Journey to Enlightenment Part 01

Author(s): Chitrabhanu, Chetana Catherine Florida, Nirmala Hanke, Raksha Penni Helsene
Publisher: Create Space

Page 34

March 1996: A Challenging Year
Dear Lighthouse Members and Friends,
Let your lives be blessed and filled with Divine Order, Love and Light until you become One with all there is to be.
We can all relate, at one time or another, to having challenging days, months or years during our lives. Some people, however, have a difficult time seeing that these challenging times can also be the most "spiritually productive times”. So instead of seeing them as a "challenge” to be met, they turn them into a "lesson”. And that takes much more effort in the long run because lessons have a way of becoming repetitive. Lessons repeat themselves over and over, sometimes for lifetimes, until we learn what we were meant to learn through the initial challenge.
One thing is certain: We all will be faced with challenges and lessons until we become Enlightened Beings. I, for one, have had a life particularly filled with challenges and lessons. In fact, it seemed like a "sink or swim" lifetime...so I learned to swim!! I also learned that it felt much better to find the positive within the negative to dwell on, rather than dwelling on the negative. I learned, too, that it is much better to laugh more and cry less, since I still have many times of purification, Releasing and Healing on my pathway.
I have also concluded, from having been a "loner” type of personality before meditation, that I really prefer to spiritually grow up with like minds on the pathway, so that we can share together the joys and sorrows, happiness and sadness, laughter and tears, blessings and challenges, and all things together rather than alone. So my Spiritual Family has become very important to me. Having a Spiritual Family helps us, I feel, to keep things more in perspective. Instead of converting all challenges into lesson to be learned over and over again, we can meet our challenges and overcome them more easily.
For instance, my challenges in 1995 began in January, when I started the New Year with pneumonia and several sinus infections that continued into March. In April I found that my beloved teacher Gurudev Chitrabhanuji had severe back pain (from an old injury he sustained as a young man saving two women from a burning building). Later on in the summer he did have back surgery, which turned out very successfully.
During this time, my first mother-in-law who has been like a mother to me since I was 17 was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Also, my husband Paul, was diagnosed with diabetes.
In June I was hospitalized and diagnosed with congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation (heart out of sinus rhythm). In August I went back into sinus rhythm. I played the Navkar mantra throughout the procedure, with permission of Dr. Bhatia, at Beyer-Oakwood Hospital in Ypsilanti and, of course, success was inevitable!
On the Wings of Light and Love - 35