Clive – Testimonial

Hi there. My name is Clive. I’ve been doing Sahaja yoga for 20 years. I wanted to just talk about a couple of things, couple of things I found really, really amazing about Sahaj yoga. One was an experience that I had probably about five or six years ago in India. And I’ve always found Sahaja yoga incredibly beneficial. It’s helped me in all sorts of ways and for many years. I got lots and lots of very powerful experiences and benefits from it but then, this experience I had about five or six years ago seemed to really change the intensity of my experience, physical experience of Sahaja yoga. What it was, was my daughter was at the International School in India and I went to pick her up at the end of term. I hadn’t seen her for a while. None of the children had seen their parents for a good while. She was only eight at the time, the children were very young and the school is in this incredibly remote place up in Himalayan mountains, incredibly pure, isolated, unspoiled area. And I’d arrived a couple days earlier than the parents were supposed to be, I was so desperate to get under and get along. I went to the gate house, there’s like a security guard at the gate house to the school and announced who I was and announced if you like and he rang through to the dorm to tell the dorm, the person responsible for the dorm that one of the girls’ father was at the game. And a few moments later heard this growing sort of roar, shrieking and yelping and whooping and suddenly I could see a big crowd of girls running up the path and I think the whole of my daughter’s dorm were coming to see me because somehow what I felt was that I was like a generic father, symbolic father, symbolic parent as I was the first one to arrive, so they all came to see me as the way of getting close to their own parents I suppose. Anyway, I was sitting on a little wall and this crowd, big crowd of girls who were sort of gathering around me, face, eye, also looking at me, the shiny, beautiful, pure, unspoiled little face is glowing and shining and glistening, they were just bubbling with life and everything that’s best about children and they all chatted away unstoppable for a few minutes and then they had to go back into school because it was playtime, activity time or something. And then I went back to my hotel and I sat on the bed and I had the most incredibly powerful meditation I’ve ever had, as if I’d been super charged by all these children. And the way I described to people is that my Kundalini felt like a shoal of fish so I had this, I was sort of just completely stuck to the bed. I just couldn’t move this incredibly powerful jet of energy, as I said, like a shoal of fish, flowing up my spine, always in a sort of upward movement like this, just pinning me to the bed. And it was impossible for me to think, I was wiped clean, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, I was just in a state of complete bliss really, you have to say, a sort of intense overwhelming bliss and just that and a sort of peace at the same time. And this must have gone on for a couple of hours. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything but meditate for a couple hours. And then, by the next morning, it subsided a little bit and I went into the school. It wasn’t quite as intense and powerful and it wasn’t easy for me to sort of get back to that intensity of that experience but somehow, ever since then, although experience, most people’s experience in Sahaja yoga sort of moves a little like that, you get some peaks and then it seems to dip as you need to work on another aspect of your meditation, introspection. But what I found is that my sensitivity of my awareness of the physical sensations of the Kundalini and physical awareness of the vibrations, as we call them, this sort of movement of energy on the spine has never returned to what it was before and the feeling of joy that I experienced in that meditation has come back to me many, many, times since then, particularly giving self-realization. So, quite often I found that when I’m showing people how to meditate or introducing people to Sahaja yoga. Once we’ve done this, what we do is we stand behind people and we raise their Kundalini with our hand and what I found many, many times now and increasingly as the years have passed, when I’m working on people like that, when they receive their self-realization, as I raise my hand and raise their Kundalini so I get this intense rising feeling of joy on my own Kundalini. So, my Kundalini is responding to the rising of their Kundalini and I  get this wonderful, wonderful sense of joy and bliss and I just want to keep raising their Kundalini because my own Kundalini feels so wonderful which is pretty amazing. But also, I find that more and more through the day, that I’m aware of my Kundalini and very, very physically aware of it. I can feel this sort of tingling, fizzy movement inside me but also the sense of joy, just peace and serenity and bliss is with me much, much more at the time and I keep, people sort of chuckle at me and pull faces when I tell them these sorts of things. But something I never really understood before that Shri Mataji has said is that what we should do is focus on something without thinking and in particular with natural, things in nature. I find this much, much easier to do now. I didn’t really understand it before but now, it’s so clear to me. For example, if I look at a magnificent tree or a beautiful view or just a beautiful landscape, I find it very easy to just enjoy the landscape without thinking and it’s mainly because I feel my own subtle system responding to the beauty of the natural environment, the thing that I’m looking and know what I am. And so, these waves of bliss and joy start bubbling up as I’m looking at something beautiful and natural without thinking about it and the more I look, the more these sensations intensified.

So, that’s it, I mean, that’s a very sort of the personal experience, sort of explaining how for me, as an individual, this experience in my Kundalini has changed over the years and how, when and I’m sure it will change in many different ways in the future but just how it can totally transform your experience of life. I feel I don’t need to look for any sort of excitement of stimulation or I don’t need to look to food or alcohol, whatever, to stimulate me, to give me pleasant sensations or to take me out of the place that I’m in because I feel fantastic, I feel blissful, I feel joyful. And awful lot of the time, I said before, it’s like divine alcohol that you don’t get a hangover from. And one other little thing I wanted to talk about. It was just, Shri Mataji sort of introduced us to a culture, a new way of being, a new way of living, as well as having this sort of internal awareness. And something she’s encouraged through the sort of culture that she’s developed is the breaking down of group-ism really. So, she doesn’t, never like to see people splitting off, forming their own groups according to whatever, culture, race, background, country groups, language groups, whatever. She always encouraged us to be one family, to be one group, to go beyond all those artificial barriers that separate us, in particular of course, religion and religious background that can cause divisions and give us ideas about what’s right or not now and she encouraged us to go beyond that but also, she introduced lots of sort of practical things that helped us to go beyond that.

She encouraged people to marry people from other countries, people from other races, casts, cultures, whatever. But one of the beautiful things that I’ve enjoyed so many times, again Mother sort of instigated and introduced is the working together. Just getting us to work together, whenever we get together, on pujas or seminars or weekends or just whenever we’re together, she always encouraged people to work together, to do things, to sort things out together. And particularly for men but I know for ladies too, I find that just sitting around and chatting, drinking tea doesn’t really cut the mustard. But for men, in particular, the thing that we always seem to find ourselves doing is moving furniture around and I’ve moved the same as have lots of other men in the English collective, we’ve moved the same pieces of furniture 20, 30 times over the years in different houses, from different houses to new houses, from an ashram to another ashram, we move furniture around within national center lots and lots of times and what you find is that every time you’re moving furniture around with different people, you’re meeting different people. So, through the active working together and moving the furniture around, you get chatting, it’s a way of breaking down barriers, of getting beyond our human silliness and quirkiness where we might not start talking to people and just through the act of shifting couple of settees and moving a wardrobe again and again, you get to meet all your brothers and sisters and to connect. So, just another little magical thing that had helped us to understand and to work out. And then, the last thing I’d like to say, I ask people as well if there is some sort of culture thing, artistic thing, musical, piece of music or whatever that might have inspired them or that they particularly enjoyed in Sahaja yoga and so I just wanted to mention one thing, one piece of music that I’ve always found absolutely wonderful, incredibly moving a piece of genius. I said to the person who wrote it that I thought it͛s the best pop song I ever heard and that song, when I used to take my daughter to school, it used to last the exact amount of time from our house to the school gates, so we used to sing it every morning. Put it on and sing it on the way to school every morning, she was used to going to school and of course that song is Daniels’, “Beautiful”.


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