Dear one,
This week we had a very auspicious and mystical moon. The Guru moon. Gurupurnima.
Now guru has many meanings, and before you run away in fear from all the naughty ones, let us keep this real and honour the true guru.
Every year on Gurupurnima I make a post that usually just says one word. Guruupaya. It is personal and deep for me. I spend the day of that full moon in full immersion with what that is for me, filled with gratitude for the guru principle.
In the Trika we have an ingenious system. The malas and the upayas. A precise map of how consciousness contracts and exactly how it finds its way back; it is the backbone of what is taught in the Artist’s Return. When I finally understood it, truly and fully, it utterly transformed my life, and not just the spiritual side. The worldly side too. It was incredible.
And there is a particular way you know the teaching is really landing in you, that you are awakening. You stop needing things to be explained. You just understand. You pick up a scripture and you get it, the nuanced version, the real version. Not your psychic events or your kirtan highs. The real thing. And that understanding is not something you achieve by effort. It comes from the guru’s grace.
Guruupaya
Guruupaya is one of the teachings in the Shiva Sutras, in the second section, the one on Shaktopaya. Upaya means the means, the way, the path. So, the guru is the way. No other practice necessary.
When I started really paying attention, truly listening in my sadhana, I heard it again and again from my own teachers and from the great beings. It was when they opened fully to the guru that they got everything. The way, the sadhana, the things to overcome, the transformation, and the grace.
So how does this translate for art and creatives?
Well, it is just the same.
Not just any teacher. The teacher who carries the energy. The mystical, creative energy of mastery.
So today I am sitting in gratitude for the teachers on my path. My first ballet teacher. My piano teacher. My conductor in the orchestra. My favourite teacher at art school. And the writers I have loved along the way, the ones who inspired me to write.
But it is more than the people. It is the energy that flows through the great ones.
So when you are reading this, get up and do this- listen to the music. Read the great writing. Stand in front of the art of the masters and let yourself be amazed. Sit with it, in awe, and let that energy settle in you and stay.
Because what flowed through them flows through you too.
The piano studio
It is fitting, to fully trust the great teachers. The ones who have attained what you are looking to attain. To pay attention to them. Everything about them. To listen to their music, read their words, watch their plays, sit and contemplate their artworks. Whatever it is for you.
I remember being at boarding school and spending hours each day in the piano studios. Hours and hours of the boring stuff just to get to the good stuff.
I also, at the time, suffered terribly from stage fright. It was acute. No amount of talent mattered when it came time to perform on the big stage in the auditorium. I was fine in a group. I was great in the school plays and in the orchestra. But alone at a piano, punching out Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk in front of hundreds of people, was another thing entirely. There were reasons, and over time I got help for it.
But what kept me going was a strange awareness that all those beings I adored were in the music they wrote. Mozart was my guy. So I would sit and look at the notes before playing. I would connect to the energy of Mozart, and I would even ask for his blessings and say a little prayer. Yes, I was always this way, ha ha.
And it worked. At the time it was the best thing I had, and I put all my focus onto it, so the fingers would move instead of stiffen and rust the instant I sat down on stage. Even to sit my music exams I had to do this. It was pretty awful back then.
But it is no wonder I cottoned on to this upaya. This direct and simple path. The energy, the gift, the power that flowed through them flows through me, and it flows through all of you too. And when you really go for it, you become so focused on them that you take all the care and the focus and the importance off yourself. And things start to move so beautifully.
We may not make something as spectacular as the Jupiter Symphony. I mean, that is a godly brilliance in musical form. We might not be a Steinbeck or a Rembrandt. But we will be something that resonates and radiates with what we are meant to do. When we do it with the focus and the dedication we hold for the great masters. The guru principle, energy that helps reveal the way.
The holy feet
In the Trika, guruupaya is always represented by a little pair of silver or gold sandals on the puja, on the altar. Or a pair of holy feet. We honour those every day. We put all our woes at those feet. We let ourselves be empty in front of them.
And we view nature the same way. This guru energy is in nature. It is in all the beings that have helped you become what you were here to be.
But just because something is destined for you does not mean you have read the cues and done what needed to be done to reach it. So guruupaya is a brilliant method. A stunningly divine and clever way to stop with the ego. With the neediness, the desires, the aversions, the misguided control. We become free of all that, because we are letting something so much bigger move through us and in us.
That is why we have satsang on the spiritual path. Satsang means to be in the company of truth. And that often means the company of the great beings. We sit with their teachings, their energy, their methods. Curiously. Eagerly. Waiting for that moment of recognition, of grace. Anything.
And it goes for everything. Especially the arts.
So be mindful of who you look up to. What you look up to, value and revere. Because the energy of it, of them, is influencing you. Curate and select your great beings, your masters, the great works. And open with the innocence of a child hearing or seeing them for the very first time. Sit in awe, in wonder, in reverence.
A soft invitation
Two small things before I go.
Tell me what you would like more of in these letters. You two are the reason I write them the way I write them, and I would love to know what is feeding you and what you would like me to bring in.
With great love,
Ammaji
Jai Jai Maa 🌺🌺🌺
MataKamaleshwari©