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Namaste, everybody. Today I’d like to talk about a very central part of enlightenment. It’s almost like a technique, but it’s not really a technique—it’s so much more than that. The word is Svadharma.

You have to experience it to see what it does for you. In enlightenment, we’re seeking a state of mind. Our actions and this state of mind come largely from meditation. In meditation, we connect with the effortlessness of being what we are—the source. We become a true expression of ourselves, existing beyond conceptual modifications. We become lights. The light actually emerges.

In meditation, when we’re completely free, when there’s no resistance to life or the moment, the energy is open. We’re just unfolding through time, not even doing it anymore—it’s simply happening. You might see the decision within a greater scope, being beyond decision.

In meditation, we formally sit down and tap into the source. There’s no self anymore, or we’re erasing the self. Erasing the self in the sense that we’re becoming disinterested—there’s a renunciation. We’re just becoming absorbed in being, and there’s no structural self, or at least the structural self becomes very thin, and it stops obscuring that free-flowing light, that energy.

So, light happens when we’re in this state of extreme freedom.

Dharma and light go together, actually. When you’re in the Dharma, it’s like God is moving you, and you’re one with the entire concurrence, the body of the universe, and there’s a condition of light. Light happens when there’s this effortlessness, this complete, absolute alignment, because everything is made of light, and it’s the resistance to it that obscures it.

That’s the formal meditative side. But what do we do between meditations? Karma plays a big role. Karma means action. If we do the wrong thing between meditations, we can’t enter into a deep meditative state. We have to kind of make up for it.

The goal is to stay meditative between meditations. But what does that mean? What does that look like? What way do we live our life that is conducive to deep meditations immediately? You sit down, and boom—you’re there.

The key is to be living an aligned life. To be extremely true to yourself. To not live with a self-image that’s constantly judging you or interfering with the natural unfolding of your true nature.

It really is almost like dancing. If you can dance uninhibited, there’s a very similar feeling. It’s about whether you can just be yourself. And there’s a great deal of humility involved in that, right? I am what I am, take it or leave it.

There’s a great deal of love, because you’re not exploiting others, you don’t want them to act a particular way to get something out of them, so there’s no pretense. You’re just, I am what I am, you are what you are. Hopefully we’ll be together if we’re meant to be, or not if we’re meant not to be.

But within all of this is this term I keep using: to be true to yourself.

Dharma, or Svadharma, is a formal practice in what you love to do, for the sake of doing it. It can’t just be about serving others. There’s a level of interest that’s there, woven into the fabric of your spirit. You just care. You always cared about something.

That could be biology, philosophy, mathematics, writing, dancing, business, engineering—it could be all kinds of things. But the point is, there’s something in you that is mathematics, is music. You are an expression of that. Your inspiration itself brings that into form in the universe.

Why do anything? The universe is empty and meaningless. That’s something I learned at Landmark, actually. At the end of their whole big long weekend that you go to—and Landmark is kind of an interesting experience, and can be very, very helpful, actually. You go and you spend the whole weekend with these people. Self-help kind of stuff, and at the very end, they come up with this conclusion that life is empty and meaningless. It’s interesting when you look at that through Dharma, because we give meaning to this universe of rocks and stars and mountains. We give meaning to it. We come here with a wish, a dream in our heart, to live an arc of experience—a destiny that should unfold from our infant stage to our very old age.

Through that process, we go through an unfolding of development. So, Michael Jackson was five, then he was sixteen, and then he was the king of pop at thirty in the eighties and nineties, right? He went through this arc of experience in life, but he was always evolving—a seed that was beyond time. That seed is the inspiration inside of us.

Part of our job in life is to find out what that inspiration is. What is the inspiration that drives us? It’s all about self-honesty. What does it really mean to you? And it’s hard to do this when the world is clamoring with expectations, pushing you into a box here and there, scared of you taking a leap of faith—or a leap into the unknown.

Because the heart doesn’t need to see. It knows that it’s doing what it’s meant to be doing. It moves forward without knowing the next step. It automatically has to take it, and it’s continuously walking into the unknown—in freedom, without security. But there’s a deeper security there, which is the security to be at home inside yourself, being what you’re meant to be. The light is a cosmic home. There’s a wonderful sense of being safe in the light.

So, Svadharma is a formal practice in doing what you would do just for the sake of doing it. A good word is autotelic—it means you do things for the sheer joy. And when you practice your Dharma, you get better at it.

There are a number of things that are of concern. First of all, you may say you’re a dancer, but you’re a very unique kind of dancer. In fact, you’re the best dancer in the world at dancing the way you dance. We’re always the best in the world at being ourselves—whatever that is. We’re not the best in the world at anything, except for one thing. And my teacher’s teacher, Rama, he said this: being who we are.

If you look at somebody like Nikola Tesla, he was an engineer, but he was a very particular kind of engineer. He didn’t make car engines; he made electric motors. He wouldn’t have made car engines—it just wasn’t interesting to him. He wanted to use electricity and magnetism to build machines. It wasn’t just about the machines themselves; it was also about transferring them, and about the whole system—transferring electricity and all of that.

So, finding out who you are is a very important step in this practice. It’s part of the path to enlightenment. That’s what I’m suggesting here. If you want to become enlightened, you have to know who you are, so that you can live in your integrity, in your art, your creativity, and your purpose.

When I’m sitting here talking, when I say art and creativity, I focus on Kira. When I say purpose, I focus on Jenna, because I know what words resonate with you. Although both of you have art, creativity, and purpose, I have a sense of which ones come first for each of you. Maybe I’m incorrect, but there’s a sort of language or paradigm that’s informed by our Dharma.

When I use language, there’s mathematics woven throughout in a very particular way. The math I do is very geometric. I like to do math through computers, computer science, and coding. To me, they’re one and the same. This is a very particular kind of mathematics. For me, mathematics is a philosophical inquiry into the universe, and it’s also a state of mind. Unless it brings beauty into my own mind, it means very little to me.

Also, it’s very social. I like to share math. I don’t like to do it just by myself. I want people to see it, and I want it to be like a rock star on stage—it should have flair. You’ll see this in my videos, my math videos. These are things I’ve discovered about my own Dharma.

So it’s good to try to find out what you would be if you were being completely true to yourself. Svadharma, which means your Dharma, requires a practice. You need to sit down and do it, and you give yourself a wide space to just have some fun. That’s the key.

I’ve been working so hard this whole month. I actually haven’t done a lot of math lately, so today, as part of my practice to get ready for the sermon, I did a whole bunch of math. It helped me reconnect, and I realized how much I’d been missing it. It was amazing how it changed my state of mind.

I’ve also built a very deep reservoir of power in my math, and that’s something that happens in your Svadharma. The more you do it, the more you store power there. It’s personal power. There’s a kind of qi—your will to live, your will to create, your will to see. All of these are involved in the personal power you generate when you engage in your Dharmic activity.

These sentences I’m saying have a lot of power stored in them. The power you generate when you engage in your Dharmic activity—there’s something very precious there that I’m sharing with you. You and I should write it on the wall so it’s never forgotten, because I forget it every now and then. That’s what today was reminding me.

One of the things that Svadharma does for us, which is absolutely invaluable, is that it creates a sense of independence. When you’re doing your Dharma, you don’t feel lonely. You don’t feel like you need others. You feel independent, strong, and whole.

This is a major paradigm shift for the codependence of humanity. Most people feel a degree of codependence—they need their show, their food, their companion, all kinds of things. But when you have your art, you sit down and you are free. You are independent in your own practice. You have an art to come home to when you need it most, and that is a precious refuge.

When you’re doing your Dharma, you enter into light because there’s a state of non-resistance. You feel like, "I’m here to do what I want to be doing right now," and there’s an easefulness. There’s a lack of resistance that dissipates energy. Sometimes in life, we push through and dissipate energy, but in enlightened states of mind, there’s no pushing. You’re just pure integrity unfolding constantly, and there’s no dissipation of energy. You retain all this inner power.

There’s no egoic self-talk that dissipates energy. There’s no attachment and aversion that dissipate energy. When we sit down and formally practice our Svadharma, we’re cultivating the karma of being in flow state, of living without resistance. We generate power in the activity, and we cultivate the neural pathways and habits to stay in a state of gracefulness and integrity.

The goal is to be unapologetically, as completely you as possible. Go crazy with it—that’s the fun part. If there was no society and I was listening to my heart, that innocent child spiritual being inside of me, what would I do? Would I make everything iridescent and sparkly? Would I make mathematics something completely different than anybody’s ever seen? Would I be a doctor who uses, I don’t know, electromagnetism from the planets to heal people? What might you do that’s completely out of left field? Every Dharma has so much potential.

These fields that we know of were created this way. Just think about how ridiculous it is—we’re going to use these tiny little creatures called bacteria and viruses, learn about them, use microscopes to see them, and medicine to interact with them. This is medicine today, right? But 300 years ago, they weren’t thinking along those lines. Somebody came in and was a trailblazer. They said, "Hey, medicine can be this." Usually, it goes quite slowly, but every now and then, there’s a very enlightened individual who takes a giant leap because they can do nothing else. They can do nothing but be themselves.

It’s painful to conform to the limitations of the status quo, of the times. It’s painful in a spiritual way that’s problematic for enlightenment. This is all a part of enlightenment, and I was thinking, okay, how do we make more progress on the path here as a Sangha? I wanted to really tell you how important this is. You can sit down for 30 minutes a day and do your Dharma.

Today I sat down. It’s hard to do 30 minutes sometimes, but even 15 minutes can be very powerful. This is a multi-year endeavor and inquiry, so you might get better at this, ask questions. You might have been doing it a long time already, but this is a good thing to question right now.

Dharma helps you develop lucidity, because the way you live and what you master helps you make sense of infinity. The universe is something to make sense of. How do we make sense of our lives? Well, we use metaphors for things that we really understand. You might say, "Oh, you see what’s happening over there?" That’s kind of like a choreographed dance. And if you know dance and choreography, you might be able to use those structures to make sense of what’s happening in a business, or in a restaurant, or whatever it might be.

Mathematics is a very powerful one—well, they’re all powerful. And you don’t choose your Dharma, so I shouldn’t say it that way. That’s interesting, you don’t choose your Dharma. Mathematics can be a nice complement to any Dharma, but dance can also be a nice complement to the mathematician’s Dharma, right? Because it frees a mathematician from maybe a degree of rigidity.

You could have your Dharma, and then you can bring other things in that support it.

I’d just like to talk about a few enlightened people. Bruce Lee is a very good example of somebody who lived his Dharma and entered into enlightened states of awareness. He actually went into Samadhi through martial arts. Martial arts is a very classical Dharma for mastery through form and practice. It’s for inner mastery through outer practice.

Another person is Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore was a brilliant poet who became enlightened as a poet. He started a school, his whole life was around poetry—I think he won the Nobel Prize.

Emerson is a writer, one of the best writers in human history, that I know of. He became enlightened as well. Shakespeare is actually an example of this too, believe it or not. You see, enlightened beings aren’t always a sage in a cave. Sometimes it’s Shakespeare. Sometimes it’s the actor on TV.

But the thing is, they entered into states of awareness. If you read Shakespeare, you’re like, how did he do that? Well, he was in a state of mind, a state of freedom. And you can see, even in the things that he says, the depth of wisdom, the lived wisdom that he was sharing. He wasn’t just a great writer, he was a wise sage sharing through his plays. He was a playwright, right? So he used plays. Emerson wrote essays—very different.

There’s a number of people in history—I think Mozart was one as well, Pythagoras was one. There are a number of people who became enlightened through mastery of some sort of art form.

Finding your Dharma—let’s end on this. To find your Dharma, look through your life and ask, what are the things… and it’s never too late. It’s never too late, because you’ll get an immediate joy from this. What are the things that were always present in my life? Like, you’ve always been doing that.

Sometimes it’s hard—sometimes it’s right in front of you and you can’t see it, which is a little bit frustrating. But don’t be frustrated, because you’ll dissipate energy. Just keep considering it.

When you look at, like, okay, what did you do after school when you were a teenager? What did you do during school? What did you do in elementary school? What did you do in your 20s? What did you do in your 30s? Just go through and see what are the things that have been a part of your life the whole time.

It’s important to think of it as something that you can refine. It’s a skill set. Now, oftentimes it exists within a larger scope. Like, you might say, for example, Bruce Lee was a martial artist, but then he was an actor. That was kind of a larger scope, but the martial arts was the thing. If he got confused and said, well, his Dharma was acting, he might have gone and done something that had nothing to do with martial arts, right?

He was also a philosopher. But the key is, it’s gotta be something where you can revel in the subtleties of it. Think about it like, in mathematics, I can keep learning higher, more subtle things and get better at understanding the basics, even. You can always become a better dancer, you can always become a better doctor, you can always become a better martial artist or a painter.

There’s gotta be some sort of joy in the mastery. It can’t just be about caring for others. There’s something you do for you. It’s a selfish activity. You’re doing it for you, but really, you’re not doing it for you—you’re doing it because it is you. There’s a difference. You’re the flower blooming in spring. It’s not selfish, it’s just being itself.

Maybe this week, contemplate what could be your Dharma, what’s something you want to do. A lot of times, like—I didn’t know I could do mathematics as my Dharma for a long time, actually, even though I was doing it my whole life. Like, literally my whole life, I was doing mathematics.

But it never occurred to me that I could just sit down and do math. Pure math. That always seemed impractical to me. But it wasn’t impractical at all, because that’s exactly what I had to do.

Pure math is a very… I had this tendency to think I needed to use it for something. It had to be for engineering, or to make cool technology, or to do something practical, right? But pure math has always been a joy for me. There are higher-dimensional mathematical shapes you’ll never see in the third dimension. Could they ever be used? Maybe. But that’s Dharma for me. There’s a lot of purity in the math.

So… what is your Dharma? And… do it every day. When you do it, try to make it a meditation. If you can do it in light, that’s a very powerful thing. Can you do your Dharma in light?

I remember when my teacher first suggested that, and I thought, whoa, that sounds so crazy. But sometimes it happens to me now. I close my eyes, and I do math, and there’s light. Literally, in Samadhi, with waves of soma washing through me, and I’m doing mathematics with my eyes closed. Sometimes that brings me into a deeper meditative state than even meditating itself.

Although it’s a different thing—it’s important to know that. Becoming completely absorbed in source… you can’t do your Dharma there. Oh, I should tell you that eventually.

There’s this back and forth: formal meditation, and dharmic living—which, by the way, can be infused throughout your whole life. You can make math everything, or dance everything. When you’re cooking dinner, you’re dancing, right? You live it. It’s your metaphors, it’s everything. But you also have the formal practice. Eventually, that back and forth becomes one.

And you enter into Sahaja Samadhi, which is a very rare state. It means the natural state. In Sahaja Samadhi, the waking state is full, deep nirvana samadhi. It’s kind of unfathomable to talk about, but there’s a state where meditation and the flow merge so completely that there’s no difference anymore.

There are, maybe, ten people in the world who can do this. It’s very rare. I do think Rabindranath Tagore achieved that. I don’t think Bruce Lee achieved the full integration, but he might have if he had lived longer. That’s a very special state—the highest samadhi.

I hope this was inspiring, and also encouraging to hold space for each of you. Sometimes it’s helpful to have someone say this is a reasonable and fair use of your time, right? To kind of give you permission. Somebody did that for me, so I want to do it for you. So, namaste.

I love the idea of an education system that recognizes and nurtures this in young children, instead of standardized—conforming the kids. What if our education system actually developed that inner genius, developed the potentiality of each of us? It could center on your Dharma, and then you could learn all the other things as a part of it. For me, I could have learned the history of mathematics. They never had a history of mathematics class in my school. Oh my god, I would have loved that! And then I could have learned the mathematics of, you know, main history.

Everything could have been centered on mathematics. It could have been writing, history, philosophy, PE, physics—like, all of those things could have been more mathematically focused for me. But it’s not designed that way. It’s designed, okay, here’s history, and it’s centered on history. That’s just one example. Philosophy could have been… I mean, everything could have been centered on mathematics.

Sometimes there’s a love of many things, and you can see multiple different paths that you could take, and you could go all the way with one path. But you don’t really want to abandon the other path. Maybe you want to combine everything and proceed. Perhaps you’re looking at an unfolding. What if you just were to look at the arts itself?

Like, I did my Dharma today. I picked a math concept that has been reverberating in my mind for some time now, and I coded it. I learned it, and I understood it, and I learned some really new, interesting things. I didn’t really ask, “What’s the path?” I just followed my heart.

In fact, I had about five different things I was thinking of doing. I was like, oh, that could be cool, that could be cool, that could be cool. Then, when I remembered this one, I thought, that’s what I’m doing today. That’s what happened. It just drew me in, and two or three hours went by, and I had just been doing that.

It was an autotelic activity—refinement and mastery and expansion of my practice, my craft, my art, right? So, I wasn’t saying, oh, I have all these things I can do. I asked, what does my heart want to do now?

Think of it as each moment. There’s something your heart wants to do now—not as an idea. That’s actually Dharma; it means truth and duty. What is your duty now? It’s always implicit in the current moment.

And that’s that natural effort that’s almost like you’re still in meditation. You’re somehow here, and it’s happening, but you’re also beyond. Because integrity is a constant, everything becomes a constant. There’s no choice anymore. Choice dissolves in integrity. There’s no room for it. Then just love and integrity operate. And then you get to see what happens.

There’s always, in every moment, the right thing to do. Actually, to me, that’s what the word righteousness means. It means, in every moment, there’s a right thing to do, and it’s always being true to yourself—and with an expanded scope of identification with the whole.

It’s always inspired, and it’s not selfish, but it’s also being what you are. Another little paradox there. You can be what you are on behalf of the whole. That’s essentially it.

And there’s always—when there’s a level of clarity and stillness in the mind—you kind of just know what to do. Krishnamurti talks about this. He calls it choiceless awareness. It’s kind of like unpremeditated action.

The nice thing is, you just follow your heart. What does my heart say? Oh, my heart knows exactly what to do, and every time you do it, your heart just gets fuller and fuller and expands.

You just live a life of being free, honest, and true to yourself, and one with everybody and everything. And then you—voila! Light. Sahaja Samadhi. Truth. All the things we seek. Love.

In light of this, being a part of the Sangha, we can live our lives exactly the way we’re meant to and grow towards enlightenment. It’s enlightenment—not the short path, it’s the middle way. It’s not in the monastery; it’s meeting life more beautifully, more completely, more happily.

Meditating for a certain amount of time, doing your Dharma formally for a certain amount of time, living in alignment and clarity for the rest of the time, and health. We’re trying to bring all of that together, and I’d like to create a big group of us who are doing that, because a big group creates a support system and normalizes these practices.

It gives us the opportunity to connect over what we care about, to have friends who are doing what we're doing. If you get really into it, it becomes hard to be close with people who are living a completely different life. You can still be friends with them, but the connection isn’t as deep. When something is deeply meaningful, we tend to connect most over the things that matter a great deal to us.

It takes courage to do your Dharma. And heart helps with that, so let’s do heart meditation—generating love in the heart center. That’s really it. Feel the heart center. Generate from the heart. Just sitting down and generating love.

Really open the heart by feeling gentleness. Accept the moment. Gratitude. Just a couple minutes of silence.

Let’s listen to the sounds. Focus into the light. Generate love. Submerge in the bliss of being. Feel the completeness from within. Invoke that. Namaste.

At what point can you just be content and not have to think about your Dharma? Because… enough? If I was much younger, maybe I would be struggling towards something, but I’m just content, so… does it just mean enjoying what you like to do sometimes, or you don’t? A specific thing…

I’m just suggesting that you can reserve some time in your day to do something artistic for yourself. That’s really what I’m saying. An activity, something where you can grow in skill. You might sit down and draw cartoons for an hour—it could be anything. Something creative. It’s not about becoming somebody. It’s about the joy of giving yourself some time to be creative, some time to—

If it doesn’t feel right for you, then it might not be right for you. If it doesn’t feel right because you’re limiting yourself, maybe you’ll notice that if that’s the case. Perhaps it’s not, perhaps it is.

I do see a possibility for you to do something joyful for yourself. You’re such a good drawer, for example. Remember when you used to make those big signs? When was the last time you drew just for the joy of drawing, and sat down and gave yourself that? I think there’d be some peace in that. I think there’d be some contentment in that, actually.

Or perhaps… I mean, you’re one of the most creative people I know, and yet, I don’t see you spending time in creativity. I see you spending time in service, for sure, but not as much time in your own joy of doing something. I think it might be a little uncomfortable for you to do something just for your own joy. I think that’s probably quite common. You might say, I have lots of things to do, this is not my usual.

No pressure. Just a suggestion, maybe feel into it.

My teacher actually told me—believe it or not—he told me it was math. I didn’t know. Can you believe that? I’d been doing math my whole life, but I always thought it was physics or engineering. But math was always the fundamental thing in what I did.

And then one day I realized—he told me, "You can do math for an hour a day." I was surprised. Really? I felt like that would be a waste of time. But he said, "At least I have an excuse to do it now." I remember saying that to him, and he replied, "That's what it is, see?" I needed the excuse to do the thing I wanted to do.

So maybe going—yeah, I mean, it could be all kinds of things. What would you do if you could just have half an hour a day to play? Usually, it's something you can get better at, something you can achieve a degree of mastery in.

Sometimes, in meditation, it starts with some weird stuff coming from the left side, like dark gray or navy blue or something, and then it goes away, and my usual—other thing comes along with a purple, green, and a little bit of red in it, but it started off with this interesting difference. Navy blue is actually very—if you saw the navy blue, that can be a very deep quality of energy as well.

When you stop the music, you can really open to the light. It’s good to do a mixture. Silence is good sometimes. I like to end with silence. There’s something about doing music and then stopping it, and in the last one to five minutes, just having silence. It’s very powerful. Because we’re in a state, and then we can just—it helps us get there, to the top of the mountain, and then we can stay and be there.

Thank you. Namaste.

Theme of the Lesson

Svadharma: practicing what you truly love for its own sake, so your life between meditations stays aligned, powerful, and conducive to light and deeper samadhi.

Key Quotes

“In meditation, we connect with the effortlessness of being what we are—the source.”

“Light happens when we’re in this state of extreme freedom.”

“Light happens when there’s this effortlessness, this complete, absolute alignment, because everything is made of light, and it’s the resistance to it that obscures it.”

“If we do the wrong thing between meditations, we can’t enter into a deep meditative state.”

“The key is to be living an aligned life.”

“Dharma, or Svadharma, is a formal practice in what you love to do, for the sake of doing it.”

“Part of our job in life is to find out what that inspiration is.”

“Because the heart doesn’t need to see. It knows that it’s doing what it’s meant to be doing.”

“When you’re doing your Dharma, you don’t feel lonely. You don’t feel like you need others. You feel independent, strong, and whole.”

“Choice dissolves in integrity.”

Key Points

• Enlightenment is a state of mind, and meditation connects us to the effortlessness of being what we are—the source.
• Light emerges when there is extreme freedom and non-resistance; resistance obscures what is already made of light.
• What we do between meditations matters: karma (action) can either support or interfere with entering deep meditation.
• The goal is to stay meditative between meditations by living an aligned life and being extremely true to yourself.
• Svadharma is a formal practice of what you love to do for the sake of doing it (autotelic): you do it for the sheer joy.
• It can’t only be about serving others; there is something woven into your spirit that you genuinely care about.
• Finding your Dharma involves self-honesty and looking through your life for what has always been present.
• You don’t choose your Dharma; you discover it, and it has a unique flavor (like Tesla being a particular kind of engineer).
• Practicing Svadharma builds a reservoir of personal power; the more you do it, the more power you store there.
• Svadharma creates independence and refuge: when you have your art, you can come home to it and feel whole.
• Doing your Dharma can become meditative and sometimes bring you into deeper states than meditation itself, while still being distinct from absorption in source.
• There is a back-and-forth between formal meditation and dharmic living; eventually, they can merge into Sahaja Samadhi.
• When there is clarity and stillness, you follow the heart in the current moment; integrity makes the next step implicit.
• It’s painful to conform to the status quo; being yourself is part of the path and supports enlightenment.

Assignment

Hold an honest, gentle inquiry into what you would do just for the sake of doing it, and give it a little space this week—not to become someone, but to be what you are, following what your heart wants to do now, and noticing how that affects your resistance, your energy, and your meditation.

Actionable Focus for the Week

• Notice what happens to your meditation when your actions between meditations feel aligned versus misaligned.
• Make a little time for a formal Svadharma practice (even 15 minutes), and let it be playful and spacious.
• Look back through your life (childhood, school years, 20s, 30s) and see what has been consistently present.
• Let your Dharma be something you can refine and grow in skill, with joy in the subtleties and mastery.
• When you feel pulled in multiple directions, feel into what your heart wants to do now, moment by moment.
• Experiment with doing your Dharma “in light”—as a kind of meditation, with non-resistance.
• Pay attention to independence: how your Dharma affects loneliness, wholeness, and the sense of refuge.
• If the idea of “finding your Dharma” feels stressful, stay intuitive and gentle, and simply feel into what is joyful.

Optional Reflection Prompts

• What activity feels like “I am what I am” when I do it—simple, honest, and unobstructed?
• What has been quietly present throughout my life, even when I didn’t think it was “practical”?
• When I follow my heart in the current moment, what changes in my energy and resistance?

Namaste Community,

We welcome you with warmth from the LoveLight Sangha. This week, our gathering centered on the inquiry of Svadharma—the unique path of being true to oneself, and the role this plays in both meditation and daily life. Whether you were unable to join us or are considering stepping into our circle, we wish to share some of what unfolded together.

Highlights from the Teaching

The heart of this week's teaching explored how living in alignment with our true nature brings lightness and freedom. Here are a few words from the teaching that carried particular depth:

“In meditation, we connect with the effortlessness of being what we are—the source. We become a true expression of ourselves, existing beyond conceptual modifications. We become lights. The light actually emerges.”

“Dharma, or Svadharma, is a formal practice in what you love to do, for the sake of doing it. It can't just be about serving others. There's a level of interest that's there, woven into the fabric of your spirit. You just care. You always cared about something.”

“The goal is to be unapologetically, as completely you as possible. Go crazy with it—that's the fun part. If there was no society and I was listening to my heart, that innocent child spiritual being inside of me, what would I do?”

Reflections from the Gathering

The evening was marked by a gentle, open presence. Participants reflected on the challenge and joy of discovering what is truly theirs to do, and the courage it takes to honor that in a world of expectations. There was an honest space for questions, and a sense of mutual encouragement—each person’s journey was met with respect and care, whether it was about finding clarity, embracing contentment, or simply sitting with the inquiry.

Ways to Engage

If you wish to explore this teaching more deeply, a full transcript or recording of the session is available on request.

You are warmly invited to join us for a future LoveLight Sangha gathering. Whether you are new or returning, your presence is valued.

If you feel called, you might reflect on these questions:

• What is the activity or way of being that feels most true to your heart, even if it seems simple or impractical?
• How might you gently give yourself permission to spend time with this, just for its own sake?

With appreciation for your path and presence,
LoveLight Sangha