Recognizing I AM the Beloved
An Evolutionary Path Celebrating the Light of Consciousness
Saturday, October 26, 2024
3pm to 5pm
Centre Yoga Aylmer
142 Frank Robinson, Gatineau QC
Come for tea, conversation, chanting and meditation
Shruti is a wonderful teacher, author, story-teller, and most delightful to be around!
In her recent book Recognizing I AM the Beloved, Shruti uses the realizations and understandings from her years of profound yogic experiences to better appreciate the details of her daily life that concern the perennial questions: Who am I? What is real? What is reality? What is true? What is my purpose?
She writes, “It has taken me a very long time to come to terms with the limited and false beliefs that I have unknowingly allowed my mind to hold and affect my experience of reality and my emotional response to it: feelings of unworthiness, self doubt, difference, separation, loneliness. Now, after years of practice, self-inquiry and study, I finally recognize that I, like you, simply AM, in a very profound and fulfilling way.”
Shruti’s intention has always been to support others embarking on their own journeys of awareness. In her book she shares the steps that have led her to finding an approach to life and living that supports her in coming up with her own solutions to life’s challenges, drawing her own conclusions, and trusting her own realizations.
She offers her readers a way of looking at life through a series of unifying principles that empower them to do the same. So they need never ‘give up’, believing they are ‘victims of challenging ‘coincidences’. Instead, they can have faith in their continued self inquiry, meditative realizations and other practices that ultimately reveal that we are the designers of our own beliefs: true and false and emotional responses: positive and negative. This means that, with the support of our practices, we have the power to refine our mind’s misunderstandings, to make new choices in our daily life, even to change those habits that have seemed beyond our control. Our practices yield a potent vibratory quality that, in a sense, helps us recalibrate and dissolve what is not proving beneficial to our life’s trajectory. At the end of the day, it is not the details of our life that are so important: they are not the goal. However, the details point us to a journey that takes us to our goal.
What is the goal? Understanding? A sense of connection, belonging? An experience of beauty, peace, love, faith, trust, God? Feelings that last no longer than the shifting details of the situation like the waves of life that break against the world’s shore of complexity and distraction. Or feelings that are deep and eternal, always there, as individual waves continue to pull back, draw into, the depths of the ocean: the constant longing to be free, to be whole, fulfilled. Could the journey be the goal?
Śruti Malcolm recently retired from her position as a linguistics professor in central Canada. She continues as an avid yoga practitioner and student of the great wisdom within. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada.
Comments about her book:
“[Shruti] The author shares the highs and the lows of her daily life, maintaining an even keel throughout. It is honest. It is piercing, It is loving. I read it over several months. Sometimes it made me cry, because it spoke the words that soothed wounds I didn’t even know I had. It made me feel seen and understood, and therefore loved and inspired and hopeful. Yet it is a demanding book that asks us to suspend premature judgement and comparison, and instead inhabit the space of love, patience and trust.” Zheng
“It affirms that there is something beyond my small, sometimes confused, self that I can lean on. The author’s immeasurable trust in, and gratitude for, her teachers including her own Highest Self move me to feel that I, too, can call my Self Beloved.” Mackenzie
“She does not just tell a life ‘story’. She tells life as sādhanā, a journey of practice, discovery and realization. Her words spark within us the recognition of what a majestic and meaningful life path we actually are on. Her book is heart stirring and transformative … she opens our eyes to see the profound and the sacred in what we sometimes mistake as ordinary life. Her words are conduits of light that open to us the extraordinary of our own lives.” Acuna