The Miracle of Shaktipat
by Deana Tareshawty

Sat Chit Ananda Guru Ki Jay

The Miracle of Shaktipat

Each year Kedarji offers a Shaktipat Blessing Intensive in honor of Mahashivarati. This is a special time of year and intensive for me. I first received the blessing of Shaktipat in March of 2015 and I get somewhat sentimental in recalling how much this gift changed my life.

When I met Kedarji in 2014, I was struggling with so much, but primarily I was not happy and very restless.

The roles I had chosen in life were no longer fulfilling. I had grown disenchanted with being a mother and wife. I was so restless and agitated that I allowed my emotions to run my life. I made a lot of decisions based on how I felt in the moment and then regretted it. I never thought anything through. So, I lived a lot in the past, ruminating over how I should have lived my life, and how I should have handled situations. I ruminated over the future, plotting, and planning how life was going to be. I was never in the present moment.

I felt quite lost, not really knowing why I was here and what I should be doing with my life. I had given up hope and began to spend more and more time on the couch drowning myself in reruns of Seinfeld or Friends as a distraction because I just couldn’t think of what else to do to fix what I was experiencing. I couldn’t escape this unhappiness, so I tried to forget it.

During this time, I started attending programs offered by Kedarji. As I listened carefully to the messages in his talks, he began to shed light on the underlying causes for why we are unhappy, restless, fearful, and anxious and why we seek sources outside of ourselves to be happy. The reason is karmic tendencies and bad habits from many lifetimes and the present one.

He shared that there was a way to be free from all this needless suffering. The way to be free and rise above this began with the receipt of Shaktipat and to imbibe the mysterious miracle of Grace that only comes from a Siddha Guru. This is the only way to remove all those habits and mental conditioning that are the foundation for the missteps in life.

Imbibing this Grace is Transformational

Shaktipat means the descent of the Grace bestowing power of God. It awakens an energy you already have within you. This is the awakening of the transcendental aspect of Divine Consciousness within you. Shaktipat begins this spontaneous unfolding of spiritual awareness. Receiving Shaktipat awakens your spiritual potential and sets you on a path to permanent spiritual transformation. In this awakening process, old habits, patterns, and mental conditioning are revealed to you so that you can stop reaching for them. Instead you are able to reach for the habits and understandings offered to us by the Saints and Sages of our lineage through the leadership of Kedarji.

Kedarji shares this definition of Grace. “It is a power that is mysterious, all pervasive, all-encompassing that allows you to move from a state of contracted awareness to the highest state of awareness. Grace is a power that transforms your being permanently. Grace is the power, the love that rescues us from the entanglement of worldliness and, like a boat, carries us across the illusion of this world to the distant shore of joy, peace, and the bliss of the absolute. Grace frees us from the bondage of worldly attachments and ignorance that causes God to be concealed from us.”

Before I received Shaktipat I had absolutely no idea that I had any kind of mental conditioning, karmic impurities, and bad habits that would be a driving force behind my behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. I did not know that these tendencies would be the influencing factor to who and what was present in my life and a root cause of why I thought I was unhappy.

Two days after receiving Shaktipat, through Grace, I had an awareness well up within me that every action and thought I held was driven by wanting to manipulate and control my life. This awareness spoke to me in an indescribable way and showed me how I was responsible for the mess I was in.

I was flooded with images and memories of the past and recent situations where I used these tendencies to subtly gain a position of power and control. I was looking to manipulate people, places, and things to create a false sense of happiness. It was not the “other person” doing something to me. It was me who committed the action through the subtilties of these tendencies. This awareness opened my eyes to the truth that was concealed from me.

This is Grace, and what I experienced is called a kriya. We refer to it as the Shaktipat Kriya process and this is what sets our approach apart from all other spiritual paths. It begins with the receipt of authentic Shaktipat from a true Siddha Guru. Kriyas are the proof that you have received authentic Shaktipat from an authentic Siddha Guru.

In the Shaktipat Kriya process, by the miracle of Grace, my tendencies were magnified in such as way that I had more awareness of them. I was then able to make the effort to stop reaching for those impurities, as they were obstacles in my path to experiencing my true nature.

With this experience I understood that Grace does exist for reversing all the missteps in life. Grace does exist to help me navigate mundane issues I struggle with, and more importantly, Grace exists to help me make the journey home to permanent spiritual transformation.

Coming to Welcome and Understand the Shaktipat Kriya Process

Kedarji shares in his spiritual autobiography, Vibration of Divine Consciousness, “your perfection is already within you. You are the self. For ages you have concealed this fact from yourself by pulling a veil down over your heart. You have concealed your true nature from yourself by holding the false notion that you are just a person, an individual, just the body, the senses and the mind, just delightfully weird. In truth, there is nothing to attain. Spiritual life is not about giving you anything that you don’t already have. It’s about burning away all that you are not. This means of burning away all that you are not should not be feared.”

At some point the honeymoon phase ended for me and I had to begin the inner work of the miracle of Shaktipat, addressing my karmic baggage. In all the previous spiritual practices I engaged in to gain spiritual transformation and to have knowledge of my obstacles, I had not ever been shown the truth so plainly. These other spiritual practices sugar coated truth and offered me good news about my bad habits by convincing me that I was never the cause of my unhappiness. So, when I began to experience kriyas, I was afraid of what the Kriya was showing me. I was in denial. I didn’t want to see all the baggage I had strapped to my back.

When I began to see the truth in how I pulled the veil over my heart and concealed my true nature from myself, all I could think of was how bad a person I was. I made judgments on the kriyas and the messages of the kriyas. I found it and the Guru suspect. I didn’t have any of these issues/problems/emotions/mental upheavals, until I received Shaktipat and started this path. In truth, I caused myself more suffering by way of my resistance to this process. I resisted the process by not following instructions, by not holding higher understandings, by not surrendering to the process. This resistance led me to experience more and more of the same circumstances and situations I was looking to be rid of. The kriyas were cycling back around to get my attention. They had a message to share with me.

It took me almost 7 years to begin to understand what Kedarji means when he utters, “all kriyas are beneficial.” I began to understand this the more I dove into the methods offered here to begin to recognize and have experiences that I am the Self. Thus, proving to me that I am not the kriya. The kriya is pointing me to what needs to be addressed, what needs to be known so that I can stop reaching for that useless understanding, behavior, thought or emotion.

The knowledge that is gained from the Shaktipat Kriya process is invaluable. For example, from my initial Shaktipat experience, I know I have a tendency to want to control and manipulate. When I find myself in a state of worry and anxiety, that will lead to an emotional outburst or me using emotion to manipulate another, I can stop myself from going down that rabbit hole. By using the methods taught here, I can engage my witnessing spiritual awareness to observe what is actually taking place in the moment. I can see and understand that the idea of worry and anxiety was triggered within me by a feeling or thought that I am not in control of the situation. Then that causes me to reach for the behavior to control. By engaging in this process, with Kedarji’s leadership, my tendency to reach for this old bad habit is being broken.

For so many lifetimes, I have been going in the wrong direction and didn’t even know it. Shaktipat and the Shaktipat Kriya process helps me to root out all that I am not, all that keeps me stuck in suffering, so that I can move in the right direction and live in a state of delight.

Rev. Deana Tareshawty performs her selfless service as Vice President of our public charity, The Bhakta School, in addition to serving as a program leader and harmonium player.  She also serves on our Board of Directors.  Additionally, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and a double minor in Biology and Chemistry.  She is a certified Ecology of Well-Being practitioner and the owner of Inspired Wholeness.  She is also a trained Reiki Master in Usui Reiki.