Shram Living, October 05

A one-woman play . . .

(On the projector delicate Om symbols )

In the late 80’s, for almost two years, I lived in an ashram. It was called The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health . . . and still is by the way . . . and it was a real humdinger.

When most people think of an ashram they think of yoga and meditation, austerity and restraint. There was plenty of that on a lot of levels – we were celibate, vegetarian, had silent meals, worked six and a half days a week, got up at 4:30 in the morning to do yoga and meditate before work . . . oh, but it was also a wild, wild, wild ride.

Kripalu’s nickname was The Yuppie Ashram because we were seriously hooked up. We had a fleet of cars at our disposal, full gas tanks, washed, ready to go. There was a "hair designer" that came up from New York City once a month to cut our hair, dentists, doctors, and other health care professionals who offered us free visits and sessions. We also received a small monthly stipend for regular day to day stuff.

The biggest downside to ‘shram life was the celibacy. It was extreme. When you entered the ashram as a resident - people came for one or two months and often ended up staying for years-, you were required to sign off on a sort of "celibacy contract" stating that you understood the rules about no hanky panky, no hanky pokey, no hanky nada. The basic premise was that the purpose of your stay was to focus on your issues and tangles and to learn the yogic way of life, with an integral part of that being no sex, and even beyond that, no flirting, and in support of that, no mingling. We weren’t forbidden to speak to members of the opposite sex, - or to members of your own sex that you found hot if you were gay - but when we interacted with one another it was supposed to be clean of a sex vibe.

Oh my god, can you even imagine how supercharged the atmosphere was because of that? Furtive glances passing between people who were attempting to breathe into the fact that they wanted to lick hot honey off those firm biceps flexing underneath that 100% organic cotton tunic but were attempting to sublimate it into their downward dog pose and not doing so well with it. . . . Yeah. . . . Dang.

Years later, after the guru was busted for fornicating with female disciples against their will, and a few hundred past and present residents got together to hang out and talk about it all over a week long retreat the truth came out: Residents had been doing it the bushes with guests, in the workout room by the lake with each other, in the hotubs with themselves. Even the renunciates who had supposedly made a lifetime vow of celibacy, poverty, and everything else that stands for anything exciting in this world were giving nubile young residents the special "renunciate’s tour" of the ashram.

(pause)

Yeah, all right, if it must be known, I had my own little excursion into the anti-celibacy zone. After having lived at the ashram for a year, I began to feel the need for a little life outside its walls. Once a week I would drive into Pittsfield and go to the movies and then hang out and people watch. When anyone back at the ashram questioned me about it I said that I was doing Mall Yoga. But after the Mall Yoga came the Bar Yoga followed by the All-Night-Smoking-and-Drinking-Wine-With-A-Hot-Local-Guy Yoga, followed by Sex-In-An-Ashram-Car Yoga . . . So much for the joys of celibacy, huh?

People came from all walks of life, from all sorts of professions. Some people came because it was one of the finest yoga centers in the country and they wanted to study with a real yoga master. Others came because their lives felt profoundly off kilter and they needed a place that would give them a different set of tools in which to reorganize their doing, loving, thinking and being in the world. There were hippie chicks and flower boys who came because they could trip the holistic light fantastic with others of their kind without having to worry about food, clothes, or shelter. I was a little bit of all three, having been kicked out of not one but two of the finest acting conservatories in the country and was living with my preppie, blue-blooded, secretly cross-dressing boyfriend while I worked at the infamous Lone Star Café in NYC. The ashram was my chance to try and erase the slate and get to the heart of why my life at twenty-two years old, felt so wrong to me. I had begun working full time at a naturopathic medicine clinic and the idea of living a holistic lifestyle fulltime was very appealing to me. After a week stay, when I saw that Kripalu was accepting new residents, I shut my whole life down and moved in within the month.

Living there changed me. It was the first time in my life that I felt the chaos that lived inside of me give way to something bright and sweet and calm and forgiving. When I think of Kripalu, genuinely remember it and me in it - when I’m not crafting it as a story to tell or write about - I remember the silence . . .

(Take a few beats to hear the sound of nothing . . . )

(On the projector more Om symbols but these are more thick and sturdy and ornamental looking)

It felt good to live there. I thrived. There was a quiet goodness I discovered inside of myself, a space of being that allowed me to let go of the sorrow I felt, that kept me from allowing anyone to get close to me. Living inside the protection and support of Kripalu’s physical and emotional boundaries was like being literally and figuratively held in the arms of the people that lived there with me, and the fear that had dictated my every move and caused me to go from place to place, never putting down roots for very long, began to leave me. I signed up for that week stay, then for a few months, then committed to a year residency.

I was so hungry for love. Especially love from men, which up til that point I had merely half-drowned in a whirlpool of drugs and sex with daddy-clones: cold, unloving, disapproving, shut down, incommunicative, beautiful, brain-smart boys who got their education in the School of Hard Knocks, men who adored me for a while and then set out to destroy that which they had adored. For my part, I was scared of what I wanted most and utterly believed myself to be worthless without the rudder of a man in my life. My father didn’t teach me about men, about how they differed from women, about the things they might say that wouldn’t be true or how to spot the predators from the kind ones. It wasn’t his fault, though. He had been abandoned at a very young age and to survive had chosen for himself the way of the predator, and wasn’t conscious enough to warn me of men like himself.

I was almost always alone, traveling from North Carolina in the back of a pickup truck to begin my life as an acting student at yet another classical acting conservatory, moving by myself to New York City to live in sublet after sublet, waiting tables, tending bar, doing the jobs that allowed me free time to wander around, both physically and in my heart and head. But in the midst of my aloneness a man would appear and I would place upon him all of my daddy-prince fantasies, completely ignoring who the man really was or how he treated me..

It was at Kripalu that I discovered my radiance. Before then, it was something that I could put on along with make-up and heels, something that came out of me when I went on stage to sing or dance or act. I was unconscious as to what it was or what it was really for. I only knew that people were drawn to me because of it and so I used it as much as possible, until people drew close enough to see the frightened girl in the midst of the bright, shimmery glow. At that point, people either walked away or came to love who I was behind the earthy glamour. The ones that loved me, because of my twisted radar and god-awful sense of what was true and not-true, I decided must be crazy, and so I moved away from them. Only the ones who didn’t love me fit into my comfort zone and were allowed to stay. This all began to change at Kripalu. The length of time I’d committed to being there, the commitment inside of myself to be clear, and the commitment of those around me to live by rules of lovingkindness and compassion and integrity and connectedness began to peel away my misunderstandings like old skin off a silvery snake.

And then there was the guru.

I’m going to try to explain this in a way so that you understand why people willingly drink the kool-aid, why they put on the sneakers and the cape and eat the narcotic laced pudding, why they give up their money and their lives, all because of what one person tells them to be true.

There are vast currents of radiance that live inside of us, oceans of aliveness that drinking and drugging and overworking and negativity and toxic, time-and-life consuming relationships cover up like thirty year old grease on a greasy spoon grill. One of the things that systems like yoga, qigong, and meditation do is awaken the practitioner to this vibrancy that lives inside of them, giving a clearer experiential picture of what is you and what is merely the greasy build up of not-you. The trick is that you have to find a teacher . . . or as the old saying goes, allow a teacher to find you . . . a teacher that is plugged in enough to show you the real deal, otherwise its all just spiritual vogue-ing and a flat out waste of time and energy. The other trick is that if beginners understand what is really going to have to occur, what they are going to have to go through to uncover the vibrancy within them, they will never, ever stick with it. And so begins the shell game of a great teacher, someone who is far enough along to know how to outfox the weaselly mind, but compassionate enough not to use the ability to outfox your mind to outfox you out of your life.

In order to be with a guru, to really learn from them enough to open the pathways to the ocean of aliveness, there is a certain amount of surrender that has to occur. For a while, the student has to suspend what they believe is true for themselves in order to follow what a teacher says is true. This is a freaky time where the student is often doing things that feel absolutely wrong but which are simply beyond what a student can assimilate as truth from the vantage of their beginners perspective. It often becomes a game of mirrors and shadows that is horrifying and terrifying, and with the right teacher, orgasmic and liberating and beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.

Picture being in love, being in love with someone who adores you utterly, forgives all of your shadows, who has all the answers to all the questions that you’ve been confused around. Picture someone who sits down with you and very patiently explains all of the tools of living, what each one is, takes the time to define how each one individually works, how not to hurt yourself and others with it, what is best used with what and when. Picture making love with this person, where the love is so vast and all-encompassing that it transcends penis and vagina and mouths and hands and tongues and becomes a current that moves through every cell, that lifts you and moves you, body, soul, emotion, into a place of mutual utter surrender to adoring and being adored, to the vast ocean of Being-ness where You are no longer, just motion and love. That is what it is like to be with a guru.

I remember the connection that I had with Kripalu’s guru. Pretty much everyone there felt connected to him, but unlike everyone else, my connection showed up physically as he would appear to me at the oddest times, always when I needed him most or was most open to be with him. In my year and a half of living there I would connect with him dozens of times, enough so that it became an odd bone of contention, a source of jealousy for some of the other residents. I would run into him in a back hall after an argument with a work sister and he would listen to me, smile sweetly and hug me, enveloping me in the scent of that musky, woodsy essential oil that he wore. In the middle of hundreds of acres of woods where I was walking alone off the path he would suddenly appear, six or so of his male disciples around him . . . female disciples were not permitted to be alone with him so to dispel any issues of sexual misconduct . . . I would be out jogging and he would come jogging from the opposite way and as we passed one another we would turn and jog backwards for a few steps our hands in prayer position as he smiled and sparkled and I laughed at the lusciousness of free flowing endorphins and the loveliness of connection. Please understand that there was no hint of sexual charge of any kind, only pure, unadulterated, home-grown love like limitless nectar, tasting so sweet to my daddy-less heart.

His name was Amrit Desai, and we called him Gurudev, which was sanskrit for beloved teacher. He was from India, and in his early fifties by the time I arrived. He had three grown children and a wife and lived in a small, modest home about a hundred yards away from the main building where everyone else lived. He mostly worked with Kripalu’s council of a dozen senior residents, people who had been with him for ten, fifteen plus years, although he would appear at morning meditations and evening community gatherings for singing, dancing, and teachings with all of us. There were also all sorts of celebrations and feasts and retreats and special teaching sessions that he was present for.

He was never just a robed guru in an silk chair on a dais. He was real, vibrant, alive, meeting us in whatever flavor of fucked-up, flustered and far from home we came to him with. And I came to him with lots of fucked-up, lots and lots of . . . .

(Again stops mid-sentence as she begins to lose control. On the projector varying shades of violet, getting darker and more vibrant as the scene progresses)

There is a particular type of Japanese Kanemoto sword that was renowned for having the strongest, sharpest blade in existence. It was created by shaping the blade, then melting it, breaking it down, and then reshaping it again. This was repeated some 10,000 times, at which point the blade was so strong that when the edge was honed, it was so sharp it would slice a silk scarf in two as it floated in midair.

The ashram was also about melting and reshaping, breaking me down in thousands of ways. When I moved in, I believed that I was moving in for the rest of my life. The place I had come to in my mind held no more room for hope, and I was smothering under the weight of it. I wanted to leave behind my failures at school, the relationships that left me in emotional comas, the detonated friendships, the endless procession of places I’d lived that left me rootless, no place that was home. . . At twenty-two years old, I felt as if I had reached the end of my life.

Moving into the ashram was all of the things I mentioned before, but it was also an extended form of suicide. By signing up, I had put out an emotional hit on myself and I was banking on the fact that the guru was the man who would pull the trigger.

In the spiritual life it is believed that who you think you are – your personality, your mind trips, your past – dies to Who You Are, a spiritual being hanging out in earth time in a flesh spacesuit. As the caterpillar dies to the butterfly, the human i dies to the cosmic I. But when I’d initially signed up, I wasn’t conscious of any of this, only that Kripalu was a place that glowed to me, whose people seemed magical, how much I wanted to be one of them.

I cried a lot my first few months there. When I wasn’t working I was sleeping. I ate until I could eat no more. But mostly just did as instructed. If the older residents said doing japa . . . which are Indian mantra and beads like a rosary . . . a hundred times a night was the way to go, then I was there every night in the dark by my cot, working away at those beads. If Gurudev said no sex thoughts then I simply disallowed their presence in my head.

And I got healthier. On a physical level, my energy got strong, clean. Chronic constipation went away. Skin rashes cleared. Laughter became a regular part of my day. . . I stopped feeling sorry for myself. Emotional and erratic gave way to focused and cheerful.

When I’d decided to move in I had called my family, spoken to my friends and assured them that I would not, under any circumstances "drink the kool-aid". How this showed up while I lived at Kripalu was a sort of holding back, even as I commited fully to the lifestyle, to the guidance of the guru. I got up every morning and was on my yoga mat by 4:45 a.m., but I never followed the instructor. In the back of the room, in the shadows, I did my own series of yoga postures or sometimes went into The Child’s Pose and slipped back to sleep. I worked hard and followed the rules and was a kind work sister to everyone I came into contact with, but I ate lunch while reading a book and afterwards walked by myself in the woods. I opened myself up more there than I had at any other time in my life, but I was still walled off, still very much alone in my own private universe.

As my energy rose, so did my creativity. At first it came out in small ways, as collages, cards for friends, inspirational posters for myself to chart the good things I was doing every day. But after several months the creativity began to surge and I would wake up at two or three in the morning with ideas for poems, plays, films, books. I’d pad down to the kitchen and drink herbal tea and write, utterly consumed, once going at it for six hours non-stop and making myself serioussly late for work because I had to put down on paper the images I was seeing. Someone suggested I ask Gurudev about it.

Amrit taught frequently, but rarely as a scheduled thing. Usually he would just show up for morning or evening meditation. We would all meditate together or chant and dance, then Amrit would speak on a topic, always a vibrant talk about some aspect of living that would have quite literally just come up for me within the previous day or two. It was uncanny and it was that way for all of the residents. After he spoke he would answer questions from us.

There were always a couple hundred of us in attendance whenever Gurudev showed up. Word would spread like wildfire and people would come streaming in from all over the building. No one wanted to miss being around him. It wasn’t *like* being in the presence of your beloved, it *was* the presence of the Beloved and it was wonderful.

Because there were so many people who wanted to speak with him, it was also difficult to get time with him. Not so for me. Some people went for years without speaking to him, but when I would raise my hand, his gaze would move immediately to me and he would invite me up to sit with him to ask my question. I would inevitably cry, he would pat my back, and then I would ask him something incredibly inane – why do I see hamburgers when I meditate? Why do I love you so much? - and he would laugh, but he would always very sweetly answer. I was like a child with him, and the questions I asked were childish, but mostly what I wanted was to be with him, and to be with him in the heightened arena that were his talks was to be lifted to this place where I felt somehow validated: Daddy-guru loves me and all the family can see.

Amrit came to meditation the night after my big six-hour writing spree and when I raised my hand, he motioned me to come sit with him. I cried, he patted me, then I told him about what had been happening, how I felt as if my head was on fire, this great push from inside, how I felt as if I were bringing living things into the world. When I was done he asked me one question: what are you eating for dinner? Confused, I told him about my voracious eating habits.

"Eat less," he said.

"Eat less?" I asked. "But it’s creativity. It’s a good thing, isn’t it?"

"It isn’t creativity. It’s digestive disturbance," he said, and the whole place fell apart laughing.

After that, something shifted in me. Instead of stopping my writing, I began hiding it, no longer speaking about it or showing it to anyone. The energy moving in me was so strong that I wasn't just thinking about things, I was actually creating them, and I’d been so depressed and stuck for such a long time that there was no way I could just chalk it up to over-eating and turn away from it. Instead I took it to the Mall, where I saw movie after movie, where I sat in the food court and drank decaf, wrote for hours, watching "normal" people go about their lives. After six months in the ashram around vibrant, healthy people, seemed like aliens from another planet, their skin sallow and erupting with sores slathered in makeup, eyes dulled and confused, bodies bloated and corrupted.

From the Mall I moved on to restaurants. For a while I drank decaf, then switched to wine. I was befriended by a local musician, then by an actor in town doing summer stock, and finally a beautiful bartender. Yeah, there was the sex thing, but mostly we talked about art, creativity, and why the heck I was living in an ashram.

Through my writing and my conversations with these men, I slowly began to realize that I wanted to go back to New York City, to return with my new strength and creativity and clarity and finally succeed there. The plan was to find acting work and write on the side, wait tables for money, live on the cheap. I felt so good, so radiant that it never occurred to me that I would do anything less than soar in the city that I had always felt so flattened by.

As I made plans to leave, my ashram family tried everything they could come up with to get me to stay. I had meetings with directors and renunciates, people left notes in my mailbox, stopped me in the halls to say: I heard you are leaving, please say it isn’t so. But nothing could stop me. I could feel the glittery freedom of NYC calling me and my local menfolk were all supporting me, saying: leave the religious freaks and go be a star!

Then, out jogging one day, I came upon Gurudev. He stopped and so I did, too.

"I have heard that you are leaving. Is that true?" he asked, his eyes sparkly and sweet.

"Yes. I leave next month," I said, feeling a sense of shame.

"Would you like to talk to me about it?" he asked.

And the love that I had for him, that desire to be anywhere that he was came rushing forth and I said, "Yes."

He asked me to call him at his home in about an hour, "You have my extension, yes?"

"Yes," I answered. I worked in the office with the switchboard and knew everyone’s extension, no matter how private.

I had never been to his home before. When I called he told me to go around to the back and knock and that he would let me in.

As I left, my work sisters looked at me with an intense mixture of jealousy and awe. To have a darshan, to be in the presence of the guru was a big deal, and I felt both special and embarrassed . . . But ten minutes later he was welcoming me into his home and I felt nothing but joy torqued to the point of tears. We sat down and he asked me questions about where I was going, what I was going to do. He didn’t ask or even tell me to stay at Kripalu. He only said, "It would be good for you to spend another five years here."

And in that second I felt like a fool. My late nights out with guys in town, talking, drinking wine, all of the furious writing. In that moment it all seemed pointless, frivolous, ridiculous. I was leaving behind the only place I had ever really felt good in, safe at. And I was leaving this amazing man who had shown me so much about living well, of letting go of suffering and opening my heart and mind so that my experience of living could be joyful. As usual, I began crying hysterical tears. We were sitting on cushions on the floor and I put my head in his lap and sobbed and he patted my back and murmured sweet things to me.

Then his voice took on a different tone, and I felt a buzzing in my head. My thinking process took on a jumbled quality and I stopped crying as I tried to make sense of how unreal everything suddenly seemed. I felt a sickly sort of thread run through me, and a pulling in my chest. I lifted my head from his lap as I realized that my face was inches away from his genitals. I looked into his eyes and they had shifted from sweet and warm to powerfully, silently predatory. Flustered, I looked around the room and realized for the first time that we were alone, in his bedroom, his bed a couple of feet from where we sat. The pulling in my chest got stronger, as did the buzzing in my head, as if a rhythmic tractor beam were pulling me forward towards him, a wall of confusion thrumming inside my head, a vibration radiating out from him of I love you-I love you-I love you, a bewildering mix of daddy, lover, teacher, thief.

Up to that point in my life I had already suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of several different men - molestation by a friend’s father at 15, date rape at 17, and others. Although I wasn’t clear and conscious around any of it enough to call it abuse, my survivor’s instinct knew that there was a particular feeling that I got right before bad things happened. And that feeling was occurring as I sat there in front of Amrit.

The next thing I knew, I looked around to find that I was running - no, hauling ass - down his driveway. One moment I was sitting in his bedroom, and the next I looked down to find that my legs were pumping at the rapidly moving ground so fast that they were literally a blur beneath me.

When I got back to my work office, I stood outside the door to catch my breath. As my heartbeat slowed I felt incredibly foolish. Why had I run away from Gurudev? Was I nuts? He had never been anything other than sweet and loving with me. What insanity had I concocted in my head? And when my work sisters asked about the darshan I just smiled and said it went fine, and never thought about it again.

Until five years later.

My mother sent me a newspaper clipping in which Amrit had been removed as the spiritual director of the ashram because of a series of rape allegations against him, one of them brought about by a director, a woman who had been a resident of Kripalu and senior disciple for eighteen years. The Kripalu Association was holding a week long ex-residents retreat to try to sort everything out, to come to some sort of understanding and healing with what had happened and what was to become of the center in the future. I hadn’t had much contact with Kripalu residents since I’d left but for some reason I felt to go back and be a part of the retreat.

It was an intense week. . . My heart broke again and again as I heard stories about the women who came forward, what they had been through not just at the hands of Amrit, but with ashram person after person. Female disciples had been leaving or been asked to leave for years because no one would listen to their accusations with anything other than disbelief and ridicule. Another stumbling block to bringing it all out in the open was that many women seemed to suffer from a sort of memory lapse. It was as if they couldn’t find a context in which to organize what had happened to them and so they simply forgot that it had occurred, until one day the memory resurfaced, refusing to stay hidden. Once a few women came forth and wouldn't back down, dozens followed them.

And in that context, in the middle of a group meeting of all of us who'd gathered that week, my own suppressed memory came screaming back.

When I left the ashram those years before, it was with a roar of energy, and the intensity of it set into motion a seven-year bout of drinking, drugging, sexing, intense creativity, and deep questioning. I wrote constantly and have two novels and literally thousands of pages of material to show for it. It was as if I had been cracked wide open and poured out into the world. Although I will probably spend the rest of my life to one degree or another cleaning up the mess I made of myself during that time, I also acknowledge that I woke myself up from many delusions: soulmates, excitement in the forms of drugs and sex, people who didn’t love me for who I was, but for what I could do for them, and the lure of a guru.

The hardest part of it wasn’t what I went through in that little bedroom, but afterwards, in separating all the good that I learned with Amrit from his failings as a man with the women who trusted him. I’ve come to fully remember those moments that occurred between realizing that something awful was getting ready to unfold and finding myself running away. In those few minutes, I fought him with everything I had. If I hadn’t, he would have raped me, and as sensitive and open as I was, it would have broken me, snapping my mind like a twig when it couldn’t reconcile daddy with lover with teacher with beast.

But in the end, when I had been broken down as I stood there and faced him, the pieces scattered until I was unrecognizable even to myself, I found courage come leaping up from some hidden place to meet me and I forged myself into a solid whole so that I might fight back. And in the end, I proved myself stronger than he was, because in that battle of psychic will over the right to my body, mind, and heart, I won.

Comments

[snakehairedgirl]

You won.

[beth]

amazing.

[Brenda]

Wow, thanks for telling your story, you are still shimmering and full of life and love. I will be thinking of you and blessing your performance,
Brenda

[steve]

Katherine, your open and honest style (with strangers who read this) is compelling and makes me feel a stronger connection with you than most people I have come to know. I pray all the best for your future (amazing) life. How could I not love you.
Steve

[Shelley Noble]

Fantastic piece, Kat! I loved your take on those experiences. Guru and ashram, check, twenty-five years solid. You're so smart and talented. You seem to be doing just great in your life, to me, for what it's worth, BRAVA!

[Rob]

Katherine, I think your written narrative is very powerful. It must have been very difficult to perform because you do not have the space to get into your character. You are the character and the emotional response to these recounted events have the power to tie you in knots. You are very brave to have done this. I cannot imagine doing this kind of thing myself. Despite the pain of doing this I am sure you have learned some valuable lessons.

I found it interesting that your ashram required a vow of celibacy. I guess I am not surprised about this, only disappointed. I do not see how one could achieve enlightenment by deliberately repressing this aspect of incarnation. Sex, of course is so complicated that it is much easier to ignore or repress it than to really understand it. First there are the biological issues of potential reproduction. Then there are the public health aspects of STD’s to consider. Then the social aspects of age, race, socio-economics, family dynamics and so forth. Then comes the psychological aspect of expectation, intimacy, disparities in personal power, and misunderstandings of every sort imaginable.

It is no wonder that a closed community would want to just avoid this whole topic by repressing it. Of course, it is too powerful to completely suppress and the metaphysical power of sex then manifests itself in all sorts of ways both positive and negative that are ignored and/or remain unresolved. If the official policy is suppression then how can the metaphysical power of sex ever be mastered for good in the life of the people? If God is in us and we in him then when we make love with another person we are we not making love with a part of God? God created these needs and desires in us did he not? Why would he want us to scorn and compartmentalize this wonderful gift?

As I read this I wondered if Gurudev was only looking for victims to satisfy his lust or was he seeking co-creators of a transcendent experience? The community vow of celibacy created a powerful cognitive disruption that would tend to sabotage this natural progression if this was his intent. Was this glass half full or half empty? How much better would it have been to include sexual power up front in the path to enlightenment in this community? That way a conscious decision could have been made up front to either accept or reject this experience instead of hiding in the bushes?

[Kath]

Katherine, I found your piece very compelling!! I too lived at the ashram for quite a few months in 1976-7ish, then stayed involved for about 15 years afterwards, while living elsewhere. It is very clear that you lived there, from many details only a resident knows and that was what occurred!! I didn't attend the week-long sessions after the news came out and Amrit left Kripalu, as I had severed ties a few years earlier, but I heard about them. We got letters explaining some of the agreed-upon facts. I just wondered about a couple of things. I know the word 'rape' was used, not implying physical force, but as in such a profound position of trust and authority, one could be seen to have lost the ability to make a choice. Was there ever any physical force talked about? I suspect not, if only because it wouldn't be needed or desired by the 'perpetrator'! Secondly, I had only heard about three confirmed or acknowledged sexual 'partners'. I can imagine that there were more, but actually 'dozens'? I'd have thought it would have come out earlier. For me, 3 is enough, as what was so terrible was so much more than breaking celibacy or marriage vows and possibly even the trust, but the wholescale cover-up and denial/lying for many years. That is horrible. I saw part of one of the situations myself and I did know all of the 3 confirmed women. The one I saw was a young wife and mother, one of the original handful of disciples, suddenly leave the ashram for California, permanently. Very odd. Apparently, she'd made the accusations and they turned it all back on her, saying she was disturbed, deluded, whatever, and kept up the story for years! That was in the 70's and the husband married someone else, who you'd know, keeping the child to be raised at the ashram!! Very nasty!! That makes me very angry. Good for you for trusting your instincts and running away, but I'm sorry those instincts were honed in other exploitive situations.

Did you ever hear about an earlier scandal at Kripalu where a young man died of malnutrition? It was written up in People Magazine, with a grim picture of Krishnapriya and Gurudev. It was much more austere in the early days and it is imaginable that that could happen. They said he must have been anorexic and nobody was charged with anything. I had to leave the ashram myself as I wasn't physically strong or healthy enough, but if I'd refused to give in and kept pushing, I would have ended up in the hospital eventually myself probably! It felt terrible walking away from what felt like such a great opportunity, but it is fine...the spiritual journey continues wherever you are and my 'ashram' is here and now, always.

I still value my disciple years and I got an enormous amount of good from it. In the last days, what finally pushed me to sever ties was what I thought I saw Gurudev doing to fund raise, when they were first building and establishing the Lenox location. He'd get the energy raised over a weekend retreat and by Sunday, people were pledging huge amounts that they couldn't afford and I knew they'd be racked with guilt and confusion later when they broke their pledges. He seemed to be consciously manipulating the energy and them for that purpose and it looked very wrong to me. The leaders, of course, said it was my 'money karma'...humph! I found it hard to move on, but I had trusted myself in the beginning to 'follow the guru', so I decided I better trust myself to leave when that was the inner message.

All the best in your creative endeavours!!! I'm still a very spiritual person, basically Christian, these days. Not surprisingly, I haven't connected at all seriously with any formal group since then! I wish you very well and a warm and hearty "Jai sister" to YOU today!!!

Kath, formerly known as Nilima

[John Vajra]

Thanks you for sharing your story. Years later similar abuses continue to reoccur with Marc Gafni and other spiritual teachers.