One of the greatest misconceptions that many people have about people who live in spiritual awareness is that their life is easy. Now and then someone will ask me, “If you have a Guru, why is your life so hard?” In reality, if you have a Guru, a true Guru, your life may indeed be a lot tougher. Before gold is transformed into its highest state of value it has to be purified in fire. A lot of dross needs to be burned away. So too it is with the human individual. Before the light of God can shine forth at its most brilliant gleam, the Guru, the Spiritual Master, needs to burn off the paradigms and expectations that we build our lives around and the karma that we created for ourselves in order to produce a masterpiece. I had been through a lot in my life well before meeting my Guru in 1998. Many hardships have been experienced since then, and I’ve been grateful for every one of them.
Over the past fourteen years I’ve asked for clarity about my life purpose. My prayer in the past couple years had been, “If I’m not meant to be a healing practitioner, then please show me what it is I was meant to do.” Still, the answer is always the same. I saw inklings of this calling when I was a young child. Incidents and encounters throughout my life propelled me down this road even if I didn’t put much thought into it. It was as if I was being carried down this road by the “powers that be”. It also seems that my nearly-ten-year professional struggle in Minnesota had its purpose. It helped me to focus more on why I am supposed to be a healer, and it helped me to develop a coherent method of how to go about doing just that. Now that I am living in Yuma, Arizona as of just four months ago, the southernmost U.S. city that sits directly on top of my Jupiter line of influence, I feel that the flood gates are about to open. It is here that I was meant to flourish, to blossom, to excel as a healing practitioner.
A true healer cannot wholeheartedly be of help to others unless he knows, firsthand, about the concerns his patients have. I will not rehash my life story of health struggles here, but I will say that I feel that there was a “purpose to this porpoise”, a method to this madness, a happy ending to the story of pain and suffering, a divine order to all that I had experienced and all that I will experience from this point on. Now when somebody tells me, “I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and most days I need to drag myself everywhere,” I know exactly what they mean. As many of you know, I suffered with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for fourteen years. I know precisely what to say to them, how to say it, and what I need to do for them as a physician. There is a lot of truth to the way of life of the Wounded Healer (as long as the Wounded Healer is doing his/her work sans ego).
When the Guru hands you a hardship, you bow with reverence and say “thank you”. It’s the only way true spiritual awakening is possible. It is the only way you can become introspective and discover God’s light within yourself. Once you discover it, you can’t help but share it. When the discovery is made by wading through a sea of frustration, it is all the more appreciated and revered. It’s not a matter of “no pain, no gain”. It is a matter of being able to find the needle in the haystack that you thought would never be found. If it was easy, it would just be something else taken for granted. There would be no value placed on it. When you ask God to reveal her light to you, you better be prepared for what you find. Light needs to push its way through darkness before you can see it.
I had encountered people who would come once to the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center, never to return again. The reason was not so much that it wasn’t their thing. It was because while in meditation there were too many memories of past traumas and hardship that surfaced. I celebrate the fact that this happens to people because it means that if they stick it out they will certainly make astounding breakthroughs in their lives. If they stick it out, they will go on to become brilliant beacons of light in this world. Some people cannot take pain very well. But pain can be conquered only by pushing through it. Presenting it to us is the job of the true Spiritual Master. There really is a nugget of gold on the other side of it all.
My own challenges with pain due to illness, pain from being so “different” due to having autism, and enduring the tapas, the spiritual challenges, that the Guru has handed me these years, have all led to one result: spiritual vibrance. I am sensitive, and most everyone with an Autism Spectrum Disorder has profound sensitivities. This is probably why the Guru had been working so hard on me these years. When I received Shaktipat, spiritual awakening, on October 3, 1998, the encounter was so great that its effect has never waned, and it never will. But even before this, intuition would come to me through my sensing of the unseen forces around me. So much greater has this been since being blessed by my Guru that when my patients open up to me about their concerns, their energy reaches out to me so strongly that they need not speak many words before I am able to find and correct the sources of their pain. God gifted me in this way, and she knew that because of my sensitivity I would be able to carry on and through such a purification process, thusly sharing the beaming results with others.
Yes, it is a PROCESS. The blessings of God do not suddenly make your life easier. The blessings of God help you to discover the light within. And here’s the best discovery of all: once you discover the light, you realize that you are and always have been the light. There is no separation between the “light of God” and you. It is all one and the same. Enjoy the process. It will be your testimony to others as you help them to discover their own light within.
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