Gurujima

This extract about my experience of GurujiMa comes from a book of yoga teachings that I developed for the Shraddhā Yoga Teacher Training Program.

This extract about my experience of GurujiMa comes from a book of yoga teachings that I developed for the Shraddhā Yoga Teacher Training Program.

The first time I went to meet GurujiMa, I got lost on the way. I arrived late and a little frazzled. Her house was in a quiet neighborhood a few minutes outside of town, a wooded street with sidewalks and shaded lawns, two car garages and neat stacks of cordwood waiting for winter. It was far enough out of town to be off the sewer and water lines, but still had streetlights that lit up the neighborhood at night. The house itself was set on a slight rise, nestled among big hemlocks and pines, with a giant oak tree shading the gravel driveway. It was painted a rich dark chocolate brown, and I entered into a small mudroom where I left my shoes.

Inside, the house was a sea of silence. It was quiet, but more than that it was pervaded by a feeling of silence like outer space, like a silence beyond the reach of sound. In the silence was a stillness full of light, pregnant with energy. The thoughts in my mind were suddenly very loud, garishly obtrusive against the backdrop of emptiness. We walked upstairs to a small room and sat on the floor. The window was cracked and birdsong floated in, somehow without disturbing the resonant silence. Inside the room and outside were two different dimensions. The room had a small altar with a candle and a picture of a lamb sitting on a book in a circle of stars on a red background.

I sat down, and she spoke with a voice that echoed the silence. Her words were clear, but they seemed to come through her from somewhere far away. Her eyes were as deep and full as the ocean. She said she saw me in a prior life as a seeker in India, a sannyasin, “one who has laid everything down”, wandering with no possessions, living on pilgrimage, in temples, jungles, and caves, searching for truth. She looked into me, and I remembered the yogi on the slopes of Arunachala. His penetrating gaze joined with hers and led me into the inner chambers of my own heart. I encountered a vast self there, extending beyond birth and death.

After this meeting with her, I couldn't speak. The inner reality that she introduced to me didn't connect to my outer life, to my personality. The gulf was too wide. I couldn’t form words. Later that day, driving in the car with Corinne, she asked me to share what had happened, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even apologize. The car window was open, and I felt the breeze on my face. The sun was setting behind a bank of pine trees, throwing golden light heavenward.

Silencing the mind is a major focus of many yoga traditions and teachings. The text commonly called The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali begins by defining yoga as “when the mind stops spinning”. And in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells the great warrior Arjuna that a yogi transcends sorrow and pain and finds contentment and the highest happiness by controlling the mind and the activity of the senses. “Like an unflickering lamp in a windless space, the one who has subdued their thoughts practices the yoga of the soul.” This kind of mental silence is hard to imagine. When we try to quiet the mind, it resists, evading our grasp. Every thought that we try to quash seems to shatter into ten more thoughts, filling the mind with activity.

On the way to Auroville, the study abroad group I was traveling with stopped for 10 days at Thich Naht Hanh’s monastery, Plum Village, in the South of France. I had tried meditating before, sitting still with my eyes closed and listening to the sound of my breath, until suddenly I was off following a train of thoughts, leaping from a childhood memory of feeding a horse a carrot to wondering about why carrots are orange, why nothing rhymes with orange, why it is that rhyming is so pleasing to listen to and so helpful in remembering things, forgetting completely about the horse and the carrot, and then suddenly realizing that I’d wandered far from my breath and making my way back.

 I understood the concept basically, but I’d never tried sitting still for any more than 20 minutes at a stretch. At Plum Village, we awoke every morning and went to the meditation hall, where we alternated between sitting, walking, and chanting for at least an hour. This was the first time I’d really come face to face with the intertwined swirls of thoughts that populate my mind.

By the second day at Plum Village, I was full of agitation. A few of us went out running through the vineyards of Bordeaux, and I felt like I could run forever. When I sat still, I wanted to squirm out of my skin. My thoughts were endless, obsessive, intrusive. They bloomed, whirled, and divided, streaking like comets across the sky of my consciousness. But over time, I began to discern that there was a sky that the thoughts were moving across. There was a silent, clear backdrop that was holding and containing and witnessing all the chaotic motion. As I got to know my inner sky, my nervous system calmed down and my body was less agitated.

The silence that I experienced in GurujiMa’s house had the same quality as this inner sky, but it was outside me. I’d felt this kind of silent stillness before in the inner chamber of the Matrimandir, in the courtyard where Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s bodies are buried, and in the aura of a sādhu that I’d encountered on the slope of Arunachala. I recognized this feeling. It was like a vibration, a low, subtle hum that pervaded the space and resonated inside me, drawing me to vibrate in sync with it. Just like the Arunachala sādhu’s own inner stillness provided a clear reflection in which to see what was going on inside me, the silence of her own being radiated out of GurujiMa and filled the house. It made meditation easier, creating a base note that I could harmonize with, a pillar that I could lean on for support as I sought the silence within me.

I could sense that inside, GurujiMa was situated, fixed in that silent stillness. Her mind was not spinning. Like an unflickering lamp, her inner being burned straight upward, radiating warmth and light. She had achieved a state of yoga.



The texts and traditions of yoga describe practices that support movement along a path of yoga that leads to a state of yoga. Different traditions say different things about the path. For some it must be beaten down by a yogi’s own will and perseverance, using physical austerities like holding intense postures for long periods of time, extensive fasting, breath retention, and profound mental concentration. The Yoga Sutras say that a yogi achieves yoga through abhyāsa, continuous practice over a long period of time, and vairāgya, not engaging with emotional attachments or aversions. Over time, austerity practices hone concentration and create space between the mind and the body’s cravings and impulses, leaving the inner space clear and quiet. This was the vibe at the Mount Madonna Center. Babaji’s patent answer to almost any question about how to progress in yoga was “daily sādhana, daily practice”.

Other texts and traditions say that a yogi achieves yoga by divine grace. They say that the best practices are those that cultivate the longing to merge with God, those that lead us to call out ever more fervently for love from the Divine Beloved. This longing for God draws lover and Beloved together, and once we catch a hint of that Divine fragrance, all other lesser desires fall away. Once we touch God, thoughts dissolve and we are illuminated by the vast, silent expanse of cosmic consciousness.

Tantrasāra, an incredible text by the great 10th century guru Abhinavagupta that summarizes the core of his tantric teachings, describes the ultimate reality, the foundational essence of existence as the endless radiance of Siva. This pure, infinite light is what we are, what all of creation is, but we don’t know that because Siva hides Himself from us. Tantrasāra describes the ways that Siva reveals Himself, thus bestowing awakening. The first is anupāya, without means. “This person of broad vision enters immediately into self-manifest Siva.”

The text then goes on to describe various upāyas, or means and methods that Siva provides us for discovering Him by purifying our thoughts so that we can see perfectly clearly. These include various techniques and practices like textual study, prānayama, mantra recitation, and nyāsa practice, through which seed sounds are installed in different places of the body. Tantrasāra accepts both progressive and spontaneous awakening, and weaves them together with the understanding that yoga is achieved through both effort and grace. Each person’s path of awakening is unique to them, determined by their unique purpose in this particular lifetime, how far they’ve progressed in previous incarnations, and how much karmic baggage they’re carrying.

GuruijiMa’s awakening was anupāya. It happened suddenly. She says that it was like being asleep for her entire life, and then suddenly waking up. She had been a wife and mother, a PhD, and vaguely interested in spirituality. But one day the veil fell away and revealed a multidimensional reality that remained stable and consistently visible. She knew that God was real, that life was purposeful, and that there are countless beings of light supporting and nurturing our growth at all times. This knowing didn’t fade or flicker. It remained as real as the feeling of sun on your skin.

She was also not part of a yogic lineage. Sometimes yoga teachings were passed down orally from teacher to student in an extended line of what’s called the guru-shishya parampara, or teacher-student succession. But not every guru was part of a direct lineage. Throughout India’s history, some spiritual luminaries awakened spontaneously, or were even born with access to the state of yoga that others might strive toward for a lifetime.

The famous 7th Century Tamil child-saint Thirugnana Sambandar is said to have composed 16,000 devotional hymns to Siva that touch on the subtlest aspects of bhakti yoga before his death at the age of 16. When he was just three years old, his father went under water during a ritual bath, and he cried out in fear. Lord Siva and his wife Parvati heard his cry and came to console him. When his father surfaced and saw a dribble of milk on his chin, he asked the boy where it came from, and Sambandar sang out a gorgeous song that’s now called Todudaya Seviyan. “He wears a ring in his ear and rides on the holy bull...the ash-smeared thief who stole my heart, the One to whom the Creator prays.”

Other well-known gurus have experienced a kind of spontaneous awakening. When he was 16 years old, Ramana Maharshi saw a corpse and laid down on the floor to see what death was like. His ego died, and shortly afterward he left home to live in and around Arunachala. Anandamayi Ma performed her own ceremony of spiritual initiation with no prior instruction at the age of 26. She later stated, "As the guru I revealed the mantra; as the disciple. I accepted it and started to recite it." And as a young girl living in a rural fishing village in Kerala, the hugging saint Amma would frequently go into states of ecstatic union with God, much to her family’s dismay.

I met GurujiMa roughly 20 years after her initial awakening, and at the time she taught mostly in the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition. She had never studied yoga or encountered a guru, but I recognized in her the state that I’d read so much about, the state of yoga that is the aim of yoga. She wrote that “the purpose of Creation is and was for God to manifest the totality of Divine consciousness within form, and for form to become one with the Divine, completing a ‘circle of creation’.” She offered a path to align ourselves with this fundamental purpose of Creation and become one with the Divine. I recognized that this path was the same path as yoga.

And beyond any ideas, she herself was the teaching. She embodied sincerity and integrity, compassion, generosity, and surrender. The radiance of her own divinity poured through the transparent vessel of her human form. She pointed out the path, walked on it herself, and transmitted the energy of her own self-realization. Her body was a vehicle for transformation.