A Visitation From Yogananda

Last August I visited Encinitas for the first time to receive Darshan from Pranananda. Darshan is a spiritual blessing from a self-realized master.  I have been blessed to receive Darshan from a number of male and female Masters and I cannot deny that this has helped to accelerate my spiritual growth.

On this occasion I had fasted for two days leading up to the Darshan event in Encinitas which, as many of you know, was once the home of Paramahansa Yogananda.  My Darshan experience was very personal, but the events of the next morning I will share as they contain some insights relevant to anyone on a spiritual path.

During my morning meditation I received a visitation from Yogananda.  He came right into my meditation and introduced himself.  His presence was so clear and discernible; I almost thought he might materialize.

I was so full of questions that morning, I joked with Yogananda that he had come to lighten Pranananda’s workload.   His radiant glow of love made me more aware of a lack of self love I had been feeling.  I feel such passion for following Spirit and living the teachings of Christ and the Ascended Masters, but a part of me felt weighed down with regrets.  How could I ever overcome the mistakes of my past to become a radiant being in the physical?  I was aware of many decisions that had scarred me in some way, but wanting to change or discard the parts of me that I did not love only reinforced a feeling of separation from love.

Yogananda read my thoughts and began to laugh.  He explained that a great many people have felt this way when they reached a point of deepening commitment to the path.  In other words, what I was going through was more common than not. He also said that: “If only you knew how many mistakes I and other Masters made in the lives leading up to our enlightenment, you would not feel so bad.  It is common, once you begin to cultivate a closer relationship with the Masters, to become more critical of your faults, but the complex entanglements we can experience with the unresolved memories of the past are really just an issue of self love.”

(I did not record the exact words of the above quote, but this is a close approximation.)

With that, Yogananda began to share with me some of his self love, with the knowing that he had also once felt that his mistakes were an insurmountable obstacle to his growth.  The message was clear. Don’t be so hard on yourself.  He then recommended: “Why not do something celebratory to break your fast.”

“Trust me, your higherself will be with you on that one,” I heard one of the masters add.   They were reminding the renunciate part of me from other lives that denying the physical was no longer needed to get closer to the divine. I had passed that test.  Now it was time to allow Spirit to commune with me through the earthly experience.

I remembered my training with the angels so many years ago when they kept wanting to come into my body and enjoy the simple pleasures of life with me.  I let them taste ice cream with me on several occasions and soon they were picking out restaurants for me that they knew I would like.

That day I celebrated food, and being human.  I knew that it was possible to overcome all of the regrets of the past and to become a vision of self love.  I began to reach for my next leap in comprehension: a new understanding of regret.  If I could transform regrets into self love, I knew I could become more radiant.

NOTE: An earlier version of this post got deleted accidentally, so if you are receiving this again in email, it is because I had to reconstruct it and repost it to the blog.  There may be some slight differences between this one and the original.