RETREAT To Make Thy Inner Light Visible – A Sadhana residential retreat to assimilate Grace Light within our Body and Being
3 April to 6 April 2025 | Thursday 1 pm to Sunday 11 am IST | Venue: Arulville, Chennai – Pondicherry route
Facilitator: Arul Dev
Immerse yourself in a 3-day retreat surrounded by nature and a quiet, joyful setting. Experience inner practices that transform your body, senses, energy, emotions, thoughts, and memory imprints. This experiential portal will deepen your capacity for healing and integral transformation.
We will spend time to deepen our connect with Source Consciousness – Above Head, within Cave of Heart and Sacred Depth beneath feet. We will draw guidance from the subtle support of flowers for our Sadhana. We will learn to work at the level of inner vibrations and allow these subtle and loving intense vibrations to open up, what still lies untransformed within.
The retreat’s sweet spot is the possible discovery of subtle substance within the depth of the body and the loving intimacy of cells. The subtle substance is always self-lit, soft, joyful, pure and filled with love. This once touched within, fundamentally shifts the orientation of our body and life.
The vision for this retreat is to empower people to do Deeper Body Sadhana on a daily basis to Transform their Total Self.
The prerequisites to participate are an aspiration to transform inwardly and express creatively one’s Self in the world, a faith and connection with something larger – Nature, Universe, or Divine, and a basic level of love to do deeper body work.
This upcoming residential RETREAT starting on April 3rd 2025 seems to take us into our next era of deeper body work. Healing and transforming personal experiences within our body is a necessary part of our work to reduce the inner noise and entanglements. However we need to learn to do the Sadhana impersonally and give a lot of time and space to the main work – to link our body and its substance to the Divine’s (Higher Consciousness) Qualities and Substance. An intuition has clearly come to do this tangibly and concretely in this coming retreat.
The retreat is facilitated by Arul Dev. Every morning to open up our body we would have yoga and dynamic flow exercises by Shweta Rajurkar. And in this retreat we have a new addition as a session on day 1 to prepare us for the whole three-day retreat.
Post the ‘Decoding Shakti’ session on Women’s Day Dr. Vishwapriya Pillai who facilitated one of the sessions had an intuition to offer a session for this retreat participants. On day 1 she will be guiding us on connecting to the Divine energy within through the Shree Chakra.
The retreat Venue Arulville founded and run by Anthony Raj built with indigenous architecture is a beautiful space to run wellness programs and retreats: https://www.arulville.com/
To get a glimpse of what normally unfolds in these retreats do find a summary and some photographs from our previous retreat:
“THE EDUCATION of a human being should begin at birth and continue throughout his life.
Indeed, if we want this education to have its maximum result, it should begin even before birth; in this case it is the mother herself who proceeds with this education by means of a twofold action: first, upon herself for her own improvement, and secondly, upon the child whom she is forming physically. For it is certain that the nature of the child to be born depends very much upon the mother who forms it, upon her aspiration and will as well as upon the material surroundings in which she lives. To see that her thoughts are always beautiful and pure, her feelings always noble and fine, her material surroundings as harmonious as possible and full of a great simplicity — this is the part of education which should apply to the mother herself. And if she has in addition a conscious and definite will to form the child according to the highest ideal she can conceive, then the very best conditions will be realised so that the child can come into the world with his utmost potentialities. How many difficult efforts and useless complications would be avoided in this way!”
The Mother, Page 9 ‘On Education’ book
INSIGHTS
Right from the time or even before when the couple plans to conceive a child they can plan for tiny practices and habits to bring the following more within themselves, hold it together and allow it to be come present within their home:
Bring beauty and purity within thoughts
Invoke beauty, cleanliness and sense of harmony in the home
Let go of stuff that is accumulating in the house, especially in the bedroom. In the bedroom every object is to be kept consciously as an invocation for Divine Qualities to be present during conversations, act of intimacy and while being with each other
Connect one’s inner sensations, feelings and emotions to Divine Qualities through resonant mantras, chants, paintings, sculptures and the like
Learn to hold individually and together: A calm and clear will, perhaps within the cave of their heart or eyebrow center. Inwardly sense or see a child with the utmost ideal and higher qualities. The Divine chooses the child’s soul that would birth through you. To support the reception of a pure soul the couple can hold the aspiration for a child of fuller potentials to enter this world. It is a subtle art of holding a full aspiration with faith while at same time being with a full surrender to the Divine to take over the process of the birth of a Divine Child through you.
Sincerity of the couple to embody each day a bit more all the qualities of goodness as a prerequisite to receive a Divine Child, should be like a flame lit steady
We first prepared our awareness within our body. We took our inner awareness to touch the substance of our body. We did very subtle practice to ensure we had a felt inner connection of touch of our awareness with our body’s substance. We then worked subtly with our inner eye. We detected points / cells in our body where the awareness was ‘seeing’ or pointing into a problem or just the past of the body. We invoked a faith or certainty as sacred feeling that this substance has the Divine within or that this substance itself is Divine. We learnt to rotate our inner awareness very tiny, so that the eye of awareness sees some light or joy or goodness that is self-forming within body. We did it in specific points / cells. We also started to practice doing this in 100s or 1000s of points simultaneously within body.
We then connected to one or more fears – from that of lizards to death. We located this fear as a sensation within and around our body. Some examples are a cringing sensation, tightening grip, a colour, a energy field and the like. Then we filled these multitude sensations within and around our body of fear with our conscious awareness offered to Divine Above and we filled these sensations with our breath. We kept filling at few points and then simultaneously at multiple sensations of fear. By itself we waited to see what shifts in the sensation because they are getting filled with our conscious breath and awareness. Then slowly we connected the sensation to a sensation within Divine or a Divine Master. And we also connected the sensation to the light or joy that is self-forming in the substance of our body.
This is a tiny subtle practice that can be done as a meditation or as and when fear grips us during our daily activities or we can take it as a main sadhana and run it through the whole day.
“The Vast Grace Light reigns eminently over the great void, beyond the domain of speech and mind.”
This is from one of the 1597 verses Vallalar wrote as Jothi Agaval in less than a night on the 18 April 1872.
Source: Page 111, Vallalar, Messenger of Grace Light by Dhaya Mesrobian (https://www.vallalar.org/English/V000009430B)
INSIGHTS FOR OUR INNER PRACTICE
We can check where in this ‘now’ we can sense deeper silence or void:
1. Above the domain of our mind and its thoughts
2. Beneath our emotions within the cave of our heart
3. Beyond the vast space of infinity all surrounding us
4. Deep below our feet or below our individual and collective unconsciousness
With an attitude of mystery, of something sacred we are doing and holding a space of ‘no matter how much there is knowledge, I really do not know this domain’, we place our awareness on this void that exists in any of these dimensions and place our inner gaze beyond this void or deep silence.
Many aspire for the experience of void, stillness, nothingness etc. Let us also aspire for the Grace Light Vast that reigns eminently above our throat, forehead, top of the head regions and over the void regions. And yet as Above is also present within cave of heart, beyond vastness and below feet.
In a very simple way if we learn from Swami Vallalar we can chant a mantra to invoke the Grace Light Supreme. We can connect to the void, silence and peace and both within and without we can keep on living our life invoking this Grace Light. We seek the Grace to be more and more united with this light, upto the point that this Grace Light permeates within our mind, vital and body cells.
“FROM the height of that summit which is the identification with Thy divine infinite Love, Thou didst turn my eyes to this complex body which has to serve Thee as Thy instrument. And Thou didst tell me, “It is myself; dost thou not see my light shining in it?” And indeed I saw Thy divine Love, clothed in intelligence, then in strength, constituting this body in its smallest cells and shining so brightly in it that it was nothing but a combination of millions of radiant sparks, all manifesting that they were Thyself.”
Page 148, Prayers and Meditations, The Mother
INSIGHTS
1. Divine Infinite Love has been spoken of in the height of that summit (above the head)
2. In The Body the description is shown as the Divine Infinite Love Identified Above, permeates within the mind (as light), vital life energy (as strength) and shines as radiant sparks in the cells (atoms) of Thy Body
INNER PRACTICE
Connect to consciousness above our head and wait with deep aspiration for this domain of Divine Love to Grace Her Presence for us, identified in summits above. May She purify us sufficiently so that we are Graced to witness Her and stay connected and united with Her
Learn to stay identified and anchored above our head within whatever quality is being opened up for us There – Vastness, Silence, Joy, Flow or Love. Even if we do not sense the presence of Divine Love above we can hold faith and stay above our head with faith that SHE is there and She is seeking to manifest in the world and within the cells of our body
Staying anchored above our head with felt presence of Divine Love, sometimes as a subtle substance or presence or as Light and Power (Sound) united or simply with faith or certainly in HER presence above. From thus anchored above we can connect to our mind and quietly wait with our glance turned upward till whatever light is present reveals itself. Staying anchored above enter into your heart, navel and pelvic region and wait with glance turned above. See all the perfections and imperfections as it is. Wait till the inner strength reveals itself underneath everything. Be in an attitude that you are willing to wait for eternity too to glimpse HER as strength here.
Staying anchored above your head, move your awareness within the substance of your body. The substance of our body is the very matter with which all of our body is made of. It has properties like weight, mass and density. Be above and also within your body’s substance. With your inner senses, all around you within body, you will see some colours, feel something, witness some movements, there will be some sensations and vibrations. We all have a truth sense within us. This will reveal the mixed energies from purer energies. Keep attention within substance and let it not get lost within the energy fields. With a slight forward movement of your awareness in a loving and calm aspiring way, move your awareness within the substance at any point in your body into its own depth, deeper than the mixed energy fields. Wait there deeper patiently untill you enter the domain of love within matter. Our truth radar will detect love as substance by its soft subtle lit radiant and joyful substance which exists on its own
