Is it embarrassing to admit that until I read Eat, Pray, Love three years ago, I didn’t really know what an ashram was? (P.S. I recently saw the movie…zzz…)
I hazily remembered book’s description of an ashram – a quiet, secluded compound full of people meditating and observing silence and doing karma yoga (read: free labor). It was pretty accurate. And the part I forgot, the near-worship of the spiritual leader, was there at Yogaville, too. It was that aspect of my experience that I had the hardest time making peace with – I felt, sometimes, that when people were saying “Swami Satchidananda” they meant “God” and sometimes when they were saying “God” they meant “Swami Satchidananda”. It was hard for me to swallow.
You’ll get no argument from me that the Swami was an incredible man. On a personal level, his creation of Yogaville, this place for spiritual study and retreat, allowed me to spend this beautiful month of my life redefining love and compassion and spirituality. There I laughed more than was appropriate, forged deep and sustainable relationships, and healed parts of myself that had been cracked for a while.
Through the our readings and study, the truth that I came to believe (and delight in) is that God, or whatever you want to call it, is within all of us, it is a light we all share. And people like Jesus and Ghandi and Mother Theresa and Swami Satchidananda were just more in touch, more tuned into that truth and therefore better examples of God. I guess it makes sense to want to worship people like this but I think it ends up absolving us of our own responsibility to work harder to grow the light within us.
Now that I am away from the safety and boundless love of a place dedicated to nurturing that light, I feel that my own is barely flickering. Before leaving the ashram everyone all of us new teachers lamented our departure (no matter how happy certain ones of us were to return to certain muscly husbands). It’s hard to keep your heart so opened and your thoughts so positive once you return to the “real world” and the ashram is not the real world – at least it isn’t for me – and the real world place I am in now is still lovely, but there are stressers abounding. I think I’ll stay here, though.
