Song of Meditation: Interview with Swami Dhyan Giten
Giten is educated in both modern psychology and in Eastern methods for awareness and meditation in USA, Italy, Sweden and India. He has 18 years of experience in individual counselling and in teaching awareness, works internationally with seminars, courses and longer development programs.
Swami Dhyan Giten is educated in both modern psychology at the University of Stockholm and in Eastern methods for awareness and meditation in USA, Italy, Sweden and India. He has 18 years of experience in individual counselling and in teaching awareness. He works internationally with seminars, courses and longer development programs in the following areas: awareness, meditation, intuition, relationships, inner man/inner woman, healing, creativity, The Sacred Yes - The Art of Spiritual Healing and Presence - Working from Within: Working with people from love & awareness. He also works as a teacher and consultant in companies and organizations, who seek to raise the awareness in their organizations. He has been a meditator since 26 years.
Since he began to meditate when he was 15 years old, he has studied and investigated the inner journey, to move out of his own way, to be in a flow and to discover the authentic inner being, the meditative quality within, the inner silence and emptiness, the capacity to surrender to life.
When he did an education in healing in USA 1984, he was told that he had the capacity to become a crownchakrahealer, a spiritual healer, to act as a channel and instrument for spiritual energy from the 7th chakra through the heart. The last 17 years has meant to deepen and develop this capacity.
His three creative areas to express the inner song of meditation in outer form are teaching, writing and painting. His meditative art is recognized internationally and are represented at The World Artist Directory for accomplished artists. He is author of the book "Song of Meditation - About Meditation, Relationships & Spiritual Creativity" (Solrosens Förlag, Sweden, 2001).
In this interwju Giten talks about his own way to meditation and about what he works with in seminars and courses.
The inner journey
Can you say something about your own inner journey?Life is like playing hide the key with God. God has hidden the key and now it is up to us to find the key again. It also takes us a while to realize that the key is hidden in our own heart. The heart is the door to allow life to guide us. The heart is the door to say "yes" to life. The heart is the door to surrender to life.
The most valuable insight I have got through my own inner journey is how Existence continuously has guided me towards a greater awareness that life is fundamentally one. Existence has continuously guided me with a greater lovingness and caring than I ever could imagine. Long before I was even aware of it, life has continuously guided me through periods of love and aloneness, joy and sadness, light and darkness, success and failure and negative and positive experiences. My own inner journey towards awareness and meditation has step by step developed the trust, sensitivity and subtle listening, which is necessary to surrender to life and to allow life to be my teacher.
Life is continuously communicating with us and it is a valuable experience to look back and see how life - despite my sleep, unconsciousness, lack of trust and resistance - continuously has guided me towards a greater awareness that life is one. Life has continuously lead me to the people I need to meet, to the situations I need to experience and to the places where I need to be. There has never been any real reason to worry since we are all small rivers already leading to the ocean, to the whole. Awareness is not about swimming faster or fighting with life, it is about relaxing and floating with life in a basic trust that life is already leading towards the ocean of consciousness, towards the whole.
The deepest pain in my heart is to be separated from life, to be separated from the inner song of meditation, to be separated from the Universal song. The most important thing in my life is to discover the inner song of meditation in my own heart and being. Sometimes I hear this song further away, sometimes I hear it closer to me - and sometimes I am one with it. But the most important thing is that I hear it, which shows that I am on the right track.
Being and working with people in courses has also been a meditation in itself for me. It has been a valuable experience in learning to trust and listen to my intuition, to the inner source of love, truth and wisdom, to the Existential voice within. It has been a lesson in how we through our intuition, through the silent whisperings of our heart, is in continuos contact with Existence.
An early meeting with death
You began to meditate when you were 15 years old. Can you say something about your own way to meditation?Early in this life I lost two of the people, who I loved immensely. First when my mother died when I was 15 years old and then when my father died when I was 21 years old. This early meeting with death lead to an early spiritual awakening and awoke early the fundamental existential questions in me: "Who am I?" "What is the meaning of life?" and "Where am I going?" It made me ask myself early what is really important and meaningful in life.
This early meeting with death created a fundamental inner feeling of aloneness in me, a sense of not being loved and a feeling of meaninglessness in me. It was an insight for me, when I many years later in a relationship with a woman could express that I felt alone, and the other person did not leave me or stopped loving me.
This meeting with death created also early an independence and a fundamental sense of aloneness in me. In the beginning this aloneness was only painful and every time I went deeper into love and relationships, it was like death was staring back at me. This made me painfully aware of my own fundamental inner aloneness. It also made me aware that the deeper we go into love, the more we find our own inner aloneness.
This meeting with death also early made my intuition, my inner source of love, truth and wisdom, my inner teacher and guide in life. Instead of being directed from without, of being directed by other people and outer circumstances, it early made me directed from within, from my inner source of love, truth and silence.
It was first after many years that I had short glimpses of another kind of aloneness. It was a meditative aloneness in which I could rest in myself and in my own inner aloneness as a source of love, joy and silence. It was glimpses of a pure aloneness in which I could be so happy and satisfied in myself that I did not need anybody or anything outside of myself. And I also noticed that this meditative aloneness could be an inner door to that which is larger than myself, that it could be a door to oneness with Existence.
Before I was 15 years old, I was also close to die two times through drowning. I can still remember with crystal-clear sharpness how this experience gave me an ice-cold insight that I will never die. It was an insight that there was something inside myself, which will never die and which is part of the deathless and eternal. This insight shock up my whole image about myself and about life.
This early meeting with death created a kind of spiritual dissatisfaction in me. It created a thirst, a longing and a restlessness in me after something that I could only vaguely sense, but which I did not really know what it was. This spiritual dissatisfaction, this thirst and my own intuition became my beacons far out on an unknown, dark and open sea after something that I did not really know what it was. This led me to begin to meditate when I was 15 years old.
My first passion in life when I was 15 years old was to become an actor, which I also worked with until I was 23 years old. Working as an actor taught me a lot about empathetically understanding other people and about life. It was first after I had worked as an actor for a number of years, that I realized that this early passion for theater was really an unconscious search for a spiritual discipline. It was when I realized that I had been a disciple to the russian enlightened master George Gurdjieff in my former life, that I understood my early passion for theater. Gurdjieff used intensive theatertechniques in his way of working with his disciples to take them from a state of mind to a state of no-mind, to meditation. When I realized this, I began to feel a thirst to be and work with people in a more direct way in awareness and meditation.
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