But you probably all know that by now that we've been involved in writing a book, Swami
Lalitnanda and me and now Kleyya. And it's based on, it is, my reflections. It's from
my diary. So I thought tonight to just impress upon you the what you have in
your diaries and how to make them more what you really want them to be. Because
reflection for Swami Radha was very important. She called it like the, the
treasure chest that you would could go back to or the gold mine that you could
mine with all your reflections and all the events of your life. And I, like I
had a journal and I had the diary and I had the reflections but I never thought
someone else would read them or that I would have to say them out loud. So it's
been a process of it just accepting where I started and all the things that I
worked through and she has said over and over that it really is up to you what
you do with what you have. And to look back and then be able to accept myself
at the beginning, the middle, the middle, the middle, the middle and then finally
you know it was a time when she wasn't there anymore, she died and so then
there's another part. But just to take myself in in this book through that part
of preparing to come and take over and it happened so suddenly then after I was
the president that, that she died. So I, when going back and looking through what
I was experiencing all along was the preparation for what I had to do. And if
you think spiritual life is easy, this isn't the place for you. It's very
difficult to go through all those stages in yourself and in other people and it's
it's really through her teachings and capturing them for what I experienced with
them then to have that so much part of who I am now. Like if it's going back and
having not lost, not lost it, it's all there. And it really is, it really makes
me understand myself more but what spiritual life is about and just what a
gift I've been given in terms of the teaching. It really helped me through so
many things. So there's some ways that you can, I mean sometimes people say that
they've just written, you know, just comments or criticisms of themselves and
other things that are happening. But how can you make it into that treasure chest?
How can you begin to take what you have and and really work with it? So you're
reporting on the events of your day, the thoughts, the interpretations, the like
the questions that you have and just seeing how you how you're working, how
your mind is working. And then like it's you can draw on that again, you can go
back and read it, make your little summaries. It's a formidable task to do
this self-development. It's not something that comes easily. You have to work and so
you have to have somewhere where there's that, where there's a place you can go
back and look at what you've done, look at what you're doing, accepting the facts
of your life as they are. And charting your own process like no one needs to tell
you, you don't need to reach out to someone else and get that mirroring back.
You can mirror back right in your own reflections. You can discover your old
traps and you can even stop them before they happen again, if you if you develop
that awareness. And you can begin to understand your intuition when it comes
and the reason, reasoning part too. So you have, you begin to have a fullness of
your life. So you develop a practice of writing, of journaling, of observing and
and building that awareness. Just what is happening, who you are. So it's possible
then to, to have mastery over your life, your, where you're going, the choices you
make. So it's good to have something that helps you, like bring some, you know,
some zest into your, into your journaling. You want to stimulate your
thinking. And one of the best things is asking yourself questions like I see,
what's happening, what I can do, who's, you know, and how does that feel. You know,
so you're, you're stimulating your writing. So you can almost imagine that this
is going to be very useful to you. So what are the insights that you have? What
inspired me today? What were the choices I made? So if you can see, begin to see
that there's always something happening that can be a learning. And then how do
you put it into action so that it doesn't just stay in the book? What have you
observed? What are your opinions? What did you risk? What did you go for safety
instead of playing it safe instead of taking a risk on something? What did you
express? What did you suppress? What did you want to look at? What didn't you want
to look at? So it, you can also choose a quality that you want to develop and see
it through. How am I doing on this? Like with patience or listening. You can
review your ideals. So like you can do your writing and then at the end of the
week you can look it over. It's just like when we're doing things in class, we
write things down and then at the end of the day you read through everything to
see what you've written because already it's fading away. You have to drop back
in and knit it back into your life. So it's the depth of your understanding that
counts when it's up to you. Don't just skim the top, the surface. Go deeper with
your understanding.
