We are joined by Gurumaa Dipti Rajkumar Baswar of Shivoham Tantra in episode 12 to speak about Gurupurnima, the auspicious July full moon when Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists alike celebrate the principle which awakens our inner knowing.

We’ll speak about the role and responsibility of the teacher, and the part that the external Guru has in awakening the inner Guru. We’ll discuss the importance of gratitude and dispel some misconceptions about practices of devotion. Shivoham will offer a live stream on Instagram on Gurupurnima itself for anyone to join and experience what it is to offer reverence to the principle that awakens our true self.

There is a single arc present in the growth of our bodies, our psychological development, and our spiritual evolution. Can understanding the trajectory of undifferentiated, to individuated, and back home to the primordial soup help us to navigate with more grace? Each individual's path is both utterly unique, and necessarily pre-patterned; can recognizing the ubiquity help us to really rest in our specificity?

We discuss thresholds, initiations, and the place of a practice as a training ground.

Episode 10; Dissecting Our Defenses; Procrastination, Postponement and Laziness is live. In the third part of our study, Paramita Oliveira and I continue on a micro-but-mighty odyssey. The terrain is tracing the ego’s development as a series of solutions and defense mechanisms. We’ll examine the structure of the personality, which was built around a being in development who didn’t have the protection or cognitive capacity to navigate life’s difficulties. We start to recognize these solutions and defenses as being a distortion of our essence.

The same way a prism separates white light into the full spectrum, the slings and arrows of this human experience fragment our light. Our fragmentation isn’t moral, its fundamentally human, but it can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and separate from our power. We will deepen in coming episodes and create a map that will lead us back to our wholeness using what in us is most unconscious and reactive as a doorway.

In this episode we explore the second layer of the mandala; sloth or laziness. We’ll look at the paralyzing and infantilizing iterations of this force; postponing, procrastinating, and keeping ourselves busy with everything but what we really need to do. We’ll study sloth’s relationship with fear and its capacity to keep us small, stuck, and not living our lives fully.

Paramita Oliviera is a psychologist focused on the study of human behavior.

She feels deeply privileged to have encountered self-inquiry and self-study in 1994, and was so touched by what she learned that in 2000 she began to dedicate her life to bringing this study to others. She has given workshops all over the world, while continuing her own personal study of meditation retreats and deeply immersing herself in trainings in India, her second home.

She specializes in working with the patterns that prevent us from true transformation by keeping us disconnected from our deepest truth.

Instagram: @paramitaoliveira

YouTube: Paramita oliveira

Amritakaya अमृतकाय is a non-profit learning platform offering tools and teachings to help us to enter into deeper relationship with ourselves, others, and life itself.

Instagram: @amritakaya

www.amritakaya.org