Mentors represent the Self, the god within us,
the aspect of personality that is connected with all things.
This higher Self is the wiser, nobler, more godlike part of us.
—christopher vogler
Inviting the Divine Teacher
into the Garden
A good and wise teacher can help make spiritual leaps into higher places. I’d never considered looking for spiritual teachers, but they appeared naturally anyway. My ideal teachers have been like trees—expansive, thriving, and sharing love with all. They arrived often when I reached low points and dead ends. In a dream, the tree of life growing in my secret garden appeared to wither. Trees have long been associated with spiritual life. In animist cultures like Bali, where all things, especially in nature, are imbued with spirit life, trees hold a special place and become objects of worship. In the South of France I’d heard of the healing oak grove hidden on a mountainside in the backcountry and set out to find it for inspiration. Trees can be some of the best teachers. They show how to weather all kinds of conditions, including big storms; they give shelter and fruits without any expectation of return; they take root and constantly change and grow until they become such a peaceful, powerful, undemanding presence that we have to stand back and admire them with awe.
The trees above Les Courmettes, a retreat center and nature preserve in the South of France, required some work to find. The path wound up and around the mountain, then disappeared into a bed of rocks, leaving me to sense the way forward. Sometimes when we trust the intuitive radar, if our soul yearning is aligned with our thoughts and action, it leads us straight to what we need. Off in the distance toward the sea, a storm rolled in from the coast and the fast-approaching clouds required a decision to turn back or continue without certainty that I’d find the oaks. I felt they had to be nearby, so I walked on through briars and over boulders; then with a crack of thunder and a downpour, I stepped magically into the grove of ancient trees. It might have taken four or five people hand-to-hand to hug the largest one. They’re an ancient presence that some say is five hundred years old or more, and I thought of how they had witnessed the Dark Ages and the birth of the first secret gardens as they sprang up to offer sheltering walls for delicate and beautiful flowers.
The trees grew miraculously on a hillside, and despite the steep cliff, they remained anchored and strong enough to grow into powerful beings. The peace and serenity in this ancient place signaled its sacredness. The trees gave oxygen like the Divine gives love—without demands or conditions or expectation of a return. I yearned to meet good teachers, ones who embodied these same principles in action, but they seemed hard to find. Teachers who performed miracles existed in other times and places, as when Jesus raised Lazarus, or when the monkey god Hanuman helped Rama build the bridge to Lanka to defeat Ravana. But where do those teachers who perform miracles live today, when only reason seems to abound? Immaculate conception, rebirth, spontaneous healings from dreadful diseases—none of these stands up under the rigid mind of scientific scrutiny, and our world works hard to deny they can exist. But when we allow it, the subtle and great essence of life expands the boundaries of the physical world and miracles become possible.
While on a trip to a spiritual center in Virginia Beach, I carried a list of people who gave “life readings.” Some of these psychics could see into past, present, and future, and help to understand why some things happened as they did. Their main mission, I believe, is to connect us with our own spirits and bring healing. Since the insights of Karim, the Egyptian perfumer, had helped so much, I had been intrigued by this ability of some people to “see” and interpret the subtle information that we carry around us, and yet I also felt suspicious. Anyone might make up things that could guide in the wrong direction, I thought. An immoral person might even abuse their powers over another. Some healthy skepticism and choosing carefully felt important.
Sometime earlier I’d dreamed that I had eyes in my hands. I began to pay attention to the ways things felt when I held my hands over them without touching. Scanning like this became a tool to help me feel what foods worked best for my body, what herbal remedies felt right, and what beauty products to use or toss out. I scanned the list of readers with my left hand and found one where the energy felt smooth, even, and peaceful. My flight out would leave soon, but as I stared out the window at the dolphins frolicking and diving in the Virginia Beach surf, my heart cried out, “Call her!” In an act of desperation I phoned Barbara, the woman I’d circled on my list.
“When are you leaving?” she asked.
“In about four hours.”
“I’ll be right over.”
That marked the first miracle. She arrived in about twenty minutes, and we sat in my hotel room while dolphins swam offshore. Barbara’s eyes literally glowed as if she stood on a wall peering over the other side into a brilliant white light. “I got here as fast as I could,” she said. Given her speed, I wondered if she’d sensed my desperation. We settled in and she turned on her tape recorder so I could keep the session to listen to later. “Do you have something of yours I could hold?” she asked. Some people read palms; she picked up your story through touching an object like a watch, a pen, or something you treasure. I later learned that this is called psychometry. I handed over my amethyst ring.
“So where were you born?”
“Indiana,” I said.
“And where are you living now?”
“Antibes, France.”
She seemed to look inward and began to speak in detailed pictures as if she saw every important event in clear detail through a camera lens. At first she went way back, even into previous lives. “I can see you in Egypt,” she said matter-of-factly. “You were a man putting up symbols on the walls. I don’t know if they were tombs or temples, but I see you working with the symbols.”
“I’ve always been attracted to Egypt and went there recently,” I said, stunned. Yes, that felt right. Even in junior high history class, I had loved the Egyptians. I thought everyone did. Now she was revealing that maybe there was a deeper reason. Maybe I had once lived there and had good learning experiences in that place. “Symbols are important to you,” she said.
“Yes!” I said. “I love symbols.”
“You lived in Egypt at the time of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. He introduced you to the idea of the one God,” she said.
I sat back in a daze. I’d brought two postcards back from Egypt: one was of Akhenaten, the pharaoh with an oddly shaped body and head whose hands saluted the sun. He encouraged the Egyptians to see the one God behind their pantheon of deities. As she spoke, her words hit chords of truth and simply felt right. They explained my interests in Cairo and the profound emotions of familiarity linked to being there. She spoke too of my family and how they had been people around me in a past life as well. Some of the people I’d met and had the most challenges with involved past-life relationships that sought resolution this time around.
Then she said, “I see your spiritual needs haven’t been met.” Tears trickled down my cheek as overwhelming feelings of hopelessness accompanied a yearning for that experience of unconditional love. “Have you heard of -----?” She gave me a name that sounded strange and unfamiliar, like cyber-something.
I managed a garbled “No.”
“It looks like you’re going to explore his teachings, because I see a trip to India for you.”
“Alone?” I asked, dreading the thought of so many miles to a strange place without a companion.
“I can’t tell. But I think you’ll find something there. We’ll see.”
A spark of hope ignited as she spoke of how the teacher refused money, did not create a new religion, and asked people to serve others, not him. She named celebrities, politicians, and royalty who had visited him, and she described his water projects, educational institutions, and hospitals that function cost-free for those who use them—and patients didn’t need to be his devotees to benefit. “For me, he’s the best thing that’s happened in the last two thousand years,” she said. “But I’m not preaching. I don’t get anything out of it. You have to see for yourself.”
Three months later I arrived to the long lines at Mumbai Airport on my way to his ashram in India. In Western life, we don’t make much room for spiritual living. We give space to hard work; it’s part of the Puritan ethic that drives many of us to achieve. We permit entertainment in the form of shopping, movies, video games, hard partying, and gourmet eating. We give ritualized moments to a religious service, usually on Sunday mornings. Some people will do volunteer work or participate in charities. Then we feel we’ve done our duty and get on with producing and consuming again.
In India, the country has a deep tradition and role for spiritual seekers. They’re not considered wackos or nutty. Some retreat to ashrams and revere family gurus. Once duties are fulfilled as parents, some even leave family and work life altogether to become ascetics who beg for food and wear the traditional orange dress of the sadhu, the spiritual seeker. The aim is to reduce worldly desires and attachments and approach closer to the Divine as the body ages. It’s considered a way to prepare for death and merge with God. Giving food to sustain spiritual seekers who renounce the world to become sadhus is considered a blessing that brings good karma to the giver. Sadhus may go from village to village and ask for food to keep them alive during their search for God. Though India is adopting more Western ideals, the spiritual seeker is still respected and accepted.
On the bus to the ashram, I met a woman, Suni, who would introduce me to my future home. Suni and I shared a room with two narrow beds and a bathroom. She placed her photos of the guru on the table that separated our beds and bowed in front of it before racing out to the darshan. Darshan is the act of seeing the teacher walk among the crowds. It relates to perceiving divine Truth. I turned away embarrassed as she kneeled in front of his picture.
The notion of a spiritual teacher or guru is foreign to most Westerners, as it was to me. We revere self-sufficiency and self-reliance and seem convinced that we can figure things out in a perfectly rational, logical way using the Internet, books, and other research. But reason and logic couldn’t provide the experience of unconditional love I yearned for. When I sat on the floor of the temple and watched the teacher walk by, the meaning of love permeated my body, mind, and spirit as an experience. It transcended reason. The presence and energy echoed the feelings of sacredness found in the sacred oak grove multiplied here by a million times.
In the ashram silence, a powerful wave of energy swept through and washed my heart of impurities and pain. Part of the numbness to life had come through carrying a thick armor around my heart, but in an instant it fell away. That powerful energy moved others, too. Tears streamed from the eyes of women and men around me; some smiled and others stared in awe. It was not magic, hypnotism, delusion, or illusion. The presence and energy touched me to the core. It affirmed life, built it up, and made it stronger. I recognized that overwhelming energy as unconditional love and it was not just outside, but also within me. I wept and could not understand how the teacher could give it so freely. I didn’t deserve it and had done nothing for him except take up space in the temple and yearn for this experience. This moment brought the withering inner garden into full bloom. That kind of love felt like a warm, gentle sunshine after a very long, hard winter. My inner tree of life revived.
On the temple floor, I sat in the presence of an elevated soul, someone who knew his divine nature. I melted at his feet and wanted nothing more than to be like him, to love and adore him. Feelings like this were foreign to me. Adoration? Devotion? I had felt an inkling of this for Jesus, but not for the religion with all the confusing contradictions that accompanied it. Here I fell to my knees and bowed my head to a reflection of who I am. As I heard many times in India, Tat tvam asi—I am That. It’s a Sanskrit phrase from one of the ancient Indian texts, the Chandogya Upanishad, that recognizes one’s true nature beyond roles and body awareness. The Bible says something similar: “I am that I am.”
In a discourse to the crowds, the teacher said, “I am divine.” A statement like this would have shocked me, except that the words were soft, sweet, and lacking pride or arrogance. “And you are divine too,” he added. Me, divine? Part animal, part human, and mostly divine, he said, and I imagined the creatures on the bowls in Moustiers. Not me, that’s impossible, I thought. God is separate. God is out there, distant, something I point to up in the sky. An image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But the teacher took the finger that pointed out there and up there and curled it around to point it directly at my own heart.
In a dream not long before this trip, I sat on a dusty garden path waiting for a guru to walk past so I could be in his presence. I held my hands together at my heart, feeling deep devotion. The holy man looked thin and wore a dhoti like Gandhi. In the dream he walked slowly toward me. I prepared to prostrate at his feet, but instead, he stopped and bowed to me. I believe he was my inner gardener in another form teaching me this truth: “I am God.” The guru mirrors my true nature of bliss and peace. All I have to do is have faith and work to peel away the shell of ego and attitudes that separate me from this wisdom.
The Indian teacher gliding along the path like an elegant angel stole my heart. That thumping, trustworthy organ and the psyche attached to it no longer belonged to me to give to a man or my job, or any earthly thing. It belonged to God—not God that resides in a single physical form, but the divine essence that permeates all of creation. All is one, the teacher said. That’s easy to say, but difficult to believe and achieve in understanding. Who wants to be one with the serial killer, or a brutal dictator, or our flawed selves? And yet, the guru said that God is in all and we must seek to see that essence in all. The sacred and profane are one and the same in the eye of the realized seeker.
I love the Hindu descriptions of how one may believe in and experience God. One can worship the Divine as separate and “out there.” Then one begins to feel an intimate connection to the Divine, as if God is a very close relative or friend. Advaita, the ultimate stage, promotes non-dualism. The seeker no longer identifies solely with the body, but understands her divine essence and transcends the finite form and name to realize unity with all beings and all of life. This is the ultimate—seeing God in all, experiencing God as the essence that animates every earthly thing from a stone to a toad to a human being. Love opens the gateway to that experience.
Just going out into nature can be a doorway to it too, and invite a deep communion with Mother Nature. But of course all of this discussion means nothing unless it’s experienced directly. My ideas formed with more clarity. Love became something practically palpable, as if I could touch it and realize fully when it was present. But my heart was just starting to tentatively open, reach out, and test the terrain. Love, unconditional love of self and others, is hard work. It takes effort and patience. Like trees, it grows slowly with time until it becomes strong and solidly anchored.
As I sat on a cushion on the temple floor, a harmonium filled the thick, warm air and moaned “OM.” A tabla kept rhythm, and a reed flute pierced the air with a sound of absolute joy. I loved the notes, and by closing my eyes and focusing on them, effortlessly I felt lifted up like a butterfly, elevated higher and wider until my heart expanded. The music grew to crescendo; the reed flute heightened its delight and I swooned like one of Krishna’s gopikas (cowherd girls), in love with God, in love with everyone sitting around me, in love with the entire world.
This moment marked an extreme shift. From birth, I’d always felt isolated and alone. I never felt I belonged anywhere, and I didn’t trust people. I felt like a pilgrim traveling through life, and the only times I really felt connected came in nature. My mantra became “I walk alone.” I felt a need to be self-sufficient because I could only count on and have faith in myself. The dreadful, horrible state of humanity condemned us to always be separate and divided. We could never understand or feel the pains in another’s heart, nor could anyone truly understand ours.
My photography reflected this. Even while traveling to the most tourist-packed destinations like Las Vegas or Key West, I’d return home with photos of monuments, houses, places, streets, but the photos rarely included people. For me, people meant pain, bad news, complication, and despair. Now, the teacher said that I needed to see God in all of these people. And worse (or was it for the better?), my heart was expanding right here to include them in a mind-shattering, earthshaking inner experience where the walls of ego fell away. Oh my God! It encompassed the Indians, Americans, Russians, Indonesians, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, and all of the other people in the temple and beyond.
To anyone who doesn’t have the direct experience, this may sound foreign. Spiritual experiences are very personal and easily snubbed, over-analyzed, criticized, and derided by others. This is why it’s usually best to keep them to oneself. Even a few months before, the business-suited, glasses-wearing executive who I was would have looked at me today over those glasses and said, “Uh-huh.” Sizing me up as flaky, she would have gone on writing out her business reports and making arrangements for the next board meeting and then made fun of me when she talked to her friends later. “You know, I met this woman today who told me about visiting an ashram and feeling communion with the whole universe. She was really out there.” And then she’d laugh and go back to drinking a chilled glass of wine and forget about it. But I sat in a state of ecstasy with my heart bursting with love for the world, sure that love and God exist, and they’re one and the same. This marked a huge miracle. I felt alive, awake, and resurrected from the dead. The ashram temple became a physical representation of the core of my secret garden—a place of bliss, joy, infinite peace, and love.
But in a few days I would leave. How do you integrate the experience of universal love into daily life? How do you make it a regular reality? I didn’t know and I didn’t think it would be easy, but it would lead me a step closer to Home, to paradise in the heart of my secret garden, where I wouldn’t have to run to India or any other place to find peace. All I’d have to do was turn inside and voilà, I would embody peace and bliss. On the way to the airport, the rickshaw taxi swerved down dusty roads and stopped by the wish-fulfilling tree. Local legend says that the teacher sat under the tree in the early days (before hundreds of thousands of people from all nationalities and religions thronged the place) and asked devotees what fruits they wished for.
The tree bore all the fruits they craved: mango, apple, pear, banana, cherries. We stopped and I walked to the base of it. The tree acted like a metaphor for human desires and our relation to the Divine. We yearn for something and through the seeds of thoughts, energy, behaviors, and actions, those desires become reality. Watch this in action. We plant a tree and then it turns into a giant oak. We plant a thought and it may become a habit; and the habit, if it’s constructive and creative, can become what we want. If the habit is writing a thousand words a day, the end result can become a book. If the thought is becoming a chef, then through training, effort, and regular practice we can learn the skills and cook for others. The same applies to spiritual practice. If you want to tend your secret garden and grow your soul, it requires an investment of time, energy, thoughts, and actions. The closer to Divine Energy or love that one is, the more quickly the fruits become manifest in the physical world. But healthy choices about who and what to admit into this sacred space in this critical time of growth will make all the difference in the outcome.
Finding the Temple Inside
The ashram became an outer representation of the inner sacred space. But you don’t need to pack up and head off to an ashram or go on a retreat to find the peace and love that appeared there. By going inside, into the depths of your imagination, into the heart of your secret garden, you can find the perfect place for your inner peace to flower and your love to blossom. Find a quiet place, close your eyes, and once again find yourself inside your secret garden. As you walk inside, find the place that to you is the most sacred inner sanctum. It may be a temple, a playground, a place where divine energies flow naturally.
You may find a teacher there in the form of a tree, a person, a divine being, or a presence. Imagine and feel the pure, unconditional love that flows from this place. It fills you entirely to overflowing. Allow your heart to open to receive it. If you feel unworthy or undeserving, acknowledge this and go deeper, to the part of you that welcomes this powerful energy. When you feel filled, come back and concretize the experience in some way using writing, drawing, collage, or some other way to capture the experience.
Bhakti—Choosing the Path
of Devotion
In India, holy men and women, saints, and gurus leave worldly pursuits to devote their lives to the Divine. Bhakti, or devotion, becomes the sole focus of their lives. Their god or goddess might be Shiva, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Ganesha, Kali, or a host of others. In rural India it’s not unusual to see people worshiping cows and trees as well. Their worship is not of the outward form, but of the divine essence the thing embodies, which relates to seeing the divine essence in all and not as a separate entity “up there.” Indian women make beautiful, heartfelt displays of devotion, offering up garlands of jasmine and golden flowers to deities. They wait patiently in long lines, often with babies in their arms, to enter into the temple.
Two women displayed deep devotion. With thin bones and graying hair, they sat in front in the innermost temple at the ashram at the crack of dawn. While one played the harmonium, together they sang ancient Vedic praises to God. The hymn called on God to awaken, for if He-She should not, the whole world would disappear. Their song awakened feelings of devotion in me. Devotion combines a complex array of sentiments: love, compassion, gratitude, awe, and joy, to name a few. In the West, we see devotion in mothers, fathers, friends, mates, and lovers. All of these contain elements of the sweetness found in this elevated emotion. Have you ever experienced a sense of devotion? It may be in the way you commit time and energy to a child, to your art, to a mate, or to a spiritual teacher. How might you deepen and cultivate this emotion to expand your heart?
Welcoming Your Teachers
All along life’s journey, many teachers arrive. Each imparts an experience or teachings that we can use to grow and expand. The teacher may come in surprising forms—your daughter or son, a partner, a colleague, a stranger on the street—all of them may offer up some insight that will help you to grow. If you choose a spiritual teacher, the best ones will encourage you to see yourself as divine and trust in your inner wisdom and conscience above all. Can you recognize the most recent teachers in your life?