meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please
infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of
thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a
normal one, at that? The thoughts came up as usual--OK, so it will be--and then the
attendant emotions rose, too. I began feeling frustrated and judgmental about myself,
lonely and angry. But then a fierce response boiled up from somewhere in the deepest
caverns of my heart, and I told myself, "I will not judge you for these thoughts."
My mind tried to protest, said, "Yeah, but you're such a failure, you're such a loser, you'll
never amount to anything--"
But suddenly it was like a lion was roaring from within my chest, drowning all this
claptrap out. A voice bellowed in me like nothing I had ever heard before. It was so
internally, eternally loud that I actually clamped my hand over my mouth because I was
afraid that if I opened my mouth and let this sound out, it would shake the foundations of
buildings as far away as Detroit.And this is what it roared:
YOU YOU YOU YOU HAVE HAVE HAVE HAVE NONONONO IDEA IDEA IDEA IDEA HOW HOW HOW HOW STRONG STRONG STRONG STRONG MYMYMYMY LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE IS!!!!!!!!! IS!!!!!!!!! IS!!!!!!!!! IS!!!!!!!!!
The chattering, negative thoughts in my mind scattered in the wind of this statement like
birds and jackrabbits and antelopes--they hightailed it out of there, terrified. Silence
followed. An intense, vibrating, awed silence. The lion in the giant savannah of my heart
surveyed his newly quiet kingdom with satisfaction. He licked his great chops once,
closed his yellow eyes and went back to sleep.
And then, in that regal silence, finally--I began to meditate on (and with) God.
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Richard from Texas has some cute habits. Whenever he passes me in the Ashram and
notices by my distracted face that my thoughts are a million miles away, he says, "How's
David doing?"
"Mind your own business," I always say. "You don't know what I'm thinking about,
mister."
Of course, he's always right.
Another habit he has is to wait for me when I come out of the meditation hall because he
likes to see how wigged out and spazzy I look when I crawl out of there. Like I've been
wrestling alligators and ghosts. He says he's never watched anybody fight so hard against
herself. I don't know about that, but it's true that what goes on in that dark meditation
room for me can get pretty intense. The most fierce experiences come when I let go of
some last fearful reserve and permit a veritable turbine of energy to unleash itself up my
spine. It amuses me now that I ever dismissed these ideas of the kundalini shakti as mere
myth. When this energy rides through me, it rumbles like a diesel engine in low gear, and
all it asks of me is this one simple request-- Would you kindly turn yourself inside out, so
that your lungs and heart and offal will be on the outside and the whole universe will be
on the inside? And emotionally, will you do the same? Time gets all screwy in this
thunderous space, and I am taken--numbed, dumbed and stunned--to all sorts of worlds,
and I experience every intensity of sensation: fire, cold, hatred, lust, fear . . . When it's all
over, I wobble to my feet and stagger out into the daylight in such a state--ravenously
hungry, desperately thirsty, randier than a sailor on a three-day shore leave. Richard is
usually there waiting for me, ready to start laughing. He always teases me with the same
line when he sees my confounded and exhausted face: "Think you'll ever amount to
anything, Groceries?"But this morning in meditation, after I heard the lion roar YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW
STRONG MY LOVE IS, I came out of that meditation cave like a warrior queen.
Richard didn't even have time to ask if I thought I'd ever amount to anything in this life
before I looked him eye to eye and said, "I already have, mister."
"Check you out," Richard said. "This is cause for celebration. Come on, kiddo--I'll take
you into town, buy you a Thumbs-Up."
Thumbs-Up is an Indian soft drink, sort of like Coca-Cola, but with about nine times the
corn syrup and triple that of caffeine. I think it might have methamphetamines in it, too.
It makes me see double. A few times a week, Richard and I wander into town and share
one small bottle of Thumbs-Up--a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian
Ashram food--always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips.
Richard's rule about traveling in India is a sound one: "Don't touch anything but
yourself." (And, yes, that was also a tentative title for this book.)
We have our favorite visits in town, always stopping to pay respects to the temple, and to
say hello to Mr. Panicar, the tailor, who shakes our hands and says, "Congratulations to
meet you!" every time. We watch the cows mill about enjoying their sacred status (I think
they actually abuse the privilege, lying right in the middle of the road just to drive home
the point that they are holy), and we watch the dogs scratch themselves like they're
wondering how the heck they ever ended up here. We watch the women doing road work,
busting up rocks under the sweltering sun, swinging sledgehammers, barefoot, looking so
strangely beautiful in their jewel-colored saris and their necklaces and bracelets. They
give us dazzling smiles which I can't begin to understand--how can they be happy doing
this rough work under such terrible conditions? Why don't they all faint and die after
fifteen minutes in the boiling heat with those sledgehammers? I ask Mr. Panicar the tailor
about it and he says it's like this with the villagers, that people in this part of the world
were born to this kind of hard labor and work is all they are used to.
"Also," he adds casually, "we don't live very long around here."
It is a poor village, of course, but not desperate by the standards of India; the presence
(and charity) of the Ashram and some Western currency floating around makes a
significant difference. Not that there's so much to buy here, though Richard and I like to
look around in all the shops that sell the beads and the little statues. There are some
Kashmiri guys--very shrewd salesmen, indeed--who are always trying to unload their
wares on us. One of them really came after me today, asking if madam would perhaps
like to buy a fine Kashmiri rug for her home?
This made Richard laugh. He enjoys, among other sports, making fun of me for being
homeless.
"Save your breath, brother," he said to the rug salesman. "This old girl ain't got any floors
to put a rug on."
Undaunted, the Kashmiri salesman suggested, "Then perhaps madam would like to hang
a rug on her wall?"
"See, now," said Richard, "that's the thing--she's a little short on walls these days, too."
"But I have a brave heart!" I piped up, in my own defense.
"And other sterling qualities," added Richard, tossing me a bone for once in his life.52525252
The biggest obstacle in my Ashram experience is not meditation, actually. That's difficult,
of course, but not murderous. There's something even harder for me here. The murderous
thing is what we do every morning after meditation and before breakfast (my God, but
these mornings are long)--a chant called the Gurugita. Richard calls it "The Geet." I have
so much trouble with The Geet. I do not like it at all, never have, not since the first time I
heard it sung at the Ashram in upstate New York. I love all the other chants and hymns of
this Yogic tradition, but the Gurugita feels long, tedious, sonorous and insufferable.
That's just my opinion, of course; other people claim to love it, though I can't fathom
why.
The Gurugita is 182 verses long, for crying out loud (and sometimes I do), and each verse
is a paragraph of impenetrable Sanskrit. Together with the preamble chant and the
wrap-up chorus, the entire ritual takes about an hour and half to perform. This is before
breakfast, remember, and after we have already had an hour of meditation and a
twenty-minute chanting of the first morning hymn. The Gurugita is basically the reason
you have to get up at 3:00 AM around here.
I don't like the tune, and I don't like the words. Whenever I tell anyone around the
Ashram this, they say, "Oh, but it's so sacred!" Yes, but so is the Book of Job, and I don't
choose to sing the thing aloud every morning before breakfast.
The Gurugita does have an impressive spiritual lineage; it's an excerpt from a holy
ancient scripture of Yoga called the Skanda Purana, most of which has been lost, and
little of which has been translated out of Sanskrit. Like much of Yogic scripture, it's
written in the form of a conversation, an almost Socratic dialogue. The conversation is
between the goddess Parvati and the almighty, all-encompassing god Shiva. Parvati and
Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the
masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom.
Whatever Shiva imagines, Parvati brings to life. He dreams it; she materializes it. Their
dance, their union (their Yoga), is both the cause of the universe and its manifestation.
In the Gurugita, the goddess is asking the god for the secrets of worldly fulfillment, and
he is telling her. It bugs me, this hymn. I had hoped my feelings about the Gurugita
would change during my stay at the Ashram. I'd hoped that putting it in an Indian context
would cause me to learn how to love the thing. In fact, the opposite has happened. Over
the few weeks that I've been here, my feelings about the Gurugita have shifted from
simple dislike to solid dread. I've started skipping it and doing other things with my
morning that I think are much better for my spiritual growth, like writing in my journal,
or taking a shower, or calling my sister back in Pennsylvania and seeing how her kids are
doing.
Richard from Texas always busts me for skipping out. "I noticed you were absent from
The Geet this morning," he'll say, and I'll say, "I am communicating with God in otherways," and he'll say, "By sleeping in, you mean?"
But when I try to go to the chant, all it does is agitate me. I mean, physically. I don't feel
like I'm singing it so much as being dragged behind it. It makes me sweat. This is very
odd because I tend to be one of life's chronically cold people, and it's cold in this part of
India in January before the sun comes up. Everyone else sits in the chant huddled in wool
blankets and hats to stay warm, and I'm peeling layers off myself as the hymn drones on,
foaming like an overworked farm horse. I come out of the temple after the Gurugita and
the sweat rises off my skin in the cold morning air like fog--like horrible, green, stinky
fog. The physical reaction is mild compared to the hot waves of emotion that rock me as I
try to sing the thing. And I can't even sing it. I can only croak it. Resentfully.
Did I mention that it has 182 verses?
So a few days ago, after a particularly yucky session of chanting, I decided to seek advice
from my favorite teacher around here--a monk with a wonderfully long Sanskrit name
which translates as "He Who Dwells in the Heart of the Lord Who Dwells Within His
Own Heart." This monk is American, in his sixties, smart and educated. He used to be a
classical theater professor at NYU, and he still carries himself with a rather venerable
dignity. He took his monastic vows almost thirty years ago. I like him because he's
no-nonsense and funny. In a dark moment of confusion about David, I'd once confided
my heartache to this monk. He listened respectfully, offered up the most compassionate
advice he could find, and then said, "And now I'm kissing my robes." He lifted a corner
of his saffron robes and gave a loud smack. Thinking this was probably some
super-arcane religious custom, I asked what he was doing. He said, "Same thing I always
do whenever anyone comes to me for relationship advice. I'm just thanking God I'm a
monk and I don't have to deal with this stuff anymore."
So I knew I could trust him to let me speak frankly about my problems with the Gurugita.
We went for a walk in the gardens together one night after dinner, and I told him how
much I disliked the thing and asked if he could please excuse me from having to sing it
anymore. He immediately started laughing. He said, "You don't have to sing it if you
don't want to. Nobody around here is ever going to make you do anything you don't want
to do."
"But people say it's a vital spiritual practice."
"It is. But I'm not going to tell you that you're going to go to hell if you don't do it. The
only thing I'll tell you is that your Guru has been very clear about this--the Gurugita is the
one essential text of this Yoga, and maybe the most important practice you can do, next
to meditation. If you're staying at the Ashram, she expects you to get up for the chant
every morning."
"It's not that I mind getting up early in the morning . . ."
"What is it, then?"
I explained to the monk why I had come to dread the Gurugita, how tortuous it feels.
He said, "Wow--look at you. Even just talking about it you're getting all bent out of
shape."
It was true. I could feel cold, clammy sweat accumulating in my armpits. I asked, "Can't I
use that time to do other practices, instead? I find sometimes that if I go to the meditation
cave during the Gurugita I can get a nice vibe going for meditation."
"Ah--Swamiji would've yelled at you for that. He would've called you a chanting thief for
riding on the energy of everyone else's hard work. Look, the Gurugita isn't supposed to bea fun song to sing. It has a different function. It's a text of unimaginable power. It is a
