Sri Vidya Tantra Lectures by Swami Rama

Four lectures by Swami Rama on Saundaryalahari, the Wave of Beauty, which is a prominent text of Sri Vidya Tantra. The wave of creativity, love and bliss of Shakti is one and the same with Shiva. The lectures contain practical advice on advanced meditation practices of Yoga, Vedanta, and Tantra. The four lectures are divided into a total of 41 parts for the YouTube presentation.
This remarkable lecture series is deep, clear and direct. For any aspirant to the development of the inner awareness and realization, Swami Rama’s lectures contain gems of wisdom from the sages of the Himalayas.

Yogachaitanya: New Yoga CDs

Sounds of Transformation

Yogachaitanya has created a CD set for yoga practice and sadhana, with Yoga Nidra as the first in the series. He explains the concept behind the CDs to Carol Sill, while discussing the practicality behind using the CDs for daily sadhana.

Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!

Yogachaitanya on Yoga Nidra (Pt.2)

Yogachaitanya continues his discussion of the practice of Yoga Nidra with Carol Sill. He describes how surfing influenced his early exploration of the states of mind and body. He also touches on the topics of breathing and meditation and the implications and range of possibilities for the application of yoga nidra - for both athletes and recovery from surgery.

Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!

Yogachaitanya on Yoga Nidra (Pt.1)

Yogachaitanya discusses the practice of Yoga Nidra with Carol Sill. Working with the neural and physical systems, the practice creates a wholistic experience for the entire being, which benefits all systems of physiology. Functioning between the waking and sleeping state, the practice enables one to return to a place of optimum efficiency, addressing deep layers of consciousness and emotional being.

Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!

Aleksandra: Death Doesn’t Exist

Aleksandra shares her reflections on the meaning and process of death with Carol Sill. These ideas are based in her deeply devotional meditative experience, which has evolved over several decades.
**********

Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!

Aleksandra on Spiritual Evolution

Aleksandra talks with Carol Sill about the evolution that occurs in spiritual life, the awakening to the point where we wish to go further.
* * * * * * * * * *
Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!

Aleksandra on the Soul

Aleksandra continues her conversation, reflecting on the concept of the Soul.

Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!

Aleksandra On Spiritual Life

Aleksandra talks with Carol about her experience and learning on the spiritual path, the benefits of the spiritual life and living the right life for you.

Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!

About Lee Van Patten

During the past 40 years, Lee Van Patten has studied Sufism, Hatha Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, and Chinese martial arts.

He has applied the knowledge and experience gained from these disciplines to the fields of health, business, and music production.

He is happily married to the woman of his dreams.

View video conversation with Lee

On Soul and the Inner Family

Transcript The Soul and Balanced Mastery

Mantra and Meditation Quiz

This quiz is rated difficult. Some of the questions are quite tricky. The original questions here were inspired by the scholarly book Mantra and Meditation by Pandit U. Arya, a student of Swami Rama of the Himalayas.

Please feel free to enter your own questions to expand this quiz, and of course, we welcome your comments in the comment form below.

Michael Shandler: Journey to Non-Dual Buddhism

“And often I’d find I began to rest in pure awareness…. I wasn’t trying to concentrate, I wasn’t trying to achieve anything, I wasn’t trying to go anywhere. And after a while this began to feel very very natural.”

Michael Shandler in conversation with Carol Sill

C: Hi, I’m  Carol here in Vancouver.

M: I’m Michael Shandler, and I’m here at Amherst, Massachusetts.

C: And so today we’re going to be talking with each other about Radiant Mind, and about some of your interest and history. What would you like to start with?

M: Well, would you like to know a little bit more about Radiant Mind?

C: Let’s do that first, sure.

M: I came across Radiant Mind about four years ago when I met Peter Fenner. Peter Fenner is an Australian guy who is a professor, a PhD in Buddhist studies, and I heard about a course that he was offering called the Radiant Mind, which is a 9 month long course. And I was interested in steeping myself deeply, more deeply, in non-dual Buddhism.

So I thought this was a great opportunity to learn more, and little did I know when I signed up for this course, what I was actually in for.  So I went through the 9 month long course and I learned a tremendous amount. It was not an intellectual pursuit, though, so much as an experiential .. as an experience, really. And after that was done, Peter asked me if I wanted to continue working with him, and in fact to become a Radiant Mind coach and trainer, which since that time I’ve been actively doing.

C: Well, you were deeply involved in a spiritual life well before then, weren’t you?

M: I was, and I have been. I started actually, and I was thinking about it today – I think my first pursuit was when I lived on a Kibbutz in Israel in 1967.  There weren’t very many books to read but I came across a book – I’m struggling to find the name right now, but – it had to do with games people play. I think that in fact was it’s name.  Games people play about, you know, being a parent to child, or being adult to adult, or speaking child to adult or child to parent, and so on. I found it very very intriguing. It was really my first exposure, as a 20 year old, to psychology. And I really got into it, and I realized for the first time in my life I was interested in psychology and in spiritual things. So that’s how I got started.

And from there I actually came to North America and I went through the whole kind of hippie revolution, if you will, with taking psychedelics and blowing my mind. But perhaps paradoxically that was how I came to have a deeper appreciation of the spiritual realm.

C: How was that?

M: Well, I was exposed to an experience which was just beyond my rational mind, beyond anything that I’d ever experienced before. And it opened me up to the possibility of realms beyond my normal consciousness.

After that I became very interested in yoga and meditation , and I met Ram Dass. I heard a recording of his and I was so moved by it that I wrote him a letter and asked him if he would come to -  I was actually in Montreal at that time for a 3 month period -  if he would come to Montreal to maybe give a speech.  He wrote back and he said: Great, I’ll come.

And indeed, he showed up about a month and a half later, and he and I went on the radio together, we were chanting and doing all these sort of weird things – at least in those days they were still pretty weird for me.  And the next day was the talk.  5,000 people showed up, and we only had space for about 2. So he said to me: Do you think we could get another hall for tomorrow night? I’ll stay longer. And I said: Well I’ll make something happen. And I went out there and I found another large hall, and this time we crammed the place again. That started a kind of a very intense relationship with him, and I became his road manager.

And he introduced me to Baba Hari Dass who became a very serious teacher of mine for about  20 years. I got deeply into what’s called Ashtanga Yoga or Eight-Limbed Yoga and that was my path for a long while.

I did take some, how can I say, maybe not deviations but some side trips let’s say, into other things. I spent a year and a half during that time working as an Arica trainer in New York City with Oscar Ichazo. And sat zazen, and had a number of other… went through the whole human growth potential EST kind of thing, but remained very true to my meditation.

And even after I went back to Vancouver to help found a community there called Dharma Sara which is still going today. And in fact they host a community on Salt Spring Island called the Salt Spring Centre, which to this day is still very active.

C: I’ve heard of that.

M: So that’s a little bit of my background.

C: So, I don’t know how to ask you this, but…You were strongly in that yoga path, and yet you took some side routes here and there, focusing back into your meditation. So how do you relate to that now, in your practice now? What would you say is the change? Or is there a change?

M: Well I think that a really big change has occurred. I think the change can be summed up very succinctly …I think that this was caused a lot by my involvement in the  experimentation with the psychedelics, in that every time I took them  I would be transported very rapidly into another realm.  And so I found myself constantly wanting to go back into that realm. So you could say that I very powerfully was inducted into the search. And so everything became about the search. When I met with Peter Fenner, I had already gotten very tired of the search and found, like wow, this is a search that maybe will never end.

C: Right.

M: What happened with Peter was he said: Why not start from the result that you want here and now? You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to do any particular practices. And I know this is going to sound heretical to a lot of people, and it was certainly very difficult for me at the time.

But basically what it did was it oriented me to working in the present. In the here and now, particularly with attraction and aversion, which as the Buddha said are the so-called core fixations. You either basically say: I want this experience that I’m having right now and I want it to go on, or you say: I don’t want this experience, I want it to stop, I want something else. Or you’re caught up in some kind of mixture of those two. And usually it’s a complex mixture, particularly if you’re fixated in a heavy kind of way.

So learning how to work in the here and now, rather than in a progressive way where I was doing meditation to get somewhere. I began to work in the here and now and to learn how to just be present, how to just be present. And often I’d find I began to rest in pure awareness, without trying to make anything…. I wasn’t trying to concentrate, I wasn’t trying to achieve anything, I wasn’t trying to go anywhere. And after a while this began to feel very very natural. That has become, again paradoxically, the practice. Because there are lots of biases and conditioning that we have that unconsciously come into our experience and take us away from the natural way of being.

C: Well that is a great start for us.

End of Part 1

View the video of this conversation.

Journey to Non-Dual Buddhism

Michael Shandler talks with Carol Sill about his journey into a deeper appreciation of the spiritual realm, from psychedelics to yoga to the non-dual. “And often I’d find I began to rest in pure awareness…. I wasn’t trying to concentrate, I wasn’t trying to achieve anything, I wasn’t trying to go anywhere. And after a while this began to feel very very natural.”

Link here for the text version of this conversation.

Explore a little more. Click something interesting to you!