Once upon a time there was a very tiny country. So tiny that it fit on a dandelion fluff. Its inhabitants had their joys, sorrows and worries. Like all people.

They believed in an unseen Force that was protecting them, that would bring rain and the light of the Sun and everything else. But they also believed that they were the only masterpiece of the Creator. That there is no one but them. But the truth was different.

When the sky was getting cloudy, the dandelion they were on was actually overshadowed by a child playing around. When it seemed to them that it was raining, it was in fact due to the morning dew. And when their world was trembling, the fluff was actually carried by the wind in all directions.

You are infinitesimal, you are infinite

On Earth, things may seem pretty big. But if we looked at them from the newly discovered Cannis Majoris, a star that could fit 11 quadrillion earths inside it, we would see that we live on a dandelion. And this world of contrasts is also found in everyday life.

We ourselves sometimes feel big and sometimes small, in regards to the people around us. There are people we consider strong as mountains, and others as weak as the grains of sand carried by the wind.

In the Tantra yoga tradition, the feeling of smallness is called anima and it represents a contraction of consciousness. Its opposite, the expansion, the feeling of greatness, is called the mahima.

It is the capacity of our consciousness to be flexible, elastic in several dimensions. We expand or contract depending on the feelings we have, on the level of consciousness, in certain privileged moments and due to our aspiration to discover the spiritual reality.

How to become as big as the Universe

Fear contracts our consciousness; happiness expands it like an explosion of stars. But we usually do not control this process. We can do this through a fruitful spiritual practice.

The ideal time is in the morning when we are full of energy. For starters, 7 days are just right, 10 minutes minimum. We sit in a comfortable position, with our back straight, on a chair or on the floor.

We close our eyes and take a few deep breaths, feeling the abdomen go up and down, until we enter a state of peace and introspection. We visualize how our aura expands like a sphere of light. We fill with it the room in which we find ourselves.

We become familiar with this new and pleasant experience: we are not the body; we are more than its physical limits. We are happy to have escaped these limits and the illusion that we are this physical body. We become boundless.

Our subtle body enlarges and enlarges to encompass the entire room: the flower vase, the desk, the chair, the bed, the closet. Once we get used to this experience, we visualize how our aura expands even more.

It goes beyond the four walls of the room. It includes the whole building and all the people in it – the neighbour on the 4^th floor with whom we had a contradictory discussion last night and whom we now embrace with love. Our aura grows like a balloon. We feel as big as the whole city.

We notice how we subtly grow more and more and with this expansion our happiness increases. We understand the necessity of life itself. We understand why some people act in a certain way and not the other way. Why we are born, why we love, suffer and die. These all seem so small in addition to the immensity of our expanded being.

We grow even bigger. We become as big as the whole country, then we cover more and more countries, until we become the whole planet. The earth is now inside our subtle, much dilated body. We live the expansion with all our pores. In every pore. We embrace inside us the entire humanity.

Our mind expands indefinitely, it becomes flexible. A feeling of fulfilment, of well-being overwhelms us. Our consciousness explodes into the entire solar system until it becomes oceanic, encompassing the Sun, the Moon, and all the other planets that are now orbiting inside us.

We do the same with our galaxy and the rest of the galaxies until we embrace the entire Universe. We sense the mystery that created this manifestation. Gradually, a part of us aligns with God. We can feel the divine power in action, giving birth and resorbing worlds.

We continue this playful exercise for 7 days. We remain vigilant throughout the exercise, alert. You never know when sleepiness or chaotic thoughts may arise.

A journey to the subatomic world

After a week of expansion, we repeat the game for the same number of days, but in reverse. We contract our aura, we shrink. We are getting smaller and smaller: smaller than the galaxy, than our planet, than the country, the city, the building we live in, our body.

Even smaller than the tip of a pin and smaller than dandelion fluff. We become the size of an atom in our spiritual heart. We shrink until our aura is even smaller than the atom. Until we melt into something eternal, into a dimensionless point.

At the end of the second 7 days-series we will become so small that we will not even be able to locate ourselves. At this point, fear may arise from around the corner of the narrow mind. But we must do our best to stay relaxed.

We don’t force anything, we don’t panic. There’s nothing wrong that can happen. We are a boundless, bodyless divine spark. We sense that what we thought so far about us was false. The wall of limitation is slowly falling.

When we shape the mind the way we want, we sense that we are in reality a divine spark. That we’ve always been a crumb of light coming from Above.

And then our life becomes harmony and happiness that implodes in every particle of our body.