The Journey to India

The journey to India:

We are flying across Pakistan on the last leg of a flight from San Francisco to India.  The trip has taken three weeks, as the pilots   who are en route to  start a small airline in Indonesia  made many stops acquiring another plane, and doing repairs in Istanbul. I’m a passenger --one of the pilots,  an old boyfriend, offered  to give me a lift to India,  as repayment for   some money he owed to me. 

The pilots wanted to take some rest as they had flown many hours since we departed Istanbul.   They asked  me to sit in the pilot’s seat,   put the small jet on  automatic pilot, showed me how to adjust the (steering wheel) and  monitor certain navigation  instrument readings.  “Just  head towards the vast horizon--  that’s India, “ they said,  and disappeared  into the back to take a nap.

 I was terrified, not only about flying the plane which I knew nothing about;  any  familiarity that may have provided comfort  had been left behind  as soon as I boarded the plane .  Whatever   lay ahead had no name or form,  I could not begin to even find  words for  why I was travelling alone to  India.  Nor could I explain to anyone else, that some energy  inside of  me,    was   propelling me.   I felt  no more confident  about this  journey of my life than I was of piloting  this plane.  In these  hours of vast, empty space, over the plains of Pakistan and western India   the  most fundamental doubts,  questions and prayers began to resound in my mind.

 The questions seemed primordial    In fact later I was to study these questions  in the ancient   Indian texts,  the Uphanishads.   Who am I? (all parameters by  which I defined myself had been left behind.)  Why am I here? (there was no logical answer, yet the compulsion was something undeniable.)  What is my relationship to  this  I  world live in?  (Well at the moment I was thousands of miles away from any familiar world , I left behind friends, family ;  my  life  working as a fashion stylist  in Los Angeles and New York   and was currently  suspended hundreds of feet above a strange land hurtling towards an unknown world. )  I no longer knew who I was or  where I was going.  The why was a compelling force that could not be articulated.  

Prayer was not at all  a familiar act for me.   The recipient of my supplications  

didn’t seem to matter so much.   Early in the trip, over the Atlantic ocean  during the night, the engine cut out, the cabin became black as we plummeted towards the ocean below. The pilot and his wife began screaming, and I discovered prayer. Surely someone was listening as  I began to bargain for my life.  If I survived and made it  to India for my spiritual journey, I would dedicate  my life to be of  service to  others. The lights went on, the plane leveled out.  Later one of the pilots explained that  one  fuel tank had emptied and the reserve  tank kicked in causing the temporary power failure,  and we continued on towards Iceland.   From that moment, prayer became my intimate travel  companion.   It helped to fill  the empty space of this  leg of a lonely spiritual journey. 

Dropping Out  May 1969

 I’m in the Pacifica section of San Francisco conducting a garage sale, disposing   of an exclusive wardrobe of designer clothes that were  my wardrobe  when I was working as a stylist for Vogue Patterns magazine in New York.    The counter culture in San Francisco of the sixties had infected me.   The  mantra:  Tune in Turn on and Drop Out had eroded my value system. I had worked  in the fashion business for l0 years in Los Angeles and New York. 

For the past  4 years,  I was travelling eight months out of the year conducting  fashion shows of designer clothes that could be replicated by people who could purchase the patterns and have them made up by dressmakers and wear the clothes of Dior, Chanel, Valentino.  Three times each year I went  to our head office in the fashion district  of Manhatten and selected my personal wardrobe to be made up and accessorized with designer handbags, scarves, hats, shows.   I also selected the fabrics to be made up into the collection of designer fashions that I would take around the country for the next season and that would  be worn by the models   in the  fashion shows.

I had become a little exhausted from so much travel, sometimes one week in Seattle, and the next week flying to Chicago, then Madison,  Wisconsin and off to Dallas.  The change of seasons, time zones, and the unsettling effects of constant travelling had caused me to feel somewhat disoriented.  One morning I woke up in yet another Hilton Hotel and  I didn’t know  what city I was in.  Where am I?  I got up  and rummaged through the drawer for the Hotel letterhead .   “ Oh yes I’m in Cleveland.” But the sense of disorientation was getting worse and worse.   Underneath this question  there were  much more disconcerting questions emerging in my mind:  “Who am I?”  “Why am I doing this?´ “Is this all there is to life?”

Up to this point  my version of the American dream had fulfilled itself:  I had  a glamorous well paid job in the fashion industry, travelling to interesting places, wearing always the most expensive designer clothes   Everything I could have imagined when I decided to take up fashion design travelling from my home in Boise Idaho to Los Angeles where I studied in a fashion institute  had manifested.   There was satisfaction in that I was able to accomplish what I had wanted, but there was an abiding  dissatisfaction challenging this idea of finding any  abiding happiness and  meaning   in my life.

I had felt increasingly lonely travelling always on my own.  Those days the only other guests in the hotels I stayed in were married business men who would often make flirtatious overtures if I ventured alone into the hotel dining rooms.  Those overtures were most unwelcome and I took to travelling with my own little cooking implement where I was able to cook my own vegetarian food in my room.  Occasionally I met a group of rock musicians in the hotel lobby or elevators and for a little while I would hang out with their party of groupies in their rooms after performances, but the level of drug taking,  and pot smoking was unappealing to  my sensibilities.  Watching these sleazy men behaving like  pashes surrounded by their adoring harem was just too decadent and demeaning to me.  The panaceas of the day:  Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll didn’t appeal to me. 

One of the critical events that brought my despair to a breaking point was in New Orleans. It was Mardi Gras season, I had been invited to attend one of the grand balls.  I  was wearing a beautiful green velvet gown that I had designed and made myself, my date was a nice looking  man that one of the models in the show had organised for me. It should have been an exciting , glamorous  evening,  It was all so glitzy and decadent,   but  so impersonal, the masks on people’s faces gave it all a surreal effect that seemed just overwhelmingly strange to me. I felt like I was  suspended  in a bizarre  Fellini movie.    I fled into the ladies room  locked myself in the toilet  and wept in my loneliness, wondering  “Why was I doing this?  Is  this   all there is to life?” The women who came in to check their makeup and have a wee, looked at me with  obvious contempt ,”What’s her problem?”

After fulfilling my professional responsibilities, interviewing models, describing 

the fashions to the audiences that came for the shows,  doing media interviews and TV  spots on ladies’ talk shows.  I began spending my weekends   visiting any communes or alternative communities that might exist in whatever state that I was visiting at the time.  Sometimes they were Hare Krishna centres, I would join the groups and eat spicy tasty food, chant Hare Ram Hare Krishna with the floaty people in the community house.  I didn’t really know the significance of what we were doing or why, but it seemed to feel good.

Sometimes I   hired a car and drove out to a commune near the city in the Midwest where I was working.  The communes were made up of young people, wearing long peasant type clothes, genuine hippies in those days, growing vegetables, living in shacks without often electricity. These communities had  a very loose relationship between the adults and masses of children around. Any delineating of family seemed to be somewhat extraneous there, it didn’t seem to matter who was husband, wife, mother father, the emphasis was on the larger sense of family of the group who had chosen to opt out of the traditional society they had been raised in.  There was often emphasis on good healthy food, but again a lot of use of marijuana and sometimes LSD made me somewhat uncomfortable,  I was curious about their alternative values and lifestyle choices,  but could not find any appealing values  in these communities.  But at least there was some kind of  genuine raw, human emotions and aliveness that I felt was horribly lacking in the life  that I had been living in, with its emphasis on “the American dream”,  having a wealthy, glamorous life.

In between my travelling period which would generally take eight months of the year, I would return to where I was living outside of San Francisco, in Marin county.  The influence of the Haight Ashbury social upheaval had particularly spread out into this area.  When I was there I packed away the couturier clothes and brought out my  peasant dresses and flowing skirts.    In those days, we hitchhiked everywhere, there was an openness,  a breaking down of rigid boundaries, the flower children were evident everywhere in Mill Valley where I lived.  My roommate had lived in the Haight previously and was  very much connected with the sub cultural groups that blossomed out of that experimental music and drug  community. 

Though I was away much of the time, when I was home I would find the house filled with  people in various kinds of costumes, long haired boys wearing no shirt and lots of beads,  white witches with Tarot cards and lots of crystals, and other  flower children.   One night I  awoke from sleeping,  heard some noise of music, and voices.  I went out to find a group of  guys in Hells Angels vests, leather pants and jackets  making themselves at home in our  living room, kitchen and  music collection.  They weren’t overtly  ominous or threatening, but in this  alternative  culture these blokes  dominated the Bay area in those days.   These men in their   leather jackets were the alpha male contingent.   They commanded authority  and  if they wanted to squat in our house, eat our food, listen to our music,  we rushed to provide hospitality unquestioningly .

On another occasion, my roommate and I planned a party in our back yard.   As guests arrived, there were bands, gypsies, and a large punch bowl decorated with flowers that was an LSD punch. Though I had not intended  to drink it, somehow in the evening I did imbibe some.  As a result I remember vividly taking off my clothes, sitting down in a lotus posture and expounding   about spiritual truths like some kind of yogi .  I knew nothing about reincarnation at that time, but seemed to slip back into some very familiar sub-personality.  I remember my current boyfriend  being enthralled, and telling me to keep on talking.  The next day we danced through the Muir Woods forest down to the beach where other flower children were dancing  with abandon around the beach.

  But after the chemical had worn off my body reacted shockingly to the  drug, breaking out in rash all over the sensitive areas of my body, my stomach, underarms, neck.  It was clear to me that my body could not tolerate the chemicals, and from then on I avoided all of the drugs that the people around me were taking as part of their expression of their free existence.  I moved more and more into taking yoga classes, and practicing yoga and feeling more and more healthy. For me a doctor in New York City had advised that I take up yoga to deal with my stress,  a back injury, an overwrought nervous system, and periods of anxiety and depression. I started to feel more of a sense of self, stability and less alienation.

These forays into another kind of existence began to erode my sense of satisfaction with my work  as a fashion stylist.    I had become increasingly disenchanted with the value system that I had been raised in;  pursuing  the American dream, having a fancy sports  car, a   home in the Hollywood  hills, success and wealth.

I had experienced directly   that this lifestyle did not guarantee happiness, and saw all around me others who  though they had the symbols of fulfilment of this 

dream, didn’t seem happy.  The upheaval of the sixties, the  assassination of John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King,  The unpopular Vietnam war ,  race riots in Los  Angeles Watts community were symptoms of a culture in decline.   None of the  social, philosophical or religious values I had been raised  with seemed to be working. It seemed like there was nothing that one could have faith in.   In fact,  I felt a complete vacuum of faith in human goodness. 

I  remember the afternoon that Robert Kennedy was shot in a hotel in Los Angeles. I was in Beverly Hills, and devastated by yet another one of our culture’s  hope for the future  being struck down.  In complete anguish I drove to an Episcopal church right there in Beverly Hills that I had passed daily for years but never entered. This afternoon I went inside and it was packed with others like myself who were grief stricken and challenged beyond our capacity to comprehend  what was happening in our world.  The church was completely filled at a time when there was no scheduled service.  But the minister dressed and came out to his pulpit to deliver what he must have felt were suitable words of comfort and consolation.  But what he spoke was some kind of  a  standard service, in a language that in no way addressed the reason that people were there.

I can’t know what others felt , but from my perspective he was unable to address  any of the anguish or heart rending doubts and distress that had brought all of us there unscheduled seeking some kind of wisdom that could make sense of this latest in a series of tragedies that had occurred.  It was at that point that I felt the churches were (at least at that critical time) unable to guide me  to  find answers   to the  existential  anguish that was  arising  within me.

  I gave notice to the magazine publisher in New York   that I was leaving the job,. Myself and another friend of mine  decided to drop out and travel in search of something that had meaning.   The immediate  destination we had in mind was the Costa del Sol in Spain,

The garage sale in our  flat in San Francisco  was the ritual of renouncing the symbols of my former life....I had no need of these expensive, elegant designer clothes, shoes, hats, jewelry.  I happily  exchanged a beautiful black fur coat that had been essential for  staying in New York City in the winter, for a pair or faded blue jeans, which I had never owned before.  To  me it was a question of value, the currency of my previous life was no longer relevant, and  I was happy to trade one symbol for a new costume for my new life.

          ------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Journey begins

My friend and I took off driving across the US as the first leg of our adventure.  I found the travelling disorienting again and longed for some kind of structure in my life,  I wanted some kind of secure boundaries. 

We arrived in New York City, and were preparing to purchase our tickets for our destination in Spain.  One day I was wandering in Greenwich Village.  I  happened to see a poster  on a  lamp post advertising a Yoga teacher training course in an ashram in Canada.  The  dream of   lounging on the beaches of  Spain faded,  I knew immediately that I wanted to feel more of the good feelings I had been having doing yoga.  My friend and I parted company,  she took off for Spain, and I hitch hiked from New York City north to Montreal,  and on  to the location of the yoga ashram in the mountains. 

There I lived in a tent on the top of a mountain.   The morning classes started very early, 5 am, and if I  didn’t wake up in time, someone would come up to my tent and literally drag me out of my sleeping bag.  The teacher, an Indian swami was very strict  about discipline. When I came for the first yoga class he took one look at me in my transparent T shirt,  and  shouted at me for not wearing a bra.    He  sent me back to my tent to return respectably dressed.  We even had to wear a kind of uniform, yellow  kurta tops and white pants, all appearing alike in our role as yoga students. 

The early days of the yoga training consisted of what is called shatkarmas, cleansing methods that deeply cleanse the inner apertures of the body, the sinuses, the stomach, and the digestive track.  We would start out the day gathered at the community sinks, washing out our nasal passages with copper pots with spouts filled with warm salt water.  Then on to the yoga classes, chanting, doing strong postures, breathing exercises which consisted of snorting strongly through the nose, using our stomach muscles to force the breath in and out in what was called bellows breath. 

The yoga classes were  held outdoors in early morning and afternoons on  a big wooden platform on which we stretched  out for the asana classes.  There were about 25-30  in our class.  The course went on for two months, with progressively more discipline demanded by the swami.   Food was healthy,  vegetarian, and we were encouraged to fast for periods as well.  During all of this I began to feel stronger, more connected within myself and with other people there.  I loved being part of a community , all working towards the same goal,  inner happiness, healthy body and healthy mind. 

In my previous glamorous life, living in New York,  Los Angeles and the Bay area I had mixed with many successful   people living seemingly glamorous lives, models,  photographers, musicians, show  biz agents, but I found in most cases that in spite of their success and interesting life, there was an inner unhappiness that manifested in drug use, a lot of promiscuity and a lack of caring for other people.  This was troubling to me, I had grown up in a very traditional American family in Idaho and had a sense of wanting to be involved with people who cared about others, who wanted to live a clean life, and aspire to lofty goals of benefitting others.

 Amongst the preliminary yogic values were the yamas: restraints, not harming ourselves or other through killing, lying, stealing or using sexual behavior carelessly.  These were followed by  the conscious  development of positive qualities, like truthfulness, purity in speech and action, contentment.

At the end of the course, the swami decided he wanted to have a big celebration, and display some of the unusual  powers that could be acquired by yoga practitioners.  Five of us were selected for a very special demonstration.  There were three priests who had come  specially from South India. They lead us through a series of rituals, called pujas whose purposes were to purify us.  Daily we had to bathe several times and chant specific mantras hundreds of time.    We had to fast and follow a very restricted diet, no onions, garlic, only  vegetarian food. 

At the end of the week many people came from  Montreal, Toronto and surrounding areas.  It was a real festive mood, lots of decorations, chanting, spicy delicacies were  prepared.  A long pit was also prepared with hot coals. One would have thought there was going to be a big barbecue.  At the conclusion of the days’ events the five of us were meant to walk across these burning coals, proving that the limitations of the mind;  pain and fear could be overcome through the special yogic practices we had been undertaking  the whole week.  I was of course anxious about it, but somehow we  were in a different state of mind, I have to say it was my first experience of an altered state of mind, produced by the chanting, meditation, bathing and   excited anticipation.  It had a totally different quality from the stupor that I had experienced smoking dope .

When it was my turn, I didn’t feel any fear, somehow the meditations and mantras had dissolved those.  There was   a crunching sensation under my feet as I walked across what must have been about a l2 foot length of burning hot coals, the kind that you would barbecue a whole pig on.  I felt the crunch, but no heat.  And once I was across I felt  a real sense of elation that I had been able to do something not normally humanly possible.  There was a news crew there who filmed the event and interviewed us afterwards.  Even as I talked to them,   I did question in my own mind how this was actually a skill that could be integrated into my daily life,  I couldn’t imagine how it was going to be  useful.

One of the other graduates and I decided we would return and open  a yoga centre in San Francisco.  I was willing to use some of my savings to help bankroll the project.  We returned to the Bay area, found a small  shop front  near the Golden Gate park.   We painted, put in straw matting flooring  and built  loft beds above the kitchen for  sleeping areas.   We started advertising yoga courses  and  quickly began to have good sized classes.

 As we were just down the street from the UC medical school, many of our students were doing their medical studies.  Some of them became quite interested in  the use of yoga postures and  power of the  mind  over physiological functions. I became the subject of an experiment to see if through meditation and concentration  I could control the acid secretions in my stomach.  Actually it was quite useful and pertinent for me as I had always had a tendency towards a  stomach  ulcer.

The experiment was to swallow a tube containing a camera, I think they call it an endoscopy.    After the camera was in place I then put myself into a meditative state, using breathing and concentration practices and the medical students measured the amount of stomach acid present.  I am happy to say that the experiment was successful, we were able to prove that through relaxation and meditation  one could  reduce the amount of stomach acid.    Beats antacids  I say! This time  the result seemed to be something actually   useful.

Our studio was going well. This was 1970 and yoga studios were very rare, even in the Bay Area.   We heard on the grapevine that one of the popular figures  of the hippie movement was visiting the Bay Area with his “guru” from India.  Ram Dass, previously known as Richard Alpert of the Harvard LSD experiments with Timothy Leary was doing a series of program with a teacher he had met in India whose name was Swami Muktananda.

We went along to an auditorium in the city, and there was ‘’ Baba’’  Ram Das sitting on the stage playing a tamboura, a string instrument that made a continuous droning sound.  He had a very beautific smile on his face  a garland of flowers around his neck, a long beard and hair, and he swayed back and forth chanting Sri Ram Jaya Ram  . The audience chanted along with him and I found  the  chanting and the atmosphere seemed to produce some kind of subtle intoxication.,  His teacher, Swami Muktananda was sitting on a s seat surrounded by flower garlands. 

He was a small Indian man with a beard, he didn’t speak English, but spoke through a translator, another Indian gentleman.  I didn’t understand much of what was being said , but underneath the level of spoken language there was  more like an energetic explosion that seemed to affect   not only me but everyone in the room.  I felt inside that some kind of light was turned on and expanding in my heart.  That feeling stayed with me for days. I thought to myself, “this man is really happy, he must be the happiest person in the world. This is what real happiness actually feels like.” 

There was one message I did get from the evening, however, and that seemed to be his main teaching, “Honour yourself, Love yourself, God Dwells Within You as You. “ What an extraordinary thought, that was something that made sense to me, though I had never heard anything like that before.   

Swami Muktananda  was staying in a house in Oakland, we went there to visit him a couple of times, just sitting in a living room with a small group of people early in the morning for meditation. It was very intimate and informal.  He seemed to be very joyful, laughing and teasing all of the time.  This definitely was not my idea of a saint, which is what people were saying he was.  No dour, serious ascetic  this one; in fact a virtual joy bunny.   We invited him to visit our yoga studio and he agreed to come in a few days time.  When he came to our studio he lead a chanting and meditation session for a packed crowd of students.    We sat with him afterwards and chatted, and he invited me to come visit him in India.  It wasn’t something I thought about seriously at the time, but as the days went by I started to read Indian guide books . 

A friend of mine was a pilot, and I had loaned him some money to help get a job .  When he found out I wanted to go to India, he offered to give me a ride there in a small private plane that he was hired to fly to  Indonesia.    He agreed to drop me  off in India enroute.  Plans were put into place. 

Then one day I had an extraordinary experience. I was doing a yoga practice called yoga nidra, yoga sleep in which one lies in what is called the corpse pose, as though one were lifeless, and progressively relaxes the entire body, then the breath and then the mind.  As I talked myself through the relaxation, I suddenly felt my mind pulled inside spontaneously.  I felt myself being transported, without my body, flying rapidly .   Suddenly I was in a beautiful garden, that I somehow knew was India.  It was very sparkling and radiant and beautiful, not like anything I had ever seen, beautiful with abundant  fruit trees and  fragrant flowers .  As I walked down the lane of the garden I could see ahead of me a figure sitting in a cross legged yoga pose,  His body was very tall and imposing, somehow it seemed that he wasn’t actually alive,  yet at the same time he radiated a powerful energy that  was radiating towards me.  I felt it touch my heart as a powerful loving force.  That radiant touch seemed to unearth a tremendous longing and simultaneously  fulfill all the desire for love that my heart had ever known. 

Then suddenly I felt my consciousness careen back through space.  I woke up on  the floor in our yoga studio in San Francisco.  I  felt a tremendous sense of separation and loss for which I wept.   I wanted to return to this place that stirred such profound emotions in me, and I knew that this had something to do with where I was going in India.

When the departure time came, we were driven to a private airport outside of San Francisco  and loaded into a small 8 person private jet.  There were just six of us, three pilots, the wives of two and myself.

As we took off  so many questions arose in my mind,  where was I going, and why?  The air trip was terrifying, I swore I would never again go in a small private plane .  Every single gust of wind seemed to cause convulsions in the plane. One night we were flying over the Atlantic after refuelling in Greenland.  Suddenly the plane went dark, all the lights shut down and the plane began to  plunge towards the ocean below.  Everyone in the plane began screaming. We plummeted for several seconds in blackness.   and then suddenly there was a jolt as the electrics turned back on and the engine started again. 

The pilots explained  that there was an extra fuel tank put in for the cross Atlantic trip, and as the fuel went from one tank to the other, the engine switched off.   After that  everyone in the plane was jittery. I started praying to every  diety that I had ever heard of. I have since then  always experienced that there was nothing so immediate as turbulence  in an airplane to bring me face to face with doubt and fear and get me scrounging for what I trusted or had faith in. Who was this God who dwelled within me?   Could he save me? 

Also as we were travelling I began to examine what it was that I hoped to find in India.  I intuitively knew that this teacher, Swami Muktananda had some key to that most elemental of human  happiness, he radiated it in a tangible way  I had never felt in any other human being.  But I also knew I didn’t want to become a Hindu, I didn’t want to ‘become’ anything that would define me and then create some kind of conflict   with another faith group. After all hadn’t  religious conflicts  been the cause of so many wars and inhumane situations?   That set me to reflecting for a long time. Whenever I heard anyone say that “Jesus was the only way.” It always made me think, what about all those people around the world who are not Christians?  Are they forsaken by God?  How could God be so selective?

We stopped in Afghanstan again to refuel and I began to see for the first time people, street scenes and landscape that were  vastly different from any I had seen in US and Europe.  People wearing white sheets covering their heads and bodies, women totally covered in black veils .   I started to get excited about  this adventure into the unknown continents .  But I was  also afraid.