THE GURU LOOKED GOOD by Marta Szabo

FROM A READER

2008-07-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

This comment just came in from K9. It was buried with an early chapter and I thought many might miss is. So I have posted it here. I thought it very worth reading. Thank you, K9.

Marta,

Reading your comments about the attitudes towards people with HIV I remembered the little rumours and discussions in the ashram here in Sydney Australia, about how "impure" someone with HIV was, and how they needed to be respected, but somehow not good enough like everyone else. I also remembered reading your blogs about how SYDA treated gay and lesbian people, how we were told not to display affection between ourselves, unlike heterosexual couples who could display (limited) affection in and around the ashram. However, i'd also heard that a lesbian couple approached Gurumayi in darshan once, and she told them they belonged together, and they took that as a sign that they were married. And we all took that as a sign that unlike "official" SYDA policy, the Guru accepted and approved of gay and lesbian people.

I was in Sydney for the 1999/2000 New Years Message, and listened intently and spent many long hours for many months pondering and cherishing those words. Its been amazing to listen to how most of those were written by people NOT the Guru! You mentioned that the other two knew something you did not, at the early stages of writing that message, but you didn't go into it further... what was that?
Now, years later having spent many years distracting myself from siddha yoga, having spent time in the army, i still pine for those days, both days spent in the ashram in an environment of control, discipline and belonging, having my life planned for me, my decisions made for me. Somedays I pine for the army, somedays for the ashram. Both provided that sense for me, that feeling of surrending to something bigger, and more meaningful than myself and letting go of control and responsibility.

Now, i'm still gay, and i'm realising that the army and siddha yoga are not that different. And where is the meaning?

Hindu gods, yoga gods, siddha gods are so much more facsiinating and interesting than the christian god i grew up with. so many new, wonderful and interesting experiences, things that takes me away from myself, my life and the drudgery that goes with a lifelong relationship of self hatred.

I found myself in ganeshpuri around 2001, after the ashram became a gurukula. I just turned up, hoping that the stories of turning up and offering yourself would be enough. I found the gates locked, the guards out the front and that i wasn't welcome. I found i only had access to a limited area of the ashram, in a limited time of the day and I felt cheated out of the experiences i had travelled so far, and borrowed so much money that i didn't have to get there.

So i spent my time at the nityananda temple in the village, which was always open and welcoming. I spent time with local boys who had spent their whole life living under the gaze of nityananda, putting their faith and trust in his love. I learnt how the siddha ashram had been closed to them, available only to westerners who had money to contribute. In nityananda i didn't find the control and dominance of the other two but only an acceptance and love. But because what i craved what giving up control of my own life, which i hated so much, i longed for the new ones, muktananda and gurumayi, who displayed such an openness and willingness for me to surrender my control over to them, for which in return i would be loved. If only i could get inside those locked gates! But alas, i did not have the money or fame to deserve entry to that one. So i had to make do with the guru who didn't want anything from me, but took me as i was.

Now, these days, i am still gay, and now i also have HIV and still pine for the chance to surrender control and give up the terrible burden of responsibility that is living life, a life that i still find hard to like, and definately too hard to possibly love.

These words of yours, this journey you took, confirms for me what I kinda of knew. God doesn't want what gurumayi asks of us. God doesn't offer us power and privilege, even though these things may come to us. God doesn't ask from us to surrender control, but to have a relationship. this is what I learnt from Nityananda in the village in Ganeshpuri. That God is God, that all gods are God, and that God worships me just like I worship God, and our relationship is a relationship of equals, not of one of surrender.

The most important thing I have learnt to do for myself, is to simply accept myself. All the things I hated, all the things I tried to get away from and hide from. Accepting these things about myself, i have learnt to at least tolerate myself and that giving myself over to something else, to the army, to a self procrlaimed living god who demands total obedience, is nothing that God wants.

POST CONFERENCE!

2008-06-29T18:04:00.000-07:00

Fred, Dan and I are back from presenting at the annual conference of the International Cultic Studies Association in Philadelphia. What a great group of people! I had no idea so much was going on in the study of cults.

We had a great showing at our workshop and the crowd was receptive and responsive. Thank you to all who were there -- especially to Cynthia Niles-Rumford who has graced this blog for many months through comments and her own writing. It was a pleasure to meet her in person.

Fred talked about what Authentic Writing is and how this particular approach to writing, which focuses on getting at the writer’s own version of reality, loosens the grip of any authoritarian version of reality, any version that is trying to smother what a person knows in their gut to be true.

Dan Shaw read a piece that he wrote in one of our workshops, a very moving piece involving an interaction he had once with Gurumayi where her blatant disrespect, abuse and lack of interest are obvious. Obvious to us listeners now, but not, of course, to the narrator of the story.

And Fred read a piece of his own that brought out the cult-like qualities of the family from which he came. Family as cult is a subject that interests me very much. I don't think just a few families are cults. I'm almost ready to say that they all are, by default. It's a big subject, though, and I'm just mostly thinking about it deeply these days, and observing.

And then I spoke of my own experience in Siddha Yoga, illustrating as I went along by reading short excerpts from The Guru Looked Good. I saw alot of heads nodding in recognition. The things that went on in Siddha Yoga go on in all cults. It's all such standard stuff. Each cult has its different flourishes and colors, but the basic forces are the same.

It was wonderful being with this group, so interested in writing, many of them already writing their own stories of cult life. The questions and comments came fast and furious afterwards. It was exhilarating.

Again, a big thank you to all who were there, and to ICSA for inviting us. I hope that we have made a bunch of new writing friends.

with warm wishes,
Marta Szabo

COMING UP

2008-06-16T06:50:00.001-07:00

Dear Readers!

I will be on a panel this month, talking about the crucial role that writing has played in changing my relationship to Siddha Yoga. The panel is part of the annual conference in Philadelphia given by The International Cultic Studies Association, June 27-29.

It’s going to be a great 90 minutes! Dan Shaw will be part of the presentation as well as my husband, the writer Fred Poole. We will talk about our own experiences with writing and dealing with cult experiences. Fred will describe the events of his life as a writer and seeker that led to creating the Authentic Writing workshops, and all of us will read pieces of memoir that we have written. There’ll also be plenty of time for questions, answers and conversation.

The conference is open to the public and you can get more information at: http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_conferences/conference_home_2008.asp

It would be great to meet some of you there!

with warm wishes,

Marta

MAYBE ~ Marta

2008-04-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

Pamela was a small woman with short brown hair and brown eyes that looked up at you from under lids that drooped. She was years older than me. I didn’t know her very well. She asked if she could move into my room. I lived down the hall from her with one other person. There was an empty bed in our room.

It was about my second year living in the ashram. I didn’t think I had any choice. How could I say no and still be the welcoming kind person a good devotee was supposed to be? My roommate agreed so in came Pamela.

She had an unusual arrangement with the ashram. She paid rent. Most of us did seva full-time and weren’t expected to pay for living in the ashram. But Pamela was a sickly woman, prone to getting ill regularly and if she overdid things in any way, so her arrangement was that she worked from her room, mostly doing copyediting jobs for magazines, sometimes writing an actual article.

She wrote one about turning fifty. It had the rounded corners of Chicken Soup for the Soul. The humor in it was safe and housewifey. But she was writing. And she was making money without having to go to an office, things I had tried for many times myself.

Each of us in the room had a single bed and a chest of drawers. Pamela squeezed a slim table up against her bed and sat there half the day, typing on a machine that was sort of half typewriter, half computer. I wanted one.

She was good-natured. I liked her enough. We talked about writing. A small group formed, a small group that wanted to write. We found an evening during the week and met in a room we found that wasn’t being used. It was winter. Gurumayi was away, maybe in India. Things were quiet. Still, it meant not joining a seva project, it meant not going to the evening chant, it meant wanting to write more than wanting to go, say, to one of the meditation caves in the ashram and meditate.

So we met and sat on the floor and read what we had written. One man wrote about his son who had died.

I was new in the ashram, still felt very much a lucky lucky guest, and although I felt also at home in the ashram, I thought of it very much as the guru’s home, a saint’s home, a place I must never take for granted.

One afternoon I was in Manhattan. I don’t know why, some kind of ashram-sanctioned trip. I had a little free time before having to catch the bus back upstate. I was on Broadway in the eighties, near the small Manhattan ashram. I went into the bookstore there, Shakespeare and Company.

A blue and yellow cover caught my eye. “If You Want to Write” was the title. I picked it up. I began to read, standing in the bookstore. The writer was a woman, writing in the 1930s. Write, she said. If you want to write, you can. You must.

I felt something inside me like a volcano or an earthquake. I put the book down. I wouldn’t buy it. I didn’t need it. Why did I need a book when there was yoga, and chanting, and meditation – really important things that could transform my life from something common and meaningless into something worthwhile?

I left the store and began to walk, but the churning was still inside me. I could leave the ashram, I thought, and write. Where? I could go to Budapest, I thought, and live with my father, and write there. I saw myself in his apartment, writing, and it seemed so real and possible. I turned around and went back to the store and bought the book.

Back in the ashram I wrote a letter to Gurumayi, the first step in making a change of this kind. I told her of my plans and asked for her blessing. I turned in my letter to the Personnel office and waited. What would Gurumayi say? It was like waiting for the oracle.

My storybook plan bubbled inside me with excitement.

I was called to meet with a woman in Personnel a couple of weeks later. Celia was a slim, solemn woman with a face that was pretty and also just beginning to age. A quiet woman, you could tell by her dress and manner. She was in charge of Personnel. I couldn’t imagine having such an important ashram job.

“Gurumayi received your letter,” Celia said with a smile, polite but not cold. “She says that you may leave the ashram if that’s what you want.”

If that’s what you want. That’s what ruined it. I had thought Gurumayi would congratulate me on discovering my life’s true path. But this anti-climactic response extinguished my passion. I couldn’t want something that much. It was too frightening.

Thoughts ~ Marta

2008-04-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

My sister wrote to me about a year ago and said that she would stop reading my writing. She didn’t approve of it. And we have not exchanged a word since.

What a mean thing to say, I thought last night as I lay in bed before sleep.

And then comes the voice that explains to me that I shouldn’t have made comments about my sister making me a card using rubber stamps, and I shouldn’t have referred to her scrapbooking as a suburban art form.

I see myself in the last room I lived in in the ashram. There were three wooden steps leading up to the front door of the small building, a railing at the top where a window box hung. It was such freedom. I put purple petunias in the window box when spring came, but they died mysteriously as if they were sensitive foreign plants, in need of special care. They died.

I lived in that room for three years. I put a long bookshelf in the room, had a friend who knew how to wield a hammer put it up. It was almost heretical to have novels in my room, literature. It had been seven or eight years of just yoga books from the Bookstore, my own copies of the books that pretty much everyone had – all these identical little yoga libraries.

I tried to read – for a time – a few verses every night from a thick trade paperback, a translation of the Baghavad Gita done by one of our swamis, published by us. This book was much praised by teachers and other officials in programs and courses, and certainly it was easier to read and more attractive in design than the funny little books that came over from India.

I lie in bed. It is before 9 o’clock. I have timed it so I have fifteen minutes here at the end of the day which began eighteen hours ago to read a few verses. It will be such an accomplishment to absorb a few every night. One day I will make it to the end of the book. But I only get through about the first fifteen pages before that discipline drops away. It feels like there is such wisdom and mystery in those pages, but I cannot get close enough.

The Baghavad Gita book is up there on the long shelf. But I like the books I am adding – To the Lighthouse, The Mill on the Floss – I start with books that had once been so much a part of me, books I’d turned away from like friends I’d betrayed in an effort to make it with a different crowd. I am so happy to see their faces again, their broad or slim spines back on the shelf. It is as if a part of myself is returning. Again, a part so familiar I thought it worth getting rid of, but I have gotten sick of getting rid of myself and I am plugging in a toaster oven and baking a potato and staying in my room and reading this week’s New Yorker magazine, not getting on the shuttle – the blue school bus that rumbles past my window every twenty minutes that could, if I ventured out, take me in less then ten minutes to the Temple, which is otherworldly, a round building surrounded by glass, with deep soft carpet, with candles flickering and the depth of silence there in the presence of the seated bronze statue of a man that sits in its center, a statue I bow down to in absolute reverence not because I worship metal but because he represents this perfection I have been imagining and aiming for for a long time, believing in it because I have brought myself to a place where this is what everybody talks about – perfection.

“What if Baba had given up after twenty-four years?” asked the same swami who translated the Bhagavad Gita once in a celebrational program – we were celebrating Baba’s liberation probably and speakers were describing his many years of traveling India and doing spiritual practices.

So you couldn’t give up. What if one more something would do the trick?

My current workplace likes to use the word “service” as if it is spiritual currency. I loathe that word, the way it is used. Why go on about service – why goad people into doing more -- when just the basics “be nice to others,” “don’t be mean” serve just fine?

Hello from Marta!

2008-04-01T09:56:00.001-07:00

Dear Reading Friends,

The last commenter suggested that I get busy and put up another post – it’s been too long without fresh material.

I agree!

But here’s the thing: I will always post something if I write an ashram-related story. But I’m not in the middle of focusing on those years, so those stories aren’t happening so often.

And I’m always very happy to post other ashram-related pieces from other writers, but those haven’t been coming in much lately either – so there you have it!

I keep the blog open and up because there are still many visitors every day, and it’s here as a resource for those who want to know more about SYDA – I’m just sorry I can’t keep it stocked with new material!

I have an agent for the book, and hope to have a publisher before too long. If that doesn’t happen soon, I’ll publish it myself. And you’ll hear all about that!

Sending love from Woodstock,

Marta

P.S. And a real thank-you to all those who offer such thoughtful and thought-provoking comments. You are the content of this blog these days! Thank you.

GHOSTING ~ Marta

2008-02-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

My mother’s house is small and white on about half an acre, a scraggy stretch of grass to the road – scraggy in the best sense, it’s real grass, not clipped and manicured, and she has different plants growing here and there, nothing tidy and Martha Stewart, everything a little ragged, some plants doing well, others that never rooted properly. It’s a quiet road she lives on.

Across the street is a slightly grander house, the kind that’s made to look like it was built in Elizabethan England – white plaster with beams of dark wood. That house was always considered special when I lived in that neighborhood.

I would drive by it, not that often although it was so close to where I lived. I would go by, usually a passenger in an ashram van, returning from the city or perhaps a group run to the bank, and I’d look at that house through the window as the van passed and I’d think how Baba had actually stayed there twenty years ago or so. It was hard to imagine.

Baba was dead now, but I thought of him as a true saint. Not the kind of saint I’d learned about in Catholic school, but a real saint, a person who actually existed and had been as close to me as that house.

The house is almost empty now. One man lives in it. His wife and little girl used to live there. He bought the house and fixed it up and brought his wife, and they adopted a red-headed little girl baby and then my mother moved in across the street and took care of the little girl for seven years and then the wife and the little girl left. I think of these houses and this street as if part of me is still part of that landscape, and I see how quiet it has become.

Just up the road is a small Catskills hotel that in the Borscht Belt heyday was called The Windsor. Then it became a place called Sadhana Kutir, a mass of buildings spread over I don’t know how many acres, but enough for an avenue of bungalows, and several buildings of dormitories, and a few smaller buildings for families and hotel-sized rooms, and offices, and what had once been a nightclub, and the Sewing Room and the Frame Shop, a snack bar, the bookstore warehouse, and a stop for the shuttle bus that came by every twenty minutes – three times an hour – old schoolbuses painted a dark royal blue.

I lived there the last three years of my ashram life, and worked in an office there, and had my two cockatiels there, and scrubbed a lot of bathrooms, and folded dorm-fulls of soft beige polyester blankets there and vacuumed and dusted and chanted and meditated in the small dark meditation room – sound proof, lit only by candles. I drank hot milky sweet perfect chai there at four in the summer morning, waiting for the shuttle to take me in the dark to another part of the ashram where the chant would be happening, the pre-dawn chant that took place every single morning year after year after year without fail with live musicians with microphones and lead chanters up front, and rows and rows of us each holding a chanting book in our right hand at eye-level – the men on one side of the aisle, the women on the other – our backs straight, legs crossed, sitting on the floor, each of us having brought our own meditation kit – a cushion perhaps, certainly an asana, that was the bare minimum, an asana – the rectangle of white wool that Baba had said was the best material to meditate on because the wool absorbed the energy of our meditation, and a shawl -- pretty much everyone had a woolen shawl. Some carried their bundle just loose in their hands, most had a bag to hold it all.

You’d come in, kneel down where you wanted to sit and bow your head to the floor towards the guru’s picture up front – a big framed photograph of her face with her big brown eyes looking right at you – you’d bow to her, and as I’d bow I’d feel it every time, I was bowing to some kernel inside of me, some place inside of me that was her, because we were not separate, I knew that, that was the point.

And then each person would unpack quickly, smoothly because they’d done it so many times before: pillow, asana, book, shawl – and sit and chant.

I drive by now in my own car and look through the chain link fence and the world I knew in there is all gone. It’s something else now, another organization and I can’t read the sign at the entrance, it’s in a different alphabet and it’s not as though what we had there was so great. It wasn’t great at all. It was fraudulent and worse. But part of me hangs over that place and looks down on it and wonders where it all went. I had thought it would last forever. Thought I’d be there forever. And it ran away like water through my fingers.

PIECES OF A DREAM by Caitlin O'Gormally

2008-02-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

Several months ago, I started reading Marta Szabo’s on-line story, The Guru Looked Good. She was describing her ten year involvement with a spiritual group called Siddha Yoga. I had also spent time with this group and I was hoping to have my own observations and feelings validated. I wanted to gain insight into my own cult mentality, and I wanted to know that leaving had been the right decision. I didn’t realize the effect this story would have on me.

The Guru Looked Good was a series that delivered one or two new chapters every week. I was captivated after finishing the first few chapters. The story was so familiar it was like reading about my own experience. I was particularly taken with the description of the early morning chant, “The Guru Gita.” I had sung this devotional song every morning for years and it had inspired me and filled me with awe, purpose and bliss. I remembered those feelings now and a deep longing for this ritual was reawakened. Like a child whose best friend has moved far away, I became quiet and wistful. “I really do miss the chanting sometimes,” I sighed.

That night I awoke possessed by visions of Siddha Yoga. As I watched the intruding images unfold, I wavered between longing and repulsion, gladness and fear. I groaned and turned again to my other side, but no amount of turning could stop this stream of memories: Once again I was sipping hot chai in the Amrit. Once again I was reverently walking past picture after picture of the gurus. Once again I was in the meditation hall basking in exalted stillness, watching the devotees sway from side to side. Once again I was singing Shri Krishna, Govinda, my boisterous participation bringing me to exquisite ecstasy. “Christ,” I murmured. “I thought I was past all this.”

I was depressed for two days. Like a drunk divorcee, I forgot my reasons for leaving Siddha Yoga and longed for the past . . . a past where everyday started out perfectly and I was surrounded by a loving community. . . a time when all my questions had answers and I felt protected and pure and holy and . . .

Now take a deep breath and think back to what it was really like.

The truth was I often felt uncomfortable at Siddha Yoga. I always felt that I had questions that I couldn’t ask and topics that I couldn’t discuss. In the beginning, my conversations were often interrupted by others and replaced with stories about Gurumayi, Baba, or Nityananda. I often felt there was a competition going on between the devotees over who had greater access to the guru; and everything that did or didn’t happen was attributed to her grace. One day a woman questioned me about my job and financial situation. She shook her head disdainfully and commented that it was a wonder I could support myself at all. I found this remark rude and superficial, but I let it slide. After all, I did love the chanting.

Indeed, it was through the chanting that the good devotee was born. The more I chanted the easier life seemed to get. Chanting usually made me high. The higher I got the easier it was to ignore the red flags and accept the new doctrine without question. The old me, or the free thinker, got quieter and quieter until there was only the occasional protest.

The next day things were back to normal. Encouraged, I looked forward to the next installment of Szabo’s story. What I soon learned, however, was that every week after reading the next chapters, I would once again spiral into an internal struggle between the good devotee and the free thinker. The two of me battling old fears and superstitions that I thought I had resolved.

“Oh for heaven sakes, you’ve gotten everything you’ve asked for, stop complaining,” admonished the good devotee.

“Just leave, already. Call a cab. Take a bus. Get the hell out of there!” yelled the free thinker.

This constant conflict began to wear on me and I wondered
if I should be reading this story at all. “Maybe this is bad for me,” I mused. “Or maybe this is good because it’s helping me exorcise the cult demons.” There had been rumors going around that the Siddha Yoga gurus had practiced black magic. “Could this author be working with my old guru and this story be a form of black magic?” My paranoia continued:

“What the hell?”

“It’s good, it’s like Tantra.”

“You mean Black Tantra?”

“No, no, it’s okay, I think.”

“Okay, I’m not going to read it anymore.”

“Well, maybe just one more time.”

“Oh, hell, I just don’t care, really.”

“Oh, really?”

I couldn’t stop reading the story. I was on the train and I didn’t want to get off. Through it all the yearning for the morning chant continued. At different times during the week I’d find myself going to the Siddha Yoga website. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I would just browse through the pages mindlessly, eventually leaving the website feeling empty. One day I went to the group’s virtual bookstore and clicked on the morning chant CD. Seeing the link for an audio sample, I figured, “What the hell,” and clicked the play button.

As the first strains of the “Guru Gita” began, my eyes widened in disbelief. The guru’s voice, which I had so often pined for, was now an assault on my senses. I winced as a discordant bellow roared at me through the computer speakers, my hands flying up to cover my ears. “Holy crap, this sounds bloody awful,” I cried clicking the stop button. “I don’t remember this sounding so bad.” I sat in shock and confusion as I realized my eardrums were actually hurting. A few moments latter I started to feel tired, even a little dizzy. I shuffled off to my bedroom and laid down on the bed.

Within moments, a faintly buzzing energy engulfed me in a heavy blanket of stillness. From the tips of my toes, I could feel a wave of euphoria spreading up and through my entire body. From far away I could hear myself exclaiming, “Uh-oh, I’ve been zapped.” But I was too tired to fight it. All the debating and internal struggling had worn me out. I was ready to feel the bliss of no-feeling. I was aware of the narcotic quality of my experience, but I didn’t care. I took a deep breath and surrendered to the delicious numbness that saturated my being.

I lay there for an hour. When I finally got up, I shrugged. “Religion, the opiate of the people.” I mumbled.

The rest of my day had a dreamlike aspect to it. I floated from one activity to the next, never entirely engaged and quite content. That evening, I noticed myself smiling inappropriately as I watched the evening news, the parade of world tragedy unable to reach me through my anesthesia. From far away, my mind chided, “You’re still stoned. Snap out of it. Get back to reality.”

“Reality?” I countered. “In the last five years I’ve lost my parents, my health, and my religion. Just how much reality can a person take?”

I was euphoric for the next week. It was during this time that I purchased The Nectar of Chanting, which contained the “Guru Gita.” “I’ll just sing it a cappella,” I told myself. “I won’t be singing it to a guru; I’ll be singing it to God.” By the time the book arrived my rapture had worn off. I reluctantly decided to give the chant one more try. Opening the book I was careful not to look at the guru pictures in the front of the text, and proceeded to sing it a cappella. I was surprised and pleased that I remembered the intonation, but in the end the experience left me tired and flat. It just wasn’t happening anymore. The mindfulness practices I’d been doing were really much better for me—more clarity, less baggage. I thought about the money I had just spent on the book. Jeez, I’m such a sucker.

But that was not the end of it. That night in my dreams I heard the morning chant—and not just the a cappella version. Gurumayi, the swamis and the devotees were all singing, as the tambura and harmonium droned in the background. Struggling to wake up, I mustered all my mental strength and ordered, “Just say no! No, no, no, no, no!” Amazingly enough, the ruckus stopped and I rolled over and returned to sleep. Several hours later it happened again. “What have I done,” I moaned. The good news was that the just say no strategy was working, but only for the short term. I had to repeat it two more times before morning, and exhausted, I got up determined to stop this craziness once and for all.

I picked up the chant book, trying to decide what to do with it. In the process the book fell open and I found myself looking at the pictures of the gurus. The first picture of Nityananda made me smile. The second picture of Muktananda looked insincere, and the third picture of Gurumayi seemed severe, distant and icy. I had never liked these last two photos, and I had never understood why they were in the book. I had always made a point of not looking at these two pictures because on some level they disturbed me. “Red flags everywhere,” I muttered. I continued to stare intensely at the photos and thought about the rumors of sorcery. “Are these the faces of two black magicians?” I asked.

A tiny point of pain began contracting in my solar plexus and I held my breath as the sensation grew stronger migrating upwards towards my throat. As my chest began to tighten I laid The Nectar of Chanting on the desk and ripped the guru photos from the book. “But what do I do with these photos? I wondered. “What is the proper procedure? Do I bury them, burn them, sprinkle them with holy water?”

Just breathe. The important thing is don’t let these people scare you.

I took a deep breath, and then another, and another. I watched my breath return to normal and continued my awareness of the breath until all the fear and anxiety had dissolved into nothing. Once again I looked down and saw I was holding two pieces of paper. I held two photos of two people who had, according to many accounts, been manipulative and unethical; two human beings who had betrayed the trust of many innocent people. I shrugged and reconsidered, “Maybe I’ll need these for future reference.”

I slipped the portraits back into the book and headed for the walk-in closet. On the middle shelf was a box labeled cult studies. It was a moving box full of books, CDs, DVDs, hand cymbals, deity statues, incense, recipes, and pictures. These objects were like pieces of a dream, a dream I was deconstructing, one delusion at a time. I dropped the chant book into the box, and strode into the next room. Closing the closet door, I smiled. The spell was broken.

AGAINST THE WIND ~ Marta

2008-02-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

My mother and I on the beach. I have come here with her, to the farthest point on Long Island in the fall after everyone has left the summertime beach and it has become something else – raw and rough. I am looking for nature without buildings and thought maybe if I drove all the way to the end of Long Island I would find it. And I have no way of getting there except with my mother in her car.

I live up in the mountains in a yoga ashram. I’ve been living here for years and lately I have been wanting to get out of it more and more – it started when the passion to write hit me hard again. I’d just come back from India, a bunch of months as the guru’s secretary – le-dee-dah, everything should be different now or something – and I’m finding that I want to be in a writing group.

It starts with Urvashi coming up to the talk to me in the evening. I’m behind the Registration counter, by myself, closing up for the night, putting out on the counter the push-button phone and the hand-calligraphied sign that Archana made – so pretty – welcoming the late-arriving guest and asking them to please pick up said phone and page Security who will come and give them a key to a late-night dorm because it will be too late for them to walk into a regular dorm where everyone will be asleep in anticipation of getting up at 3 to walk to the Temple in the dark and meditate, and in the morning the late-comers will have to return to Registration – to this long front desk with its row of computers – and be checked in properly and assigned to a proper dorm.

We know that some people come late on purpose to get the late-night dorm because you usually get to have it to yourself, but we haven’t figured out a way to close this loophole.

I have been thinking about writing again, feeling that yearning inside that I used to feel, that I felt very intensely at certain times – intense enough to really act on – to quit my job and then the brick wall would descend and the blackness that told me I would never be what I wanted to be, I was crazy to fall for that dream thing again, because I was damaged, remember?, not whole. How else to explain that other people wrote and kept writing while I started and stopped?

The thing about yoga was that it didn’t think writing or art was very special. There were other things more important and for a few years I willingly packed away writing with things like blue jeans and New York City streets and apartments and those long drags on a pipe, holding the smoke in as long as I could – all things that didn’t seem to be taking me anywhere – and threw them into cardboard boxes that fit under my twin bed, the only space for non-public things in a room I shared with two other women, each of us in our twin beds, each of us with a bureau – a few drawers and a few hangers in the shared closet.

But a few years later the writing thing was hitting big time – like wanting to listen to rock and roll again instead of the unbroken soundtrack of Sanskrit chanting – and wanting to be in New York City again, just walking on the sidewalks – just me in jeans and hiking boots, the way I used to walk.

Something must be wrong with it if it feels good. It’s too simple. If I really want to get something out of life and not take the easy route then I should take the hard route, the one where I stay up in the ashram and sign up for another seva assignment like washing mounds of potatoes in freezing cold water next to a girl who tells me – her hands plunged in the cold water – that she has some condition I’ve never heard of before where she mustn’t let her hands get cold. Neither of us thinks this is a reason to stop or ask for something else to do -- or planting small trees in the rain with twenty other people, trying to plant each one the way the head of the Garden Department demonstrated because if you do it wrong the plant won’t get enough water or too much, and when will the truck come with tea and cookies from the kitchen, and then finally stopping for lunch, going back to the dining room, wondering why I don’t feel like I’ve really done something even though seva is supposed to be such an important practice?

But I am going to New York City every Wednesday. I’ve been sent on a project there so I get to not go to my office every Wednesday. I get to leave at 7am after breakfast. leave in the 12-person van, unloaded onto the Upper West Side at 9 with the hours of the day spread out for me like a feast and I am starving.

Urvashi and I start talking about writing. She wants to write too. She knows of a group in one of the nearby towns – someone she works with told her about it – Urvashi has always been a bit of an outsider, different. She lives here like all of us, but she has a full-time job in the local college. She pays rent to the ashram to live here instead of being on full-time staff. She has her own room.

We do not warm to the Sunday afternoon group in the local town. Soon we make our own group.

It is in this time that I go out to the tip of Long Island with my mother. In a lot of ways my mother is a pretty good go-to-the-beach buddy. She is game.

We get to the last little town and to a little place where we rent a room. It’s raining but I am desperate to go out to the ocean. I have to go out. My mother comes too. We walk against the wind. The rain soaks us. But I don’t want to stop. I have come for this. I want to get as far as I can away from everything I have known and it’s like I can never get far enough.

I am wrapped in a red and green woolen shawl that an old Indian couple gave me as a gift. I take photographs and then we turn back. I don’t feel ready, but at the same time I know I can’t keep going – not in this furious rain and wind. I have to go back, to that snug room.

WAKING UP by Estee

2008-01-25T07:21:00.000-08:00

I had just returned from spending a couple of months traveling the length and breadth of India. I had hoped months of being on the road – a wanderer and pilgrim traveler, a musafir -- would change me. And change me it did in a most profound and unexpected way.

They asked me to come to the ashram for a ‘Mission’ training. We had to write an essay to complete our application. They always make it seem that way – you’re invited, means you’re special, don’t tell anyone, the final say remains with us. The form and essay is supposedly meant so they can assure themselves you’re a ‘follower’. (Read tame, won’t ask difficult questions, do as you are told.)

It had never struck me as odd although I had done it so many times before. Now, it did. I passed the test although it didn’t seem to excite me hugely. They spent some three-four days telling us about the Mission, its various arms and trusts etc. Then made sure we could parrot the same to another. We got to have darshan too. The pre-noon darshans were ‘analysed’ in the afternoons. ‘Singhavalokan’ they called it – ‘you know like a lion looks back as he walks forward’. It was to be a term reserved for ‘chewing on’ on the Guru’s words – however mundane they may have been.

All of it suddenly began to seem alien. Why do we regard someone as God? Why does someone call himself/ herself a ‘perfected master’? Who gives these titles? It occurred to me that ‘followers’ give titles; the ‘following’ increases. And then they say he has a following of so many millions, it must be true he/she is God or an ‘enlightened being’.

Why does it all seem so insane all of a sudden. Haven’t I done the same for years? Then the big discussion on what will you say when you return from the ashram – did you get to see Gurumayi, what did she say, what was the workshop about etc. Hours and hours were spent deliberating what ‘should’ be said. I was stumped. Isn’t it obvious – the answer depends on who’s asking the question. Is it a friend who was going come herself but couldn’t make it (they don’t seem to understand this one – it’s beyond their comprehension that somebody who was invited chose not to come); is it a co-sevite I work closely with as a team; is it a parent or a sibling; is it an acquaintance I bump into once in a while. Hours of deliberation followed. I seemed to be the only one getting restless about it. It looked as though the others thought this was pretty normal.

These last few months I have studiously followed this blog – the posts and the comments. I was not aware about many of the things mentioned here. An Indian saying goes – was the branch already broken or did the crow’s perching on it break it. I guess the branch was broken, knowing more just did it.

Through my months of travel, I studied the SY teachings and applied them like a ‘scientist’. I learnt a lot, grew a lot, it became my lens to understand and view the world. Ironically, the same teachings set me free from the need to believe in a ‘Guru’ and any form of organised religion.

I like to think I’ve graduated. I still do the stand-and stretch I learnt in the ashram. And sometimes as I take a brisk walk, a chant comes up by itself. I hum and sing, and I enjoy the music that has given me much over the years. A lot of who I am today comes from the years of practice and I am grateful for that. Even more grateful to be free again.

NEW TIMES -- Natvar Series. By Marta

2008-01-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

We bought a refrigerator for the kitchen of the new Institute. The kitchen had no windows. We built it right next to the big utility sink, the only running water in the loft. Only cold water came through the one tap. For the months of construction we did not cook in the Institute that we were creating. We went down to the Annex. That’s what we called it, Mark’s apartment on West Twenty Fourth St., a walk-up railroad apartment.

But then when all the walls were up, the carpet down, we made a sort of kitchen. We bought a real refrigerator and two sets of hot plates. Natvar said that when people came for a yoga class in the evening they could also purchase dinner, and that dinner would be soup, salad and bread, and we would serve it on plastic trays and people could sit on the lobby floor in tidy rows to eat and we should oversee it. Extra income for us. He ate in his room when people started to stay for dinner. Tracy was the cook.

She had left her husband to come and live with us. She slept in the loft bed in the office. She got up first in the morning and made us breakfast. She didn’t like having to get up first and would sometimes be complainy and cranky. I had no sympathy. Natvar was the only one allowed to complain. The rest of it seemed to be about how much you could take.

Tracy left for the day, going to Arianna’s apartment to help her with secretarial things. Natvar left too every morning to go to the homes of his clients – all of them wealthy – to give them their private yoga classes.

I stayed home and Mark stayed home. Mark had things to do in the office. Before the girls came and I became their school mistress, I had tasks in the morning – cleaning and secretarial. It was a new time. We had the new Institute and Natvar was getting all these new clients. When we were at the first Institute Natvar had only gone out twice a week to see Prince Michael. But now he was going out every morning and coming back at lunch time, full of stories and excitement.

Now he had a leatherbound appointment book in which I typed his appointments. Now he wanted us all to look good because every day he was with these monied New Yorkers and he wanted to be one of them.

One Sunday we went to Bloomingdales and we left with Natvar wearing a long flowing camel hair coat. It cost $500. We put it on my mother’s credit card. She had left the card with me. She had no money, but she said I should get myself something. Natvar said we would pay her back. He loved the camel hair coat. He did look elegant and aristocratic in it. He came home, saying with delight that Arianna, who was his client, had dubbed it the “drop dead” coat, and this he loved, repeating it often.

He wanted us all dressed well. But there was no money. I did not ask for anything. I had no money. I stole as much as possible to make the grocery money go farther. Natvar loved my ability to steal, the way I could get caviar this way, jams, cheeses. But stealing began to consume me. Whenever I walked into any store I could only see what I could steal, and what I could steal was not always what I wanted, and the two – what I could get and what I wanted – became confused in my mind, impossible to tell apart.

Mark now was dressing better. He seemed to be able to do it, to follow Natvar’s model on this one. Mark, who had just been a boy in sweatpants and Salvation Army overcoats, suddenly knew how to wear a button-down shirt and leather shoes. He went in and out of it. Sometimes he looked perfect, almost Natvar’s double, in a sweater vest that Natvar had handed down to him, looking fresh and clean-shaven, every hair in place. “My Markey Boy,” Natvar might say at these times, tweaking Mark’s ear. I was surprised by Mark’s ease with this stuff, felt almost betrayed, betrayed by both of them, because suddenly now I was not good enough, my baggy pants and Army Nave tank tops – none of it was any good. I should be like Arianna, like all the women Natvar saw all day – make-up, panty-hose, sleek suits.

It was a very different. time. Suddenly, Natvar wanted us to be successful and sophisticated. I missed the first Institute. It had been cozy there, much smaller. And we’d all been friends. It had become grueling with this second Institute. First, the building, done with money Natvar persuaded Mark to ask his parents for. “Your parents have it – of course they do,” and though Mark had hesitated for days and even run away – that was the first time Mark ran away, ran away for several days, but then came back, came back to be welcomed, chastised, ripped apart with words by Natvar, but essentially reabsorbed after he’d been punished and done some penance – our Crown Prince who could be such a bad bad boy.

SEPTEMBER by Asterisk*

2007-12-28T05:02:00.000-08:00

My days as Sydney’s assistant were long and empty, as long and empty as the corridor that I frequently walked up and down in my boredom during the afternoon-slump hours when the light was especially dim back there. I always had the impression that something exciting was happening just out of my reach, and I was purposefully being excluded from all of the activity. When I was first brought to my new office, one of the drawbacks of my seva to which Joan alerted me was not to let any of Gurumayi’s other secretaries “use me” for any of their projects. “You are here to act as Sydney’s assistant, and no one else. It may seem convenient for them to ask you to do things when they’re really busy, but you’ll be really busy too, and it’s important that you accomplish all that Sydney needs you to,” she said forebodingly and peered out at me from over the tops of her spectacles.

Despite Joan’s warning, at times I would desperately walk down the hall to Lucy’s and Margot’s office and ask them if they needed help with anything. They were rarely at their desks, and when I heard their sweet laughing voices down the hall, I was always eager to seek out actual human contact and drop by. I would ask their stressed-out faces, “Good morning, may I help you out with something?” They were always cutting things out of construction paper, inflating balloons, or sketching at their desks with expensive, brightly-colored markers. “Thanks, Hilda. We’re good for now.” We would exchange a few sentences of small talk, both of them too intent on their tasks to look up at me. They were always kind to me, but never warm. I knew I was bothering them, so our interactions were usually brief. It was never fully clear to me what their roles were. In this environment, so much was left unspoken that I always had to deduce what was occurring based on overheard whispered words or obscure memos that I happened to catch a glimpse of. I was never sure, but I thought that Lucy’s seva had something to do with Gurumayi’s “interiors” and Margot’s seva has something to do with keeping high-profile guests happy.

One rare day when Lucy was alone in the office, we exchanged a little more than small talk. She confided in me that she had once been married years ago, well before she ever moved into the Ashram. Lucy was a petite brunette who had an understated elegance about her, and she always dressed meticulously except for one consistent disheveled detail. That one disheveled detail made her seem “artistic,” if not “eccentric.” I was not surprised to hear that she once had a failed romance with a gorgeous stud who rode a motorcycle. “Sometimes I would be waiting for him by my darkened window,” she shared wistfully, “and I was so comforted by the sound of his cycle revving up as he rounded the corner at 10pm on Tuesdays.” She sighed. “Did you like being married?” I asked her. “At that time, yes, I did.” She answered truthfully, frowned, and then proceeded to whip out a massive eraser from her desk drawer. She began to erase a line from her sketch of a shelf she was working on. Lucy had a degree in architecture, and presumably she was designing something to be used in Gurumayi’s house. When she began erasing under the bright light of her office lamp, I knew our talk about her previous failed marriage was over. I would never get to know what happened. I would never get her advice. I was a gawky young teenager, and she was a pretty woman with a past. She shut down and would never tell me what I needed to know. I took the hint, and started to open her door with my head down. “Oh Hilda, could you bring this sketch to Sydney for me? Thanks,” she gently requested.

Weeks and weeks into my new seva position, I still had no projects I needed to work on, nor did I see or speak with Sydney regularly. Sometimes I would go into her glamorous office with its curved white marble desk, upholstered slate-blue chairs, fancy filing cabinets, large-screen television, and just sit there in the dark with the plush crème carpeting massaging my bare feet. Her window overlooked the deck of Anugraha Amrit, and whenever I looked out of it, I never saw anyone in sight outside. It was if the Ashram was deserted, both inside and out. The sky in South Fallsburg was usually so overcast in September, and I felt cold and privileged looking out at it from my borrowed luxurious expanse. I consciously “forgot” to water her plant in a feeble attempt of passive-aggressive expression, but I did manage to straighten her many stacks of papers for her or dust the parts of her desk that were not covered by newspapers, books, or post-its. Every day Lucy would give me important reports to post on Sydney’s bulletin board, and every day I had to shred the previous reports first thing in the morning. These reports usually listed the arrivals and departures of important people visiting the Ashram, or detailed the anniversaries or birthdays of various people of note. Sometimes room numbers were listed under these headings, but usually it seemed to be a straightforward memo meant to help someone “special” appear omniscient. I was almost certain that Lucy posted a similar report in Gurumayi’s house.

Once in a while, I would get a knock at my door. That sound brightened my day, as it meant that someone needed me or wanted to talk to me. It broke up my quiet, dull days of ubiquitous Internet surfing and occasional phone answering. In these instances a cheerful, “confidential” sevite would greet me and present me with a sealed folder marked “private.” Sometimes these folders were even marked with a provocative “confidential” stamp. These folders were always colored-coded, though this never occurred to me until months and months went by and I gained the courage to start opening them. I would usually phone Sydney when these deliveries occurred, as I was never sure if these folders contained timely information, but she typically never picked up my calls. Sometimes as many as four folders at a time would sit in the center of my carefully-cleaned modern desk, right next to the running list of messages I was meant to deliver to Sydney. My seva role seemed sillier in light of the fact that Sydney had an Ashram voice mail, as well as a cell phone with its own voice mail. A part of me worried that things were slipping through the cracks, though I reasoned to myself that the items that were being fielded to me must not have been that important anyway. The really, really important people could always reach Sydney directly via her cell phone, and she would be sure to always pick up for them.

PERSONAL ASSISTANT by Asterisk*

2007-12-13T14:17:00.000-08:00

I first met Sydney in Ganeshpuri while I was taking a year off between high school and college. I had been working in the Trustee’s Office as a secretary for quite some time when once I had received a mysterious phone call one tedious Tuesday morning. When I was in the office alone, the phone hardly ever rung, and the sound of its shrillness actually made me jump out of my seat. I mentioned to the caller that my seva supervisor, Lakshmi, was in a meeting at the moment and would be back in thirty minutes. “Would you like to leave a message?” I asked in my best phone operator voice. “It’s Gurumayi.” My heart flipped, but I maintained my cool. “Gurumayi, she will be back momentarily. I would be happy to get her for you right now if that is necessary.” I replied. “Oh no, that is not necessary. Please tell her I called when she returns. Goodbye.” Click.

I wondered what that was all about, though I did overhear a few days ago that Lakshmi had recently taken on the additional role of acting as Gurumayi’s “business” darshan secretary in addition to serving as the secretary to the Trustees. When Lakshmi returned, she tried her best to not seem too excited that Gurumayi had called, but she exuded a glow about her that I had rarely seen since I began working with her. At the news, her dull dark hair became glossier and miraculously her smeared bindi looked more perfectly formed. Lakshmi was a deliberate and articulate Indian woman who was raised in South Africa and was married to a Westerner. Usually relationships between Indian people and Westerners in Ganeshpuri were “not encouraged” by the Ashram administration, though in Lakshmi’s case it was excused since she was raised with a lot of exposure to Western culture.

A day later, one of Gurumayi’s right-hand men, Kenneth, came by our office. He was a distinguished-looking British man with salt-and-pepper flecked hair. He wasn’t very tall, but he radiated authority and shrewdness. He always gave the impression that he was carefully studying the people with whom he spoke. As if surprised, he told me, “I hear you are excellent on the phone – and very polite.” Blushing, I thanked him for delivering the compliment and knew very well who had provided him with this information. He gave me a curious once-over, and than began to discuss a few mundane points with Lakshmi. I turned away and stared at the wall above my little wooden old-fashioned secretary’s desk, pretending not to listen to their conversation by busying myself with some papers. That was one of the main tasks of my job: knowing when to be nondescript and unobtrusive.

A few weeks later, Laksmhi delightfully told me that Sydney wanted to meet with me. “You could work with her by doing creative things like making specialized cards and that sort of thing, You’ll love it.” I wondered why Lakshmi had mentioned “creative” tasks to me as a selling point, but I was almost instantly reminded of the time when I had made Gurumayi a beautiful card with a drawing of a vivid peacock that I had modeled after an antique pin of my great-aunt’s. I had shown it to Lakshmi once it was completed, and she had swooned over it. “This is lovely. I’m sure Gurumayi will love the card.” I had no idea what the hell working with Sydney would mean, but it sounded enticing. I knew enough not to ask more questions. I didn’t want to appear too excited or too ignorant. All would be revealed at a later time.

Sydney and I met in the Ganeshpuri Amrit the next day. She carried a notepad and a disheveled stack of papers. She placed her cell phone on the table pointedly, and I was shocked to see such a luxurious electronic device in India. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Very few people carried pagers in India, not to mention cell phones. She flipped her long blonde hair and spurted excitedly, “Tell me a little bit about yourself.” I told her about how I was taking time off before I attended college in order to explore if Siddha Yoga was my true path and not just something I was brought into by my mother. I explained how I had received invitations for admission into a couple of decent universities in the states, but how it was difficult for me to receive funding to attend any of them. “Why don’t you take another year off and come back to Shree Muktananda Ashram with me to work as my personal assistant? We have some exciting projects on deck!” Sydney did not go into further detail, but I knew what she meant. These projects had something to do with Gurumayi’s private work, and I was being considered for the position. I felt honored and flattered, to say the least.

***

Joan confidently escorted me through the smallish courtyard of Anugraha Amrit to a pair of glass doors that I’d never noticed before. Even after sitting on top of those faded red bricks on Adirondack chairs while eating dosas and salads for years, it never occurred to me that people were going in an out of those glass doors furtively. Joan punched in a few numbers onto the metallic padlock that guarded these doors, and the buzz of the doors sounded like something from a psychiatric ward. She led me through a drab lobby to another door, where she punched in yet another code onto a similar padlock. She was a petite woman with graying hair, and she always pursed her lips into a subtle smirk.

Immediately we were transported to another place, one that was more meticulously maintained than the other public parts of the Ashram. The walls were painted in a fresh coat of ecru, and the carpets were a crisp pattern of beige-on-beige tones. A long corridor of closed doors was in my view, though there were no people currently treading that pristine hall. Taped to one of the closed doors was a sign that said “Welcome Hilda” – it was hysterically painted in pink and purple swirls on a sheet of heavy art paper. “This will be your office,” Joan explained calmly. “I took over for Sydney’s previous assistant for only a brief amount of time, so I’m not the best person to train you for this position.” I watched her expressionless face as she gestured toward a generously appointed office desk. “There’s your computer and your printer. Sydney basically wants you to help her keep track of her incoming phone calls. Make a list, and when she calls you for updates, try to prioritize her messages. I’m sure you’ll eventually work out a system of your own together.”

Joan left me to my silent, perfect office and retreated to her station down the hall in the correspondence office where she worked as a mail sorter for Gurumayi’s incoming mail. Once my office door was closed, I looked and wondered when I would be meeting with Sydney to discuss our future working relationship. Occasionally the phone would ring, and I would introduce myself as Sydney’s new assistant to her callers. Usually I had no idea who was on the other end of these calls even after a name was given, and each message were usually vague and unspecific as if they didn’t trust me to give me more details. I had no idea how to “prioritize” such cryptic messages.

Sydney dropped by once to greet me during my first week as her assistant. She was a booming blonde who dressed in stylishly cut jewel-toned suits and kept her accessorizing to a minimum. She had a similar body type to mine: tall and athletic, yet curvy. I heard from Joan that she was once a dancer and an actress on Broadway, though after meeting her I didn’t need to hear any back-stories about her life. She seemed to emanate theatricalities: she enunciated her words very clearly and seemed to have a gushy voice that dripped ghee. She articulated her thoughts in a very politically correct, “Siddha Yoga” way. During our first meeting in South Fallsburg, I began to deliver a list of messages to Sydney. “Those things have already been taken care of,” she smooth-talked and sauntered away after closing the door gently. My shoulders sunk, and I felt useless and perplexed. When I peeked out the door after her, no one was in sight. I sighed, turned on my computer, and waited for the phone to ring again.

I'M YOURS ~ Marta

2007-12-12T06:16:00.000-08:00

One night Natvar walked back with us from Mark’s apartment. It was the very early days. We had just started eating together in the evenings. I had only just moved into the Institute. Maybe it was so early on that Natvar was still spending nights there too before he moved in completely with Mark.

I had moved into the Institute. Natvar had said that he was looking for someone to rent the back room, and I volunteered. I thought it would lower my rent. I liked that idea. I had quit the full-time job about six months earlier, desperately trying to rid myself of something so conventional and predictable as a 9 to 5 job. It had been six months and the excitement of the dream of creating a completely different life had worn thin. I hadn’t managed to transform my life into the pictures I held in my head – maybe I would rebuild furniture I found thrown out on the street and sell it. Maybe I’d become a carpenter. Or a political person who went to rallies and meetings. Maybe this, maybe that – and now I could live in the Institute if I wanted. Boy, wouldn’t that be a great way to let Natvar know how much he could count on me.

The square lobby with the cut-out window looking into the small office that until now had felt off-limits to me, Natvar’s private area – a place I had no business in. But now I was part of this place. I slept on the floor of the lobby – thin green carpet, a muted grass-green color with narrow lines of a darker green creating almost a plaid. For a little while Natvar was there too, discretely in his room at night, a room I had never entered, much more private than the office, the place where Natvar slept. For a few mornings we did as planned, getting up early-early-early to meditate in the meditation hall together before walking over to the coffee shop to meet Mark for coffee and bagels with cream cheese.

We walked back from Mark’s that night, walking in the Manhattan streets, four or five of us, Natvar at our center, doing all the talking.

We stopped downstairs outside the Institute. Next door to us was a hardware store, owned by our landlord. Natvar was complaining. He said he had been asking the landlord to install a light there at the door, in the small alcove between the door to our building and the door of the hardware store. “It smells like a toilet,” Natvar was saying. “There’s no light so the bums come and piss here. I keep telling him we need a light, but he doesn’t care. I know,” he said. “I’ll show him –“ And Natvar was pissing now, spraying his urine across the front door of the store. He was laughing. We were all laughing. This was new for me. New to be with someone who crossed lines I had assumed you could not cross.

“In the morning,” Natvar was saying, “we should leave a turd. That would do it. That would make him put in the light.”

I did it. I did it the next morning, placed my offering just as Natvar had suggested, early, and reported my accomplishment later at breakfast. Natvar was delighted. I was his star pupil. Well, so was Mark, but I was certainly a star.

I was certain I had hitched myself onto a skyrocket that would take me out of the mundane into something brave and original.

HERE I AM by S

2007-12-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

Here I am, relishing the comforting warmth of my candlelit cosy former meditation room, converted into a personal library and dining room a few years ago at a point when, after 18 years or something of SY, I finally decided to commit this outrageous "sacrilege" and let "the world" into the privacy of my meditation room. Communication with real-life friends at the dining table rather than with a photograph of "the Guru" on my puja. Non-SY music and books and even TV (!), something I would not have dreamt to do for at least 15 years.

Heavy, Indian colonial style dark wooden furniture which I purchased to furnish the formerly almost empty room, comfortingly solid and reassuring as if to say: This change is here to stay. A beautifully carved wall-high bookcase right where the puja used to be, filling with all kinds of books which I enjoyed reading and looking at so much these post-SY years.

Novels which delicately expound the intricacy and vulnerability and greatness of the human heart and soul.

Poems celebrating the many flavors of life.

Psychological and self-help books which I would have eyed suspiciously in my SY years.

Books on religion and spirituality (for a long time I would have felt like an unfaithful wife or lover had I read other masters’ teachings. Let alone listened to critical voices elucidating the traps involved in any kind of belief or organized religion).

Travel books (now that I had the means to go traveling to other places than to the ashrams and now that deciding to go on a holiday rather than offer seva or to dive into "the Practices" by taking "the Intensive" no longer felt like cheating "the Guru" and settling for less than the highest I promised to strive for).

Beautiful books on photography and works of art, some of which had been relegated to some remote corners of my home during those times when all that mattered were "the Teachings".

Books on quantum physics, philosophy and history.

Many, many books on India and by Indian authors (I went through a prolonged period when I wanted to know everything about historical and contemporary India that I could get hold of, as if this were to help the child in me to understand better, why her mother (yes, I am talking about "the Guru") left. And what that mysterious tugging at my heart was about, this feeling of finally having come home which caressed me when I first found myself in the Ganeshpuri Ashram many years ago. The Christmas I spent in the Ganeshpuri Ashram back then continues to exist as if in a parallel world …

Okay, quantum physics tells us that time the way we are used to experiencing it, does not exist. So I find part of me, especially during this time around Christmas, still being the innocent child taking in the fragrance of nightblooming jasmine, the sounds of Hindu love songs on the radio wafting across from one of the settlements, the sparkling lights in the tropical trees, the tingling caress of the Shakti vibrating in the air like electricity and the sacred feel of the marble floor on which I was sitting chanting or watching the lovingly prepared Christmas show. A sense of utter safety, utter purpose, utter devotion, utter zest for learning more about life and the world from the perspective of "the Saints". Feeling nurtured and surrounded by a huge, well-meaning family of mankind, her life’s purpose forever clearly laid out by those able to see the bigger picture.

Yes, it was the inner child whose needs had not been met and who responded to this type of heaven. Collective regression. Gurumayi literally sent some of us new arrivals to bed, jet-lagged as we were during one of the pre-Christmas programs, and I actually enjoyed it, feeling loved and seen and my needs being acknowledged. Like kids preparing a Christmas gift for their mother, we conspired to create a gingerbread house in the ashram, trying to hide it under a lot of giggling when Gurumayi happened to stride past, so totally unable to respond as adults would that one of the women, having been asked Gurumayi (teasingly, as we perceived it): "Where are you going to put it?", only managed to say in a total state of confusion: "Into the fridge, Gurumayi", followed by an awkward and almost hysterical fit of laughter of everyone around.

Being used to going to bed after midnight and being the newcomer that I was, I once enjoyed a walk around on the Ashram grounds late a night together with another woman. We were marveling at the beauty of this place and the miracle which had brought us there. In that state of total reverence and driven by the longing to take in every single moment that this precious place had to offer which I had otherwise only experienced once when deeply in love and spending my first night with my beloved, reluctant to fall asleep because his presence felt so precious that I did not want to miss any single moment of it. Now, in the absence of all the hustle and bustle of these busy Christmas days, in the silence of the night, it was as if an even deeper essence of this place was about to reveal itself.

And it did. In the guise of a sevite, a psychologist, as we soon were to learn, who had received orders not to allow anybody to stroll around on the ashram premises at night and who began to interview us, very obviously in an attempt to determine whether we were kind of "mentally deranged" and maybe "not able to tolerate the Shakti". Again, we got shooed to bed like little kids. ("You know, you’re supposed to be in bed by now! It’s lights out after 9 p.m.!") And again, it was kind of weird, but it also had this delicious quality of having permission to be like a child again, with somebody else knowing what served your highest good best and somebody else knowing the rules …

Back to my adult self, clicking away on her laptop computer in her former meditation room. Above the local SY meditation center, which still feels a bit like floating on a sheet of ice, although time had taught me that this "sheet of ice" is wonderfully thick and reliable and that there is nothing to fear, now less than ever, since all I need to do is reach out to the Above and All-Around. I have come to happily inhabit the layer of "worldliness" between "the Center" and the "higher realms". Anyway, it’s even closer to heaven this way ;-)

You know what happened when I first decided to spend the evening (a beautiful summer day) on my sunlit terrace, surrounded by the singing birds, rather than in the dimly lit and stuffy satsang hall downstairs? Was I about to become one of those losers who give in to that which is pleasant and forego that which is truly beneficial?

I bowed my head and brought my hands into prayer position, taking in the sacredness of GOD so present in everything around me. And there it was, all the devotion, all the reverence, all the love and gratitude, but now no longer directed towards "the Guru", but towards a nameless, all-pervading, loving force much, much greater than all those limiting beliefs. I felt blessed and reassured, and all my concerns about maybe being on the verge of allowing many years of sadhana to go waste by ceasing to practice SY, or even (who knows?) about having to bear the wrath of "the Guru” and being condemned to a miserable life ever after, dropped away. That was the day when I finally disembarked from the Siddha Yoga cruise ship. Here I am …

I'M IN by Marta

2007-12-09T04:29:00.000-08:00

I didn’t like my first yoga class with Natvar that much. It was too easy, I thought. It would never keep me thin. I would have to keep looking.

I was trying to find the best yoga class in all of Manhattan, one that I cold love as much as the one I had left behind in Los Angeles. That class had been like a mysterious drug, one that made me happy and excited just to be there, even though I didn’t know anyone. It was something about the sunny large high-ceilinged hall, and about how the people who taught the classes seemed. They were all good-looking and young. They all seemed to be friends. And they did mysterious things like travel to India.

But Natvar’s class wasn’t at all like the big sunny one in California. His was in a small narrow carpeted room where the lights were kept very low most of the time, and when they came up they came up on dimmers, and there was bamboo flute music playing the background and Natvar stood up front facing us, his hands clasped above his head, the breath sometimes snorting out of him as he led us from one movement to the next.

But I liked him a lot that first class. I liked the way he started the class. The lights were up and he spoke to us first. Very naturally. Something about his day, maybe something that had happened on the subway that he had noticed, that had meant something to him. I sat on the floor, cross-legged, tidily next to and behind a couple of women – there were a couple of men seated on the other side of the narrow aisle that ran down the center of the room, marked off with masking tape on the black low-pile carpet – I saw with my back very straight, really listening. It was like opening a book at random and finding someone speaking your story. There was something about how he spoke – gentle and strong at the same time – the way he noticed the old lady on the subway and how it reminded him of his grandmother back in Athens when he was growing up – that made me feel I was with someone who thought and felt like I did, but someone who could speak it. I could never speak from the place where I felt things or noticed things. I could only be silent when things were important. Things always seemed too important for words and I had spent many years in a kind of silence. People who knew me probably didn’t think of me as quiet, but I felt frustratingly silent, unable to say most of what I wanted to, unable even to think most of it. And there was this man with alive brown eyes and a smile just speaking and speaking things I knew I could have been saying, those words could have been mine. It had never happened to me before, hearing someone talk for me.

I went back to Natvar’s classes haphazardly, still going over to other classes, still looking for the perfect class, venturing back to Natvar’s now and then – until I just quit all the others. Natvar’s class was the best in the end, not because it was vigorous enough – he said it was all in the breath not in how much you pushed – but because something happened there that didn’t happen anywhere else. I did not feel anonymous when I stepped into Natvar’s school It was not a place of bland yoga-class conversation. No, Natvar was really there. Him. Not just a yoga teacher trying to be pleasant. But a man with an accent I couldn’t identify who was joyful to see me, who called my name and told the pretty old lady who seemed to work for him to make me a cup of tea with boiling water and pieces of fresh ginger.