Beloved, we have come to a place together, where it is very difficult to leave Your presence. How difficult it was, at the beginning of this journal, to hold You for very long. You have made Yourself so delightfully delicious to me that I do not want to withdraw from You. It is easier to will myself into Your presence than it is to will myself out of it, once in.

I had been attending yoga classes for about two years when three men in dark suits appeared one day and arrested our teacher. Everyone knew that someone from the class had betrayed him by reporting him to the KGB. Later we learned that our teacher had been arrested for distributing the yoga literature he had translated.

I came to realize that the God I believed in was a Jewish God, and that my entire self-identity was wrapped around that concept. Each step of the way was like shedding a layer of myself.

My Guru guided me into medicine and he has been with me ever since. In my practice I ask for guidance all the time. As long as I remember to ask for help, it comes, and miracles happen.

The drama began when my husband, Brian, phoned his longtime friend Andrew, whom he hadn’t heard from for awhile. Andrew sounded very strange on the phone, and Brian could tell something was wrong.

The mother squirrel’s dynamic will, perfected in attunement with the divine will in former incarnations, had prepared her to continue her strange activity as long as the world endured.

As early as I can remember, Mom’s greatest dread, and therefore mine, was that she would become incapacitated and have to live for many years in a nursing home.

The secret gift of the loss of a loved one is that you get catapulted into a world of expansive love. Along with feelings of deep human loss, I have experienced the gift of that boundless love.

A year after receiving Kriya Yoga initiation, I went through one of the most challenging times in my life as an attorney. I was appointed by the court to represent an emotionally disturbed woman whose teen-age daughter had been removed from her care.

Inwardly I asked Yogananda whether I should try hang gliding and was surprised to feel his stamp of approval in my heart. I tried to visualize myself hang gliding high above the ground—and the fear returned. Nevertheless, I decided to try it.

Millions of people saw the stigmata and witnessed Therese’s weekly visions of Christ’s passion and death, among them, Paramhansa Yogananda in 1935. Yogananda later revealed that Therese had been Mary Magdalene in a past life, and for this reason, was blessed with Christ’s wounds and the weekly visions.

In India, there once lived a God-loving saint and his wife. Continually he would ask himself whether he loved anything more than God.

For us, Gurupod’s visit was a thrilling message from God.

Bernadette Soubirous emerged as a visionary at a time of growing nineteenth century religious skepticism. Many believed that the new scientific age would sweep away religion “like cobwebs in a musty closet.”

I never wanted to go to India. But I felt my Guru, Paramhansa Yogananda, guiding me to go on the Ananda pilgrimage in October 2006.

I found this path twenty-five years ago and immediately felt a kinship with the disciples I met at Ananda Village and elsewhere. I give thanks every day for my gurubhais because I know I am not strong enough to fight the spiritual battle alone.

Spiritual healing worked for me when nothing else did. From my own experience, I know that strong willpower coupled with dynamic faith in the Guru can accomplish just about anything.

By the time Helen was six-years-old, her parents had become desperate, for their firstborn seemed increasingly more animal than human.

The death of a parent is never easy to accept, especially when you’re an impressionable 15-year-old shielded from life’s harsh edges.

Living by intuition deepens our spiritual life tremendously, but to do so takes more courage than one might think.

I was first diagnosed with heart disease in 1997. The timing of this new attack of angina couldn’t have been worse.

The opportunity to live with other spiritual seekers is a profound blessing. Such was the case with all of us who were touched by the passing of our friend and fellow gurubhai, Vairagi Escobar.

People from all walks of life have testified that it was not Padre Pio’s miracles but his Christ-like presence and deep devotion to God that changed their lives.

My birth took place in a humble, silent part of your mind. Only your pure and simple thought children knew of my coming.

Living together with two churches in one house is more complicated than respecting one another’s beliefs.

George Washington Carver, one of the best-known African-Americans of his era, was a brilliant scientist and educator, a major force for the upliftment of the black race, and an innovator in the field of agricultural biochemistry.

The flow of God’s light can transform the most challenging situations into experiences of grace.

My husband faced illness with the attitude of a spiritual warrior.

When I was 19 years old, I was critically injured in a 100-mile-an-hour collision with a drunk driver. On the way to the hospital I had a heart attack and “died.”

From the kitchen I heard the sound of a low flying borate bomber and wondered if there was a fire nearby.