When my Ma died, I felt something I didn’t expect to feel: freedom.

My guru passed a short while ago, and I am sitting Shiva like a good Jew does. For me, that means I am just sitting quietly, sorting out my feelings and remembrances of what it was like to live with Ma these years and what it will be like without her. I know that the sadness, contemplation and emptiness that arise also mirror the feelings of most of my gurubais. I know that we sit together.

For an instant after she died, I thought, now I’m free.

Then I asked myself, free to do what? Free to do all the things I resisted not doing in her presence? Things that were essentially self-destructive? And yet, there is a certain freedom, similar to what I felt when I took Erhard Seminar Training years ago. As the group leaders pummeled away my conventions of thinking and engrained habits, I felt a great freedom as they fell away.

However, not aware of the gift, I took up smoking. I see now I was afraid of the freedom I felt and tried to push it away. Similar to a kundalini experience I had in the 1970s, this time, having woken up, I laid my freedom at the feet of my Mother Ma.

I see a lot of my being with my Ma was her desiring to give me more and more freedom; I pushed back against it numerous times. But she didn’t give up. That was our Ma. She never gave up on us.

Now I see after Ma’s passing there again arises within me a palpable sense of another freedom. This time I don’t want to diminish, suffocate or dissipate it. I don’t want to engage in self-destructive behavior that will destroy it. Nevertheless, my personality, or ego, still remaining sometimes falls into fear and anxiety and I can feel the possibility of this delicate freedom leaving. It terrifies me; I don’t want to resist anymore. I get it now: this is the freedom to at last release and uncover that divine self I have been searching for this lifetime. I have a chance to re-form and move forward in an entirely different way. This is the gift of Ma’s passing; the true grace that remains for us.

I had a wonderful relationship with my Ma while she was in form. We laughed a lot together. She told me I brought her joy. She even played with my hair and lightened my being, but that’s another story. Essence to essence, spirit to spirit; that remains.

She touched me deep.

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Editor: Alex Gormley