How I came to Sahaja Yoga

Hi. My name is Cathy. I grew up in Texas.

I first encountered Sahaja Yoga at an Earth Day fair in the city where I live. There were community booths, local groups, and plenty of fair food.

At one booth, a man stood alone. Having worked booths myself, I knew how long those hours can feel, so I stopped to say hello.

He told me there was a Sahaja Yoga meditation center in my neighborhood and spoke simply about how meditation can change the way we experience life. He mentioned they had a program on Monday nights.

I took the card he gave me.
Put it in my pocket.
And forgot about it.
(I hadn’t had an elote yet.)

Later that evening, I pulled the card back out. Something in me knew I should go. I remember telling my husband, “I feel like I’m supposed to try this.”

So on a Monday evening in 2009, I took my shoes off in the lobby of a meditation center near my home and walked barefoot into a room where we sat in chairs. (Thankfully, not the floor.)

A woman named Barbara led the class. She guided us through simple affirmations, placing our right hand over the left side of different energy centers in the body. (There was a poster at the front of the room showing which chakras were where.)

During the meditation itself, I didn’t feel anything remarkable.

After class, Barbara asked if I wanted her to “work on me.” I assumed she meant the energy centers, so I said yes. She stood behind me and made a few quiet movements with her hands.

The sensation was unmistakable.

I turned around abruptly, convinced she had poured a bucket of water over me. But my clothes were completely dry.

What mattered more was this: a pain in my chest I had lived with for two years was gone. I felt it drain away in the same instant as that overwhelming sensation of being drenched.

While my experience was a bit more dramatic than most, it’s what Sahaja Yoga calls self-realization, the awakening of the inner spirit that becomes perceptible in meditation.

I began attending regularly and meditating daily. I was learning and changing. But I was also conflicted.

I recall emailing Barbara to ask if many Christians practiced Sahaja Yoga. I had years of deeply ingrained beliefs and didn’t know how to reconcile them with what I was experiencing.

At that point in my life, I couldn’t.
I walked away—not because the experience wasn’t real, but because I was afraid of what my Christian family and friends would think.

Over the next ten years, I explored many paths, but none of them brought me back to that same living sense of being fully present with God.

Eventually, I returned.

I’ve sat in meditation every day since.

What does Sahaja Yoga say about Jesus?

This question mattered deeply to me.
(It probably does to you, too.)

I’ve always appreciated hearing Shri Mataji—the founder of Sahaja Yoga—speak about Jesus. She is unequivocal: Jesus is the Son of God, and His death on the cross made it possible for human beings to connect with God.

What took me longer to understand is that Sahaja Yoga carries a broader understanding of “for God so loved the world” than I was taught growing up. God is love, and it is possible to connect to that love directly in meditation.

Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God being within. Sahaja Yoga gives me a lived experience of that reality, as something tangible and present.

I don’t experience Sahaja Yoga as a belief system I adopted. I experience it as a way of becoming quiet enough to listen to God. Meditation stills the constant noise of my own thoughts. Prayer still has a central place in my life, but I’ve found listening, rather than telling, creates a much richer relationship with God.

I understand why Christians have questions. I did, too. This site isn’t here to resolve every theological tension. It exists to speak honestly about lived experience, and to make room for people who love Jesus, have encountered something real, and aren’t sure how to hold it.