Sally Kempton

Tap into your own Shakti: the subtle power that is the true source of yogic growth. Feel it enliven every part of your life.

To find your way to true openness of heart, you need to pass through the forest of vulnerability. How do you explore your own vulnerability while still holding appropriate boundaries?

Here I offer you seven core yogic instructions that will help you navigate radical change.

When you look into the layers of the self, you start to see that who you really are is much more nuanced than you might have thought.

An exploration of the seven steps of radical transformation

As you take yourself through the process in this article, you’ll find out a lot about yourself – about who you are, and what you value. Above all, you’ll start to see what it means for you to live deeply, authentically.

Uncertainty is part of life, but you can release yourself from the clutch of fear.

For a yogi, responsibility is actually response-ability – the skill of responding spontaneously and naturally, from a core of inner stillness, in such a way as to take a situation to a higher level.

what we have here are some nitty-gritty hard questions, questions that focus on a few core dilemmas of romantic love, along with answers that call on the wisdom of yoga to help you get to love’s unconditional essence.

At some point in your spiritual life, you will come up against the need to engage the yogic practice of truthfulness. And, as in all the great yogic practices, we usually discover that it’s not as easy as it might seem.

What we have here are some nitty-gritty hard questions, questions that focus on a few core dilemmas of romantic love, along with answers that call on the wisdom of yoga to help you get to love’s unconditional essence.

When you forgive a long-held grievance, you open the door to true freedom.

Most transformational moments – spiritual, creative or personal – involve this sequence of intense effort, frustration, then letting go. The trying, the effort, the slamming against the walls, the intensity and the exhaustion, the fear of failure balanced against the recognition that it is not okay to fail – all these are part of the process by which a human being breaks out of the cocoon of human limitation, and becomes willing on the deepest level to open to the infinite power that we all have in our core. It’s the same process whether we’re mystics, artists, or people trying to solve a difficult life-problem.

To practice right speech is essentially to approach speaking as a form of yoga. The first stage in the yoga of speech is to start becoming conscious of what actually comes out of your mouth. You might begin by spending a day eavesdropping on yourself – hopefully, without activating your inner critic. Try to notice not just ‘what ‘ you say, but the tone with which you say it. See if you can sense the emotional residue your words create. How do you feel after certain remarks? How do others react?

When life hands you a difficult decision, try asking yourself, “What is my dharma?”

Having trouble deflating that smart, sweet-talking ego of ours? Try embracing it instead. When it’s as big as possible, you can include everything that exists in your sense of ‘me’.

No one likes dealing with difficult people. But by inviting them into your heart, you can invite a radically different experience.

Strength always radiates from the inside out. It comes from the center. That’s a core principle of all inner work, and it doesn’t really matter how you find that center, as long as you get there.

Well-managed, directed desire is a powerful ally – a force that can inspire us to action and help us shape our lives. Unmanaged desire – well, distraction is the least of it.

Our culture’s obsession with excellence keeps us toiling under the tyranny of perfectionism. Yet perfection itself is not the tyrant it’s our notions about it that rule us.

If love is real, why doesn’t it feel the way I’ve always heard it was supposed to feel? Why can’t I feel it all the time? And why does love so often feel lacking, or painful, or both?

The Tantras invite us instead to turn our gaze around and investigate the energetic material inside a thought. To do this, we need to take our attention away from the content of the thought, to stop following where it leads, and instead look into the energy that the thought is made of, the actual substance of the thought itself.

In Sanskrit, there are basically four different words for happiness-sukha, santosha, mudita, and ananda. Each of these points to a different level of happiness. Together, they can actually constitute a path that leads us to the kind of happiness that really can’t be shaken.

How can we discern when something is wrong without being judgmental, without disliking the perpetrators, without filling our own mind with negativity? On the inner level, how can we change our own difficult personality traits, our fears and tensions and resistances, without judging them or judging ourselves for having them? Is it even possible to eliminate the ‘bad’ kind of judgment, without losing the good kind?

It’s no secret that strong feelings and experiences carry a lot of energy. Why else would people go to raves, become war correspondents, or provoke their lovers into screaming matches? But there’s a big difference between using strong energy to get high or to feel more alive, and consciously using energy as a way to move deeper into our own essence. That movement, of course, is what the inner life is all about.

And it’s the radical truth behind the Spanda Karikas verse: If we choose to practice with such strong energies, they can lead us into the very source of our own power. Entering a strong feeling is like splitting an atom, except that when you practice going to the heart of an intense feeling, the power you will find inside it is essentially the very creative force of the universe.