Keeping the Soul in Tune

“The Master never leaves his disciple and is ever bestowing his grace.”

Maharaj Charan Singh

“If you love music and from a child you want to play brilliantly, say the piano, you can’t just all of a sudden become a brilliant player. You’ve got to practice it. Well it’s the same with the Path.”

Kathy Sharp, “Seva Not Meditation,” Satsang, April 18, 2004

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Earlier this week I was working out with my trainer, and as usual, I had rock and roll playing. He mentioned how much I love music, and I briefly mentioned the Path and the inner Sound. Then he looked at me and said, “You are in tune.” I laughed because the timing was funny, but later I kept thinking about what it actually means to be in tune.

The inner Sound is central to the Path. It is not heard with our physical ears. It is Shabd, the Audible Life Stream, the current of God that created and sustains everything and is always calling the soul Home. To me, keeping the soul in tune means learning to place our attention on that Sound instead of allowing the world and our own minds to carry it everywhere else.

Instruments go out of tune for all kinds of ordinary reasons. They are played, carried around, exposed to changes in temperature, or sometimes left sitting for too long. No one decides that a guitar is a terrible guitar because one of its strings has slipped. You tune it and keep playing.

People are not all that different. We move through work, family responsibilities, health concerns, relationships, social media, and whatever unexpected thing arrives before we have finished dealing with the last one. Our attention gets pulled in ten directions at once, and sooner or later we can feel that something is off. Sometimes we know exactly what happened, and other times we simply realize that we no longer feel quite like ourselves.

This week I also watched Alanis Morissette being interviewed by Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy. Alanis was iconic for me as a young single mother in the 1990s, but my connection to her music went far beyond liking the songs. When Jagged Little Pill came out, I was fiercely exploring myself through the 12 Steps, individual therapy, group therapy, and anything else that might help me understand myself and how I had gotten where I was. I related to that album on a visceral level because she said things women were often expected to soften, hide, or apologize for feeling, and she said them without cleaning them up first.

People often reduced her to an angry young woman singing loudly about heartbreak, but I never heard her that way. I heard someone who was deeply in touch with her emotions and willing to show what she was actually feeling. She was not pretending to have herself figured out. She was paying attention to what was happening within her and telling the truth about it.

Then Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie came out in 1998, after Alanis had traveled to India, and her search became even more overtly spiritual. Songs such as “Thank U” and “Baba” explored gratitude, silence, spiritual teachers, and the difference between true guidance and giving away our own discernment. Alanis later explained that “Baba” was about placing gurus on pedestals to the point that people stop listening to their own inner voice.

By the time that album came out, all the work I had done on myself had led me into an active search for God. I had spent so much time looking at myself that I had begun looking beyond myself. I wanted God, and I was trying to understand where and how to find Him. Alanis was singing about India and gurus and trying to figure out what was real. I was asking many of the same questions in my own life. The album became part of the period in which my own search was leading me toward Kathy.

This is part of why it makes me so happy to see her having this resurgence and to watch another generation discover her. In the interview, she was still the deep, searching, vulnerable woman I remembered, only now with another thirty years of life behind her. She spoke openly about postpartum depression, terrifying intrusive thoughts, and a period of psychosis, as well as how painful it was when people around her no longer trusted her sanity. She did not hide any of it or let those experiences become the whole story of who she is.

Alanis has always listened closely to what is happening inside of her. The Path asks us to listen inwardly too, but it also teaches discernment because not every thought is truth and not every inner voice should lead us. I understood the importance of going within, but I still needed Kathy to teach me where to place my attention once I got there.

When I met Kathy, my life and my mind were both very loud. I had spent years searching for God, trying different forms of meditation, reading everything I could find, and looking for someone who could explain what I was experiencing. I did not need someone to tell me that every thought or feeling was spiritually important. I needed someone who understood what was happening and could show me where to put my attention.

Kathy brought me back to meditation continually. She did not teach me to collect spiritual experiences, spend my life interpreting signs, or build an identity around being spiritual. She taught me to repeat the Holy Names, focus at the third eye, listen for the Sound, and then get up and live responsibly in the world. Her purpose was never to make the personality feel important. Her work was to free the soul.

That is one reason I believe a living Master is so important. Spiritual books have been an enormous part of my life, but a living Master can answer the question we are actually asking and tell us when we have misunderstood the answer. Kathy used to say that we would not ask a friend to perform brain surgery or take directions from someone who had never been where we wanted to go. The inner journey is vast, and I need a Guide who knows the way because my mind is quite capable of giving me directions, and not all of them are good.

Kathy left this world nine years ago, but She will always be my Master. It was Kathy who initiated me, gave me the Holy Names, and connected me to the inner Sound. That relationship did not end when She left the physical body, and when I meditate, it is still Kathy I picture at the eye center. Before She left, She named David as Her successor, and for the past nine years he has carried the work forward as our living Teacher. He makes himself available to us in so many ways, especially to answer questions about meditation and help us live the teachings in the world. People who were initiated by David picture him at the eye center when they meditate, just as I continue to picture Kathy. The Master who initiates us remains our Master, but the same Power works through every true Master.

In The Living Master, Kathy shared Maharaj Charan Singh’s explanation that the Lord is never separated from us and manifests within us as Shabd, Nam, or the Word. The Master does not create that Sound because It has always existed. The Master connects the disciple consciously with It and teaches the method through which the soul can follow It Home.

Dr. Julian Johnson, an American physician and disciple of Great Master Sawan Singh, wrote in The Path of the Masters about practical ways to recognize a true Master. A true Master does not charge for spiritual teachings, boast about spiritual powers, seek worship, or perform miracles to attract attention. The Master teaches the inner Sound Current and gives the disciple a way to verify spiritual truth through direct experience. Popularity and charisma may attract people, but neither one proves Mastership.

The relationship is not about becoming special. Years with a true Master should make us less impressed with ourselves because the mind can turn absolutely anything, including meditation and service, into another reason to feel important. It can even become proud of being humble, which is quite an accomplishment when you think about it.

Kathy was the most loving Being I have ever known, and everything She did was Love, whether I understood it at the time or not. Sometimes I wanted comfort and received corrections, but the correction was Love too. Sometimes I wanted to run out and fix something for someone else, and She would tell me, “You’ll do more good in the chair. Go meditate.” She was not dismissing anyone’s suffering or telling me to ignore the world. She was reminding me that I could not bring peace anywhere when I had no peace within myself.

The books written by the Masters return to this constantly. In Die to Live, Maharaj Charan Singh explains that other forms of service can lead us toward meditation, but they cannot replace it. We can serve people, attend Satsang, read spiritual books, and speak about Love, but we still have to practice what we have been given. This is why Kathy’s comparison to learning music is so perfect. Someone can love the piano, read about great pianists, and attend concerts for years, but eventually that person has to sit at the piano and play. Some days the music flows, and some days the same measure has to be repeated until everyone in the house is tired of hearing it. The practice is what changes the player.

Meditation is much the same. Through simran, we repeat the Holy Names and begin gathering the attention that has been scattered through the world. Through dhyan, we hold the form of the Master within, and through bhajan, we listen for the inner Sound. The words may be unfamiliar to some people, but what we are doing is simple. We are withdrawing our attention from everything pulling at it outside and bringing it back to the eye center, the doorway within.

Simple, of course, does not mean easy. Some mornings I sit down and feel peaceful almost immediately. Other mornings my mind reviews conversations, work, people, problems, plans, and random things I have not thought about in years. After decades of meditation, my mind can still put on quite a show when it wants to. I keep saying the Names and bringing my attention back because bringing it back is the practice.

Kathy also taught us that regular and punctual meditation creates an atmosphere around the practice. Sitting at the same time each day helps the mind and body understand what is expected, although life does not always cooperate. She told us that even five or ten minutes mattered during times when the full meditation seemed impossible, and She also said that quality mattered more than quantity. There was discipline in Her teaching, but there was mercy too.

Being in tune does not mean I am going to be peaceful and centered every minute of every day. I am still going to become distracted, tired, emotional, irritated, and occasionally overwhelmed because I am still living in this world. What has changed is that I usually recognize it sooner, and I know where to go when I do.

I can feel when I am moving out of tune because I become much too interested in what everyone else is doing, saying, thinking, posting, or not saying. I can be on LinkedIn for work, check X, look at Instagram, answer a few messages, and suddenly realize that my attention has been everywhere except where I want it to be. I enjoy social media, but I can also feel when I have had enough.

When that happens, I pull back and meditate more. The change is not always immediate, but eventually my thoughts stop feeling as though they are all shouting at once. I remember what is mine to do and what is not. I become less interested in interpreting everyone else and more able to meet the people in front of me with Love, which is a much better use of my attention.

We are moving quickly toward fall now, and it has always been a reflective time for me. Kathy left the earth in the fall, and I was also initiated in the fall, so the season holds both endings and beginnings in my life. The days grow shorter, the air becomes cooler, the leaves start coming down, and the whole world seems to quiet itself and turn inward.

Every year I feel myself responding to that change. I start reassessing my work, my writing, my health, the way I spend my time, and what I want the next season of my life to hold. Meditation is always at the top of that list because everything else becomes clearer when it is where it belongs.

Alanis helped me understand and survive many emotions when I was a young mother, and I am grateful that her voice is reaching so many people again. Kathy gave me something different. She taught me that beneath every emotion, every thought, and every song playing in the outside world is a Sound that does not change with the circumstances of my life. It is there when I feel connected to It, and it is there when I do not.

Maybe my trainer knew exactly what he was saying when he told me I was in tune, or maybe it was simply the perfect thing to say with rock and roll playing after I had briefly mentioned the inner Sound. Either way, he made me laugh and then made me think, which is a pretty good thing for a trainer to accomplish during a workout. I will probably never remain perfectly in tune while living in this world, but I know how to return when I hear that something is off. I sit down, close my eyes, say my Names, picture Kathy, and listen for the Music that was there all along.