There are two great impediments to spiritual life. The first is attachment to the body and the sensory experience, because when there is attachment to the physical form and the sensory experience there is engagement with the body-mind structure and the belief that you are this small person who abides in the body. That belief becomes dominant in the mind, and so attachment to the enjoyment of sensory experience and embodiment becomes a hindrance when they overtake the mind and leave consciousness attached to embodiment.
The second greatest impediment to spiritual life is the assumption that you are small, that you are limited, that you are not divine, and that all the life around you is not an expression of divinity, but other. It is an outgrowth of the first impediment, the assumption of self and others and the definition of self as limited, confined, restricted, and small. You can be in this world but not of it, not immersed in the belief in your individuality, but rather sailing through the experience of embodiment in human form, human life, and human senses while maintaining an expansive understanding of the nature of yourself.
When you dissolve the illusion created by the sensory experience of self and other, then you can walk in the world in this physical form but maintain the larger perspective that only the infinite Self, the one infinite divinity exists in all the beings in the world, and in your I-feeling, in your consciousness, in your awareness. Then there is nothing of you that is separate or apart from that integrated whole; that you are one with that divinity.
This knowledge of your unity with the divine is your saving grace. It allows you to be embodied in this world but in a state of conscious awareness. Your consciousness is like a beam that focuses attention, and it can focus on sensory experience, it can focus on bodily experience, it can focus on the sense of self apart from others. But it can also focus on the unitary sense of the whole.
The beam of your awareness can focus on that unitary sense of the whole. You can draw your attention to it, realizing that all is the manifestation of the one infinite Brahma and that you are in fact, part and parcel of that manifestation of the whole.
The idea of your aloneness is an illusion of duality when your very nature is the unbound love, the infinite consciousness of the one eternal essence of being. That is who you are. That is what you are.
When you begin to constrict into small definitions of yourself and identify that vast love, that vast consciousness that is you, with this limitation or that limitation, I am...and what follows that? Some form of limitation is it not? I am ugly. I am beautiful. I am talented. I am without talent. All of these are definitions of limitation.
When you are all things, when you are the infinite Self of yourself, you are not bound by the ego or others. These are creations of the mind and of the sensory experience of the two impediments: the body-mind structure and the definition of self and other.
Maetreyii Ma Nolan, Ph.D. is an author of spiritual books, a teacher of mysticism and yoga, and a psychologist in private practice. She is also an expert in yoga philosophy. Dr. Nolan has a school for mystic yogic teachings called Ananda Gurukula. She has years of experience leading retreats, teaching yoga teacher training, yoga therapy training, and meditation training.
Through her own meditative practice and deep personal connection to the Divine Source, she has gained profound insights and understanding that she shares in her writings, webinars, trainings, and personal guidance.