MAYBE ~ Marta

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.