From the spiritually incorrect to the spiritual capital of the world

The  last destination on my journey was Varanasi formerly known as the holy city of Baneres. Many gurus , swamis, and prophets achieved enlightenment here. Also, just outside of the city in a small place called Sarnath,  Buddha himself- Siddhartha Gutama- gave his first sermon after he came down from the mountain. Buddhism officially began here. It's the most intense, eye opening, and life changing place of my pilgrimage. 

     But before we get there I must close out Osho. On one of the last days I had a very bizarre encounter with one of the teachers there. This was my warning sign to proceed with caution when diving into these meditations like this, because you are literally playing with fire- the fire of your own sanity.  It's a very real thing to not be able to handle this new source of energy and evolution and to actually go crazy because of it. The world as you now know it becomes too much to handle. Kundalini yoga has the same dangers if not practiced right. Luckily I've always been reminded or kept in check so to speak. Before I even began kundalini yoga I had a dream where Buddha, the Dali Lama, and Krishna appeared to me in my mirror in my room (intense, I know). Now at this point I had absolutely no idea what Kundalini was and had only heard it once from a teacher who said something about it being the energy at the base of your spine, but I didn't even know a yoga practice existed for it.  In my dream they were telling me all sorts of things about something called "the awakening of the kundalini". When I woke up all I could remember was the three powerhouses whom appeared before me and Krishna saying this thing about the awakening of the kundalini. I got out of my bed and googled that exact phrase and the first thing that came up was a book on Amazon called: The Awakening of the Kundalini  by a guy known as Gopi Krishna! I thought that was pretty specific in connection with my dream and ordered it right away.  When it came, it was a very small book I finished  in two days, and the entire thing was basically a big warning sign. It spoke all about the cases in India of people losing it amongst many other things but that's mainly what I took away from it. However at that point the message was very random because I had no idea why I needed the warning or what it was for. Then a week later my friend, Aimee invited me to my first kundalini yoga class and it all made sense. 

    The warning at Osho came in the form of an actual person. After Dynamic one morning I was sitting at a table by myself, enjoying my breakfast, when I saw this wild looking woman speaking to herself. She was in the Osho teacher outfit which is an all black robe with a white belt, and I could feel she was going to come talk to me. Shit, it is way to early for this. Sure enough she asks me if she can sit down even though every other table is open in the whole area! She sits down and feels chaotic as she feverishly peels her orange, rubbing each slice on her lips before quickly devouring it. Uncomfortably weird. As I'm looking at her I know there's a message in all this and I start to realize she looks exactly like me! She's like an older, say about 65, version of myself. As I'm thinking this she meets my eyes and says: "oh you're wild too, I can feel it. Yep (pointing her finger at me) you're wild alright. It's our red hair. That red hair. That red hair!" Then she spits out some gibberish and darts her eyes around. I am literally terrified of everything- how she looks like me, what she's saying, and the mere presence of her separate of myself. She's Dutch and tells me she comes here 7 months a year and just loves the gibberish meditations as she awkwardly spits out some more non sense. I am so creeped out I can't even stand it when suddenly a guy walks over and thanks her for the amazing meditation she held the other day and how it was so powerful and beautiful and really helped him a lot!! Ok, now I'm in a sheer state of flabbergasted confusion. I mean, this woman has clearly lost her mind yet still effective for others??  Then just as quickly as she came, she just fluttered away, leaving me deep in thought. Whether it was a warning or not, I chose to take it as such and decided to take a break from meditation that afternoon, taking only a Bollywood dance class,  and didn't do dynamic the next day either. 

     When it was time to leave, I was ready to go. I hit the airport to begin yet another strenuous excursion of tuk-tuk to plane to cab to train to tuk-tuk. I left Pune at 9am and didn't arrive in Varanasi until 11am the next day. I met my friend Anjay in Delhi. He gave me a lot of gear before I left for India as he has made a documentary about his journey to find his family here a couple of years ago. It was amazing, halfway through my trip he just decided he had to join me and booked a ticket on a whim to come help me film in Varanasi! Awesome, right? What's even more amazing is the fact that he and I went to the same high school and college together yet didn't meet until LA. We've pretty much been on the same path since we were 14 but didn't meet until about 28. He's four years older than me so I couldn't help but laugh at say the senior passing the freshman in the halls of Fenwick and saying, yep one day we're gonna travel to India together! Or the frat boy behind the bar serving the underaged sorority girl a beer not knowing one day they'll be meditating in a Shiva temple together. Funny how life unfolds like that and eventually brings people to a meeting point. 

    Since Anjay is male, 6'2" and Indian I suggested we take an overnight sleeper train from Delhi to Varanasi for the experience of it.  And it was great! I loved every minute of it. We had second class which means we shared bunk beds with two other people. We arrived and found our travel buddies to be this old Indian couple. Anjay and I had the top bunks which was perfect for me but ridiculous for him because he's so tall. Haha. Next to us was another Indian man and a solo female traveler from Indiana. I've met so many remarkable women traveling alone in India and it makes me proud to now be apart of this tribe as it's something I have always, always wanted to do.  We bunked up for 17hours and I actually had a pretty comfortable night's sleep.  However Anjay was pretty restless and told me later the Indian man below me was just ripping ass the whole night, he said it was so loud it was unbelievable. Ah hahaha. I totally did not hear this bc I slept with my music in the whole time. 

    As we're getting off the train the next morning we find out it's Shivarati! This is one of the biggest festivals in all of India and the fact that we happen to be in Varanasi for it is the equivalent of say, being in Bethlehem for Christmas. It's huge and this was totally unplanned! I've actually celebrated Shivarati the last two years in the states and suddenly here I am in the center of the motherland for the festival?! Incredible.  The festival is three days long. The first day is a wild all night celebration- the point is to not sleep and to keep your energy high, bathing in the potency of Shiva. We made our way down to the Ganges river for the night's puja. It was this beautiful ceremony of about eight guys dressed in stunning clothes doing this fire and smoke dance in honor of Shiva. The place was packed with thousands of people. Our tuk-tuk driver told us over a million people will migrate to Varanasi for Shivarati.  Anjay and I got to work immediately capturing everything with our cameras and it was all very powerful to be apart of. Afterwords everyone gives an offering of flowers and a lit candle to the river, releasing their intention for Shiva. It was here we realized this is definitely an intense city where the westerner will be shaked down for every possible rupee. I honestly have not had a problem my entire trip until Varanasi where the concept of fixed pay doesn't exist. Basically they start off by saying: pay as you like and look all spiritual and kind. Then you go to pay as you like and they immediately get angry and demand 1000 rupees which is preposterous! This woman straight up got into a fight with us demanding we pay her for the flower she insisted we send down the river and then refused to accept our 300 rupees because it wasn't 1000. It was mad! 1000 rupees is a lot and is definitely not the standard price for pretty much anything in India.

     After the puja is the insane block party. The streets are packed with people all night long. From infants to seniors to Saddus everyone is celebrating and most people are high on bhang lassi! It's a type of weed yogurt shake! Marijuana is illegal in India except for this one day out of the year where it is accepted as a part of the ritual. It is believed that by ingesting or smoking it on Shivarati it is known to connect you with the infinite source of the supreme as Shiva himself is connected to the powerful healing plant.  Very, very tempting to try, but I did not. However you certainly didn't need to be high to feel this intensity. There was a massive parade down the main street with elephants, camels, horses, bands, massive statues of several gods being charioted through the city. Music everywhere. Think St. Paddy's day in Chicago meets Cinco de Mayo in Mexico City and that's Shivarati in Varanasi! It was nuts. At one point I was stuck in what literally felt like a corral with all these people pushing their way through ( there is absolutely no concept of "personal space" here) when a massive cow appears in front of me. He's just in the line, slowly walking as he's a loud to do because the cows are definitely kings here, and I have to try and get past him somehow. If I don't the flow of traffic will push me right into his ass which could result in a swift hoof to the shin. There's no time to panic only to move as the shoving becomes more aggressive. I have no idea how I'm going to get past this thing, he's gi-normous! Finally I make an attempt to slip past him like the others and he turns to try and shove me with his horns!! I almost had a heart attack as I dodge them at the last second while screaming like an idiot. Meanwhile,  Anjay got the whole cow face off on film. Haha.  As the night went on a massive rainstorm broke out which you know is a gift from Shiva... And, as you also could imagine, 

us westerners without our umbrellas and proper rain gear simply had to call it quits.  We grabbed a tuk-tuk  which was almost impossible as every other westerner there was also fleeing the scene and ended up gratefully sharing one with a guy from Australia. As we drove back to the British Cantonment area, where we all comfortably stay away from the madness, we left the Indians to their fanatical rain dance that gives the other people we once so ignorantly called Indians, the Native Americans, quite a run for their money! Om Nameh Shivaya.  

The Trance Dancing Yogini knows Kung Fu!!

    To continue with my Matrix references because there’s honestly no better way to describe this, you know the part where Neo is in the all white room with Morpheus for the first time. Where he states that famous line… “I know Kung Fu” and then the two break into some serious sparring? Osho International was pretty much that, I mean, the Wachowski brothers must have gotten some of their inspiration here- to say the least.  First off, most of the meditations are held in a massive football field sized, marble pyramid that fits up to 5,000 people equipped with a cutting edge surround sound Bose stereo system. A moat of crystal clear water presents itself in front of the pyramid with a single strip up the middle for everyone to glide up as if walking on water (with our long dresses it definitely looks more like we’re gliding around this place than a boring old walk). (Ha). The second you enter it’s as if something stripes you of your density and you get to actually experience energy. Sure we can talk about energy all day and can feel it here and there, but inside this pyramid you become the energy you already are. It’s like you transform into a cell within your own body and finally get to experience what it means when people say: everything is energy. Your vibration truly becomes tangible. There are pyramids all over the complex and everything has a purpose from the power of using pyramids to the healing stones used to make them to the reason why we’re all in maroon dresses. 

      Ninety percent of the time everyone is dancing. Every meditation has at least 15 minutes of ecstatic dance included in it. Sometimes you’re dancing to amazing trance, other times it’s to some serious drum and base, and at other times it could be to some angelic violins. Again, everything serves a purpose and every sound projected out is set to a certain frequency and holds a certain power to help you release negativity as you dance your way back to your child-like nature. I swear I danced more at Osho than I did at the Coachella Music Festival two years ago and I was dead sober.  Outside they have this amazing white marbled dance floor that’s about half the size of a football field, known as the Buddha Grove. Everyday at noon a deejay would spin all sorts of unbelievable music from all over the world and people couldn’t resist but be drawn to the dance floor. The exotic trees created a lush canopy over the large stage as everyone melts into their own little, tiny dancer for the hour.  It’s incredible to watch the awkward, enormously tall, Dutch man move his hips to the beat of his own drum next to the small Japanese professional dancer who flows to rhythm like silk in the wind. Then there’s the young, wild-child with the dirty feet, head banging out of sync next to the exotically beautiful Indian elder, whom shifts with defined poise. Behind her is the dreadlocked Euro-gypsy spirit weaving (it’s a form of dance) with the picture perfect American ballerina, and it’s all just proof we can re-learn how to be completely free through the power of our own movement.  Dance is meditation. 

      Now, when I dive into the spiritually weird you have to understand I don’t just stand on the sidelines, point fingers, and laugh. Sure there’s definitely a lot of laughing and “this is bat shit crazy” moments, but I’m also here to see if this actually works, to learn, and of course to report back. Spread the word on insanity’s perhaps sanity. Therefore, I went for it! Over the course of seven days I participated in anywhere from 4-6 hours of meditation per day. Four out of the seven days I woke up at 5am to walk half a mile, in the blissful silence of darkness, by myself to the ashram for the 6am Dynamic Meditation. This is Osho’s most powerful meditation and it’s so intense! Everyone has a blindfold on because the experience is meant to be an individual one. Yes, you are with other energies but you want to keep your eyes closed the whole time because it’s about going in, external circumstances are irrelevant. This weird frequency, high-pitched noise, blasts out and the first 15 minutes is spent erratically breathing. The idea is to not make sense with your breath, to mix it up and disrupt its flow as much as possible. To confuse its linear pattern.  You breathe hard, fast, intense. Kinda like as if all of India was just a breath- fast, chaotic, no sense of order yet continues to flow with such life. Next, you SCREAM! You scream at the tops of your lungs, hit the floor, kick and punch the air, cry, howl, laugh... Whatever you feel like you need to do to get it out! 15 minutes of completely losing your shit! And it’s just that… lose all that shit… all that negativity that harbors inside of you. The insecurities, the hurt feelings, the sense of loss, the anger, the fear that resides deep in your cellular memory- SHOUT IT OUT! Release it with all your might. It’s called “consciously going mad”. Just go for it, everyone else is and no one cares. They’re not even there, remember? You’re alone and it’s a freaking soundproof pyramid! After that, the next 15 minutes is spent jumping up and down with your arms over your head shouting the mantra hoo! There’s so much that goes into this part. Chanting hoo is associated with Taoism, Sufism… it’s a specific vibration that resonates with your earth center allowing you to activate your core. Opening your mind and body up to the possibility of receiving new possibilities. Once you have hoo-ed it out you then stand completely still for 15 minutes and just receive and feel the energy coursing through your body. Let the awareness and messages come. After the stillness is the celebration! The dance! 15 minutes of free movement, just divinely dancing with yourself in whatever way feels necessary. At this point I couldn’t help but sneak a peak to see a grown man twirling around next to a woman sitting on the ground clapping next to another woman air guitaring next to… me, rolling on the ground. Haha, it’s what I wanted to do.  Good thing we were all in red and not white or I would’ve questioned the idea of whether or not I had been committed to the loony bin and didn’t realize it.

     This meditation was then followed by either Zen Archery class or Tai Chi in the Buddha Grove to help calm you back down, bring you back to the reality we must live in. Then the rest of the day was filled with meditations such as gong and laughing class, chakra breathing, silent sitting, Sufi whirling, and gibberish! The concept behind the gibberish meditation is to say everything you’ve always wanted to say but could never say, but say it in another language. This then confuses the mind/ego and allows you to wipe it clean, to disrupt its normal way of processing in order to allow room for clarity to come through in new ways. It’s said that if you’re having trouble sleeping just do even a minute of gibberish and you’ll be able to calm your mind to rest. 

         So where do I stand with all this? Well, I’m not devoting my life to Osho or calling him my guru or anything like that, but this process is no joke. I had so much come up for me especially over the 4 days of Dynamic Meditation. This was the part of the journey I was definitely seeking, the higher meditation techniques. Going deeper within the mind.  I went through a lot of layers like getting myself to the point where I actually heard myself cry the way I used to as an infant, as we all do as infants. I screamed so much that certain ones took me back to past lives where I was tortured and killed during the Middle Ages. At my very first Dynamic the thing that came up the most for me was Catholicism. Being a “recovering Catholic,” as Jillian likes to call it, (haha) I had so much emotion arise about how the Church forbids its Priests to truly experience love by convincing us that we have a God who tells us NO we can’t do certain things if we truly believe in him. It’s a religion and by definition that means- comes with limits… It only allows the soul to go so far when there’s so much more personal power we have in the ability to consciously co-create our lives with God. I studied Catholicism from Kindergarten all the way through college where I was a Religious Studies minor with a strong focus in Catholicism.  Therefore, I'd like to think I can speak from an educated standpoint on this feeling and no, this doesn’t happen to everyone, these meditations are not secretly making you go against the Church or anything idiotic like that. It’s an experience that is solely personal to me and my journey but it was a strong one. Again, it’s about finding that inner child and realizing there’s true wisdom inherent in all of us as children, but it’s through the clutter of knowledge that we lose sight of that wisdom as we become adults. However, it’s through meditations like these that we get to play again and find our own remembrance.

    A more pleasant moment was at the end of dancing one of the days, I opened my eyes and saw this beautiful, older Indian woman with a single stripe of gray in her hair, across the room. For whatever reason I absolutely had to hug her.  It was weird because I was actually thinking- am I really walking over to this woman right now? Am I just going to hug her? What the hell am I doing? But I couldn’t stop the feeling, it was too strong.  Halfway through the walk over she made eyes with me and knew what was happening. We hugged for a genuine amount of time and I felt as if she were a mother to me. I had so much love flowing through me that every pore was tingling. I was in pure ecstasy. We connected eyes, holding each other with a stare, and then moved our hands to our hearts, bowed, and went our separate ways. No worldly exchanges needed- my name is, I’m from, I do this… just pure human connectedness. Afterwards I walked to my phone and wrote the following: Once you open yourself up to the possibility that anything is possible you can begin to play with the idea that you might in fact know the very stranger that appears before you. That you’ve traveled with their spirit before on this earth as we are spiritual beings having a human experience not human beings having a spiritual experience. You can hug them for an extended amount of time, exchanging no words or names, and know in that moment you are fulfilling your spirit with a reconnection- a remembrance- as you dance your dance this time around and they dance theirs, separate of each other. Does this all sound mad to you? Well that’s exactly the point, going so far against the mainstream that the “stream” no longer exists for consciousness has now become a river and the point is to get to the ocean.  

Sat Nam. 

And the journey continues... Red robes, dancing, one nation under God

    I left McLeod Ganj on a 12hour bus ride, twisting and turning, jerking and twerking, down the Himalayas as if I was stuck on Big Thunder Mountain in Disneyland with Miley Cyrus for an entire day. It was that bad! I had severe motion sickness most of the time as I curled up in the fetal position with my OM scarf tied over my eyes and mantra music playing in my ears, hoping I wouldn’t reach the stage of vomit. And as if the motion sickness wasn’t enough, we can’t forget about the maniacal use of horns in India. This bus had the most asinine horn I have ever heard in my life and I’m pretty sure it was louder on the inside than out. Basically, every time I almost drifted out of my misery this horn, that was fit way more for a traveling circus of clowns, would blare its ridiculous carnival-like jingle causing me to jump up in disarray thinking I’ve won some sort oversized stuffed teddy bear. But no, I’ml just on a bus in India.  I was heading to Delhi in the middle of the night to wait in the airport for 5 more hours before catching a flight to Pune. I had been nervous about making this journey by myself for a couple days leading up to it. However, once again I was shown complete protection and safety by God. There were about 50-60 people on this bus and I just happened to sit across from this lovely Brazilian girl, named Maria, who also just happened to be going to the exact same location as I was and was even on my flight!! I mean, what are the chances?? In all of India, here we sit two solo female travelers, from different parts of the world, divinely connected and just like that I am no longer alone. It’s amazing how the two of us immediately shifted into the friend role with each other. You would have thought we’d known each other for years and it felt like it too. Instant radical trust. We were now a team on this adventure that took an entire 24hours to complete.

    Our destination was the Osho Ashram, well more like, The Osho Institute for Higher Meditation. Osho is a very famous Guru who passed in the 90’s but has left quite an imprint on society. He’s known as the “spiritually incorrect” Guru. He allows drinking and smoking in his ashram! He also teaches different, far out techniques to meditation and believes the mind can’t really be silent until you release it first- get the energy out. Go mad. Then sit still. Be and see the presence as the observer instead of the doer. He also has a lot of controversy over being labeled the “sex guru” and before you’re even allowed into the Institute you have to take and HIV test. Yes, I thought that was super weird and was resistant to it at first but I’m here for the experience, right? This place was on my agenda because Jillian’s boyfriend spent 7 years here- it’s like his Golden Temple and I was meeting them.  Now, I don’t know what went on in the 70’s, but I can assure you nothing sexually weird happened while I was there for the 7 days. 

    This place was certainly not some barebones ashram either. Instead it’s a state-of–the-art, technologically advanced, ecologically renowned sanctuary/ resort center. Seriously, like a slice of heaven on earth cut right out of India. Of course the place was about 90% Westerners. In fact, when I was there we had people from 100 different countries visiting. At any given time there are anywhere from 500-5,000 people at this Institute and it’s expensive.  Upon arrival, Maria met up with a Buddhist, Japanese Brazilian woman named Michele. She too was traveling India alone and the two of them were connected through a mutual friend but have never actually met. They went off to their expensive, pre-arranged hotel and I caught a tuk-tuk to take me to this place called “Popular Heights” that was supposed to be a cheap but decent place outside of the Osho Ashram. Definitely not so popular. And I should have known better when it had the word heights in the name. I arrive and it looks like a low-income housing unit you’d see in the seedy areas of the US. Thank God it was 3pm in the afternoon, giving me 3 hours of sunlight to find a new place ASAP! The guy was really nice about it and understood I was clearly not going to stay there. He let me store my massive bag with him and I just started walking up and down the street looking for an Internet café to get on Lonely Planet. Jillian is nowhere to be found and I can’t rely on her to help me find a place. At this point, our trips are very much separate ones now. I have no idea where anything is in relation to the Osho Ashram on Lonely Planet and I’m a little frazzled. I don’t even know where the ashram is at this point. But once again, I am always safe. The owner of the internet café picks up on the alarmed look I wear on my face and tells me there’s a great hotel literally around the corner and we’re only 4 blocks from Osho. He walks me over to the Surya Hotel and it’s perfect! It’s another westerner’s haven with this popular restaurant known as the Yogi Tree attached to it. I bargain with the guy and get my usual $17 a night rate and he sends a boy to get my luggage for me. Now I’m ready for this Osho business.

    After the HIV test you are then taken to the red robe store. Everyone on campus is only allowed to wear maroon robes so we're all on the same vibration. And when I say robe, I mean like those long dresses/kurtas they wear in the Matrix, not a bathrobe.  Yep, hundreds of people in matching floor length maroon dresses walking around, high on meditation… and you thought the white rat was bizarre. Ha. We had a half-day orientation all newcomers are required to go to and I have to say it’s quite surreal. There’s about 20 people in our group from Russia, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Japan, India, and Australia.  They take us to this room where we learn Osho’s wild techniques for the major meditations, which consist of oooh… speaking in gibberish, screaming, shaking, twirling, jumping, and dancing. It’s like Kundalini Yoga on crack and Kundalini’s already quite cracky! They had music from every country in the world and we all got in a big circle as they played what would be considered popular songs for the country each person was from. They had to then lead everyone else in showing us how they dance in that country. It was great! Hilariously enough they played Madonna's “Like a Virgin” for the US.  The coolest part was at the end when we went around the room and shared our different ways of greeting one another that is custom to our country. It was so interesting to watch from the Australian’s one hand up- G’day mate to the Japanese bow to the Russian’s giant hug and triple kiss to the German's strict arm fully extended, hearty handshake to the Indian’s hands at heart, namaste. Cultures are so different yet here we all are, in one room together, bonding through the vehicles of English and dance. This is a place where humans can come and allow their conditions to melt, bringing us back to our child-like nature, which is a lot of what all spirituality is truly about. Letting go and in letting go you get to truly feel and see our oneness. No matter where we’re from we all desire the same things and those are love and happiness. As we all danced our last orientation dance we naturally made a train around the room… All countries effortlessly linking up with our smiles acting as the chain that allow us to remain connected on this path we all share, and I knew in that moment this Osho business was gonna be one extreme ride.