Poona. Poona. Place of Osho and his ashram, India. I was planning a trip to India. I had been reading about Poona.

OK. So on the map it went.

India. 2001. I followed my nose around it. I sniffed out the trail.

My dear sister, with whom I travelled for part of the way, met me in Calcutta. We moved around, going to a few places, before heading to Poona.

In Poona, we were not interested in the ashram scene. We were there with one mission in mind: find my Teacher. So we positioned ourselves in a chai stall and waited for him to appear.  

It was ridiculous and hilarious, but also I had to do it, and bless my sister for doing it with me. We sat there drinking chai and smoking cigarettes and being available for my Teacher to find me.

After 3 days of this, he didn’t show. Maybe I got the place name wrong after all. Maybe it was just a wishful thinking fantasy.

On we went, following our noses and arriving in Tiruvanamalai – the home of the ashram of saint Ramana Maharshi. Ramana. Matchmaker. The ashram at the foot of the mountain Arunachala, Shiva’s mountain.

And there I did not meet my Teacher either, but I did meet my future husband. He gave me a Sat Nam Rasayan treatment – meditative healing art of Kundalini Yoga and I heard the mantra Ong Namo for the first time. I read words in a book, about 10 spiritual bodies, numbers and Sikh gurus. Words by Shiv Charan Singh, Beant’s teacher of numerology. They struck a chord.

Longer story short, my future husband and I find ourselves and each other in Varanasi. He leaves India. I travel more, then get ready to work in London, planning to “just visit” Beant in Berlin on the way through.

Once in Berlin, I do a reccy trip to London, to visit my friend, see if it could work to save money there (find out it wouldn’t). I have a book with me, the story of the saint poet Janeshwar, which I am to deliver to Shiv Charan Singh as a gift from Beant, at his place the Kriya Centre. Walking up the street to the centre, I am inexplicably very nervous suddenly, at the thought of meeting this teacher. A voice inside me says “It’s not time yet”. He isn’t there and I am relieved and leave the book at the reception for him.

Back in Berlin, 6 weeks later: I am pregnant! Not planned, though not surprising somehow. Though I am surprised how happy I am about it. Then off to the European Yoga Festival in France.. and I tell that story HERE.

But the main thing here is, that is where, finally, I met my Teacher.

We were wandering the bazaar, meeting people, enjoying ourselves, when we came across this man with a long ginger beard and blue eyes. With a turban, of course. It was not a case of instant recognition, fall to the ground, eureka moment. It was more, in that moment and in a conversation, guided by numbers, to follow, that it gradually began to dawn.

How incredible the navigational device of the soul. The accuracy of the timing. The precision of the play. There we were. His name, Shiv Charan, meaning at the feet of Shiva. At the foot of Shiva’s mountain I heard his words for the first time. And now, in my tent at night, I can’t sleep because I know my life is, again, about to change monumentally.

It was less of a flash of light moment and more like a slow dawning. Or like some pieces of the biiiig puzzle of my life slowly shifting and falling into place.

21 years later, I am still a student of Shiv Charan Singh.

I am infinitely grateful for the magic movements of life. I’m grateful to Ramana, for he truly was the matchmaker in more ways than one – another story lies hidden like an Easter egg in that one.

Be ready to throw away the travel guide, stop googling it and go in blind. Follow your noses, people. The nose knows.

Umm.. is this a cult? Or a whole other culture?

People will sometimes ask me when I first met Kundalini Yoga.

It’s a bit of a hallmark of some extremeness in my character that my first encounter with Kundalini Yoga was in 2001 at the Kundalini Yoga Festival in France. I went with my German partner (and husband to be). He had gone every year for years already, so the scene to him was akin to coming home. For me, on the other hand…

I arrive there to see a sea of white-clad people, many with turbans on their heads. I’m 27 at that stage. I’ve been travelling for the past year in Asia, looking for my vocation, looking for my self, looking for a spiritual practice and my Teacher. I had had a dream while still back in Perth.. a story for another day.

So I get out of the car to see this sea of white and my mind says “Uh oh”. However, I am at one of those major thresholds in life - the kind where you know that disbelief MUST be suspended for long enough to allow the sharp 180 degree turns that are necessary to get on course. I knew enough to know that I didn’t know much at all, if anything.

So, I firmly told my mind “shoosh” and resolved to be open, honestly open. Open was not my default position. Skeptical was much firmer or at least familiar ground. So I felt I almost had to pretend to be someone else for long enough that the message could make its way to where it needed to land: in my heart.

My heart received the message - yes. And through its feelings conveyed that to my mind. My heart, dear heart, was the messenger for my soul. Yes. This. Here. Now. And I listened.

My first Kundalini Yoga experience proper was then White Tantra. If you know White Tantra you will likely be thinking “whoah”. If you don’t, White Tantra is an exceptionally powerful practice in which you sit in pairs, facing each other in rows, and do meditation practices for a total of 6 hours a day, in these pairs. At the European Festival you do that for 3 days. It cleans the subconscious out in a radical way. And it’s HARD. Challenging. I thought I had a pretty good pain threshold and command of my body, but I was humbled to realise that what had gotten me through thus far was of not much use to me here. This required something else. A strength of spirit? Largely, in retrospect, trust.

Anyway, I made it through — did I mention I was also about 10 weeks pregnant at the time and feeling almost constantly nauseous? And I learned only years later how good it was for the baby to come, for my own subconscious cleansing in preparation for receiving a soul, and for my partnership.

At these festivals there is always a marketplace - a bazaar. Alongside all the yoga and meditation, with early morning practice (Aquarian sadhana) every morning, workshops on offer, yogic diet and seva (selfless service) jobs, was the fun of yogic browzing and hanging out with beautiful souls. Here, wandering through the marketplace one early evening, I met my Teacher. I remember clearly telling him I was not surprised to be pregnant (that was so “unplanned”), but surprised at how happy I was about it.

This story of meeting my Teacher, as I said, deserves its own space, so I’ll save that for later, but truly this meeting is what cemented it for me. The something that was happening, that I intuited was going to happen here, in this place, now, turned my life upside down and inside out. It was more real than any appearance. More true than any shallow judgement It was a victory for true sight, breaking through the protective, defensive shields of the super ego.

I’m so grateful for the radical, now or never atmosphere of those times, or the voice of God that is actually my own true voice, that was so loud then. So loud that it silenced all the rest.

Me in my first ever turban. It felt so natural.

Further Words From the Heart ~ on Grief & Praise

(From a newsletter November 2021)

Sat Naam

Dear every one,

You may know because I shared with you about the recent appearance of grief in my life. It came in the form of the sudden death of my beloved 8 year old nephew. The tide has permanently turned for me in some way, and for my family, and of course most especially my sister and her other sons. Tragedy could really strike any moment. Death really is a real thing. All the mystics say, those who live without the awareness of death as a constant companion are not really living. Life and death are inseparably intertwined with each other, so to deny one is to deny the other. It’s the yin and the yang of existence.

I say it is the appearance of grief but actually it is not new. Grief has been there for a long time in me, even before this more obvious loss. We carry ancestral grief. We all know loss. You cannot live and not lose. You cannot love and not lose. Heartbreak and loss are part of life, are they not? Grief is now my teacher - the one who leads me to the river bank to kneel and take teachings from the very place where life and death hold hands. I discover these days some very wise elder voices that are speaking about grief. One of them says, grief and praise are close to each other. You can’t grieve something if you are not loving it, praising it. So love and celebration are part of grief. Grief keeps the sharp, awake edge on the heart’s love and pain. In that sharp edge place of paradox we feel, we exist, we are human. Don’t let it get blunt and numb.

My sister has said, there are many different ways that people can communicate with someone who is grieving that are right. And there are a few ways that really miss the mark. One of them is not acknowledging it at all. Not even saying those well worn words, sorry for your loss. Perhaps people think they are helping by not mentioning the tragic. I understand it. This could even have been me a few short weeks ago. Yet not mentioning the thing that is most pertinent, most acutely relevant in that moment is to have a communication that has no basis in reality. Here in such communication there is a great loneliness behind the smile. The real is not touched or referenced. Perhaps it is because the mind thinks it should not mention that which it cannot solve. You can only really be with it and be with the person who is with it. Simple acknowledgement is just stating what is real and letting it be real. It’s not solvable and can we just be with that? Death is not a problem we will ever be able to solve and that’s a fact. Grief like birth and death, like all rhythms of a human life, has its own season and reason, and for it to move on as nature intends and for it to deliver its significant gifts of grace, beauty and, yes, joy and renewal, it needs to be allowed to be what it is and it needs a certain witnessing – a being with. And at the most small level, acknowledgment.

This is what I am learning.

This brings me to other griefs that we as humanity are experiencing. The loss of the life we once had. A loss of carefreeness and innocence. The widening divisions in our society. We are also facing potential future loss of what we have known of our lives on an unprecedented level, and many people feel this and are grieving in advance.

For me, there are many times that Mother Earth herself inhabits my body suddenly and I cry from the depths of my being for the destruction and disregard of the earth and her plants and creatures. I weep her tears. I feel a gap opening up in me inside which is a deep deep river of things that have been forgotten. A way of living that involves elders, nourishing traditions, community and a life that is not inflated but in proportion with nature. The name of the river my nephew drowned in is Deep River. Between the 2 banks of the river is a deep current that can be devastatingly dangerous and wildly beautiful... just as it can be calm and safe. There is wisdom and poetry in it. It speaks of a continuity from the past to the present and things we have lost that we now need. We need them and we don’t even know how much we miss them because the loss is not acknowledged. And that is the greatest loss of all.

Well, I am here to acknowledge it.

I am not given that longing, that weeping and that realisation and awareness of a grief that has really been there all along so that I can drown. No. I am given it so that I can give words to it and so it can be a healing force. Where many are saying nothing I will say something. I’ll put it in the room. Or rather point out that it is already in the room. The deep sadness of what we don’t have and need. The ignoring of the liminal, the mystical, the non rational. And of our common humanity.

Only then when a loss or any kind of ailment is properly named can it begin to be healed. I am full of hope actually, because although nature can seem so cruel and we can wonder what kind of God if there is one would let the things that happen happen, I trust that I would not be given this grief and lack to feel if it wasn’t also possible to discover beautiful ways to live with it and let it lead us towards a life that is healing and beautiful.

As long as I feel the loss or it is at least accessible to me then I am OK. That’s what grieving people say – the days when the tears are flowing and the grief is felt are the better days. It is also, like a river, a constantly changing flow. Now dark and awful, then it rounds a bend and suddenly it is sunny and light sparkles on the water and we are laughing. The days when the flow is blocked or numb and nobody is acknowledging the loss, including yourself, are the worst. Most of the planet is living in this denial of grief, or blocked grief, and THAT is making us sick.

Was I not going to talk about numbers? Ah.. I have been all this time!

Number 2 is the number of the gap, like the gap between 2 things. A missing and an emptiness. In feeling terms, sadness – which is not badness. Grief. That which we long for and miss is made present through the missing. Next year is made up of 3 twos. 2022. Along with a widening gap of division amongst us, there could be deep dark holes of depression opening up and we need to learn how to not fall in either of these holes, whilst not denying them. The sum total of the year – 2+0+2+2 is 6 which, as well as being the number of conflict, revolution and war (real possibilities and actually inevitabilities on some level), is the number of poetry, of grace, of song and dance. That human expression which can take emotion and elevate it. Turn it into art in some way. Grief can’t be fixed, but expressing it helps. Putting flowers on a grave, lighting a candle, singing a song, scattering ashes – or any small act that enacts, expresses and makes external what is inside, so that it can keep shape changing. This is the way we won’t go mad. It fixes nothing to place a flower on an altar. That person or habitat or species is still gone. It’s a non rational act to place objects in a coffin with the dead person’s body to be buried or cremated. Yet it helps. The non rational helps. And we need so that we don’t go crazy.

Also, our longings when listened to will bring us clarity, also number 6. They will point us in the direction we always wanted to go anyway. For some of us the revolution we have long longed for may be about to begin. We need the faith (6) to let the longing loose so that it can show us the way to fulfilment.

There is so much magic everywhere. So much poetry, metaphor and symbolism in this mythical life. So much meaning and purpose. And this also helps keep me in a relationship with the divine hand that is moving through everything in life. EVERYTHING. And in this way, trust. In this, faith. Where we are going, nobody knows, but I am starting to feel really ready to go there.

Please stay in dialogue with me and with each other. Our words, our expressions, help. Naming things, saying things out loud, putting words to the things that are moving inside us, helps. There need not be an immediate solution at hand in order to begin speaking about things that trouble us. Together we weave and find new ways. We are going to really need each other in the times to come.

Looking forward to seeing you soon perhaps,

Jai Ram Kaur

Words from the Heart ~ when tragedy strikes

(From a newsletter, November 2021)

Sat Naam

Dear every one,

This last month has brought tragedy into my life. You are going along, doing what you’re doing (in this case teacher training) and then suddenly, with a phone call, it strikes. Then that news story that touches your heart is about your own family.

Such events have impact. The ripples that can go out from the passing of a single soul can be many. As we are interconnected and separation but an illusion, there are many threads woven into the tapestry and the connections reach far and wide.

The loss of a loved one, and a very young one at that, has led me to confront things in myself. Death is right here, always, and yet we pretend it isn’t. Moving in the space of grief where death is so real and present reminds me of travelling in India. There, sickness, decay, death is in front of you, on the streets and on the burning ghats of the Ganges in Varanasi, where the bodies are burned. For me Varanasi is a place of death and romance both, going hand in hand, existing in the same breath, one illuminating the other. Death is there in India as a very real possibility every time you get into a bus with a crazy bus driver to travel those insane roads. I found it so liberating to be confronted on a daily basis. Anyway, I am not my body. That was the only attitude that could help me relax. And it was, after all, relaxing. The thing that in western culture is blanked out in India is in your face. Not hidden. It was healthy to live with that reality. It is actually crazy to live somehow forgetting that death is a constant companion of life.

On returning to the West I felt the weight of suppression and ignoring return. The nice smooth pavements and roads covering up and concealing the reality of the cracks in the universe, the impermanence of all this. Paving over the soul and not letting it breathe. That avoidance, that passive lie born out of fear holding so much reality at bay. And with it, so much release, so much beauty and grace.

This is what I feel about this death. It is terrible and yet there is beauty. There is horror and there is grace. There is the impossibility of living with such a loss, and yet here we are, doing it.

I am reminded how very very human I am these days. The teachings do say, I am a spiritual being having a human experience. Well, here it is, that human. It hurts. But it hurts because of the love. And love is never not worth it.

It is too soon to say that healing is coming from this event, yet I know behind it all that that is true. In some moments and at times I have been attuned to the waves of wahe guru – this is what was always going to happen. It is the hukam, the command, of that soul, and all who are connected to it. There is nothing but universal will playing out. There is no other way to “understand” such a thing other than standing under it and bowing. It’s not a contradiction to at once feel overcome with grief and sadness for the human loss and also touched by the magnitude of grace and poetry, the perfect weave of Life, beyond our ken.

So I do what I always come back to doing. The only thing that makes any sense. I bow. I fight and I bow. I complain and I bow. I shake my fist at God and I bow.

It’s too soon to say I am grateful. That would be premature. But I do feel grace, so that is getting closer.

I realise this is very personal, what I am sharing, and not the usual fare of a newsletter. But it is also a universal experience and in times like these, humanity and heartfelt connection between people is grace made physical. Humans can be really shitty, and they can be incredible. Like angels, almost, in their selfless service. So there is a lot of human warmth in this story. A lot to be pleased with. And when it comes to the death of a child, it doesn’t matter what your views and opinions are on this or that topic: every human heart feels the same love and loss. There we are really the same. There we can feel we are one. So I feel events like this open the heart door and through that true community can be ushered in.

Thanks for being a reader of this, and of receiving my words. They have been healing to write. Some say, words are just words. They can never reach. But in my experience, words are what we have. If I can reach across a silent space and into your heart with my words, then that is a kind of magic.

humbly

Jai Ram Kaur

A personal story of trust and faith

From a newsletter, September 2021.

Dear everybody,

I would like to share something with you to do with TRUST and FAITH.

It’s personal.

People would say, when I went to India alone on a one way ticket back in 2000 that I was courageous. I don’t think I thought of that, or felt it. I just did what I knew I had to do. Which didn’t make it easy. Or romantic. I felt desperately lonely alot of the time. But I just knew I had to do it.

There was a sense in me at that time, of “now it has to be one way". It has to be a no turning back situation.” No return loops. No safe forays and then back to the familiar. No. It had to be new ground.

So I sold and gave away almost all of my things and bought a backpack and a one way ticket to India.

Wandering India in an unorthodox way, getting lost so many times that I eventually lost all sense of concern about it and realised I’m as lost or found anywhere in the world really, regardless, I started to find a deeper something in me. A sense of being at home in me. By the end of 9 months in India I felt totally at home in that crazy, confronting yet incredibly peace-giving, satisfying land.

Letting go of the familiar is what was needed to be available. Without knowing what I was looking for, but knowing that it was out there, what I was seeking was also seeking me. By a series of incredible synchronicities that only the natural intelligence and the dead set accuracy of the soul’s navigation system could possibly manoeuvre into being, I met my life partner to be. Through him I met my Teacher. I met Kundalini Yoga. Karam Kriya. And these have been my pole stars ever since. My reference.

What has this to do with trust and faith? Obviously alot! Through putting myself into a series of situations in which nothing was there for me for company and comfort but my own inner sense of Okayness, my abiding Self, I learnt to trust that. Every time I trusted an inkling, followed a yearning, a sign, a knowing, it always turned out to be something true. And when I didn’t know, was blind, groping, falling into empty space, there was something catching me. Much bigger than me personally, a big Plan. A vast poetic, magical logic. I have been shown so many times that this is so that how could I still not be surrendering 100% in every moment?

I must admit I’m having a few little tears writing this. They are truth tears. When the truth barometer is vibrating, sometimes tears come out. Truth barometer has its own language and expression. What happens in you when you know something is true?

To gain trust in you, let go of looking to others or to the familiar. Put it to the test. To experience faith, think of the times in your life you just knew something. Let’s let this sense in us grow. We are going to need to navigate by the sixth sense in the future. More and more.

Love

Jai Ram

PS: The picture above is me with some Tibetan refugees on one of the most hair raising parts of the adventure, into Spitti Valley for the Dalai Lama. These are not my life partner and teacher, just to avoid any confusion!

4 Paths of a Woman - hearing the call

I stand in my life looking at the view around me and I see what I see. The familiar forms of my life, with my intimate loved ones in it – my husband and 3 children closest by. The scenes of the every day as they play out in the various rooms of our lives.

In many moments my heart swells and I just feel grateful for all that I've been gifted with. It is really too big for my heart to fathom and so it pulls at the edges and tugs at the limits. There where there is a sense of limit, where love gets interpreted as tension or pain, is a threshold.

There were there is the most rub is the greatest potential to let me know – I can do this. I am in truth infinite. What I think I can't bear, can't be with – whether that is the amount of beauty and love I perceive or the amount of struggle, difficulty and pain – I actually can.

And that realisation is monumental, because it opens the door of my heart to the truth of its own limitlessness. To an ocean of compassion. You can't hold that amount of love (and all is just a modification of love). You have to let go and let it hold you.

It's a total flipped on its head scenario. A turnaround. And if there's one thing I've noticed about truth so far it's that if there is a total turnaround – things are not just a bit different to what I thought, but are the complete reverse – then I'm onto something. Because the ego mind with its limited, clinging, fearful agenda, has to be turned on its head to liberate the experience of being much bigger than that. Of being, in fact, vast.

As Yogi Bhajan said, and he said so many things that bear repeating time and again, understanding them more with the passing years, “In your caliber there is a consciousness. In that consciousness there is a caring being. In that caring being there Is God. That's all I am saying. Look to your vastness. Look to your bigness. Look to your totality. Don't look to the little things.”

It can seem painful also, to look to your vastness. Well, I experience that. Because there at the limit of who my little me thinks I am are the false and contracting beliefs that keep me identified as being small. And bumping up against these, touching and stretching them temporarily touches on the original pain and contraction. This is but temporary. And needn't be a big deal. We touch on, we feel, we recognise, we let go and go beyond. That's what I love so about Kundalini Yoga (amongst so many other things) – it trains us to reach to that fake limit and resolve it. WE go on beyond that, into truth. Sat Nam. True Identity, not false.

Also, in looking to our vastness, and in living as a woman of consciousness and caliber, as a caring being in whom God lives and breathes, requires the giving up of convenient excuses and cop-outs. It takes a certain dignity and stature and posture to wear the crown of our own greatness.

I think together we can do it.

That's why I am daring this year to bring out the big guns of Kundalini Yoga – the shabds.

What's a shabd? A shabd is a teaching verse. It's a poem. But it's also a very pithy, encoded form of communication with the soul and a form of cellular therapy through sound vibration. It works, whether or not you understand the words. Shabd means to cut the ego at its root and guru is teacher or that which destroys the hindrances to real perception of truth. So shabd guru is the sound as guru. These verses have the capacity to cut the ego at the root and show us our higher selves.

They are in Gurmukhi, and some people find it easier than others to relate to a foreign language. But think, your soul is like a foreigner here. Don't you want to relate to that foreigner that is paradoxically the most intimate and known and natural part of you? Go foreign to get familiar. What may be foreign to the world is the complete reverse in the world of the soul who you really are. So it is an invitation to take a leap of faith, with us, together.

I do feel there is a whole other dimension of being just on the other side of a thin screen. The vastness of the dimensions of the universe which we glimpse there – the extreme power and dignity of us as women, the grace and royalty, the incredible ability to impact and influence with anything from a smile to an earth-shattering prayer – could be overwhelming. Or it could be exciting. A great adventure. How great are we actually?

We may also have to face a pain and breathe through the corrective emotions that come up when we realise how we have not honoured ourselves. We have not revered ourselves as in truth we would do if we saw the truth. There is the pain of neglect of that glory. That has to be gone through. But it's nothing to be afraid of either. It's only a temporary illusion. Nothing to get too hooked up on.

Let's, together, step by step, dissolve those boundaries that were meant to keep us safe and also safe to others ie non threatening and do what we were born to do: bring heaven to earth. Bring that vastness into our breath. Into our smiles. Into our words, our actions and our thoughts. Because we are women and that is like, wow-man.