mighty purifying practice. It burns away all your junk, all your negative emotions. And I
think it's probably having a positive effect on you if you're experiencing such strong
emotions and physical reactions while you're chanting it. This stuff can be painful, but it's
awfully beneficial."
"How do you keep the motivation to stay with it?"
"What's the alternative? To quit whenever something gets challenging? To futz around
your whole life, miserable and incomplete?"
"Did you really just say 'futz around'?"
"Yes. Yes, I did."
"What should I do?"
"You have to decide for yourself. But my advice--since you asked--is that you stick to
chanting the Gurugita while you're here, especially because you're having such an
extreme reaction to it. If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's
working on you. This is what the Gurugita does. It burns away the ego, turns you into
pure ash. It's supposed to be arduous, Liz. It has power beyond what can be rationally
understood. You're only staying at the Ashram another week, right? And then you're free
to go traveling and have fun. So just chant the thing seven more times, then you never
have to do it again. Remember what our Guru says--be a scientist of your own spiritual
experience. You're not here as a tourist or a journalist; you're here as a seeker. So explore
it."
"So you're not letting me off the hook?"
"You can let yourself off the hook anytime you want, Liz. That's the divine contract of a
little something we call free will. "
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So I went to the chant the next morning, all full of resolve, and the Gurugita kicked me
down a twenty-foot flight of cement stairs--or anyway, that's how it felt. The following
day it was even worse. I woke up in a fury, and before I even got to the temple I was
already sweating, boiling, teeming. I kept thinking: "It's only an hour and a half--you can
do anything for an hour and a half. For God's sake, you have friends who were in labor
for fourteen hours . . ." But still, I could not have been less comfortable in this chair if I
had been stapled to it. I kept feeling fireballs of, like, menopausal heat pulsing over me,
and I thought I might faint, or bite somebody in my fury.
My anger was giant. It took in everyone in this world, but it was most specifically
directed at Swamiji--my Guru's master, who had instituted this ritual chanting of the
Gurugita in the first place. This was not my first difficult encounter with the great andnow-deceased Yogi. He was the one who had come to me in my dream on the beach,
demanding to know how I intended to stop the tide, and I always felt like he was riding
me.
Swamiji had been, all throughout his life, relentless, a spiritual fire-brand. Like Saint
Francis of Assisi, Swamiji had been born into a wealthy family and had been expected to
enter the family business. But when he was just a young boy, he met a holy man in a
small village near his, and had been deeply touched by the experience. Still in his teens,
Swamiji left home in a loincloth and spent years making pilgrimages to every holy spot
in India, searching for a true spiritual master. He was said to have met over sixty saints
and Gurus, never finding the teacher he wanted. He starved, wandered on foot, slept
outside in Himalayan snowstorms, suffered from malaria, dysentery--and called these the
happiest years of his life, just searching for somebody who would show God to him. Over
those years, Swamiji became a Hatha Yogi, an expert in ayurvedic medicine and cooking,
an architect, a gardener, a musician and a swordfighter (this I love). By his middle years,
he had still not found a Guru, until one day he encountered a naked, mad sage who told
him to go back home, back to the village where he had met the holy man as a child, and
to study with that great saint.
Swamiji obeyed, returned home, and became the holy man's most devoted student, finally
achieving enlightenment through his master's guidance. Ultimately, Swamiji would
become a Guru himself. Over time, his Ashram in India grew from three rooms on a
barren farm to the lush garden it is today. Then he got the inspiration to go traveling and
incite a worldwide meditation revolution. He came to America in 1970 and blew
everybody's mind. He gave divine initiation-- shaktipat-- to hundreds and thousands of
people a day. He had a power that was immediate and transformative. The Reverend
Eugene Callender (a respected civil rights leader, a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr.
and still the pastor of a Baptist church in Harlem) remembers meeting Swamiji in the
1970s and dropping on his knees before the Indian man in amazement and thinking to
himself, "There's no time for shuckin' and jivin' now, this is it . . . This man knows
everything there is to know about you."
Swamiji demanded enthusiasm, commitment, self-control. He was always scolding
people for being jad, the Hindi word for "inert." He brought ancient concepts of
discipline to the lives of his often rebellious young Western followers, commanding them
to stop wasting their own (and everyone else's) time and energy with their freewheeling
hippie nonsense. He would throw his walking stick at you one minute, hug you the next.
He was complicated, often controversial, but truly world-changing. The reason we have
access now in the West to many ancient Yogic scriptures is that Swamiji presided over
the translation and revitalization of philosophical texts that had long been forgotten even
in much of India.
My Guru was Swamiji's most devoted student. She was literally born to be his disciple;
her Indian parents were amongst his earliest followers. When she was only a child, she
would often chant for eighteen hours a day, tireless in her devotion. Swamiji recognized
her potential, and he took her on when she was still a teenager to be his translator. She
traveled all over the world with him, paying such close attention to her Guru, she said
later, that she could even feel him speaking to her with his knees. She became his
successor in 1982, still in her twenties.
All true Gurus are alike in the fact that they exist in a constant state of self-realization,but external characteristics differ. The apparent differences between my Guru and her
master are vast--she's a feminine, multilingual, university-educated and savvy
professional woman; he was a sometimes-capricious, sometimes-kingly South Indian old
lion. For a nice New England girl like me, it is easy to follow my living teacher, who is
so reassuring in her propriety--exactly the kind of Guru you could take home to meet
Mom and Dad. But Swamiji . . . he was such a wild card. And from the first time I came
to this Yogic path and saw photographs of him, and heard stories about him, I've thought,
"I'm just going to stay clear of this character. He's too big. He makes me nervous."
But now that I am here in India, here in the Ashram that was his home, I'm finding that
all I want is Swamiji. All I feel is Swamiji. The only person I talk to in my prayers and
meditations is Swamiji. It's the Swamiji channel, round the clock. I am in the furnace of
Swamiji here and I can feel him working on me. Even in his death, there's something so
earthy and present about him. He's the master I need when I'm really struggling, because I
can curse him and show him all my failures and flaws and all he does is laugh. Laugh,
and love me. His laughter makes me angrier and the anger motivates me to act. And I
never feel him closer to me than when I'm struggling through the Gurugita, with its
unfathomable Sanskrit verses. I'm arguing with Swamiji the whole time in my head,
making all kinds of blowhard proclamations, like, "You better be doing something for me
because I'm doing this for you! I better see some results here! This better be purifying!"
Yesterday, I got so incensed when I looked down at my chanting book and realized we
were only on Verse Twenty-five and I was already burning in discomfort, already
sweating (and not like a person sweats, either, but rather like a cheese sweats), that I
actually expelled a loud: "You gotta be kidding me!" and a few women turned and looked
at me in alarm, expecting, no doubt, to see my head start spinning demonically on my
neck.
Every once in a while I recall that I used to live in Rome and spend my leisurely
mornings eating pastries and drinking cappuccino and reading the newspaper.
That sure was nice.
Though it seems very far away now.
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This morning, I overslept. Which is to say--sloth that I am, I dozed until the ungodly hour
of 4:15 AM. I woke up only minutes before the Gurugita was to begin, motivated myself
reluctantly to get out of bed, splashed some water on my face, dressed and--feeling so
crusty and cranky and resentful--went to leave my room in the predawn pitch-black . . .
only to find that my roommate had left the room before me and had locked me in.
This was a really difficult thing for her to have done. It's not that big a room and it's hardnot to notice that your roommate is still sleeping in the next bed. And she's a really
responsible, practical woman--a mother of five from Australia. This is not her style. But
she did it. She literally padlocked me in the room.
My first thought, was: If there were ever a good excuse not to go to the Gurugita, this
would be it. My second thought, though? Well--it wasn't even a thought. It was an action.
I jumped out the window.
To be specific, I crawled outside over the railing, gripping it with my sweaty palms and
dangling there from two stories up over the darkness for a moment, only then asking
myself the reasonable question, "Why are you jumping out of this building?" My reply
came with a fierce, impersonal determination: I have to get to the Gurugita. Then I let go
and dropped backward maybe twelve or fifteen feet through the dark air to the concrete
sidewalk below, hitting something on the way down that peeled a long strip of skin off
my right shin, but I didn't care. I picked myself up and ran barefoot, my pulse slamming
in my ears, all the way to the temple, found a seat, opened up my prayer book just as the
chant was beginning and--bleeding down my leg the whole while--I started to sing the
Gurugita.
It was only after a few verses that I caught my breath and was able to think my normal,
instinctive morning thought: I don't want to be here. After which I heard Swamiji burst
out laughing in my head, saying: That's funny--you sure act like somebody who wants to
be here.
And I replied to him, OK, then. You win.
I sat there, singing and bleeding and thinking that it was maybe time for me to change my
relationship with this particular spiritual practice. The Gurugita is meant to be a hymn of
pure love, but something had been stopping me short from offering up that love in
sincerity. So as I chanted each verse I realized that I needed to find something--or
somebody--to whom I could devote this hymn, in order to find a place of pure love within
me. By Verse Twenty, I had it: Nick.
Nick, my nephew, is an eight-year-old boy, skinny for his age, scarily smart,
frighteningly astute, sensitive and complex. Even minutes after his birth, amid all the
squalling newborns in the nursery, he alone was not crying, but looking around with adult,
worldly and worried eyes, looking as though he'd done all this before so many times and
wasn't sure how excited he felt about having to do it again. This is a child for whom life
is never simple, a child who hears and sees and feels everything intensely, a child who
can be overcome by emotion so fast sometimes that it unnerves us all. I love this boy so
deeply and protectively. I realized--doing the math on the time difference between India
and Pennsylvania--that it was nearing his bedtime back home. So I sang the Gurugita to
my nephew Nick, to help him sleep. Sometimes he has trouble sleeping because he
cannot still his mind. So each devotional word of this hymn, I dedicated to Nick. I filled
the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him
with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it's all OK
because he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do anything to help him.
And not only that--he has wisdom and patience of his own, buried deep inside his being,
which will only reveal themselves over time and will always carry him through any trial.
He is a gift from God to all of us. I told him this fact through this old Sanskrit scripture,
and soon I noticed that I was weeping cool tears. But before I could wipe the tears away
the Gurugita was over. The hour and a half was finished. It felt like ten minutes hadpassed. I realized what had happened--that Nicky had carried me through it. The little
soul I'd wanted to help had actually been helping me.
I walked to the front of the temple and bowed flat on my face in gratitude to my God, to
the revolutionary power of love, to myself, to my Guru and to my nephew--briefly
understanding on a molecular level (not an intellectual level) that there was no difference
whatsoever between any of these words or any of these ideas or any of these people.
Then I slid into the meditation cave, where I skipped breakfast and sat for almost two
hours, humming with stillness.
Needless to say, I never missed the Gurugita again, and it became the most holy of my
practices at the Ashram. Of course Richard from Texas went to great lengths to tease me
about having jumped out of the dormitory, being sure to say to me every night after
dinner, "See you at The Geet tomorrow morning, Groceries. And, hey--try using the stairs
this time, OK?" And, of course, I called my sister the next week and she said that--for
reasons nobody could understand--Nick suddenly wasn't having trouble falling asleep
anymore. And naturally I was reading in the library a few days later from a book about
the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna, and I stumbled upon a story about a seeker who once
