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Siddha Yogini Girija Maa of Trivandrum , Kerala

Bhagyodayam — Mon, 26 May 2008 01:31:33 GMT

www.bhagyodayamyoga.com/home.htm

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AMMACHI IN NYC JULY 8 9 10 ALSO Swami Nityananda back at shanti mandir in August

Mitranand — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:44:17 GMT

I will be in nyc to see Ammachi and in PINE BUSH NY AT SHANTI MANDIR IN AUGUST shantimandir.com ALSO I JUST WROTE A REVEIW OF THE NEW BOOK ABOUT BABA MUKTANANDA AT MY WEBSITE ON MY SPACE www.myspace.com/starMitranand The book titled BABA MUKTANANDA A BIOGRAPHY written by Swami Prakashananda a swami of Baba's who was with him since 1969!! can be found at www.sarasvatiproductions.com

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skfuzion — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 04:54:02 GMT

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THE GURU LOOKED GOOD by Marta Szabo

A full-length memoir describing over ten years on staff in Siddha Yoga ashrams ~ a new chapter or two is posted every Tuesday ~ please scroll down to find the beginning or check the archives for past chapters ~ try printing if it's hard to read on the screen
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Chapter Twenty Eight ~ ON THE DEFENSE

One morning I was called into a very special meeting. I knew from the location that only the most elite members of the ashram would be present. I slipped into the confidential conference room that very few people knew about though it was just a few steps away from the room I shared with Helen. About twenty of the usual faces were gathered, sitting on the carpeted floor – secretaries, swamis, some department heads, people who just seemed, for whatever reason, to have won Gurumayi's favor over the years.

I noticed many of them had left colorful plastic sandals at the door. The sandals were pretty and good for the monsoon rains. Anything except plastic rotted and molded, never drying out. Gurumayi must have given the bright sandals out recently to some group in which I hadn't been included. Of course, no one mentioned them. They were just suddenly there, lined up at the door.

Katy Parsons welcomed us into the meeting and led us in the opening mantras. She had been around for a few years now, one of the most popular people in Siddha Yoga. Gurumayi seemed to love her and always wanted her around. And everyone else liked her too.

Katy was friendly to everyone, not just the elite. When she gave talks it sounded like a real person speaking. When Katy had first come to the ashram with her chubby, amiable husband and her seven-year-old daughter, her hair had been short and prematurely gray. She'd been some kind of non-profit executive out in the corporate world. Now she wore punjabis and her hair had grown long and become blonde.

Katy had a self-deprecating humor and was highly respected. Even though she was so new, Gurumayi had put her in all sorts of top executive positions – working with trustees and the board of directors -- the kind of positions that landed people in perpetual meetings and stress. But here in Ganeshpuri I saw Katy sometimes just walking around with Gurumayi as if she had plenty of leisure time. Katy was allowed to carry a small camera in the ashram and take pictures of anything she wanted. Snapshots. It was a strange sight. No one else – outside the official photography department -- was allowed to photograph anything, another new rule. Like everyone else, I liked and trusted Katy for her unaffected ways, and she always expressed a sincere warmth for me.

This morning Katy said that Gurumayi had asked her to come and give us an update on the New Yorker magazine article. We already knew something about the New Yorker article. It had started back in South Fallsburg the year before, just before I left. A journalist from the New Yorker magazine – one of the oldest and most prominent magazines in the country -- had begun visiting the South Fallsburg ashram and preparing an article about Siddha Yoga. Right from the start the journalist had raised alarm. She asked questions. The standard answers did not satisfy her. Instead of taking in all that the ashram had to offer, accepting our explanations for everything, she kept wanting to know what went on behind the scenes.

Since I was one of the heads of Registration back then, I had been put on alert. “Page Magdalena the moment the New Yorker journalist arrives,” I had been told, and there was a big flashing message in the journalist's computer record so that we wouldn't forget. The journalist was not to leave the lobby or go anywhere in the ashram without someone going with her.

By the time I was in India the New Yorker article was looming. The journalist wanted to print all sorts of rumors about Baba. We had been told the rumors, whatever they were, weren't true. The journalist was writing an article about the ashram, but I knew she couldn’t understand our practices or teachings at all. She was an outsider looking in. There was no way she could do justice to the greatness of Gurumayi and Baba. She would demean them, misrepresent them. The ashram had asked the magazine repeatedly not to print the article, but plans for publication, Katy said, were going strong.

"We have to stop this article from coming out," said Katy. "That's why you're here this morning." I sat on the carpeted floor and listened while Katy told us how our small group had been chosen to perform a concentrated daily meditation to halt the publication of the article. We were to meditate every day at a specific time together in Baba's house. “Meditation with intention,” this was our new seva, to take precedence over everything else we were doing. "Adjust your schedules," said Katy. "Make sure you are there, every afternoon, starting today." We were not to speak of it to anyone.

That the meditations were to be held in Baba's house signaled just how special and private this work was considered. I had never been in Baba's house before, the set of rooms in which he had lived that formed one side of the courtyard, adjacent to his Samadhi Shrine. At 3 o'clock that afternoon the group re-assembled in a small hidden courtyard. Rukmini solemnly ushered us into Baba's bedroom, a small room with a high bed in the corner, the walls covered with pictures of Bade Baba, his guru.

I was in awe. This was where Baba had sat at his desk and written his books. I could not believe that I was being allowed to see this hallowed place. We squeezed into the small room and sat on the floor. I was pushed up against Baba's bed. I could smell the dark wood of its frame. This was the greatest seva in the world.

Amazing, I thought as I settled in to close my eyes and begin repeating the mantra – Om Namah Shivaya – I honor my own Self as the divine -- how the busiest people in the ashram – or at least the ones that always seem the busiest, the ones you could never ask to do anything extra – had found time to come and meditate like this in the middle of the day.

A few days later Amanda came up to me. She was a thin woman with long dark wavy hair and a sharp, pointed face. Years ago she had almost become a swami which gave her permanent special status. I knew she did a lot of work very close to Gurumayi. Most of the time I did my best to be friends with Amanda. She was smart and witty, but it annoyed me how she always seemed to be parading the fact that she had almost become a swami. "I am," she always seemed to be saying, "a little better than you."

"Madri, can I talk to you a minute?" Amanda began, drawing me into a quiet corner of the garden where we would not be overheard. "I need to meet with you tomorrow. When are you free? It's to do with the New Yorker article. Another group is being formed and you have been chosen to be part of it, but I need to initiate you into Reiki first."

This was interesting. I had heard of Reiki, an alternative form of healing that I knew many people in the ashram swore by. I didn't know much about it and certainly hadn't known that Gurumayi took it this seriously. I thought about this new twist for the rest of the evening. Like everything that came from Gurumayi's inner circle, it was exciting and promised a change of pace.

The next day I met Amanda as scheduled, once again in the hidden conference room that was near my room but known only to a few. We sat on the floor and Amanda told me to close my eyes. Obediently, I sat with my back straight, my eyes closed. Nothing seemed to happen, but a few minutes later Amanda declared the initiation complete.

I opened my eyes. Amanda had a folder in her lap that she handed to me. “Study these,” she said. The folder contained three xeroxed sheets, each depicting a different diagram. I saw lines and circles with arrows pointing in different directions. Amanda explained that I was to memorize the three simple patterns so that I could trace them in my mind, without looking at the sheets. Back in my room, I read that this was a form of long-distance Reiki. Using these patterns, I would be able to affect people who were in other cities, other countries, even people on the other side of the world.

And so it began. A group of about eight of us met every evening after dinner, when it was dark, slipping quietly into the inner courtyard where someone from Gurumayi’s quarters would silently open the door to the narrow, dark corridor running through Baba’s house. From there, we were led into Baba’s Samadhi Shrine through a rarely used back door. By now the Shrine was closed for the night. It was lit only by the brass oil lamps that stood at each corner of the white marble tomb.

We sat on the marble floor, spreading our white woolen mats over our meditation cushions. We stayed for about an hour, our eyes closed, performing our Reiki exercises silently as we had been taught. Over and over, I mentally traced and retraced the simple patterns I had memorized from the set of xeroxed pages. As we each silently traced the patterns, we were to aim them at a woman called Tina Brown who, we were told, was the editor of the New Yorker magazine and at the woman called Lis who was the writer of the article. We were given vague physical descriptions of each of them so that we could roughly imagine each woman, drawing these prescribed patterns over the person we saw in our minds.

I did my new seva with determination. It was delicious to go every night into Baba’s Samadhi Shrine like this, alone, in secret. It felt like being ushered into some inner circle. And of course we were not to breathe a word of this to anyone, even the larger group with which we meditated every afternoon for the same purpose.

Back in South Fallsburg, we were told, there was another group of ashramites, meditating as we were. From time to time we had a conference phone call with them. We listened to the voice of Patsy Flemming, cheering us on. She was in charge of Public Relations for the South Fallsburg ashram, the woman whose job it was to persuade the New Yorker not to publish the Siddha Yoga article. Patsy was a bright perky blonde who had once been a television newscaster and she assured us over the phone that our efforts would not be in vain.

Weeks passed and then once again we were asked to gather in the conference room. The New Yorker article had been published, Katy told us. My heart sank. We had failed. “Don’t read it,” she said with emphasis. “Whatever you do, don’t read it. Don’t pollute yourself. It’s gross.” She thrust a finger in her mouth as if to gag herself, and stuck her tongue out.

I didn’t read the article. I had been told not to and there seemed no reason to. It was tempting, but I didn't want to disobey such a clear directive. Reading the article might make me waiver on this path and that was the last thing I wanted. Why read something that would only invite falsehoods into my mind, I thought. I never even saw a copy of the issue.

Instead, as the months progressed, we began hearing stories of devotees in the United States who were leaving Siddha Yoga because of the article. Some of them were people who had been considered rock solid, people who had written articles for Darshan magazine, who had taught scriptural courses and run Siddha Yoga centers in their homes. I was shocked at some of the names I heard, people who I had thought would be there forever.

We were not to say that someone had left Siddha Yoga. We were to say that they had become “disaffected” because no one could "leave" Siddha Yoga. Once you were one of the guru’s children, you would always be one of her own.

Posted by MartaSzabo at 3:15 AM 45 comments Links to this post

Chapter Twenty Seven ~ THE GURU'S COMMAND

“You’re too thin,” Gurumayi said to me in darshan one morning. “You should gain at least five pounds. Go up to the Swami Meeting Room and eat something there every afternoon.”

I bowed my head and retreated, holding her special words – meant only for me -- close. It was rare for her to address me directly like that about something personal. She had given me a clear command. I could not ignore it. I didn’t want to.

Except that the last thing I wanted was to gain weight.

It had started in my second year of college when I moved to New York City two weeks after my sister Durga had taken a bunch of my father’s sleeping pills. I had started not to eat. I thought it was because I didn’t want to weigh anything and because I didn’t want to spend money and because my boyfriend Jeffrey seemed so cool the way he slept til noon and didn’t eat until nighttime when he made a huge dinner and ate for hours.

I had managed to lose a bunch of weight then – never enough of course, but that was a long time ago. I had gained that weight back long ago. I liked eating now, but I still watched it. I wasn’t a careless eater. I couldn’t eat snacks. If I did, it was hard to eat when mealtimes came around. I didn't like Gurumayi’s command to gain weight, but I figured that all my history around eating had something to do with why she mentioned it. The spiritual path always seemed to be about doing things you didn’t want to do – breaking through your resistance. She was trying to help me in some way.

The Swami Meeting room that Gurumayi had told me to go to was a small sort of living room that branched off the big private conference room that so few people knew about, part of the private rooms and wings used by those who worked directly with Gurumayi. The conference room was where I laid out all the pretty cards that people sent to Gurumayi. I laid them out on the long table, ready for when she might want to see them. She didn’t call me often to look at the cards, just once in a while. We would walk up and down together, me pointing out ones that I wanted her to notice in particular.

Sometimes I felt very close and in synch with her at these times, as if I was with someone who knew and understood me well. Just like with Natvar. There had been many times with him too that I felt very close to him, as if we had something in common.

“This card’s pretty,” I had said once to Gurumayi, picking up a card made of handmade paper with a real leaf attached to it, trying just to offer her some conversation, share something I had noticed. I knew she hated it when I was “stiff” with her. Somehow there had to be a way to be relaxed around the guru without becoming sloppy.

“No, it’s not,” she’d replied abruptly. “It’s ugly.”

The afternoon of Gurumayi’s command to eat more, I stepped into the Swami Meeting Room hesitantly, like a guest. A woman called Georgia and Swami Atmananda were sitting on one of two small couches. I was shy. I hadn't been with either of them before in such a private setting.

Georgia wasn't beautiful or glamorous like almost everyone else in Gurumayi's closest circles. She didn't wear make-up or jewelry. She had strawberry red hair and glasses and a southern country accent and was one of Gurumayi’s main musicians. Despite her seeming lack of outer qualifications, Georgia was an innermost member and an ashram celebrity. I'd heard that when Gurumayi wanted to chant alone she called for Georgia. I could not imagine being that wanted. I'd seen Georgia perform in many programs over the years, singing songs she had written about her own devotional life and love for the guru with a big smile and an acoustic guitar. Before becoming absorbed into the ashram Georgia had been a folk singer with recordings and a following though I hadn’t heard of her then. She’d given it all up. Quit her career entirely to live in the ashram. I liked her tomboy casualness though we’d never spoken.

Swami Atmananda was a tall, thin, merry woman with long silver hair. She was one of the most respected elders of the ashram, a woman who had taught Gurumayi English when Gurumayi was still a teenager, long before she became the guru. Atmananda was a big favorite wherever she went in the world, always cheerful, always a friendly hello for everyone she passed.

“Hi, Madri,” called Georgia. ”Swamiji and I are trying to remember that melody for Om Namah Shivaya that we did the last time we were here in Ganeshpuri. Gurumayi wants us to chant it again for the Guru Purnima celebrations. Do you know it? It sort of goes like this.” She sang a few notes.

Atmananda started giggling. “That’s not it at all,” she said and they both started laughing.

Guru Purnima was coming up, one of the biggest Siddha Yoga holidays of the year. Guru Purnima was always held on a full moon and was a time when the guru was especially honored. Gurumayi honored Baba during Guru Purnima. We honored her.

This year Gurumayi had declared that we would have a nine-day saptah to celebrate Guru Purnima. A saptah was a long, extended chant. A saptah could last for hours, or for days, or even for weeks. When Baba had died there had been a one-month continuous saptah.

It wasn't easy to hold a saptah. Musicians had to carefully schedule themselves around the clock so that there was always someone playing the harmonium and always someone on drums, plus some lead chanters. I liked watching the musicians take over from one another during a saptah without any break in the music, the new harmonium player easing her hands onto the keyboard and herself onto the floor while the last player eased her hands off and stood slowly, a coordinated ballet. If a saptah continued through the night there would usually only be a few scattered chanters in the hours after midnight, but always enough to keep the chant going.

Saptahs were magical and powerful. Whether they lasted ten hours or two weeks, saptahs caused time and ordinary life to be suspended, taken over by the continuous sound of chanting. During a saptah, wherever you went in the ashram – whether you were in South Fallsburg or Ganeshpuri or in any of the other centers or ashrams around the world -- you heard the chant, broadcast from the hall on speakers. It permeated everywhere. Even when you were in your office you felt you were still part of the saptah. Even the word was beautiful.

I looked around the Swami Meeting Room, smiling and polite. Over to one side was a bright fresh kitchen with a large refrigerator as well as a counter and sink. “Gurumayi told me this morning to come over every day and eat something,” I explained. “She wants me to put on weight.”

“Well, I should say so,” said Swamiji warmly. “You’re nothing but skin and bones. Open up that refrigerator and help yourself. There’s always something yummy in there.”

I opened the refrigerator. Its shelves were empty except for a box of chocolates. I must have come on an off day. Chocolate was the last thing I wanted. Not in the middle of the afternoon. I knew if I ate it I’d never be able to eat dinner. But this was what Gurumayi wanted me to do.

“Oh, god, that chocolate is divine. Alejandra brought it from Italy. Take some. You’ll die,” said Georgia. I took a couple of round creamy chocolates and bit into one.

"Wow," I said obediently.

“There’s always something different in there,” said Georgia. “Gurumayi is always sending over stuff from the house.”

I went back the next day and the next. There was always chocolate in the refrigerator, sometimes imported cheese. Nothing ever that I wanted to eat.

I looked for other ways I could fulfill Gurumayi's command. I went to the clinic and explained that I had been told to gain weight. The clinic was a collection of rooms on the ground floor of a large building run by Patricia, a nice Australian woman. When people came to the ashram to stay who had any health skills whatsoever they were often asked to help in the clinic. Sometimes there would be a great acupuncturist staying for three months or a polarity therapist. There was one doctor, an American with an actual MD. Often staff people went into Bombay to see an Indian doctor or to go to a dentist. I always felt safe with the people at the clinic. I never thought about their actual qualifications. I felt like the work they did was blessed by the guru and therefore more valuable and healing than anything I could ever find elsewhere.

Patricia looked through her files and handed me a typed set of instructions on how to gain weight. "Eat four to six chapatis at every meal?" I said, glancing down at the page in front of me.

“That does sound like a lot,” agreed Patricia. I hated the dull, dry pancake-like staple that accompanied all meals in the Annapurna dining room. I didn't know how I was going to obey this command.

I tried Antonio, the man who was offering some of us confidential Tai Chi lessons every morning before breakfast. "Can Tai Chi help a person gain weight?" I asked, hopefully.

"Oh, yes," said Antonio, small, dark and serious. " Tai Chi corrects your body’s balance, it helps with everything." I wasn't so sure. The movements of Tai Chi didn't even get you to break a sweat, but I was glad he had said yes. Maybe it was true.

The next day, after going through the day's stack of letters with Gurumayi, I said that I was going to focus on Tai Chi as a way to gain weight. I didn’t directly say that this would be in lieu of visiting the privileged refrigerator. Gurumayi shrugged. It didn’t seem to matter to her anymore, but I hadn’t expected encouragement. She had delivered her command. She might never refer to it again. That did not lessen its importance. Obeying the command and discovering the secrets it contained was up to me.

The Guru Purnima nine-day saptah began, held in a small white marble hall with only three walls that opened directly onto the main courtyard, the steady downpour of monsoon and breezes of fresh, cleansed air. The sound of heavy rain mingled with the haunting melody of the chant in its minor key. The ashram became an enchanted cocoon. Especially at night. That's when Gurumayi came to the chant. She glided in and took her seat in her chair up front in the dark. We could only see her as a silhouette. But her voice was loud and clear, joining ours in the unusual melody I had never heard before. As the monsoon raged out in the courtyard and across the sky I sat in the hall, lost in what could only be sacred music and the most holy place on earth.

Posted by MartaSzabo at 3:09 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Chapter Twenty Six ~ MY COUSIN

My cousin is here in Ganeshpuri. He's from Hungary. His name is Laci, which is pronounced Lahtzi, a common Hungarian name. He is my second cousin once removed, something like that, a distant cousin I never knew about until last year when he showed up in South Fallsburg to visit me. Laci had come to the States on a visit and before he left my father had told him I was in South Fallsburg. Laci had looked me up. He had liked the South Fallsburg ashram so much he had stayed for a couple of weeks. He’d even taken an Intensive, bought a picture of Gurumayi and said he was going to stop smoking and meditate when he went back to Hungary.

He sent me letters from Hungary, writing in tiny, neat handwriting, saying that he was painting again, and meditating, and that he had stopped smoking for two weeks. Now he has shown up in Ganeshpuri. He is staying for a couple of months.

I like Laci's face. It is usually serious and brooding. He is a little shorter than me. His hair is blonde, short but not careful. He wears jeans and tee shirts most of the time. A cigarette looks natural, hanging from his lip. He is back to smoking though of course he has to go out into the street to do it.

Laci went to a Cooper Union – a really good art school -- in New York City in the sixties, but went back to Hungary when the U.S. army wanted to draft him for Viet Nam. He says that time in the sixties in the States was the best time of his life. He still paints, but to support his wife and three children he restores medieval churches, of which there are many in Hungary.

Something in me likes Laci a lot. I like his jeans and his impious self, so different from everyone else here. It would be easier though if we had met somewhere else, not in the ashram. I wish we had met in New York City or some place where my ashram self did not exist. It is hard to be with him here where he seems so at odds with what is going on.

When I meet Laci at the end of the day, on a garden bench, he says how he likes it in India and how it is so cheap to stay in the ashram. I wince when he says that. You shouldn't stay in the ashram because it's cheap. You should be here only because it's holy and you want to serve and give yourself to this holiness, because you want to do sadhana – spiritual practices -- in the home of the guru.

But I'm not sure Laci knows what the guru is or what this place is. He doesn't have much English and I know he doesn't understand most of what is said around here. Still, he is doing seva like everyone else. Because of his background, they have him supervising a team of people repainting the statues in the ashram many of which are weatherbeaten.

Sometimes I walk by on my way to a meeting, dressed in a sari, carrying my notebook that has lists and lists of people I am supposed to contact, calls I am supposed to make, and I pass Laci and his team. He always calls out to me with a smile and a wave and it's nice, seeing his friendly face here where most people just think of me as a darshan secretary.

Laci likes to go out exploring. He walks into Ganeshpuri village, a couple of miles down the road, and instead of just going to the Bade Baba temple and returning like I and most ashramites do, he hangs out at the places that sell candy and cigarettes and gets friendly with the people. He has told me of walking along the river and meeting all sorts of people who invite him back -- people who are living there, children, guys hanging out. He shows me photographs he has taken of smiling Indian faces. "Come with me," he says, but I can't. A darshan secretary can't go hanging out with the locals. No one from the ashram should be doing that.

We've been told to be very careful with the local people, even about how important it is not to pay the price they ask in shops but to always bargain them down because that's the way the economy works around here and we should not disrupt it. I hate bargaining, especially when the money in question is almost nothing in American dollars. But I try to do as the ashram managers have urged us. I try to explain to Laci about bargaining, but he doesn't seem interested. I know it sounds bad to him. It sounds bad to me too, but I know it is more important to follow the ashram's lead. Laci doesn’t get that and – with the little English he has and the even less Hungarian I have -- I have no way of explaining it to him. Laci does what he likes.

When Laci first came to Ganeshpuri, taking me by surprise, he brought a letter for me from his wife, Ilona. In it, Ilona seemed to be handing Laci over to me. "Take good care of him," she said as if she had already given up and I was the new girlfriend.

I'm not sure if I'm a candidate for girlfriend or not. I don't want to be, not here, surrounded by darshan secretaries, but Laci likes to call me "baby." It's embarrassing. I hope no one hears. I don't know why he does that. Does he know what calling someone "baby" means? You don't call your cousin "baby." But maybe he doesn't know that. I pretend I don't notice.

I haven't said much to Laci about my seva. Just that I'm a secretary. He is part of the outer circles of the ashram, the fringes, people who visit for short lengths of time, who only see Gurumayi once a day during formal darshan, who otherwise spend their days doing seva and going to the chants.

"Your cousin is pretty outspoken, isn't he," says Adriana, a thin New York City woman who has been put in charge of ashram beautification because she owns a gallery in Soho. Part of her assignment is overseeing the repainting of the statues. Her hair forms tight curls around her head. She always has a clipboard in her hand. "I tried to explain to him that seva is not about doing what you think is right, but about following instructions. He doesn't seem to get it."

I meet up with Laci later outside on the small dusty street where he can smoke. He's pissed. "They want I make the statue like a Barbie," he spits out in his heavily accented English. "I know to make every statue beautiful. I don't need Adriana. She knows nothing." Oh boy, I think. Laci doesn't get it. Doesn't get the meaning of seva at all. He thinks it's about doing what you want. I wonder again why exactly he is here.

On my birthday he gives me two framed paintings he has made, he says, right here in the ashram. They confuse me, abstract explosions of color – one violent with reds and oranges, the other muted in soft colors, lavender, rose. Abstract art bewilders me.

One Sunday, when the ashram is flooded with people visiting from Bombay for the day – it is before the new policy has kicked in, restricting this area -- Laci is out with his team of painters, working on the statues. An Indian visitor stops to talk with him. The man is well known. He owns a big museum in Bombay. After speaking with Laci for some time, he invites Laci to visit him and the museum in Bombay.

Two days later, Laci takes the train into Bombay for the day. When he comes back, he tells me how the man wants him to come back next year and teach restoration classes. Laci is excited. He has a gig. The museum owner has promised him a studio in which to work and teach and an apartment to live in. "Come," he says with delight. "I buy you a chai." He will be able to return to India next year in the winter when there's no work in Hungary anyway and everything will be paid for. It's amazing. Even I cannot believe how lucky he is. After all his miscreant behavior he is receiving such a great present from the guru.

As he prepares to leave and return to Hungary, Laci buys almost every book the ashram bookstore sells – books on Indian philosophies, scriptures and poetry. He loves how cheap books are here. He has to buy an extra suitcase to fit all the books into. Laci says with excitement that his oldest son is interested in meditation. He wants his son to read all these books, study all these things and learn them. I can sort of tell that part of Laci wants to read the books, but knows he never will. His son will do it for him.

The day before Laci’s departure I plan a nice dinner with him, the kind of dinner I would have if one of my regular ashram friends were leaving. I invite him to come to Amrit for dosas, one of the treats of ashram food, crispy paper-thin crepes filled with sundried tomatoes, goat cheese, fresh basil, whatever you want. It's my favorite meal and I am happy to have an excuse to spend the money.

A few minutes before he is supposed to meet me, I catch sight of Laci coming out of the big regular dining hall where you sit on the floor in long rows and eat dhal and rice. He has gone there for dinner. He meets me as planned, pretending he hasn't already eaten. He would rather be in the Annapurna kitchen with everyone else, sitting on the marble floor, eating with his hands. Amrit holds no enticement for him. It doesn't feel like India.

Posted by MartaSzabo at 3:05 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Chapter Twenty Five ~ ONE SMALL TASK

Author’s note:

Yesterday, the morning of Monday, July 30, my phone rang. I looked at the little screen that usually tells me who’s calling. I saw only the word “Private.” I had noticed over the weekend that while I was out my Caller ID had recorded that someone with this same “Private” reading had tried to call me several times but hadn’t left a message. So I picked up the phone. Clearly, someone was trying to reach me.

“Hi,” the male voice said. “This is Ganapati.”

Ganapati Buga had been a central figure in ashram management for many years, not someone I knew well, but I knew who he was and I recognized his voice. He said with a little laugh that he was surprised that I remembered him.

He said that I had signed a Confidentiality Agreement in the ashram and that I should take down this blog and that if I didn’t the ashram will take legal action. I don’t remember signing this agreement, but maybe I did. I thanked Ganapati for his call and hung up.

I've sent a request for a copy of the agreement and will continue posting as I have been doing.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE ~ One Small Task

We were going into what would have been the summer months if we were still in New York. Here it was monsoon. My first monsoon. I had found out that monsoon in India comes after the hot season with the same overpowering relief that spring comes after a New York winter. I had been warned so often about hot season -- the months from April through June – had been told what clothes to have ready, which meditation place was air conditioned and about the hotel in Bombay that had a swimming pool. Helen and I actually had an air conditioner in our room, almost unheard of in the ashram. Helen had it on whenever she was in the room, but I never ran it if I was alone. It was too Marie Antoinette. Almost no one in the ashram had air conditioning. Most people lived in dorms, some of them open-air. At best, they had ceiling fans. I heard of people pouring water on their floors in an effort to cool the rooms down. I heard stories of rats waking people up in the middle of the night. My room with its cool tiled floor, its shower, regular toilet and air conditioning was not something I talked about.

In hot season I learned to go outside as little as possible. The heat made nature cruel. I avoided her. But when the sweeping rains came, delicious and extravagant, I threw on a plastic poncho and went out onto Dakshinkashi, the huge glorious lawn-like field, and I walked with the rain in my face, exhilarated as if I was walking on the edge of the Atlantic in Maine.

There were not so many guests in the ashram these days, not like when I first arrived four months ago. Gurumayi had changed the policies of the Ganeshpuri ashram. She said that the ashram could not contain such huge numbers of people, that the ashram was suffering from trying to accommodate so many. She had people stand up in programs and during darshan to repeat a story about a famous moss garden in Japan. “People came from all over the world to see the beautiful moss, and then the moss began to die. No one could figure out why. And then they realized that the garden's thousands of visitors were actually raising the temperature of the air with their body heat and thus harming the moss.”

The Ganeshpuri ashram, Gurumayi said, was suffering in the same way. It would not survive if something was not done. And so everything changed. Almost overnight. From now on, it was announced, people who came to the ashram for the day could only visit the front of the ashram: the courtyard, the Temple and the Samadhi Shrine. That was the only public place. The back of the ashram – its gardens and eating places – was now only for people residing in the ashram. And if you wanted to stay overnight at the ashram you had to stay for at least one month. And if you wanted to stay at the ashram for this minimum of one month, you had to fill out an application. With an essay.

A special department sprang up to create the application, send it out around the world, and then – as the mail came tumbling in – to read the applications and make the decisions about who could come and who could not. Quickly, the applications piled up. I knew it was taking weeks and weeks to hear back on your application.

This was all hard to understand. Ever since I’d been coming to the ashram we’d been told how important it was to welcome people. And India was always full of Westerners traveling around, coming to the ashram because the guide books said it was a great place for good food and a clean bed. Many people had discovered Siddha Yoga and become long-time devotees just because they had stopped by twenty years ago, looking for a place to take a shower.

One morning I got a phone call from Australia. “Hi, Madri, it’s Elizabeth!” I heard the faint but familiar voice of a woman who came every summer with her two pretty teenage daughters to help in the South Fallsburg Registration department. She was a huge asset during those taxing Registration summers, always organized and hard-working. “Marina and Rose just got an email saying they have to fill out an application to come to Ganeshpuri,” she said, perplexed. “But we’ve been planning this for over a year. They already have their tickets for next week. So I thought we’d give you a call and see if you could help.”

“They do have to fill out an application,” I said. I hated saying it, it sounded so cold, but I had to. Gurumayi had told us there were to be no exceptions. “There have just been so many people visiting and the managers feel some limits have to be set.” You could never say that this had been Gurumayi’s idea.

“But Gurumayi loves Marina and Rose,” Elizabeth said. “They always come when she’s in Ganeshpuri. They’ve been excited for months.”

I couldn’t believe it either. I didn’t know what else to say, but to confirm that those applications had to be filled out just as if Marina and Rose were strangers.

A whole week was set aside for the staff to attend special talks and workshops during the day about why the ashram policy was changing so that we would all get it. A young Indian woman named Sheila who had headed up the Accommodations department for years spoke about how exhausting it was to run her department. In tears, she described impossibly long hours, days of no rest, her and others getting ill just so that they could keep up with the steady stream of visitors. “No more!” was the word. We were not here to service the public. We were for serious seekers only.

I didn’t fully understand why the example of the head of Accommodations was singled out. I liked Sheila a lot. She was hardworking and friendly and capable, and I believed her tears and every word of her story. But seva like this was typical, almost a tradition. Why were we suddenly talking about it? There was no real explanation, like: okay, for years we’ve been overdoing it and overlooking it, and now, finally, we are going to change. No, it was presented more as if this had all just come to light. I didn’t understand, but I let it go. No big deal. My job was to do what the ashram was telling me to do.

“Gurukula” was the new word. That’s what we were, that’s what the ashram was: a gurukula. A school of the guru. “That’s what Baba always intended the ashram to be,” said one of the swamis during the week. “A place for serious yoga students to study the scriptures and become learned.”

I had never gotten that impression from Baba’s books. How come I'd never read about being a gurukula before? If Baba had always wanted it then why hadn’t we had it? But I settled for thinking that we are always refining Baba’s vision, getting closer to what he intended.

In addition, we were now to refer to the ashram as "Gurudev Siddha Peeth," its formal name. We weren't to just say "the Ganeshpuri ashram" or just "Ganeshpuri." Technically, "Ganeshpuri" was the name of the local village, a mile or two from the ashram. Ganeshpuri was where Bade Baba – Baba Muktananda’s guru -- had lived. The small room in which Bade Baba had died was there as was the large temple in which he was buried. People came from all over India to the tiny, dusty village of Ganeshpuri to pray at the tomb of Bade Baba.

When Bade Baba had died in 1961 Baba Muktananda had claimed that he was the successor and set up his ashram down the road. But many of Bade Baba's original followers didn't believe in Muktananda and refused to consider him a guru. For them, the village of Ganeshpuri, Bade Baba's home, was the only holy place.

We were told that we had to distinguish ourselves from those who did not recognize Baba Muktananda. To refer to our ashram as "Ganeshpuri" sounded as if we were related to the people who only went to the village, to Bade Baba’s shrine, the people who scorned our ashram.

I didn't like having to call the ashram by its stiff, formal name, Gurudev Siddha Peeth. I had, like everyone else, always referred to it as "Ganeshpuri," a name that was soft and affectionate. I used the new name, but always with effort, as if I were practicing a spiritual discipline.

To support the new policy it was decided that we should now have computerized photos on our nametags like in South Fallsburg. I was asked to set up a new computer photo ID system from scratch. Someone figured that since I’d been the co-head of Registration back in the States where we used this kind of system, I’d know what to do. The new nametags here in India, I was told, would have to be computerized. The old stick-on Polaroid photos wouldn’t work. They weren't secure enough.

I went up to the tiny MIS department at the top of a flight of stairs, a small cramped room manned by Kenneth, a gray-haired, energetic, cranky American. “You’ll never get a computer ID system to work,” he said from his desk. “This is India, not Indianapolis.”

“Well, we’ve got to try,” I persisted, notebook in hand. Every day I visited Kenneth, feeling like I was banging on a locked door until – miraculously – he and his wife were told they should move back to the States. It was a shock to everyone. They’d been in Ganeshpuri for over ten years.

Randi was brought in from the music department to head up the computer department. Randi was smart, short-haired and pragmatic. She wore glasses and worked steadily, like a carthorse. Her walk was more like a trudge, her movements never rushed, always deliberate. She wore plain, unflattering punjabis and was clearly one of the worker bees, not a princess. She talked about computers with words I understood. "I'll put something together," she said with confidence. "Give me a little time though. I have about a hundred other projects."

Over the next few weeks, as I waited and met regularly with Randi, I also went over to the Art Department, a small room with one or two full-time people, nothing like the two corridors of offices back in South Fallsburg. I asked Tanya, the head of the department, to put together a few possible designs for the nametag – where the photo would go, the person’s name, the emblem of the ashram, the country they were from – everything that was on a South Fallsburg nametag. Tanya, a pale American with a mid-Western accent, looked tired. She had been living in the Ganeshpuri ashram for at least three years. She looked very at home here and said she loved India. Almost everyone who had lived here for a long time loved India.

"I'll get to this as soon as I can," she said wearily. She too had a backlog of projects, but I knew, since I was a secretary, that she would push the nametag project up the ladder of priorities. I was used to hearing how busy people were. It was standard. Department heads usually felt that they had way too much to do, that only a miracle could save them. I'd heard swamis and teachers talk about how seva helped you believe in grace. How else did the ashram keep going? Our efforts alone could never do it. That was clear. It always felt like we were accomplishing the impossible – the books, the programs, the meals, this worldwide and ever-expanding effort. The guru’s will – god’s will – was the only thing that could explain it.

I went over to the Accommodations department, housed in a white one-story building, and discussed where we could set up a computer camera and hang a backdrop against which people could be photographed.

Week after week went by. Randi was working on it but not quite ready. A few designs came in from the Art Department and some sample papers. I looked them over. None of the colors were very exciting. This was India. A beige, a muted blue, a dull yellow. I asked Tanya to make up some sample nametags using different designs and colored paper and when she sent them back, a week or two later, I put them in a folder and went up in darshan to get a final decision. In South Fallsburg I wouldn’t have asked Gurumayi to make this decision, but here in India – the way she sat out every morning – it was normal to ask Gurumayi questions like this.

I went up on the left-hand side of Gurumayi's chair, the side for ashram business, and waited my turn at a respectful distance, sitting cross-legged on a carpet. Three swamis and the ashram manager were already clustered on their knees at Gurumayi’s left hand side. I could not hear what they were speaking about. When my turn came, I scooted forward and knelt close to her. No one had to see what I was speaking to Gurumayi about. No one even had to know these nametags were being planned.

I discretely opened the folder and explained with as few words as possible what I was showing. I wanted her to choose which color and design she liked best. She glanced down and tapped the blue paper with one finger then returned her gaze to the people bowing down in front of her. "Thank you, Gurumayi," I said as I closed my folder. I touched my forehead to the carpet – quickly so as not to take up too much more time -- and retreated to my office, much closer now to getting these nametags done.

The huge crowds of visitors from the winter had disappeared and my office was no longer the privileged little office off the courtyard. “Go set up a desk near Registration,” Gurumayi had said a few weeks ago. “And try and think of another name for ‘Registration’” she added. “I never liked that name. Too harsh.” I had moved my desk and pondered a new name, but nothing had come to me.

Finally, the camera I had ordered two months ago arrived and was set up and a background curtain hung. Randi declared the computer hook-up complete and everything ready to go. I put up flyers everywhere, letting people know that they had to come to have their photo taken. Two days were set aside to take every ashramite’s photo. Everyone would have to come by -- every carpenter, every cashier, every cook, every nurse, every swami, even people who did their seva deep in Gurumayi’s world and were usually exempt from such mundane duties.

The only people exempt from photo ID's were the Indian ashramites, the people – most of them young – who came from all over India to live in the ashram and offer seva -- service to the guru. They were exempt for now. To start with. The world of the Indian ashramites was too much of a mystery for me to penetrate. It had its own ways of operating, separate from that of the Americans and Europeans, Asians and Australians. I felt a stranger to their world though we were here together, supposedly on identical missions.

For two days I watched over the camera in Accommodations, checked in with Randi, hosted the people waiting in line and scurried around making sure everyone showed up for their photo. People laughed. It all seemed so odd, computer ID’s in Ganeshpuri where the brooms were bundles of branches tied together.

The nametags were printed up. I arranged them in alphabetical order and the announcement went out. As darshan proceeded down in the courtyard the next morning, everyone stopped by Registration – just upstairs from the courtyard -- and picked up their new tag. It was like a great unveiling.

And then I got the message. "Gurumayi says to stop giving out the nametags. There’s a problem."

It didn’t surprise me. Although I felt I had done everything I possibly could to check that everything ran smoothly, I couldn’t believe that I could actually pull off this complex ashram-wide operation without a hitch. Plus it was seva, and seva was supposed to test you.

Darshan was still in full swing. I went up to Gurumayi directly, up by the side of her chair where I’d be able to speak to her. She told me that one of the Indian trustees had just seen the nametags for the first time. He did a lot of legal work for the ashram and he didn’t think it was good that the nametags indicated which country a person was from. The Indian government already complained too much that the ashram was only for Westerners. There was no need to emphasize it. It seemed obvious as soon as she said it. Something I maybe should have thought of myself. “You should have shown the nametags to him first,” Gurumayi said.

I nodded and ran back to my office. I recalled all the tags and reprinted them without country names. Two weeks later I distributed the new tags during darshan again, and this time we made it through.

The next day when I went up for darshan as usual with my batch of letters, Gurumayi looked at me and said, "Some people say the new nametags are ugly." I pictured a small group of darshan secretaries standing around together, complaining. Maybe they didn't like the bland color of the blue paper. Was I supposed to offer to redo them? I wondered for a split second. No, I thought. No way. “I guess you can't please everyone,” I said. Gurumayi shrugged slightly, not letting me know if she agreed or not.

Posted by MartaSzabo at 2:54 AM 13 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Chapter Twenty Four ~ Happy Birthday

It was the end of March. I had been in India for three months and my birthday was coming. I knew Jayshri, the woman who had been a darshan secretary for years, had had a special birthday meeting with Gurumayi early on the morning of her birthday a few weeks ago. I’d overheard the laughter coming from the secluded inner courtyard near Baba's Samadhi Shrine where Gurumayi often met with people privately. I didn’t expect a private party with Gurumayi, but surely there would be something special for my birthday. That’s how it was for darshan secretaries ~ a bit like a sorority.

I expected that one of the other secretaries would let Gurumayi know ahead of time when my birthday was. It was one of the things I’d been learning over the last few months – how we secretaries were expected to pass on to Gurumayi the little tid-bits of personal information we thought she might be interested in. Like certain people’s birthdays. It was part of our job.

I tried not to think about what I might receive. Instead, I wondered what would be the perfect gift to give Gurumayi. That was the ashram custom, to give the guru a gift on your birthday. Jayshri had mentioned in a recent gathering of a few of us secretary types that Gurumayi needed a silver cup. “Here in India gurus and brahmin priests drink only from silver,” Jayshree had told us in her rise-and-fall Indian English. In rupees, the new cup would cost a lot. Jayshri was wondering if the secretaries wanted to pitch in together to buy one as a group, a fitting gift from personal secretaries.

I thought about it. I had put aside $100 for clothes when I first came to India, but I hadn’t spent it. $100 went a long way in India. It would cover the cost of the silver cup. I told Jayshri I wanted to buy the cup myself, but she looked concerned. “It’s too much, Madri. Don’t you need that money?”

But I went ahead. I would offer Gurumayi enough money to buy the needed silver cup. It would be the perfect birthday present – valuable and personal, something Gurumayi would drink from every day, and it would be from me. I changed $100 into a thick wad of colorful rumpled rupee notes at the tiny dusty bank next door to the ashram. I prepared my best sari. I made myself beautiful and I walked up the morning of my birthday for darshan, my several thousand rupees in the most elegant envelope I could find.

It was about 11 o’clock in the morning and there had been no sign of my birthday yet. No one had called me with a special message from Gurumayi. There had been no invitation to the inner courtyard, but I was sure Gurumayi must be waiting for me in her chair, waiting to see me and wish me a loving happy birthday.

It was traditional in the ashram to tell Gurumayi in darshan when it was your birthday. Even though it felt strange to me to draw attention to yourself like that, devotees had always been encouraged to let her know. Otherwise, how could she congratulate you? How could she share her love with you? You had to open up to receive the guru’s gifts. She couldn’t enter a locked room. Usually even a standard-issue staff member in South Fallsburg found a bag of gifts on her bed on the day of her birthday, with the familiar but still desirable xeroxed note, "With love from Gurumayi."

I walked up to the shady spot where Gurumayi was sitting in the courtyard, the three sets of wooden padukas set out in a row before her. I had chosen a time when not many people were around. I thought I’d catch her eye, that we would smile at one another and she would say something. Gurumayi and I spoke every day. But as I approached her that morning she was deep in conversation with Rukmini. I kneeled down slowly, giving them time, I hoped, to finish their conversation. I put my envelope bursting with rupees in the basket and looked up at Gurumayi again. She was still talking with Rukmini. I bowed slowly, touching my forehead to the wooden sandals and paused, breathing in the sanctity of the moment. Then I looked up again. Gurumayi and Rukmini still had not noticed me. There seemed no way to interrupt them. I stood and walked away, not knowing what else to do.

“Did you tell Gurumayi it was your birthday?” whispered Janis with a scowl as I passed her at the edge of the courtyard from where she was surveying darshan. Janis was older than me – plump, pretty and blonde. She was known for her exquisite soprano and her harsh bossy manner. She had been on staff since Baba’s time and was always included amongst the most privileged. When I quietly said no, she said almost angrily, “Why not? Why do you make Gurumayi do all the work?”

I felt terrible. I had made some horrible mistake. Once again, I hadn’t done it right, something so simple, something people did every day, telling the guru it was your birthday. Throughout the rest of the day I replayed the scene. Why couldn’t I have gone up innocently and joyfully, and told her it was my birthday instead of assuming she knew? I shuddered at how I had revealed so much ugly pride. That must have been what I did wrong.

There were lavish gifts on my bed in the evening. Two saris of heavy silk, a sapphire bracelet and matching ring, some pens and a printed slip of paper that said "Happy Birthday With Love from Gurumayi." I had always wanted jewelry from Gurumayi, especially a ring. I slipped it on. Yes, it fit the fourth finger of my left hand, sparkling there like an engagement ring. Perfect. Perhaps everything would be okay.

The next morning I went as usual with my sheaf of letters to kneel at Gurumayi’s left side as she once again sat out in the courtyard. Ironically, I had promised a friend back in New York that I would let Gurumayi know that today was her birthday and that she sent Gurumayi her love. “It’s Rana’s birthday, Gurumayi,” I said with a cautious smile, “and she sends you all her love.”

“You see,” responded Gurumayi, turning to look down at me, “how sweetly she lets me know it’s her birthday? But you? All ego. You want everyone to chase after you.” She turned her gaze away from me, back to surveying the crowd gathered in the courtyard.

I never heard a word about the silver cup, whether it was ever bought or not. But that was okay. It was very important that when you gave to the guru you expected nothing in return.

Posted by MartaSzabo at 4:20 AM 149 comments Links to this post

Chapter Twenty Three ~ GO!

Finally, Gurumayi had given me something to do. “Correspondence,” she said over her shoulder one morning as she passed me in the corridor outside my room, and it became my job to read all the letters to Gurumayi from people who were staying in the ashram -- letters from the staff and letters from visitors.

There were hundreds of guests from all over the world crowding the small Ganeshpuri ashram in the months following Gurumayi's arrival. A small city of huge tents had been erected in a field to house the overflow, the tents all tended and decorated by the Accommodations department to look as elegant and inviting as possible. I went over there a few times to leave a note on someone’s cot. There were almost no phones in the ashram and usually the only means of communication was in person or with notes. I never saw anyone in the tents during the daytime when I made my visits. The large shady tents seemed simple, clean and orderly, a world unto themselves.

Every morning Gurumayi sat out in the courtyard, giving darshan for several hours. It was the focus of the day. Everybody went though most waited until the end of the morning, just before lunch, after putting in several hours at their seva. I had quickly learned how different darshan was here in India than in the West. Here, Gurumayi sat outside in the shade of the overhanging roof of Baba's "house," the suite of rooms in which he had lived and which now included his Samadhi Shrine where he was buried.

I thought often of Baba’s rooms and wished I could see them, wished I could see where he had spent his days. Baba was still so dear to me. I had come to this yoga through his books and still I loved to read his words, his strict but encouraging directions on how to reach perfection. Alone in my room with a copy of his autobiography, describing his years of solitary meditation, I wondered what my scurrying life as a secretary had to do with Baba’s path, but here I was and one thing Baba always said was to obey the guru.

With her back against Baba’s building, Gurumayi sat every morning on a large, wicker chair placed on a broad Oriental carpet spread over the white marble. Usually she wore dark glasses and didn't speak to, or even seem to notice, most of the people as they approached for her silent blessing. There was no wand of peacock feathers in India, no bright lights, no music. The guru didn’t laugh and chat. She sat there, behind sunglasses, almost a statue.

Three sets of wooden sandals, or padukas, were lined up in a row, each on a low pedestal, several feet in front of her chair. People approached and knelt before the padukas. Some touched the padukas with their fingers, then touched their forehead and heart. Others bowed their foreheads directly onto the sandals, symbol of the guru's feet, the source of divine energy, the holiest of holies.

I had heard that Indian people sometimes tried to literally touch Gurumayi’s feet, and that she didn't like it. Her feet were usually bare in India. When she came out to sit in the mornings out in the courtyard, Rukmini – always at her side – rushed to scatter large embroidered silk cushions around the base of her chair. Here, Gurumayi didn't sit with her feet tucked up under her skirts like she did in South Fallsburg. She hid her feet amongst the cushions. “And that’s why Gurumayi carries that little cane when she walks around the ashram,” Helen told me briskly, “so she can bat away anyone who makes a dive for her feet.”

I loved these little explanations of Gurumayi, small windows into who she was. I didn’t know how to place her – as a human being or as god. Somehow she was supposed to be both and it was a mistake to think of her as just one or the other. She was a human who had become god -- in a way that supposedly we all could -- and she was god who – out of compassion -- remained human.

I had a routine now. Straight after breakfast I rushed to my windowless cubicle off the courtyard to give a final review to the letters I had chosen to show Gurumayi that morning. I would only have a few minutes of her time so I chose the five or six most important ones. I carefully stacked the letters in the order that I wanted to present them with a small note attached to each, reminding me of its contents.

I kept an eye on the courtyard – dashing out of my office every few minutes to go out and check -- so that I knew as soon as Gurumayi appeared and took her seat. There were only a few people around usually when she came out at about 10 o’clock. Most people were in their offices, or in meetings, others in the kitchens or gardens. The crew would be busy with building or maintenance. The people who minded the animals – the cows, a few monkeys and the collection of rare birds – would be tending to feedings and the cleaning of cages. The only people who witnessed Gurumayi's quiet entrance into the courtyard were the one or two who might still be finishing up the daily washing of the courtyard's marble floor, or people who had just arrived the night before, who had not yet been assigned a seva and were just sitting in the courtyard, drinking in its blessings they had traveled so far to see and anticipated for so long.

I dressed carefully for my morning meetings with Gurumayi in a silk sari. I made sure to have a red dot of kum-kum between my eyebrows, the traditional Indian symbol of devotion called a bindi. Some women – even Indian women – preferred the convenience of stick-on bindis made of red felt, but a stick-on bindi had no meaning to me. I always used real kum-kum, a red powder, using the fourth finger of my right hand to apply it. My sister Durga had once told me that the fourth finger was the most appropriate for applying kum-kum because it was the finger least used. I applied a dot of fragrant heena oil to hold the powder in place. A lot of women used Chap-stick instead of oil. Chap-stick gave you a perfect circle upon which to apply the kum-kum, ensuring a nice round bindi instead of a smudge. But again, for me, Chap-stick was too prosaic. I loved the fragrance and authenticity of oil.

For daily darshan Gurumayi sat in her throne-like wicker chair with Rukmini kneeling, tucked in close, to her right. Sometimes I could stare at Rukmini, marveling at how pretty she was. She was in her early twenties, slim, with fine Indian features, her skin a soft olive, her hair long and black and straight. Even though she was fairly new to this intimate position, Rukmini seemed to know naturally what to do most of the time. She did not smile much except to Gurumayi and to guests. She was like a princess – elegant and composed, every sari-fold in place. They said she came from a wealthy Bombay family.

If you wanted to speak to Gurumayi in person the daily darshan hours were your chance. Most people, of course, did not dare and were not supposed to. For them, the silent bow to the padukas in front of Gurumayi had to suffice. But for those who had this privilege, there was a protocol. Certain guests could speak to Gurumayi if they were brought up by a host. And staff people – namely swamis and department heads – had the green light to discuss “business” -- shorthand for seva-related matters – during darshan.

If you had seva to discuss you were to approach the guru from her left. By late in the morning, there was a small crowd of swamis and department heads all kneeling at some distance to the left of Gurumayi's chair, all hoping to have a quick word with her before she stood up and walked away. That's why I tried to get to her early, when the courtyard was still quite empty and the pressure of time had not yet descended.

Every morning – except Sunday when only Indians were allowed to go for darshan -- I approached Gurumayi as she sat in the shaded corner of the courtyard. I knelt down a few feet from her left on the soft carpet, watching intently, waiting for a turn of her head in my direction, a faint nod to signal that it was okay to come close. Gurumayi rarely looked at me on these mornings. Her face was usually expressionless. When I got the signal – a slight turn of her head or a flicker of fingers -- I moved quickly forward, until I was kneeling just a few inches from her side, letters, notebook and pen in hand.

“Gurumayi,” I might say with a smile, “a woman from Hong Kong called Rabia is very worried about her older son. He's getting into a lot of trouble at school. She's here for two weeks.” One by one I went through the letters, doing my best to be both sweet and efficient. To each letter Gurumayi had a different response. I jotted each instruction down fast. Sometimes – especially if a staff person had written -- she dictated a brief letter back. Sometimes she asked me to bring the letter-writer to her in darshan. Sometimes she merely nodded. When the only response was a nod, I walked over to Accommodations after lunch, found out where that person was housed and left a pretty note on their bed, saying that Gurumayi had received their letter and sent her blessings.

I knew that the recipient of even such a short, standard response would feel a rush of love upon seeing that envelope waiting, as if the guru herself had just paid a visit. I knew because I had received such notes in the past. I felt honored to be the carrier of the guru's messages to her ardent devotees.

I never knew in advance how Gurumayi would respond. Sometimes she ignored elaborate letters from people she'd known for years. Sometimes she picked out someone who seemed insignificant and asked me to bring them to her. Once I waited to present a breezy note a woman had written, inviting Gurumayi to stop by her room sometime. There were other more pressing letters and I thought this one could wait. Gurumayi wasn't going to visit this woman anyway who was not important or particularly devout, and who had a nerve, I thought, inviting the guru over so casually.

I passed the woman in Amrit one afternoon and apologized for not having brought the letter to Gurumayi yet. "Oh, it's okay," the woman gushed. "She came to see me last night!"

Often the whole process -- these letters, my seva as go-between and the guru's varied responses -- seemed like theater designed solely for the benefit of her devotees. Gurumayi didn't need our letters to know what we needed, I thought. She tolerated them and the whole process of responding to them as she might tolerate the make-believe of a toddler.

People were beginning to seek me out. Finally, my office was getting some use. I hadn't expected this. People knocked on my door to speak of their most intimate lives, things they wanted the guru to know. They trusted me. I was the guru's secretary, or at least I was one of them, an approachable one, a secretary without the typical secretarial hard shell.

James was from New York. I remembered him from my Manhattan ashram days. He was a short man with a sweet, moustached face who had married a beautiful woman several years his junior. I remembered seeing them both at the Sunday Guru Gitas in Manhattan, newly wed. I remembered Sandi as beautiful, with long strawberry blonde hair, a few inches taller than him, an actress. They had been noticeable back then: the short man with his young, beautiful wife. I'd heard they had a little boy now. Now James was in Ganeshpuri, just for two weeks, he said. He was in my office one morning before darshan, crying. In Manhattan we had never spoken to each other. I had been so new then, he so much part of the established crowd. It was different now.

"The day I was leaving to come here," James said, "Sandi said she was taking our baby and leaving." His body was shaking. He was sitting in the one chair I had for visitors. "Can you take me to see Gurumayi, Madri? I have to talk to her. I don't know what I'm going to do."

"Of course," I said gently, moved by his desperate tears. And he was immediately relieved as if already he had unburdened himself and felt the guru’s reassuring love in return.

Or there was Catherine who asked to see me, a beautiful woman with a Julia Roberts smile from Los Angeles. "It's a guy thing," she said, laughing from the chair James had been sitting in a few days earlier. "Isn't it always?" She said she'd been seeing a French man who Gurumayi had warned her a year ago in a private darshan to stop seeing, but how she hadn't been able to resist and now she'd been jilted. "I have to let Gurumayi know how it ended," she said to me. "Can you take me up in darshan?"

"Of course," I said, wondering why on earth Gurumayi had spent so much time on this woman's love life.

It was tricky bringing up someone in darshan. I didn't do it lightly. Any contact with the guru was volatile.

While those who wanted to speak to Gurumayi about ashram business were waiting discretely to her left, guests who, for whatever reason, had earned a few moments of private time with the guru were brought up on her right hand side. All this while the multitudes – often five abreast if it was almost lunchtime – were approaching Gurumayi from the front.

When Gurumayi asked me to find someone and bring them up, or if someone asked to see her, I brought the guest to the line that extended from the right side of the guru’s chair. There we waited, kneeling side by side on the carpet behind the other guests and hosts -- one pair behind the other -- all of us alert like puppies with our ears perked, watching ahead to where Gurumayi was speaking or listening to the pair that had reached the head of our procession. As each had their moment with Gurumayi and departed, the rest of us inched forward on our knees. Two darshan girls struggled not to let the line get too long at any one time. “Can you come back in a few minutes?” they might say as you approached with your guest in tow. This line of people being privately introduced was not supposed to be too noticeable.

Rukmini -- up on Gurumayi's right hand side all through darshan – was busy, Gurumayi’s last shield of protection. When I got to the head of the line with my guest I would whisper in Rukmini’s ear why I was there. When Rukmini nodded I gestured with a smile to my guest and we moved quickly over the last few inches of carpet until we were kneeling right up against Gurumayi’s chair.

"Gurumayi," I would begin, my arm lightly around the shoulders of my guest in customary secretary-stance, "this is Rabia. She's from Hong Kong. She wrote to you about her son's difficulties in school." Gurumayi might turn her head towards me as I spoke. I loved it when she did that. I loved looking deep into her brown-black eyes and feeling connected to something huge and essential, something eternal that went far beyond this scene of conversation. She might turn her gaze towards her eager visitor. She might ask a question, sometimes surprising me by remembering more than I had told her. If the guest was too overwhelmed to answer quickly, I might repeat the guru's question or answer the question myself. That's what hosts were for, to make sure things went smoothly and the guru's time was not wasted. I kept my eyes on Gurumayi's face, watching for any sign of irritation or the signal that she had had enough.

The guest always shone with joy as we bowed and walked away. I knew that this day in Ganeshpuri, when the guru had spoken to her, would live forever in this devotee's mind. Off to the side of the courtyard, away from the crowds, we gave each other a parting hug. Both of us had just had close, personal darshan. Even for me for whom it happened almost every day, it was a strong experience. I waited, relieved that things had gone well this time, while the guest dried her eyes. Gently, I wished her well as she moved towards Baba's Samadhi Shrine to meditate and absorb all she had received. And then I too moved on, to my next guest, or to Gurumayi's left side with my daily stack of letters to review. You had to be quick to fit in all the guests and letters in one morning, quick but not rushed.

Things didn't always go well. One morning I introduced a newly arrived guest to Gurumayi. She had asked to see him. I smiled, gestured gracefully towards the young man kneeling at her feet, leaned forward so Gurumayi could easily hear me and told her the young man’s name. I had expected Gurumayi to smile at him and say something nice. Instead she turned to me. “Look at you," she snarled. "So frightened. Look at him. He's the one with the real love and he's not even a secretary." I lowered my eyes, aware of the young man kneeling, watching and hearing all this. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, but I mustn’t let it show. I had to be a model of good behavior. I had to keep hosting the guest. I had to take in the guru's words, let them enter, and not strike back. I’d read so many stories about how disciples accepted whatever they received from the guru, be it harshness or a smile, with equanimity. If you fought back, how could she do her work? What would be the point of having an enlightened master who loved you if you couldn't accept her guidance?

As I walked away with the guest, a gentle smile on my face as if nothing untoward had happened, I thought of the time Natvar had slapped my face in front of a client. He too had complained of similar things: I was a bundle of nerves, I had no love. I had responded to Natvar's slap as I had to Gurumayi's criticism -- my face not changing at all, as if nothing had happened. I’d learned it at home. I’d learned it from my father who could sit through my mother’s rages pretending nothing was happening, who always smiled and was gracious when guests arrived no matter what household disaster had just happened. For my father – and for me – it was what showed that mattered and we had that down. What didn’t show you were on your own to manage.

I found myself thinking of Natvar often during my first few months in Ganeshpuri. I felt his terrifying, paralyzing presence when Helen came racing into the room. "God, where's that file?" she had cried, desperately searching under her bed. "I can't find it anywhere. And I need it right now!" Seconds later she raced out again without having even glanced at me. I knew she was running to a meeting with Gurumayi and that she was scared. I saw the same look in Rukmini's face as she told me one afternoon to go over right now to the famous director's cottage and make conversation with him so that he wouldn’t leave. “Don’t tell him that Gurumayi will be walking there and wants to see him,” said Rukmini in her lilting Indian voice, a determined look on her face. “Just keep him there so that when she walks by he is there.”

I didn’t want to do it. I hated these forced things. It was impossible to make them look unfake. Couldn’t we just leave things to chance? If the famous director was there when Gurumayi passed, great. And if he wasn’t, no big deal. At least it would be real, right? But Rukmini clearly didn’t think this was open to debate, and perhaps she was right. After all, Gurumayi had chosen her to be her right-hand person, not me.

I walked across the dusty street outside the ashram to the group of small buildings known as “the condos.” Special VIP staff lived here – people who had actually purchased an apartment here years ago -- and some were kept for special guests. These were pretty apartments, shaded by trees and flowering plants, with living rooms and kitchens -- sometimes with second floors -- all with cool marble floors and colorful furnishings.

I was relieved to see the director and his wife sitting out on their small porch. Now, all I had to do was keep them there. He was an old man, tall and thin, who rarely smiled and didn’t speak English. His wife was about thirty years younger than him, buxom and harsh. I couldn’t believe she’d married him for love, and I couldn’t believe he really wanted to be in a yoga ashram. But what did I know? Certainly, the guru treated him with great respect. He didn’t have to do seva – neither did his wife from what I could see – and spent most of his days being driven around in a golf cart. In addition, I knew a young woman had been assigned to go over to his cottage every morning to help him prepare for the day. I’d known this man’s name since college film courses though I’d never seen one of his movies. “Would you like a cup of tea?” the wife asked politely.

I could tell she wasn’t thrilled to see me, but I did my best, asking how they were and keeping a light conversation going. After about twenty minutes Gurumayi appeared at the edge of their garden. I rose to leave. “What are you doing here?” Gurumayi spat under her breath as she passed me. “I suppose you want to run my life?”

“No, Gurumayi,” I demurred and melted into the background. I hadn’t wanted to come and she hadn’t wanted me to either. It was my fault. I should have said something. I should have stood up for what I believed was right. I must become stronger, I thought, otherwise I will never be in synch with the guru’s will.

None of the panic that I saw in the faces of secretaries and those working closely with Gurumayi fit with what I read in Baba's and Gurumayi's books, and yet the fierce, ever-present tension was there. It snaked out and bit me now and then, but I knew I was not part of the walled-in inner city -- where Helen and Rukmini and others seemed always to be trying so hard to stay afloat. Just like when I had lived with Natvar.

But I must be wrong, I thought, passing under the benevolent gaze of the statue of Tukaram, the Indian poet saint Gurumayi loved to quote. I was with a true guru now. How could I confuse her with Natvar? My fears, as Gurumayi had pointed out in front of that guest, were my shortcomings, the result of ego and limitation. It was her job to point them out. My job to have faith in her benevolence, no matter how grueling.

One evening I saw Gurumayi approaching me on one of the garden paths. It always felt like a visitation to catch sight of Gurumayi, especially at an unpredictable moment. Respectfully, I stopped and stood to the side to let her pass, my hands in prayer position, my head bowed. “I’m not crazy, you know,” she murmured as she went by, not pausing for a response. I pondered her words. Words from the guru were always significant, like text from a scripture. Did she know I had been comparing her to Natvar? Was she saying I was making a big mistake?

In addition to the letters, every morning I presented Gurumayi with a short typed list of who would be arriving in the ashram over the next few days. Not a list of everyone, just of people I thought she might like to know about. I had to get help on this from other secretaries because I didn’t know everyone with whom Gurumayi had a “personal relationship.” I would hold the list of eight or nine before her as I knelt and watch as she pointed to one or two. These were the ones who should have a vase of flowers waiting for them in their rooms when they arrived.

I’d put in my orders with Margit in the tiny air-conditioned flower room and then ferry the vases around to the rooms where they were needed in time for the person’s arrival. A couple of months went by before Gurumayi realized one morning that I had not been tucking the special “With-love-from-Gurumayi” notes under each vase.

No one had told me I was supposed to add those little notes. Pretty much the only training I'd received for being a secretary was Petra's advice to never begin a report to the guru with the word "I" -- and Helen's instruction to always carry a notebook so you'd never forget anything the guru asked you to do.

"If there's no note, how do they know who the flowers are from?” Gurumayi asked with irritation. By the end of the day I had a drawer full of the little slips that had charmed me so often, xeroxed on different colors of paper, “With love from Gurumayi.” Now all the vases I set out had the little note tucked underneath.

One Sunday Rukmini brought me a letter that had been mislaid. "I'm so sorry," she said breathlessly. "I just found this! You should have received it ages ago." The letter was about a month old, from a woman who had been on staff in Ganeshpuri for many years. Gurumayi always gave staff letters priority, and the longer someone had been around the more important their letter was. The woman's letter was deeply troubled and asked Gurumayi for help in saving her marriage. This was a top priority letter and it was a month late.

Even though it was Sunday and Gurumayi didn’t read correspondence on Sundays I sent the letter to her right away in a special folder.

Two hours later my office phone rang. “Hello,” I said, “this is Madri.”

“Don’t you know what day it is?” a woman’s voice growled. It didn’t sound like Gurumayi at all, but I had heard her disguise her voice on the phone before.

I had to know for sure if I was talking to the guru or not. Gently, I repeated, "This is Madri," hoping the woman would say who she was.

“I know who you are,” the voice said, dripping with disgust. “Why did you send me this letter today? You have no respect for my time.” The phone at the other end slammed down.

Shaking, I replaced the receiver. This, I thought, is what they mean by being close to the guru, that it's like being close to a fire. They compared it to fire because of the heat, but also the purification. I knew better than to think for one second that the guru was really angry. She had orchestrated this conversation to give me some valuable lesson, I told myself. I pondered her statement: I had no respect for her time. I had thought I did. I had thought I was always very careful in how I treated Gurumayi, but I must be wrong. I had something to learn. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to change, but obviously I was unaware of a flaw in my character. I would have to be more careful, become more sensitive.

Posted by MartaSzabo at 3:58 AM 22 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Chapter Twenty Two ~ GET SET

“You have to get some punjabis,” Sandra was saying to me earnestly the next morning. “I mean, what about all those times when you’ll get a call to come down to the courtyard right away because Gurumayi wants to see you? You’ll have to get dressed and look good in a second.” All the women I'd seen so far in the Ganeshpuri ashram, both Western and Indian, wore punjabis, sometimes saris. Punjabis were the long Indian tunics worn over matching pants, usually cotton, usually in bright colors. In South Fallsburg women had started to wear fancy silk punjabis on big holidays, but I had never owned one.

I liked Sandra though I didn't know her well. She was a petite older woman, not glamorous, but energetic, the kind of person you might have expected to run a theater company or an arts program for kids. She had never quite been an actual secretary though she seemed used to their company and unintimidated by it. She didn't have their good looks, but she had been around a long time, had done a lot of teaching in courses and programs and had been the manager of the Boston ashram for years. We’d never talked much before but now she was saying, “Now's the time to get your wardrobe ready. Once Gurumayi's here, you won't have a moment."

I had no idea what life would be like once Gurumayi got there. I figured I'd better just do what she said.

Sandra walked me across the dusty, narrow street outside the ashram to “Lookin’ Good,” a small store the ashram had set up for Western women devotees to buy saris, punjabis, lipstick, Tampax and hair clips. “The store is opening up just for us this afternoon,” Sandra said. “They just got in a new shipment. We'll get first choice!" She was excited. I wasn’t. I was hating this constantly awkward feeling of being new and with strangers. These people shouldn’t feel like strangers, but they did.

Sandra and Linda – another woman I had never spoken to though we had lived in the same ashram for years – assured me that I looked “gorgeous” in two punjabis and I bought them though I thought I looked stupid in both. The baggy pants with the long tunic tops looked like clown suits to me. “You just can’t wear Western clothes here,” said Linda with authority and I was pretty sure she knew what she was talking about.

Linda was a pretty woman with an all-American face, long straight mousy hair, light eyes and freckles. I didn't know exactly what she did in the ashram, but she had always been one of the close ones to Gurumayi. I knew she was involved with interior decorating and clothes. I imagined she knew what Gurumayi's private rooms looked like. She probably chose things like the fabrics for drapes and the armchairs the guru sat in. She might even, I thought, be someone who sewed – or even designed -- Gurumayi’s clothes. Not, of course, that I would ever ask.

The next morning as I stepped into my new costume, Helen, my big-sister roommate, intervened, picking up the scarf that was a standard part of the punjabi ensemble. "You have to drape it across your chest like this,” she said firmly, “and then safety-pin it to each shoulder and then let the ends hang back behind you. There." She stepped back to view her creation. I looked in the mirror. The image looking back at me was beginning to look like a Ganeshpuri ashramite.

Otherwise I didn’t see much of Helen. She was tall and plain and on the go, perfectly at home here. I had no idea what she did but if she was in the room she was on the phone or typing on her laptop. Usually, if I saw her at all, she was whipping in or out of the room, on her way to something and running late. She seemed to know everybody in the ashram – Indian and Western. When the phone rang in our room it was always for her, always some problem that needed solving. I heard her on the phone, making hasty last-minute arrangements for trustees to be picked up or for a shipment of something to be delivered. Helen was always getting something done. She knew who to call, she knew how the ashram worked and she seemed to know its relationship to the local officials in the surrounding towns and villages. No wonder she got the bed by the window.

She had told me a little about growing up in Oklahoma. "My mother gave me a typewriter on my tenth birthday," she said dryly. "I've been making myself useful ever since." She never went to chants, never got up early to meditate. She was too busy.

Gurumayi had not yet arrived in the ashram and the question seemed to linger everywhere in the air, “When is she coming? Will she come today?”

Since it was known that I was to be a secretary, it was assumed I had a lot to do, but I didn’t. No one had spoken to me about anything. As everyone else in the ashram dashed from one place to the other, it seemed I was the only one who had nothing to do. I started going to the kitchens to peel carrots and slice papaya. It didn’t quite feel right. I was sure that anyone else in my position would think of another, more deft solution, but I couldn’t. I felt guilty that I had no assigned work while everyone here was so busy. What was wrong with me? Had I missed something?

Within a few days, the ashram manager, a nice looking man from Australia, showed me the tiny windowless office that had been assigned to me. I realized this was a special office just because of its location. It was right off the courtyard, only a few steps from Gurumayi's chair where, I was told, she would soon be sitting and giving darshan. Clearly, ashram management was assuming I would need this kind of office.

In my idle hours I walked around the ashram. Its scale was completely different from South Fallsburg’s. The focus of the Ganeshpuri ashram was up at the front by the street. Here was Bade Baba’s dark rectangular temple, very different from the light, graceful temple in South Fallsburg. Here, the temple floor that Baba Muktananda had built for his guru was of dark gray marble not plush turquoise carpeting like back home. The statue of Bade Baba looked stern here in Ganeshpuri and he sat behind a low rigid railing. I missed the sweet South Fallsburg Bade Baba that I knew. Despite the differences, I went there early every morning to meditate, amazed that I was sitting on the same floor Baba Muktananda had sat on thirty years ago.

After meditating I walked the few steps over to the Samadhi Shrine where Baba Muktananda was buried, a simple square room with a white marble floor. The walls were carpeted with overlapping peacock feathers. In the center of the room was the wide square block of white marble under which Baba's body had been placed. Years ago, when I was still with Natvar, the dictator-like yoga teacher who had first introduced me to this yoga, I had seen the video of Baba's seated brown body, shining with sacred oils, being lowered into this tomb, his legs folded in the lotus position.

Every morning there was a new display of flowers artfully scattered across the surface of Baba’s white marble tomb. Tall brass oil lamps burned at each corner of it and in front, as you entered, was a pair of silver sandals on a pedestal. Every morning I stepped in Baba’s shrine with complete awe.

All day long people came to the Samadhi Shrine or to the temple to meditate, often bearing coconuts to offer or garlands of small orange marigolds bought from the street vendors outside. Bade Baba’s temple and Baba’s Samadhi Shrine made up two sides of the beautiful white courtyard. Stretching out beyond the courtyard, away from the street, were the ashram grounds and other buildings.

The ashram was known for its gardens. Although the surrounding valley was parched – its hills dry and brown -- the ashram grass was emerald green; bright flowers and trees bloomed. I saw parakeets up high in the branches of cashew and mango trees. The paths were shady with greenery. Here and there were colorful painted statues of Indian saints, gods and goddesses. It was beautiful, but it was not home.

Ashramites ate their meals in silence, seated on the floor in long rows, in a high-ceilinged hall where the traditional Indian food – rice, chapatis and dahl -- was served onto round, shiny, stainless steel trays. Most Westerners – as we were called -- tried to eat the Indian way, with no utensils, using just the right hand. But I felt no compunction to try this, nor did I like the food in the dining room very much. I missed the South Fallsburg menu. If I could have afforded it, I would have eaten all my meals in Amrit. That's where the good food was.

The Amrit here in the Ganeshpuri ashram was the Westerners' watering hole. Here you could find fresh fruit, croissants, goat cheese and even pizza on Saturday nights. The tables were all outside in a shaded pavilion, next to a swimming-pool-blue fountain and a long lawn that led to a towering colorful statue of Durga, the fierce goddess seated on a tiger. Like in Fallsburg, Amrit was a place to gather, a place to relax, at least for the non-Indian ashramites. The Indian ashramites were a mystery to me. Some of them mixed with the Westerners, but most of them didn't. I wondered who they were – the dark skinned young men and women I saw on the paths, dressed in plain cotton clothes, hurrying to offices I never saw.

There were other mysteries, like the Indian guards who stood at the gates of the ashram dressed in brown uniforms. I wondered why we had guards. Were they devotees, or were they hired? We had nothing like that back in Fallsburg. And who were the Indian people I saw in the gardens, the women in shabby saris with silver rings on their bare brown toes? Who were the Indian men I saw dressed in fresh white Indian clothes speaking to each other in Hindi? No one talked about them. No one else seemed to wonder who these people were. I figured I would catch on eventually.

Two weeks of waiting for Gurumayi passed before Helen came striding into the room one evening as I was getting undressed. "Set your alarm," she said, dumping an armful of manila folders onto her bed. "We have to be up in three hours, at 1 o'clock. She's coming and you and I are part of the welcoming group. Wear a sari." I realized again how I was now part of an aristocracy that had always existed in the ashram. I was being invited to do things I had never been invited to be part of before. I wondered why. None of the others seemed to wonder why they got these privileges. They had some gene I didn’t.

Nevertheless, I stood in the glow of a few small lamps the next morning in the small courtyard by the street with about twenty-five others. The ashram behind us was dark, silent and sleeping. The sun would not be up for hours. A black car pulled up and Gurumayi got out from the back seat with a six-year-old boy, the son of a German trustee. Linda, the woman who had helped me buy a punjabi, stepped forward, dressed in a sparkling sari and carrying a traditional round silver tray in both hands. On its smooth surface a small candle burned. There were flowers on the tray too and the requisite rice and spices laid out in neat rows. I watched as Linda stood a few steps in front of Gurumayi. She lifted the tray slowly and traced three large circles with it in the air. Then she dipped the fourth finger of her right hand into the sacred red kum-kum powder on the tray and pressed her finger gently to Gurumayi’s forehead, leaving behind a light smudge of red between her eyebrows.

Gurumayi stood through the short familiar ritual without expression, then passed through our silent group. I shyly wondered if she would notice me just because a few weeks ago in South Fallsburg she had sought me out almost every day -- but she brushed right by me.

I turned with the others and followed her inside the temple, watching as she bowed to the statue of Bade Baba, laying her entire body flat on the dark gray marble, her arms stretched over her head, her face to the ground. I was enthralled at the secret sight of my guru’s worship. While most of the ashram slept, I was being allowed to see this. Gurumayi stood, walked outside and into Baba’s Samadhi Shrine. We waited outside until Jayshri, a young, beautiful and calmly experienced Indian darshan secretary, came out of the Samadhi Shrine to let us know that Gurumayi had gone on into Baba's house and that we could go.

I didn't speak to anyone. The moment seemed too holy. Perhaps words were superfluous. Or maybe it was something else that kept me quiet. Maybe I had nothing to say or maybe nothing appropriate enough. I had felt this way before, a disappointment that an important event had taken place and that somehow its significance had passed me by. Something in me was dissatisfied, but I quieted it. I decided to be awed and overjoyed just to have been allowed into the guru's private life for a moment. Surely, that should be enough for any loving devotee.

Each day I wondered when Gurumayi would let me know what she wanted me to do as her secretary, but no call came. Seeing that I was not busy yet, one of the other secretaries asked if I wouldn’t mind being a host for some of the special guests. We weren't supposed to use the term "S.C." -- "Special Care" -- anymore. The new term for those to whom Gurumayi wanted to pay particular attention was "special guest." "Sure," I said.

I wanted to help wherever help was needed. Hosting special guests usually meant getting a phone call at two in the morning from the little security office at the front gate, letting me know that a guest from abroad had arrived downstairs. I threw on a punjabi and ran down the two flights of stairs to welcome my assigned guest, usually someone coming in from Australia or Hong Kong. And not just anyone. Only VIP’s got hosting in this way.

I didn’t mind meeting them when they arrived and showing them around the ashram the next day even though I’d only been there a couple of weeks myself. What I hated was joining my guests at meals or when they were having tea in the Amrit garden. But that’s what I was told to do. “Go sit with them,” Petra kept urging. “Don't leave them alone.” But I couldn't do it. I knew that if I were them I wouldn’t want me and my hosting smile showing up every five minutes. I would want to be alone in this beautiful, mystical place, or with people who were really my friends. Petra knew how to do it though. She never left her guests alone for a minute and could always think of light conversation. I tried to mimic her, but could rarely justify barging in on these people and getting them to chat.

One afternoon Gurumayi passed me in the courtyard. “I hear you are hosting,” she said. “Be careful. If you’re available to them, you won't be available to me.” Her words confused me. I thought Gurumayi would be pleased that I was using my empty time to help out, that I wasn't pulling rank and refusing seva like so many people in these upper circles would have. Darshan secretaries were never asked by anyone beyond their own kind to do anything. They were beyond the reach of the day-to-day needs of the ashram. Not to mention that Gurumayi had brought me here to be her secretary but wasn't giving me anything to do. I had heard her say many times in talks that when we were in the ashram we should always be asking, “What can I do for the ashram?”

Over the years I had seen people sometimes vie to get a particular seva over another. It was the kind of strategizing I had tried not to indulge in. It seemed to be against the spirit of seva. You were supposed to accept whatever seva was offered to you, trusting it was the right one, intended just for you. Seva wasn't supposed to be something you chose or maneuvered for. I told the hosting department that I couldn't help them any longer. I had to be available to Gurumayi.

I had seen for years that when Gurumayi walked about the ashram she was followed by a small group of people – usually some secretaries and other inner circle people. I had imagined that now that I was a secretary I would find a way to join the group that trailed after her when she walked around. I had been invited to do it a few times in South Fallsburg during my last few months there when it seemed almost every door had been open to me. I had felt like a princess walking behind the guru like that while others stepped aside and stood with their hands in prayer, watching the guru pass them by. But I had received no such invitations in Ganeshpuri.

One afternoon I heard Gurumayi pass my tiny but privileged office. My door was open. Perhaps I should show some spunk and invite myself. Maybe that's what she was trying to get me to do -- to offer myself rather than just wait to be asked. "Don't go anywhere near the guru without a notebook," Helen had advised me so I snatched one up. I slipped in amongst the small cluster of people walking behind her. Almost immediately Gurumayi spoke, without turning her head. “Madri doesn’t need to come.” Okay, I thought obediently, and dropped back, wondering when I was going to get the hang of this.

Gurumayi had offered me no personal greeting since she'd arrived. There was no sign of the guru who had been showering me with gifts and smiles and conversation back in South Fallsburg all autumn. I was not surprised. This had to be a test of my devotion. I was determined I would not let her indifference throw me. I had read about the guru's tests. If you thought the guru was just an ordinary friend, you were sunk. The important thing was to keep your focus, to trust and know that whatever the guru did or did not do, all she had in mind was your best interests. All she wanted was the liberation of each of her devotees. We were all equally precious to her. The illusions of preferences were only tricks of our mind. I was here to do sadhana, spiritual work, not be my guru's girlfriend.

People in the ashram often spoke of how they had experienced the “honeymoon” with the guru being over. Many people told stories – often in public talks – of how when they first came to the ashram Gurumayi had been so sweet to them, but that it didn’t last. After awhile, they said, the tests began. Gurumayi had also spoken about the so-called honeymoon though she said it wasn't true. She said that it was the devotee's delusion that there was a honeymoon and then a post-honeymoon when the sweetness was gone. She said the guru never changed. It was the devotees who changed. They were unable to hold onto their faith, she said, in something as huge and unfamiliar as unconditional love.

One evening, I was passing through a deserted hall with Helen. We came upon Gurumayi, walking with a handful of secretaries. “Quick,” whispered Helen. She pulled me to keep up as she quickened her step to join the group. Gurumayi walked out to a back corner of the ashram grounds where vehicles were kept and serviced, the small group following. It was dinnertime and no one else was around to notice Gurumayi’s evening stroll. I was reluctant to impose myself like this, but Helen kept silently urging me to keep moving. “Just stay until you’re told to leave,” she whispered emphatically. I was used to Helen knowing pretty much everything. I followed and hoped she was right. Maybe this was the correct way to be around Gurumayi.

Gurumayi stepped up into a jeep that was waiting for her with a driver at the wheel. About four secretaries in saris jumped into the back, giggling quietly. Helen pushed herself into their midst and me with her. “Come on,” she insisted. It still seemed rude to intrude like this on anyone’s gathering, let alone Gurumayi’s, but the possibility that this might be okay was tempting. Perhaps you were supposed to love the guru so much that you stuck to her side until forced away.

Gurumayi turned from the front seat and looked at me and Helen. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you had been invited.” I smiled uncertainly. “Well, whatever,” sighed Gurumayi and turned to face the front again. Helen winked at me. She was happy just to be there.

We drove along a dirt road to the back of the ashram and then upwards, still on ashram property, to the top of Tapovan. I had been up to Tapovan once or twice before. It was a hill in the farthest boundaries of the ashram, about twenty minutes’ walk from the courtyard. I knew Tapovan mostly from the video that had been made there a few years earlier of Gurumayi chanting the Guru Gita with hundreds of devotees. I remembered how we used to watch that video on Sunday mornings in the Manhattan ashram, spellbound by its beauty. The video started out in the dark of early morning, with Gurumayi and hundreds of devotees, wrapped in scarves and shawls, chanting around the light of a roaring fire. By the end of the chant the sun had begun to rise over the surrounding mountains, bathing everyone in golden light. Now I was here, just before sunset, in the back of a jeep with Gurumayi in person. I held my breath.

The jeep came to a halt at the top of the hill which had been artificially flattened, the trees cut down and replaced with acres of fine green, freshly mown lawn. We all clambered out of the dusty jeep. Rukmini -- young, beautiful and Indian -- was Gurumayi’s closest assistant here in India, always at her side. That evening she carried a bulky canvas bag. She walked quickly, glamorous in a perfectly wrapped sari, trying to stay close to Gurumayi, a worried frown of concern on her gorgeous delicate face.

Gurumayi strode ahead along the broad beautiful grassy lawn. From this height we could see out over miles of Indian countryside. I could see skinny trails of blue smoke rising here and there, the distant green of palm trees, mountains of burnt yellow earth. Gurumayi sat down on the grass in her red silk robes, facing the red ball of sun which was now close to the horizon. Rukmini sat down beside Gurumayi and opened a slim stainless steel thermos. She poured out some water and offered it to Gurumayi who shook her head without turning to look.

Everyone settled down in a line on the grass, looking out onto the horizon. I was careful to leave a respectful distance between myself and Gurumayi. No one spoke. We watched the sun get closer and closer to the edge of the earth. Clouds fanned out from it in stronger and stronger colors – purples and golds. We sat and sat. I wondered if the sun would ever actually disappear.

Again, I tried to take the moment in. I was sitting on top of a hill, on the grass a few feet from a guru – a living saint -- just watching a sunset. I should be relaxed, I thought. I should be absorbing every glorious moment of this joy and beauty. This was no time to be thinking ordinary thoughts. I tried hard to have a perfect mind, empty of anything frivolous.

And then it was gone. The sun, liquid, slid out of view like the yolk of an egg. Gurumayi remained a few moments longer. Then she stood and walked back to the jeep. We followed. I wondered if there was a right thing to say or if it was better to be silent. Gurumayi chatted a little with the secretaries who giggled and said things that made Gurumayi smile.

I felt tall and big-footed amongst them. No mellifluous words came to mind. I kept quiet, still feeling I was an outsider, not welcome, a party crasher. I struggled, trying to remember that the guru loved me, must have wanted me there no matter what it looked like. All these feelings of rejection, I thought as we bounced back down on dirt roads to the ashram gardens, must be ancient feelings, things from other incarnations, things I had been born with, things that were being burnt away by the guru. I had heard a swami once say that when you had painful feelings in the ashram it was evidence that the guru was cleansing them away for you. It was up to me to have the right response to all this.

That evening I sent in a note to Gurumayi, thanking her for the evening, saying that I had never had the patience before to wait and watch while the sun dropped out of view. The next morning I received a calendar of sunsets, a beautiful color photograph for each month and a note, “With love from Gurumayi.” I felt as though the guru had taken me in her arms and smoothed my hair. Maybe in public she was being hard on me, but I knew that secretly, between her and me, we had a deep and abiding connection. Her gift reminded me. I put the calendar up on the wall of my office. Even if things sometimes looked different, the calendar confirmed that the guru loved and understood me – not the secretary but the person inside I knew myself to be.

Posted by MartaSzabo at 4:08 AM 131 comments Links to this post

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* ▼ 2007 (28)
o ▼ July (11)
+ Chapter Twenty Eight ~ ON THE DEFENSE
+ Chapter Twenty Seven ~ THE GURU'S COMMAND
+ Chapter Twenty Six ~ MY COUSIN
+ Chapter Twenty Five ~ ONE SMALL TASK
+ Chapter Twenty Four ~ Happy Birthday
+ Chapter Twenty Three ~ GO!
+ Chapter Twenty Two ~ GET SET
+ Chapter Twenty One ~ ON YOUR MARK
+ Chapter Twenty ~ LUCKY, UNLUCKY
+ Chapter Nineteen ~ FAST FORWARD
+ Chapter Eighteen ~ A SHIFT
o ► June (8)
+ Chapter Seventeen -- SINGLES DANCE IN A PURPLE DRE...
+ Chapter Sixteen -- BEHIND THE COUNTER
+ CHAPTER FIFTEEN ~ SPIRITUAL NAME
+ Chapter Fourteen -- CRISIS
+ Chapter Thirteen ~ FACE TO FACE
+ Chapter Twelve ~ NO AIR
+ Chapter Eleven ~ HANDMAIDEN
+ Chapter Ten ~ SERVICE, THE HIGHEST FORM OF PRAYER
o ► May (7)
+ Chapter Nine ~ FIRST MORNING
+ Chapter Eight ~ RAISING THE STAKES
+ Chapter Seven ~ MOVING IN
+ Chapter Six ~ SUMMERTIME
+ Chapter Five ~ BEFORE DAWN
+ Chapter Four ~ THE MORNING AFTER
+ Chapter Three ~ HOMELESS
o ► April (2)
+ Chapter Two ~ IN GOD’S PRESENCE
+ Chapter One ~ NOTHING TO LOSE

About Me

Marta Szabo
I am a writer of memoir. My husband, Fred Poole, and I run a series of workshops we call Authentic Writing in which people write passionately about their lives. I do almost all of my writing in these workshops. For readers of the Siddha Yoga blog (the-guru-looked-good.blogspot.com): I was on full-time, live-in staff 1990-2000 in Manhattan, South Fallsburg & Ganeshpuri.

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posted in Siddha Yoga - 14 replies

Wherever You Are, Attain The Self

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 14:31:29 GMT

Video of Baba and Gurumayi (known as Malti)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZkSgfluXpP0

posted in Siddha Yoga - 2 replies

Namaste'

Ondrea — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 03:31:30 GMT

I simply desired to share my greeting.. as I was drawn to your gathering... as a practioner of Siddha Yoga.... it will feed my spirit anew.. to chat now and again.. of the teachings and sharings from Gurumayi...
Om ..
Ondre'a

posted in Siddha Yoga - 1 reply

a center in temecula-murrieta area?

asa — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:56:14 GMT

hello, i very pleased to have found this tribe.i have been gurumayi`s since her first trip to santa monica as the head of syda and she is my heart and soul.i would like to find some devotees in my area and see if we can establish a center here.i live on a homestead out in the n`atl forest, see synergy sanctuary,and while a syda center if possible would have nothing per se to do with it this is my home and i very much wish satsang with fellow devotees, jai gurumayi asa

posted in Siddha Yoga - 1 reply

request for prayers and chants .... Namaste'

Ondrea — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:39:34 GMT

Namaste' Beloveds
I have not posted here often.. I have received the love and blessings in others sharings.. and today I ask for your sweet prayers and blessings for me.. for this precious Spirit as ,I move deeper into and let go of 'old habits and paradigms ' that I have lived within.. those limiting beliefs that dwell in scarcity and pain.. in smallness and inadequacies, in fears and frozen terrors... those energies that hold the veil over my heart and eyes.. ( at what ever level it is)....
I humbly request your loving open hearts to embrace me.. the I Am..that knows deeply the truest expression of Spirit and of my Path here .. as I open my heart even more deeply in embracing this delightful Shiva that has entered my life.. for Spirit has been calling and Spirit has answered... I know not how all is to Be and at the same time I do KNOW...
I am preparing for a trip to Maui for a month to explore and share in this dance between Shiva and Shakti.. to embrace that heart that is calling me.. * and I watch as the small parts of me. wish to hide and try to prepare and make all right before I go' trying desperately to create safety before she leaves.. something"... " so my heart calls out to you to embrace me more deeply as I embrace mySelf.. and Let Go Into the Grace that IS ...
Om Namah Shivaya !!!
a trip in ease and comfort with all that 'needs' to be done before is completed with light and smoothness.. the finances unburdened and flowing.. the homes taken care of.. the ease worries and the deep breath of Peace.. permeating all that IS .. Namaste'
Ondre'a

posted in Siddha Yoga - 3 replies

Video of Bhagwan Nityananda on YouTube

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:35:03 GMT

was just surfing around You Tube when I put in "Bhagwan Nityanada" as a keyword search term. It took me to a short video that I believe was uploaded about a week ago. The web addy is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFlBf--DyCI

Enjoy!

Paul

posted in Siddha Yoga - 0 replies

Happy MahaShivAratri!!!

Elemirion — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:44:14 GMT

The Oakland Ashram is holding chanting on Thursday evening from 7:30 -9PM

Chanting Om Namah Shivaya is very auspicious this night. Each repetition of the Mantra is worth 1,000 repetitions. Come chant off that Karma...

posted in Siddha Yoga - 0 replies

Quan Yin

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 11:23:20 GMT

Quan Yin, the head of the gods, is a conceited coward who is extremely terrified to see mankind evolve into a warrior so powerful that the earth would tremble with fear by his mere presence.
Mankind is being deceived because his essence is turned into hookers and pussies by this conceited goddess.

Maharishi Chin Chau An.

posted in Siddha Yoga - 1 reply

Oakland Ashram Visit

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:20:55 GMT

Just returned from the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Oakland California. During my time away I celebrated my 49th birthday and made a "pilgrimage" to the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco . The morning of September 2nd (a personal anniversary for me; I was fortunate enough to meet Gurumayi on that day 11 years ago) I was sitting at a bus stop in Oakland waiting for the bus to take me to the ashram to chant the Guru Gita. It was about 6 am and the sun was not up, but in the sky a crow was flying making his "caw! caw!" sound. It brought to mind the cycle of death and rebirth. It was at that moment I knew something had been completed and now it was time for something to begin.

The ashram was warm and welcoming. I spent a good bit of my time doing seva in the dishroom. I had never gone to the ashram strictly to do seva before. I was amazed how envigorating and shakti-filled it could be. I regretted having to leave but so thankful for the visit.

posted in Siddha Yoga - 2 replies

I'll start.

Kylie — Sun, 29 Aug 2004 05:04:07 GMT

This year's new year's message has not been as easy to integrate as have others in previous years. I don't know if this has to do with me spending considerably less time at the Ashram than I used to or not, but I think talking about it and thinking about it with the sangham does increase an awareness of the nuances and meaning of the message. Are people here actively involved in their center, either by way of seva or going to evening programs, or practicing Siddha Yoga, for now anyway, on their own?

posted in Siddha Yoga - 10 replies