Amplify Your Light

I just watched this video about Charlottesville. How can I respond? I can share Light. How do I amplify that Light? With attunement.

What is attunement?

Attunement is a simply a state of resonance with sound, style, attitudes, and even thought. I tune my cello to a set frequency. I attuned my cello technique to the style of my teachers. I follow friends on Facebook and tune into their conversations and opinions. Sometimes that is helpful, sometimes not.

Choices of attunement face us daily.

The music we listen to can take us in many different directions. It can amplify negative emotions. Or it can calm our stress, and lift us into a sense of unity with ourselves and one another, just to name a few.

But we can also attune our thoughts by our choice of focus. We can tune into whatever we like! No one can take from us. It is our power of attention, and ours alone.

We can’t drive out this darkness with a stick. We need Light.

I ask each and every one of you to attune yourself to Light, wherever you find it: meditation, relationships, music, religion, literature, whatever is in your life right now that gives you a sense of hope, a sense of our highest potential as human beings.

Our highest potential as a nation is not on parade at the moment.

Personally, for the past 20 years I’ve been striving to find my highest potential. I’ve been following the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, a great saint from India who wrote Autobiography of a Yogi. I’ve lived and worked closely with people who have known him and who have brought a tremendous amount of Light into their own lives from their attunement.

I, too, have striven to increase my attunement with a great line of spiritual masters, including Jesus Christ. I strive to share Light from this attunement on some subtle level in every class I teach, every note I play, every blog I write.

I share this not to try to convert any of you, but simply to share the tangible blessings and resonance of Truth that I have received through attuning myself to the source of Light that speaks the most strongly to me.

I have a constant choice of where to focus: the Light or the Darkness.

I have my own darkness to deal with—doesn’t everybody? But focusing on the darkness doesn’t help it go away. This last bit of darkness is just remnants, to be overcome not by dwelling on the weakness, but by bringing in more Light.

I leave you with a meditation by my spiritual teacher, Swami Kriyananda, which thrilled my heart, mind and soul the first time I heard his recording 20 years ago.

A Meditation Exercise for An Expansion of Light

Sit upright. Sit very still.
Feel that, surrounding your body,
Is an infinity of dark space.
Listen intently: Listen to the whispering silence!
Out of silence was sound born.
Out of darkness the light came.
Of that light, suns and galaxies drew their substance.
Light, not form, is the truth that infuses the universe.

Surround your body now with a halo of blue light –
Soft, soothing – a luminous peace.
Light enters you;
It pierces the pores of your skin;
Space lies outside you no longer: It has made you its own.
It reaches deep into your muscles, your bones.
The sense of heaviness has been lifted from you. You are made of pure light!

Like a boundless sphere, now,
The light has started to grow.
Shining freedom – claim it your own!
Light and joy thrill the air of the room.
The people, the objects nearby –
All these, in the peacefulness of that blue light and joy,
Are one with you.

See: Light is embracing the house in which you live.
It reaches out to your neighborhood –
To your township.
Like an expanding sail, ever outward
The light swells.
It embraces your country –
Your continent –
The world!
The whole world is basking
In the peaceful radiance of your joy.

Softly, now –
Release your light from the boundaries of this world.
Behold, light rays stream out
To the limits of the solar system –
To distant stars –
To our galactic fringe.
At last, countless galaxies in all space,
Their stars, tiny like the lights of a far-off city,
Glimmer serenely in the vastness of your being.

God’s light and you are one!
God’s joy and you are one!
O ray of the Infinite! You are not only this little body:
You are more – much more.
Boundless! Eternal!
All the atoms of creation gather,
Like thirsty children,
To drink from the waters,
To play in the fountain spray
Of your inexhaustible peace.