037: How Meditation Transforms Lives

Can one practice unlock infinite paths to growth and connection? In this introspective episode, we explore the profound ways meditation bridges spirituality, religion, and personal transformation. Journey from the heart of Cape Town, South Africa, to the West as we follow the story of a passionate teacher guided by the remarkable Gururaj Ananda Yogi Learn how meditation enhances spiritual beliefs, deepens connections to the universe, and fosters a community of growth and enlightenment.

Through touching personal stories, including a humorous narrative about a father’s skepticism transforming into pride, we uncover the powerful impact of self-realization on family dynamics. This heartfelt episode offers insights into how personal growth not only enriches individual lives but also leaves an indelible mark on loved ones.

Whether you’re seeking to deepen your spiritual journey, explore meditation, or understand its transformative effects on relationships, this episode is your gateway to infinite paths of growth.

FISU Meditation:
https://www.fisu.org

The Meditation Guru on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@themeditationguru8032

Rajesh Ananda on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajesh-ananda-198a34a

FISU – Foundation for International Spiritual Unfoldment
International Headquarters
58 Marlborough Road
London E4 9AL, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 843 289 9898
Email: courses@fisu.org

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📒 The Books Referenced in this Episode: 📒
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The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself Hardcover – November 1, 2013
by Michael A. Singer (Author)
https://amzn.to/3LzPCfB

Chapters

• 0:06 Meditation and Spirituality
• 14:51 Parental Reaction to Personal Growth

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

a little about you say you mentioned the spiritual side is is meditation religious?

Speaker 2: 0:15

no, it doesn't have to be. It can be if you want it to be. I mean, we've taught priests, nuns, monks in the past who adhere strongly to their own beliefs. So you know, meditating doesn't mean you give up your beliefs. In fact, it can strengthen those beliefs. You know, you become a more devoted Christian, muslim, buddhist, whatever.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Because essentially we don't want to empty the churches, we want to fill them, but we want to fill them with people who understand what they're doing and understand about spirituality and understand. So you can be a very religious person but not necessarily spiritual, and you can be a very spiritual person without being religious. So spirituality is something unique to each and every one of us, it's our path, it's our divine expression. And what meditation does, and the purpose of meditation again, is to raise our consciousness, so that we move from the grossness to the subtleness, to that refinement where we experience divinity, god or the universe, whatever you want to call it, every moment of the day and we no longer feel separated, we feel at one with ourselves. And then, of course, we have that greater awareness of just feeling connected with everything around us, and that is such an amazing feeling. It's such an amazing feeling.

Speaker 1: 1:55

So you mentioned the heart and love. It sounds like being more of the core of the meditation. So with the meditation, I guess I'm just processing a little bit as we go, not necessarily being religious, but we're talking about the spiritual aspect and that is slightly different for everyone, correct, yeah?

Speaker 2: 2:21

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:23

You mentioned 45 years of practicing meditation, correct, personally, yes, personally.

Speaker 2: 2:31

Um, how did you get introduced to meditation, some 45 of put it in a nutshell, I basically connected with the organization, with my guru who started this organization, guru Raj Nanda Yogi. He was in Cape Town when I was a young man, in my mid-teens, I became a travel agent and I got the opportunity to fly to South Africa on one of these excursions learn the destination, which I was very excited about because I hadn't done a lot of traveling and I flew to. We were only going to Kruger National Park and Johannesburg and Pretoria, you know, the capital of South Africa and there was a girl there and I said, oh God, we've come all this way, we've got to see Cape Town and Durban. So we extended our stay and flew there. So we went to Durban first, then we flew to Cape Town. When I landed in Cape Town Town, I had this weird sensation, like as the plane was landing, I was like pushed against a bubble and and it pushed so hard in my body and I thought maybe it's the pressure of the aircraft or something. Anyway, I sort of it burst as we landed and I absolutely loved cape town. I fell in love with it and in fact then I worked for the travel company that had branches in south africa and I so fell in love with this place.

Speaker 2: 4:15

I was desperate to get back there so I came home, had a wonderful time. It's it's it's an amazing city to go and visit um, and this was the time of apartheid as well. So that was the shocking aspect of the country, but its beauty and its magnificence sort of overrid that. You know it's there and we had to deal with it, and only on my return then I tried to apply for a transfer there, but my father got ill. My father had a heart attack, fell in, tried to apply for a transfer there, but my father got ill. My father had a heart attack, fell in the garden, had a heart attack, and I was the only son. I had a sister, I was the only boy and I thought it's just not a good time for me to leave my parents. I felt a sense of your parents look after you. You have that responsibility to look after them. So I stayed.

Speaker 2: 5:10

But I discovered three or four months later that I was kilometers from Guru Rajananda Yogi and that attraction that was so strong manifested itself like three or four months later and I was like when I heard about this guru that was teaching this unique form of meditation, it was so life transforming and you know it all sounded a bit too good to be true, which when we talk about these things, they sound a little bit too good to be true but they're not. They're real. You know, it's something you can experience for yourself personally. So it all sort of connected then that I'm coming together. I met my wife there. We had a bit of a tumultuous sort of time with family and relationship. She was quite a bit older than me. We got through that and we became a very solid couple. We were married for 43 years. Unfortunately, my wife passed away 20 months ago.

Speaker 1: 6:14

Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.

Speaker 2: 6:17

Oh, that's okay, that's okay, um, but we created this amazing organization. We carried on from our gurus uh, you know, creation of the organization to carry on teaching, know people mainly in the west, um and um, yeah, that that's how it all started for me. But it was just so incredible that I had that experience when the plane landed, yeah, and it was sort of the connection between him and I because I didn't know then that I would be his successor. You know, know, I was 18, 19 years old. Then I started to learn to meditate. It so changed my life in three months that I wanted to be a teacher. So I'm like 20 years old now. I'm with my wife now, just meaning we had come together as a couple. And then I asked the organization can I be a teacher? And they were like, oh, my God, you know, he's so young, can he do this? But he's with a person that's more mature than him. So I think we'll allow it.

Speaker 2: 7:23

But Jasmini and I, my wonderful, glorious wife, we ran the London Center. We created this enormous group, you know, in London in teaching. And then, obviously, garage passed away in 1988. And he prepared me to sort of carry on the role. We spent a lot of time together. Just, you know, up, I suppose that's the word, isn't it? You know scaling up or unfolding down, or whatever you want to call it, because we talk mainly about unfoldment. Um, and he passed away I was still, obviously that was 35 years ago, um. So we then started carrying on with the organization, started started building. Our first sort of international branch was in Denmark, then it was Cyprus, and then we sort of grew from there and now you know, we have Finland, germany, finland, denmark, greece, cyprus, spain and soon to be in the US.

Speaker 1: 8:27

Very, very cool. I mean it's that growth right and that extending, and I'm assuming that technology we kind of discussed, uh, in the green room and technology has allowed you probably to extend a little bit farther, um, faster and more so and establish that you in the past you talked about in the in the 80s, might not have had.

Speaker 2: 8:47

I mean, yeah, our most powerful, um, you know, way of getting people is through recommendation. Okay, because, like me, I had this profound experience in three months. I wanted to tell the world about it. You know you can have this too, so mainly it's word of mouth, um, that is our biggest medium beyond advertising. But of course, you know, we want to help people in other countries, so we focus internationally, you know, being extremely successful. We have physical buildings in Spain, in Cyprus, where we teach.

Speaker 2: 9:43

Yeah, it's been, and it's so wonderful to mix with other cultures, learn from those cultures, understand their weaknesses, because all cultures have certain weaknesses or certain, you know, strengths and, yeah, be able to help those people. I remember, in 1984, I went to China this was before many people had been there and I was looking, thinking, oh god, they must be different to us, they must have less problems than us, they must have less securities than people in the west. No, no, they didn't. They didn't. People are the same all around the world, you know, and there's certain things that perhaps we haven't grown up very well from, from, you know, going back to cave times. You know it's those, maybe, those insecurities, those instabilities, that make our life so much harder, and they don't have to be there. You know they can be resolved, and then we have no longer conflicts, you know, in our life, and everything is a lot more harmonious.

Speaker 1: 10:37

And that is so, so beautiful, so beautiful, a wonderful experience no, it sounds now a that the fact that you get to visit those countries at such a really young age and experience those different cultures and to learn about those individuals and to realize that we all have similar problems, right, insecurities, you know, in a sense you might want to say we're all broken in some way, shape or form, or we haven't yet fixed these things that we might perceive as being broken when you at 18, 19, as a young man, right, because, hey, you're a man at that point a young man.

Speaker 1: 11:20

Were you in life that? And you said you had this bubble and you were drawn to this. But you as an individual, as a young man, um, what were you? Were you seeking that in your at that point in your life? I mean it was. I mean, as you said, we all had our, we all have our issues, right? You know what about you as a young man?

Speaker 2: 11:41

that, yeah, made you open to that I struggled again with confidence, struggled a bit with what's it all about? Okay, how can I live a harmonious life where there's no conflicts, where I feel more confident, secure? So I suppose, like most teenagers, when we go through that, you know, when that role modeling from our parents, and obviously the brain grows and has greater self-awareness, then we start as teenagers questioning the world. Which is perfect? We all go through that. That's a natural progression of the development of the brain. Where we get through the prefrontal cortex, we've got greater self-awareness, so we start what your parents told you and what happens out there is different. So how do I reason with that? So we all go through that and that that's fine, that's a way of finding ourselves, our path.

Speaker 2: 12:37

Sometimes that gets, you know, that that can be damaging it. You know, depending if we've been brought up with rejection, with, you know, with family difficulties etc. That can be the basis of, you know, our experience of life. And then we suddenly realized, probably like me at that age, was oh, I'm sure life is more than this. I really am sure life was more than this. And you know, a blessing for me that I was guided to something. And again, I think, if you're sincere. You know, if you're a sincere, honest person, that guidance is always there. It's that divine finger pushing you down your path and you will find something that's suitable for you at that time. Okay, you may grow out of that and move on to something else, or you may stay on that particular path all your life.

Speaker 2: 13:32

Yeah, I was lost. I definitely was lost, and in three months I found myself. I got my mojo back, you know. It so changed me. I was happier, I was smiling all the time. You know, I'm quite a smiley person. I even find it difficult if you ask me to smile for a camera. It feels very uncomfortable to me because I I smile all the time and that's like you ask me to smile, I smile all the time. This is a bit, this is a bit difficult. Um, but yeah, those changes, uh, change.

Speaker 2: 14:06

It changed my life when I was a young man and I thought, you know, I'd found a wonderful person to be with, which was another huge blessing in my life. You know, an absolute goddess on earth to be with. You know, I was really punching, as they say. I was really punching above my weight, but she was an amazing, amazing woman from Trinidad in the Caribbean who had come to live in the UK and I was very blessed to meet her. So we have this sort of triangle. She came from Trinidad, she came from Trinidad, gourard came from South Africa and I came from England. We all sort of met here and it sort of progressed from there.

Speaker 1: 14:49

So at 18, 19 and finding this. So where was, I guess, what feedback did you get from your parents at that age and what was their? I guess? Thoughts about you finding yourself and and and finding this happiness in the three months and change.

Speaker 2: 15:05

I mean my father, god rest his soul was um soul was quite a joker. He was very jovial and at that time I started working from quite a young age and when I came home from working in the evening he used to say to me right, go on upstairs on your bomb stick. You know he was very joking about it and didn't really take it very seriously. And then he realized, when he saw the changes in me, my God, this is something actually quite powerful, this is something quite profound. So he changed his attitude, hi.

Speaker 1: 15:39

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