I wrote a prayer today for Guru Purnima. I shot a quick video to share it with you, and the words are here below. Feel free to use this prayer for your own practice of Guru Purnima, or to read it in the classes you teach, gift to friends, etc.

Click here to watch now. 

What is Guru Purnima?

This is the full moon of mid-summer, a time when we honor all of our teachers who have brought us closer to our own Inner Light. Especially we offer Guru Purnima to the Great Teacher, that divine love that is always with us, guiding our lives from within and without.

How to practice Guru Purnima?  

First, name your teachers and feel in your heart how they have awakened or uncovered your own Inner Light. It may help to write their names in a journal, or to speak their names to a friend. Remembering your teachers enlivens the fullness of gratitude. Can you remember 108? You have definitely had this many!

Second, take extra time for meditation and prayer on Guru Purnima. Sit quietly in your favorite meditation spot, and feel your intense love for your teachers, all of them! Then sit and enjoy the stillness. This is food for the soul.

Thirdly, take time to go outside and enjoy the moon. A wonderful aspect of the Full Moon is that it perfectly coincides with sunrise and sunset. This makes it visible from dawn to dusk. How auspicious!  Enjoy sitting with the moon in the evening, receiving her subtle but strong light, and offering a prayer. If you wake before sunrise or in the middle of the night, go outside again to sit with the moon.

Prayer for Guru Purnima:

Oh Great Teacher ~ Great Spirit of Ultimate Light
Thank you for all of the blessings you have given me in my life.
Thank you for so many teachers,
Known and unknown,
Remembered and forgotten,
Big and small.
Thank you for my lovers, friends, parents, grandparents, school teachers, meditation teachers, asana teachers, dance teachers, teachers of the ways of the soul.
Thank you for sending me so many companions on my journey through life.
Thank you most of all, Great Spirit, for your presence in my life,
Unending, always available.
My life moves through countless cycles of waxing and waning,
Increase and decrease,
Like this beautiful Moon before me,
But You are always with me.
I give you great thanks.
Enjoy!