Chapter 2: Five Movements, Not Five Steps
The most damaging thing a spiritual book can do is give you a ladder.
A ladder tells you that you climb from the first rung to the second, from the second to the third, and you do not go back. A ladder tells you that if you slip, you have failed. A ladder turns the interior life into a performance review: Where are you? How far have you come? Are you keeping up?
This book does not offer a ladder. It offers something closer to a weather report.
Why "Movements"
What follows in these pages traces five movements the Name makes within you when you give it your time. We call them movements, not stages or steps, for a reason that matters.
Stages imply a sequence that, once completed, stays completed. Steps suggest a staircase: you put the first step behind you and stand on the second. But the Name does not work that way. The Name is alive. It moves in you the way weather moves across a landscape. You may taste the deepest stillness of the fifth movement one evening, a palpable presence of love in which the head is empty and the heart is full. And the next morning you may wake up and find the whole thing has gone dry. The Name feels wooden on your tongue. The heart feels shut. You wonder if last night was real at all.
Ananta speaks to this directly, and his words carry the whole teaching in miniature:
"It may completely happen that you are praying so deeply from within your heart one night, and next morning you wake up and it's all dry. So what? You just have to start again."
Just start again. That is the whole method. Not start again with disappointment. Not start again while measuring yourself against last night's experience. Simply start again, the way you would light a lamp that the wind has blown out. You do not blame the lamp. You do not blame the wind. You strike the match.
The Spiral, Not the Line
This is perhaps the most freeing thing Ananta teaches, and it is not his alone. Every tradition that has placed a sacred word on human lips has discovered the same thing: the journey is not linear.
Spiritual growth can be thought of as a spiral rather than a straight ascent. You come around the mountain and see essentially the same view, but from a different height and with greater clarity. Each loop peels off a deeper layer, and each revisit means you are strong enough to hold more of the truth. The path, as one teacher put it, is "not linear but circular and continuous." It is like a labyrinth, a flower's petal-by-petal opening, a deepening dance around the still point.
We are so conditioned by the idea of "progress" that we mistake loopbacks for failure, as if revisiting our grief means we are back at square one. We panic when the prayer that moved us last week feels empty today. We interpret dryness as evidence that God has withdrawn, or worse, that we have done something wrong.
But listen to what Ananta says about the practice itself:
"Even if it is just pure lip service, God's name will do something. Yet why settle for lip service?"
Notice the balance. The mechanical repetition is not wasted. And yet it is not the whole story. Both halves of that sentence are true at the same time. The Name works even when you bring nothing to it. And the Name deepens when you bring everything. You hold both truths together, without choosing one over the other, and that holding is itself the practice.
The Anonymous Pilgrim
The most honest account ever written about the non-linearity of prayer is a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox spiritual classic called The Way of a Pilgrim. It was composed anonymously and recounts the journey of a mendicant wanderer whose inner life begins when he hears the words of Saint Paul: "Pray without ceasing." The pilgrim becomes consumed by a single question: how is it possible to pray without ceasing?
He meets a starets, a spiritual elder, who teaches him the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." The elder gives him practical instructions. First: say the prayer three thousand times a day. Then increase to six thousand. Then twelve thousand.
The progression sounds like a ladder. But what actually happens is anything but linear. The pilgrim is repeatedly sent back to the practice. He does not graduate from the prayer. He goes deeper into it. And the practice itself moves from effortful counting to something he never expected: spontaneous, effortless repetition.
"Soon the prayer became so easy and delightful that his tongue and lips seemed to do it of themselves."
But then the prayer goes dry again. Then it returns. Then the elder dies and the pilgrim must continue alone. Then he loses his copy of the Philokalia and must recover it. The entire book is a story of returning: returning to the same prayer, thousands upon thousands of times, and discovering that each return reveals new depth. There is no point at which the pilgrim finishes the prayer. The prayer finishes him.
This is what "movements" means. You do not leave the first movement behind when you enter the second. You return to it, again and again, but each time you return you bring everything the later movements have given you. The prayer on your lips at the beginning of the journey and the prayer on your lips after twenty years are not the same prayer, even though the words have not changed.
The Lifelong Re-turning
The Sufi masters understood this with particular clarity. Dhikr, the Arabic word for remembrance, is the practice of repeating the names or attributes of God. But dhikr is not a ceremony. It is not a phase of training that you complete and move beyond. It is, as the Sufi teachers say, the very object of life.
One of the fundamental commands in the Sufi path is to practice dhikr as often as possible until continual awareness of the Divine Presence is established. All the great shaykhs, the perfected teachers, advised the seeker to make continuous dhikr in all states of life. Not just in formal prayer. Not just during retreat. In all states.
And here is the key point for this chapter: the content of the remembrance deepens, but the form does not change. The rawest beginner and the most advanced mystic are both doing dhikr. They are both repeating the Name. What differs is not the practice but the depth at which it resonates. Gradually, the remembrance enters deeper levels of the seeker's being: the tongue, then the soul, then the heart, then the innermost heart. But at no point does the practitioner stop saying the Name and move on to something else.
You never graduate from remembrance. You never outgrow the syllable. The Sufi who has practiced dhikr for forty years is not doing something different from the beginner who started this morning. He is doing the same thing, at a depth the beginner cannot yet imagine, but the same thing.
The Tree That Must Not Be Transplanted
Gregory of Sinai was a Byzantine monk of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one of the most important figures in the hesychast movement, the tradition of silent prayer that produced The Way of a Pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer. Five of his works are included in the Philokalia, the great anthology of Orthodox spiritual writing.
In his instructions on the Jesus Prayer, Gregory gives a warning that speaks directly to every practitioner who has ever abandoned a practice because it felt dry:
"You must say this half over and over again and not out of laziness constantly change the words. For plants which are frequently transplanted do not put down roots."
Plants which are frequently transplanted do not put down roots. Sit with that image. The person who picks up the Name, finds it mechanical after a week, and switches to a different mantra. The person who tries the Jesus Prayer, then shifts to centering prayer, then experiments with Zen, then returns to japa but with a different name. Each transplanting pulls up whatever roots were beginning to form. Each fresh start resets the clock.
Gregory is not saying that all practices are equal or that you should never change your approach. He is saying that consistency, the willingness to stay with a practice through dryness and difficulty, is what allows roots to grow. The dryness is not a sign that the practice has stopped working. The dryness is the condition in which roots go deeper, searching for water the surface cannot provide.
This is why Ananta does not teach a new technique when the old one goes dry. He does not offer a more advanced method. He says:
"So what? You just have to start again."
The method does not change. Your relationship to it changes. And that change does not happen by switching methods. It happens by staying.
The Arc This Book Traces
So what are these five movements? Here they are, in brief, before the rest of the book unfolds them one by one.
The first movement is the lips. The Name is spoken aloud. The tongue moves, the breath carries the sound, the ears hear it. This is the most accessible form of prayer. It requires nothing you do not already have.
The second movement is the mind. The Name leaves the tongue and enters silent repetition. You hold it there through conscious effort, through willpower. This is harder, subtler, and vastly more powerful than spoken chanting.
The third movement is what happens when the mind releases its grip. The Name, having been practiced deliberately for a sustained period, begins to repeat itself without your conscious effort. The traditions call this ajapa japa: the chant that is not chanted.
The fourth movement is the heart. There is a moment, recognized across every contemplative tradition, when the Name falls from the mind into the heart. Ananta describes it directly:
"Then the prayer drops into your heart. It is full of fragrance, full of life."
And the fifth movement is the one that no tradition can fully put into words. The question is no longer about effort or technique at all. Ananta frames it this way:
"Nobody can ever say, 'I know how to pray,' because it is only that tiny bit in the method and 99% in Grace."
From mechanics to fragrance to grace. That is the arc. But it is not a one-way arc. You will walk it forward and backward, sometimes in a single sitting. The most experienced practitioner in the world still has mornings when the Name feels like dust. And the rankest beginner can be seized, without warning, by a sweetness that veterans spend years waiting for.
The movements describe what the Name does on its own when you keep showing up. They describe the Name's own journey within you: from the lips, where it begins as spoken sound, to the mind, where it is held through quiet effort, to the heart, where it arrives with fragrance and warmth, to a deeper heart, where it holds itself without your help, and finally to a place where the Name and the one who names are no longer two, where the chanting and the chanter dissolve into what was always already here.
Your job is not to climb. Your job is to keep showing up. The Name will do its own work, the way water softens stone. Not by force, but by returning. Always returning.
A Fire Metaphor
Ananta uses a metaphor that holds the whole teaching:
"The name of God is like fire. Whether you burn fire with reverence or accidentally, it still burns."
Fire does not interview you before it lights. It does not ask whether you are sincere, whether your heart is in the right place, whether you have meditated for ten years or ten minutes. Fire burns because that is its nature. The Name works because that is its nature. Your sincerity makes the fire larger. Your wholeheartedness makes it burn brighter. But even a match struck carelessly still produces flame.
So when the morning comes and the prayer feels dead, you do not need to manufacture feeling. You do not need to wait until your heart is ready. You simply strike the match. You say the Name. The fire may be small. It may barely flicker. But it is fire. And fire, given time, given air, given the patience of returning, will grow.
The next chapter explores something that may surprise you: the compass that turns you toward the Name in the first place was not designed by you. The longing you feel, even the longing you think you do not feel, has a source. And that source is not your own will.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"There are spells of dryness in everybody's sadhana. There is no sadhaka who's ever said, 'Oh, my sadhana started blissful, it continued blissful, it ended blissful, it's still blissful.' It's always an ebb and flow. There will always be times where it seems so dry and mechanical. There'll be other times where it's so sweet that you can even taste the sweetness in your mouth."
-- Emptiness Is a Prerequisite for This Grace of Meeting This Divinity Within Ourself
"Nobody can ever say, 'I know how to pray,' because it's only that tiny bit in the method and 99% in Grace. And because that Grace is indeterminable, we can never say that 'I have the best method now to pray' or 'I know how to pray.'"
"There will be dry spells. There will be periods of time where prayer feels like the most blank thing that you are doing. Allow your heart to guide you, your faith to guide you in those times."
"We are not to give up on those days where it seems difficult. When relationships, the days where relationships are difficult, those are the days where we must put in the additional work. Our relationship with God is the most important. He's making us humble sometimes by making it difficult."