A few months ago a friend gave me a small deck of cards that contain some of Ammachi’s teachings. The idea is to pick one card for each day, though I have just been picking one every few days. For some reason (hmmm…), I have picked this card many times:

"Today, I practice offering myself to God,
surrendering without asking, demanding, or suggesting."

At the beginning of last week, I had picked that card and left it out on the table for several days. Then one morning I put the card back in the deck, shuffled, and picked it again! At that point even my rational mind surrendered and I said out loud, “Okay, Amma, I get it!”

That little card has put me through a major transformation process. One month ago I still had a “plan” even though I know we really shouldn’t have a plan. At that point, I was still telling God how I wanted the Universe to unfold things through me. But then, all of a sudden, I noticed that I had completely let go of worrying about my To Do list, and I searched inside and could not find my “plan”… where had it gone? I looked at that quote again:

"Today, I practice offering myself to God,
surrendering without asking, demanding, or suggesting."

I realized that I had finally understood what it means to not even suggest to God what we want to happen. When we let go of even suggesting, then we find ourselves in a more surrendered state, in which we can authentically chant the “i don’t know” mantra. After repeating “i don’t know” over and over, we can then go deep inside and allow our inner teacher to give us a true knowingness. The knowingness that arises from the depths of our beings is really different from the knowingness that we think we have when we are making all of our grand plans with our little monkey minds.

I love it when a spiritual teaching manifests in my daily life like this. After all, that is the whole point of being on a spiritual path: to gradually learn to actually live the wisdom of the teachings.

May all beings everywhere know Peace and Happiness.

Om Shanti (Peace),

Yogini Tejaswini

Photo of  Orange Flower by Oneras – CC license