by Psalm Isadora

Feb 2007, Devipuram Ashram, India

In the back of an Indian taxi,
an impossibly old car with upholstery organically dissolving into it’s greasy self
with springs that cut my ass cheeks
no a/c, I sweat profusely and hold my breath.
I am going to meet my teacher for the first time
will he be the one?
I feel my heart ache and my ribs felt like they were being stabbed
“it is my heart I have come to heal” I think to myself
we are in the jungle, and there are only Indians here.

I was working as a yoga teacher in California when I started reading the older yoga scriptures that talked about the importance of a guru-disciple relationship. I started experiencing insomnia, but I knew it wasn’t regular insomnia that kept me staring at the ceiling, wrestling with my sheets, feeling hot and sweaty on cold winter California nights. The fire burning inside me felt holy, it made my skin hot to touch and left a strange taste of sweetness like honey in my mouth.

Somewhere halfway across the world, in a country I had never been to, I could feel my guru calling me. I sent emails to the ashram he founded in India, but got no reply. Still I knew I had to go. With no response from the ashram I took the risk borrowed money to buy my plane ticket to India and found a substitute teacher for my yoga classes. I was afraid, but I knew India would change my life forever and I knew I would not be able to sleep until I went. Because I had not heard back from Guruji’s ashram, I bought my ticket to land in a nearby city where I had an Indian friend so I could wait there until I heard back or just show up at the ashram to see if he was there.

I  landed in India in the middle of the night. Instead of taking a taxi from the airport, I hitched a ride with some young Indian men I met on the plane. We piled into their cousins Jeep, who drove like a madman until they dropped me off at my friend Lakshmi’s house. I had met Lakshmi when she took my yoga classes in Los Angeles. Her family was very wealthy, there was a guard at the gate with a gun. He called Lakshmi’s mobile phone and handed it to me, she said she was out at a dance club and would be back soon.

When Lakshmi arrived, we went in her room with a small group of friends and they pulled out a contraband bottle of Patron tequila. I was a good vegetarian yogi on a pilgrimage to India, leaving my years of hard partying long behind me. Still, I thought, “Why not?” and took a shot of tequila. I woke early to the sound of mantras playing on tinny radios in the house. It was decided that it would be best if I went to Ammachi’s ashram in Kerala while I continued to send emails and wait to hear back from Guruji’s ashram.

Amma’s ashram was crowded like a small city, lots of Indians and lots of us “white westerners” come to seek salvation. I would rise with swollen, sleepy eyes at 5am to sit at the morning fire pujas. I learned to sit still and go into trance watching the fire, fixing my mind on the smells of the wood and the sounds of the priests chanting the mantras. I thought I had learned to meditate before, but three hours in lotus position on a concrete floor being eaten alive by mosquitos was a whole new level of concentration. Then I finally received an email from Guruji’s ashram. They told me to come as soon as I liked and that I was welcome.

Arriving in a beat up taxi, I could see that this ashram was very different from Ammachi’s, it was small and nestled in the jungle with hardly anyone there. Guruji was napping, so they had one of the young women devotees give me a tour of the temples. We went to the first temple and I sat on the roof looking at green palm trees and red earth and mountains surrounding us that looked like breasts and hips of a woman’s body. I closed my eyes and felt a strong energy pushing up inside my yoni, my womb. The girl told me this was the temple to the Shiva lingam, a lingam is the sacred masculine penis. We walked to the second temple, a small room and the entire inside was a giant yoni, the sacred feminine genitals. I sat on the stone yoni and felt my hips melt and my own yoni merge with the earth, as if i was magnetically connected to the roots of the universe. When we walked back to the ashram, Guruji was awake.

I saw a man sitting on a bench in the distance, with about four or five people sitting cross legged in the red dirt around him. He was wearing all white and had snow white hair and beard, from a distance he looked like Santa Claus. Even rom a distance, I knew immediately this was my Guruji, that I had come to the right place. I sat in the earth with the other disciples and he looked at me with kind, twinkling mischievous eyes.

Before I left to return to America, he initiated me into Sri Vidya Tantra. In the empowerment ritual he touched the chakra petals on my body and placed the sounds of the bija seed mantras in my body. I was to sit still and repeat the mantras he was saying. At first I felt clumsy and confused repeating these sanskrit words, then my mind felt sleepy and I felt like a robot repeating after him, like I was in a trance. Then a sudden hurricane wind blew through the room, I opened my eyes expecting the whole building to be torn down, but everything was the same, it was me who had changed forever from the initiation. Guruji asked me to teach Tantra back in America, to pass along the mantras and share the Goddess energy of Sri Vidya to do healing rituals for men and women. He also asked me to return and to bring my students from America.

On the day the taxi came to take me back to America, I was crying and sad to leave my new family, but knew I had to return to my teenage son at husband at home. I hugged Guruji one last time and then got in the cab. He stood waving at me and said, “Be careful, the world can be cruel”.

Psalm Isadora grew up on a born-again hippie commune in Northern California. From a young age, she had ecstatic experiences with the Spirit that did not fit in the dogma of the religion she was raised with. She traveled to India to study Tantra. She is currently writing a book about her spiritual seeking experiences.
www.psalmisadorayoga.com