I could not afford Transcendental Meditation like my older sister when she went off to college, so I tried free meditation classes in UCLA’s experimental college. In my first experiment, I entered a darkened gymnasium to find a circle of elderly women and a few students meditating on candles and quietly walked out.
Then in January of 1971 I began attending Kundalini Yoga classes in the Student Union building or on the grass under the trees for the price of a poem or a feather and never missed a class. I recognized some of the exercises as the very same ones my angel taught me as a child. Baba Singh, our teacher, lived with Yogi Bhajan and taught ongoing yoga sets and the yogic lifestyle as he learned them. I learned the reason for doing every yogic practice. There was no mystery about it. The only mystery was the depth of my own being. And like my childhood experiences of angel yoga, sublime shifts in consciousness took place during deep relaxations.
I carved, “Sut nam,” my understanding of “Sat Nam”, meaning, “Truth is God’s Identity,” on my clay ocarina, and then wrote in my journal,
I am depressed because I’m not doing what I want to do. I’m in the middle of a big university, a big city—almost anything I seek is at my door, but all I do are repeat old patterns. There is so much more in me that wants to be!
The solution is not to play recorder, guitar, to eat, paint or finish reading “Waiting for Godot”. And I am too restless to meditate. And I keep thinking, this is going to happen no matter where in the world I am. I will never find God essence in anything if first I feel I must label and understand what I am to find before I find it.
More and more I am realizing the pure joy of simple surrender. And tree becomes more than “tree” and I become more than “I”. I’ll have to go walking more often. In dark and alone it makes me, lets me realize so clearly that I almost want to push it away—that every sound I make, look I seek, step I take, every motivating thought is my own, and always new.
What I was also going through, and feeling tortured by, was a deep craving to eat everything delicious and steal everything precious I saw in other’s homes and yards. I wanted to take them all unto myself—but didn’t. It was the first test of being a yogi—feeling my power, craving everything, desiring not to desire, craving God.
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