I FOUND GOD IN 1974, stretched out on my mother’s olive velvet couch reading Be Here Now. Unspeakably burdened and tormented by my teenage thoughts and desires, the precepts of Eastern religion were the good news I’d been waiting for. I searched through the phone book and ended up at the Asbury Park Zen center, which was a little on the quiet side. Somehow I got my parents to send me to Taos, New Mexico, where Be Here Now had been published and where Ram Dass himself was teaching a two-week workshop that summer.
What a dream to hear that I was not my physical body, not my monkey mind nor my endless wanting. Beyond this samsara, there was something else entirely. Every morning Ram Dass spoke of these matters in his warm, humorous way, with his Massachusetts r’s, his bottomless blue gaze a kind of blessing. After the lecture, there was hatha yoga and kirtan. I found the latter particularly ecstatic, with its sexy twenty-something chanting teacher, Krishna Das.
I worked very hard to attain samadhi for about a year and a half, then my endless wanting got the best of me. By the time I returned to yoga in the early 2000s, it was about my body, not my soul, sweating through sun salutations in a hot vinyasa class. Then one day, on the yoga teacher’s playlist—Krishna Das! It took me right back to that whitewashed adobe room in Taos, my chakras blazing. What ever happened to that little seeker who wanted enlightenment more than anything, who had an om tattooed on her ankle and wrote a sonnet to Shiva and Shakti?
Ram Dass is still with us, living on Maui after two brushes with death, one of them a stroke that took his beautiful fluency. At RamDass.org, you can sign up for online seminars or order a Be Here Now wallpaper pack for your desktop. The little seeker, a survivor herself, is on the other side of the world, still gamely attempting Warrior III and Utkatasana. Bending her knees, stretching her arms, lifting her heart. Her glasses are on the windowsill so her drishti is a little blurry, not to mention the titanium wrist and a few other issues, but she’s no longer in such a hurry to escape her thoughts and desires. Maybe that was the point all along.