It is Peace of Mind - P.A.W. Print - Philadelphia Arts Writers

We create our own reality all the time, by our choices of where to direct our attention. As a result, some people live in a world populated entirely by Starbucks lattes and corporate savings plans. To some, free speech - in actual practice, not in noble theory, is "Un-American." All hippies are Communists, and vice versa. We've all met people who live in realities like this.


	Ananda Ashram

Even I, in my comparatively bohemian world of frequent travel, yoga practice, vegetarianism, and prolonged unemployment, could not have imagined the version of reality that awaited me at Ananda Ashram. There, residents wear orange robes and hold twice-daily fire ceremonies, complete with Sanskrit chanting and group meditation sessions. The menu is vast and entirely vegan, prepared with love by a 6-foot-3-inch man named Harvey, a sweet-natured teddy bear who wears an eagle feather in his brown felt fedora. Geese hold court along the gravel paths and hiss vigorously at passersby, when they're not busy jockeying for position on the shores of the rustic, little pond (Harvey told me he saw a goose get dragged under, feathers flailing, by what appeared to be a snapping turtle). And the five, roomy residential buildings are cleaned and maintained by a former dope fiend with a strong south Boston accent, whose passions are the Red Sox, Guns 'N' Roses and yoga, and who taught me how to stand on my head. For the past forty years, the ashram has kept its quiet vigil in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains of New York, one hour - and many worlds away, from Manhattan.

An ashram is a place of worship and study, devoted to the contemplation of the spiritual teachings of yoga. Yoga, the Sanskrit word for "union," is a spiritual practice involving eight branches. Among those, the most familiar to Westerners are purification of the body through physical postures and purification of the mind through meditation. Throughout yoga’s 5,000-year history, the practice has been kept alive largely through the intimate relationship of teacher to students in the many ashrams which exist throughout the world.

Ananda Ashram was founded in 1964 by Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati, known as Guruji ("Beloved Teacher") to his faithful followers. Before becoming a spiritual leader, Guruji went by the name of Dr. Ramamurti Mishra and was a respected neurosurgeon and psychiatrist in India and the United States. He made a natural progression from the world of the intellect into that of the higher consciousness, and his abundant writings are informed by a strong psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical foundation. The Guru did not select a replacement to fulfill his role as leader of the ashram when he died in 1993. He reassured his devotees that he would remain with them in spirit, and would work through them as they kept his visionary university alive.

Life at the ashram is not just about religious devotion. Nor is it about swallowing whole a completely foreign way of life. There are American- and German-born devotees who do spend their lives there, assuming Sanskrit names and devoting their time to meditation, chanting, ashram-related chores, and the study of Guruji's teachings. They keep the ashram going for the rest of us, we who variously dabble in meditation, occasionally assist with chores, listen to the teachings, and chant in high, hesitant squeaks or flatly not at all. In all these respects, we appear inadequate as devotees. But we are not the devotees. We are the seekers. In the ashram, we find a slower pace of life, a soothing routine, a physical and psychological removal from our cultivated chaos. After two weeks of daily meditation, I felt like my mind was a small apartment from which someone had just removed a large sofa. I wanted to stretch my arms out and twirl in the space created. There was room there, at last, for the Guru's wise words to take root.

I am not this body, a woman's gentle voice repeated at the evening session, as she read from one of Guruji's books. I am not this mind. Through meditation, we learn to dissolve away from the needs of the body, to still the capricious mind. We direct our focus to that which exists beyond the body-mind duality, beyond the cycle of birth and death. It is known as the witnessing consciousness. The goal of this practice is to recognize ourselves as something more than our thoughts, our emotions, and our physical pleasure and pain. Beneath and beyond all that, we exist as a consciousness which is unchanging, "still as a candle-flame under a glass," which simply observes, without participation, the tidal flow of the realities we create for ourselves.

A respected sitarist and music scholar at the ashram offered a useful analogy: If we seat ourselves only in our minds, we are seated in a sturdy chair... on a boat, in the sea. We may perceive ourselves to be strong and firmly rooted, but as the sea moves, the boat moves, and the chair moves. But, if we identify that witnessing consciousness as the true seat of ourselves, we find a truly steady foundation on which to remain at peace, to participate in life with a sense of healthy detachment. Just as we observe our breath in meditation, so may we observe without fear as the body develops illnesses or pains, as it ages and dies, as the mind becomes euphoric or troubled, as we meet and lose the ones we love.

There is a reason why the seekers return to Ananda Ashram again and again, why the devotees remain for decades. True enlightenment will happen for only a very few people in the entire world, but we don't all need to be enlightened. I'm not even sure it would be convenient for me. What we need, far more than supreme knowledge and flawless awareness, is available to us when we go to the ashram and when we direct our attention steadily and quietly inward. It is peace of mind.