lose the focus of your true intention. Whereas, if you just go to one of her Ashrams and
discipline yourself to keep to the austere schedule of practices, you will sometimes find
that it is easier to communicate with your teacher from within these private meditations
than to push your way through crowds of eager students and get a word in edgewise in
person.
There are some long-term paid staffers at the Ashram, but most of the work here is done
by the students themselves. Some of the local villagers also work here on salary. Other
locals are devotees of the Guru and live here as students. One teenage Indian boy around
the Ashram somehow really provoked my fascination. There was something about his
(pardon the word, but . . .) aura that was so compelling to me. For one thing, he was
incredibly skinny (though this is a fairly typical sight around here; if there's anything in
this world skinnier than an Indian teenage boy, I'd be afraid to see it). He dressed the way
the computer-interested boys in my junior high school used to dress for band
concerts--dark trousers and an ironed white button-down shirt that was far too big for him,
his thin, stemlike neck sticking out of the opening like a single daisy popping out of a
giant flowerpot. His hair was always combed neatly with water. He wore an older man's
belt wrapped almost twice around what had to be a sixteen-inch waist. He wore the same
clothes every day. This was his only outfit, I realized. He must have been washing his
shirt by hand every night and ironing it in the mornings.(Though this attention to polite
dress is also typical around here; the Indian teenagers with their starched outfits quickly
shamed me out of my wrinkled peasant dresses and put me into tidier, more modest
clothes.) So what was it about this kid? Why was I so moved every time I saw his face--a
face so drenched with luminescence it looked like he'd just come back from a long
vacation in the Milky Way? I finally asked another Indian teenager who he was. She
replied matter-of-factly: "This is the son of one of the local shopkeepers. His family is
very poor. The Guru invited him to stay here. When he plays the drums, you can hear
God's voice."
There is one temple in the Ashram that is open to the general public, where many Indians
come throughout the day to pay tribute to a statue of the Siddha Yogi (or "perfected
master") who established this lineage of teaching back in the 1920s and who is still
revered across India as a great saint. But the rest of the Ashram is for students only. It's
not a hotel or a tourist location. It's more like a university. You must apply to come here,
and in order to be accepted for a residency, you must show that you've been studying this
Yoga seriously for a good long while. A minimum stay of one month is required. (I've
decided to stay here for six weeks, and then to travel around India on my own, exploring
other temples, Ashrams and devotional sites.)
The students here are about equally divided between Indians and Westerners (and theWesterners are about evenly divided between Americans and Europeans). Courses are
taught in both Hindi and English. On your application, you must write an essay, gather
references, and answer questions about your mental and physical health, about any
possible history of drug or alcohol abuse and also about your financial stability. The Guru
doesn't want people to use her Ashram as an escape from whatever bedlam they may
have created in their real lives; this will not benefit anyone. She also has a general policy
that if your family and loved ones for some reason deeply object to the idea of your
following a Guru and living in an Ashram, then you shouldn't do it, it's not worth it. Just
stay home in your normal life and be a good person. There's no reason to make a big
dramatic production over this.
The level of this woman's practical sensibilities are always comforting to me.
To come here, then, you must demonstrate that you are also a sensible and practical
human being. You must show that you can work because you'll be expected to contribute
to the overall operation of the place with about five hours a day of seva, or "selfless
service." The Ashram management also asks, if you have gone through a major emotional
trauma in the last six months (divorce; death in the family) that you please postpone your
visit to another time because chances are you won't be able to concentrate on your studies,
and, if you have a meltdown of some sort, you'll only bring distraction to your fellow
students. I just made the post-divorce cutoff myself. And when I think of the mental
anguish I was going through right after I left my marriage, I have no doubt that I would
have been a great drain on everyone at this Ashram had I come here at that moment. Far
better to have rested first in Italy, gotten my strength and health back, and then showed
up. Because I will need that strength now.
They want you to come here strong because Ashram life is rigorous. Not just physically,
with days that begin at 3:00 AM and end at 9:00 PM, but also psychologically. You're
going to be spending hours and hours a day in silent meditation and contemplation, with
little distraction or relief from the apparatus of your own mind. You will be living in
close quarters with strangers, in rural India. There are bugs and snakes and rodents. The
weather can be extreme--sometimes torrents of rain for weeks on end, sometimes 100
degrees in the shade before breakfast. Things can get deeply real around here, very fast.
My Guru always says that only one thing will happen when you come to the
Ashram--that you will discover who you really are. So if you're hovering on the brink of
madness already, she'd really rather you didn't come at all. Because, frankly, nobody
wants to have to carry you out of this place with a wooden spoon clenched between your
teeth.
40404040My arrival coincides nicely with the arrival of a new year. I have barely one day to get
myself oriented to the Ashram, and then it is already New Year's Eve. After dinner, the
small courtyard starts to fill with people. We all sit on the ground--some of us on the cool
marble floor and some on grass mats. The Indian women have all dressed as though for a
wedding. Their hair is oiled and dark and braided down their backs. They are wearing
their finest silk saris and gold bracelets, and each woman has a brightly jeweled bindi in
the center of her forehead, like a dim echo of the starlight above us. The plan is to chant
outside in this courtyard until midnight, until the year changes over.
Chanting is a word I do not love for a practice that I love dearly. To me, the word chant
connotes a kind of dronelike and scary monotony, like something male druids would do
around a sacrificial fire. But when we chant here at the Ashram, it's a kind of angelic
singing. Generally, it's done in a call-and-response manner. A handful of young men and
women with the loveliest voices begin by singing one harmonious phrase, and the rest of
us repeat it. It's a meditative practice--the effort is to hold your attention on the music's
progression and blend your voice together with your neighbor's voice so that eventually
all are singing as one. I'm jetlagged and afraid it will be impossible for me to stay awake
until midnight, much less to find the energy to sing for so long. But then this evening of
music begins, with a single violin in the shadows playing one long note of longing. Then
comes the harmonium, then the slow drums, then the voices . . .
I'm sitting in the back of the courtyard with all the mothers, the Indian women who are so
comfortably cross-legged, their children sleeping across them like little human lap rugs.
The chant tonight is a lullaby, a lament, an attempt at gratitude, written in a raga (a tune)
that is meant to suggest compassion and devotion. We are singing in Sanskrit, as always
(an ancient language that is extinct in India, except for prayer and religious study), and
I'm trying to become a vocal mirror for the voices of the lead singers, picking up their
inflections like little strings of blue light. They pass the sacred words to me, I carry the
words for a while, then pass the words back, and this is how we are able to sing for miles
and miles of time without tiring. All of us are swaying like kelp in the dark sea current of
night. The children around me are wrapped in silks, like gifts.
I'm so tired, but I don't drop my little blue string of song, and I drift into such a state that I
think I might be calling God's name in my sleep, or maybe I am only falling down the
well shaft of this universe. By 11:30, though, the orchestra has picked up the tempo of the
chant and kicked it up into sheer joy. Beautifully dressed women in jingly bracelets are
clapping and dancing and attempting to tambourine with their whole bodies. The drums
are slamming, rhythmic, exciting. As the minutes pass, it feels to me like we are
collectively pulling the year 2004 toward us. Like we have roped it with our music, and
now we are hauling it across the night sky like it's a massive fishing net, brimming with
all our unknown destinies. And what a heavy net it is, indeed, carrying as it does all the
births, deaths, tragedies, wars, love stories, inventions, transformations and calamities
that are destined for all of us this coming year. We keep singing and we keep hauling,
hand-over-hand, minute-by-minute, voice after voice, closer and closer. The seconds drop
down to midnight and we sing with our biggest effort yet and in this last brave exertion
we finally pull the net of the New Year over us, covering both the sky and ourselves with
it. God only knows what the year might contain, but now it is here, and we are all beneath
it.
This is the first New Year's Eve I can ever remember in my life where I haven't knownany of the people I was celebrating with. In all this dancing and singing, there is nobody
for me to embrace at midnight. But I wouldn't say that anything about this night has been
lonely.
No, I would definitely not say that.
41414141
We are all given work here, and it turns out that my work assignment is to scrub the
temple floors. So that's where you can find me for several hours a day now--down on my
knees on the cold marble with a brush and a bucket, working away like a fairy-tale
stepsister. (By the way, I'm aware of the metaphor--the scrubbing clean of the temple that
is my heart, the polishing of my soul, the everyday mundane effort that must be applied
to spiritual practice in order to purify the self, etc., etc.)
My fellow floor-scrubbers are mainly a bunch of Indian teenagers. They always give
teenagers this job because it requires high physical energy but not enormous reserves of
responsibility; there's a limit to how much damage you can do if you mess up. I like my
coworkers. The girls are fluttery little butterflies who seem so much younger than
American eighteen-year-old girls, and the boys are serious little autocrats who seem so
much older than American eighteen-year-old boys. Nobody's supposed to talk in the
temples, but these are teenagers, so there's a constant chatter going on all the time as
we're working. It's not all idle gossip. One of the boys spends all day scrubbing beside me,
lecturing me earnestly on how to best perform my work here: "Take seriously. Make
punctual. Be cool and easy. Remember--everything you do, you do for God. And
everything God does, He do for you."
It's tiring physical labor, but my daily hours of work are considerably easier than my
daily hours of meditation. The truth is, I don't think I'm good at meditation. I know I'm
out of practice with it, but honestly I was never good at it. I can't seem to get my mind to
hold still. I mentioned this once to an Indian monk, and he said, "It's a pity you're the
only person in the history of the world who ever had this problem." Then the monk
quoted to me from the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: "Oh Krishna,
the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as
the wind."
Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga. Meditation is the way. There's a
difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communion with
the divine. I've heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is
the act of listening. Take a wild guess as to which comes easier for me. I can prattle away
to God about all my feelings and my problems all the livelong day, but when it comes
time to descend into silence and listen . . . well, that's a different story. When I ask mymind to rest in stillness, it is astonishing how quickly it will turn (1) bored, (2) angry, (3)
depressed, (4) anxious or (5) all of the above.
Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the "monkey
mind"--the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves,
spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly
through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This
in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes
along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but-- whoop!-- how quickly I
swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it's the remembrance of an
angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind
decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows
promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your
thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are
never where you are. You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but
rarely do you rest in this moment. It's something like the habit of my dear friend Susan,
who--whenever she sees a beautiful place--exclaims in near panic, "It's so beautiful here!
