Below is an excerpt from a short book written by my father about my mother and their relationship. It is a chapter written by my mother for a book called Living Spiritually. In it she goes into great detail about her experiences, and shows the intense nature of her love for Gurumayi, whom she wanted to give up everything for. I am putting it here because it is frankly more interesting than my own story and is a good place to put it for the sake of posterity.

SPIRITUALITY AND THE PSYCHIC LIFE

This aspect of life became for Jan by far the most important part of her existence. In fact, the integrity of her commitment to her spiritual life so impressed a writer who met her, that Jan was prevailed upon to participate in a series of interviews which ultimately became a chapter in a published book. It is: Living Spirituality : Contemporary Australians Search for the Meaning of Life , by Christine McColl, (Greenhouse Publications, 1989). This chapter describes in Jan’s own words the background to her spiritual initiation in 1983 and the ensuing six years of intense spiritual practice. I will place all Jan’s words in italicised print, and pick up the narrative in my own words when her account is completed. Let me just sketch in as background that Jan was a spiritual child as a little girl, and she had been much drawn to the sacred mutter of the mass in Latin, and to the incense shrouded ceremony of Benediction. Ritual worship thrilled her, and the Catholic faith filled a deep hunger in her. Despite all that had been inflicted on her, she had considered becoming a nun as a young teenager, and her devotional nature ensured that she found a life of contemplation and prayer an attractive proposition. She was also quite psychic and knew many times what would happen before events unfolded in time, although she could not control the ability and her “knowing” came and went unpredictably and of its own accord. For example, shortly after we were married she told me that eventually we would have three children and they would all be sons. She did not know how she knew this, just that she was certain it would be so. She had her first Out of Body Experience at about six years of age when she found herself floating up on the ceiling of her bedroom and looking down on her body, and they occurred occasionally without warning thereafter. Her uncritical Catholicism remained her only spiritual outlet until we married. Jan thought I galloped into Eastern religion after our wedding, but I had been deeply engaged since the age of twelve when I first read “A Search in Secret India” by Paul Brunton and suddenly realised that there was a whole new world of Eastern spiritual experience, to which I was strongly drawn, to be explored. In Christine McColl’s book, Jan’s name and our circumstances had been disguised to preserve her privacy, so here I will reinstate the real names and circumstances as they appeared in the early drafts of the chapter. That is the only change I will make to the published account. Where explanatory footnotes occur or are required, I will place them in the text in normal type face and in brackets. The following text is in Jan’s own words.

As soon as we were married my husband went headlong into Eastern religion – couldn’t tolerate Catholicism at all. I was terribly influenced by him. I dropped all my practices totally. While he contemplated, and read a great deal, I had absolutely nothing. I did nothing. Before that, I had been going to church and having moments of meditation. They’ve never formally taught meditation in the Catholic Church but I don’t think I’ve ever stopped meditating. Moments when I was quiet, I’d have strange experiences where I was witnessing myself. My mind would get quieter and quieter, and all of a sudden I would have the sense of not being myself. Sometimes quite powerful experiences would leave me very scared. When I started anticipating them, I would block them, put on music, because I had such a fear of them. They have never left me, never. But I had no formal religion to support me, and it left a big blank in my life.

I looked to lots of other things to fill in that blank, but I was never satisfied. Everything made me miserable. I would think I would be happy if I had something else, and something else would come, and I would be miserable. I was utterly materialistic. I was looking at my family, my job, my house. I would get different jobs, we would move to different houses. We’ve moved eleven times. I’d renovate houses endlessly but I could find no satisfaction in anything. Frank tried to interest me in Eastern religions, and I’d read a bit, but I felt no attraction to them at all.

When I was about twenty-eight, bad things started happening in my life. My health became very poor and I suffered a lot of pain. I had a chronic illness, systemic lupus erythematosus. It affects the connective tissue. My knees and ankles went, and I couldn’t walk. I had endless operations, and none of them worked. I started looking at Frank’s spiritual books, mainly the Eastern ones. I’d pick them up and skim them, and think, “There’s something there. I’ll get to that, but I’m not ready, not yet.” The children were taking all my energy. I had three boys, all little at that time, and, not being able to walk, it was heavy going.

Then, the next catastrophe in my life. My beloved beautiful eldest son went wild when he hit thirteen. He dressed up in punk gear, he ran away, he took to drugs, to alcohol, petty thieving – everything possible that an adolescent could do. It was devastating because it was totally out of keeping with our life, and the lives of our friends. We took it very badly. Nothing we did would stop this boy going crazy. I’d sit up all Saturday night beside myself with anxiety and terror at what he was doing. This continued and got worse over several years, it took my last energy and enthusiasm. I knew I needed some help to get through.

The last straw came when my youngest son had an accident. He was hit on the head with a cricket ball. He had brain injury and suffered narcolepsy. That was it. I felt I could take no more. I was very depressed, and I needed support. I knew then that I had to meditate. I had read in magazines that meditation was beneficial, and I knew I had to do something.

Just at that time an article on Siddha Yoga appeared in The Australian. Frank saw it and thought it would be good for me as they didn’t seem to be too rigid about the way people sat. I find it hard to sit cross-legged. So he rang to ask about a Learn to Meditate course. They didn’t have anything going at the time but they had a little centre that was offering a course several months away in January. That was great, because it was closer to home, and it felt less intimidating.

That was November but it was almost as if my sadhana (sadhana: spiritual discipline, a life based on a spiritual discipline.) had started from the phone call. I picked up books that Frank had had for years, and I was rigid with interest in them. Practices like “japa” (japa: the practice of repeating mantras, silently or aloud. A form of meditation.) made me think “Wow, this is wonderful”. I didn’t do them, I didn’t understand them, but just reading about them made me feel great. I was just dying for the meditation course to start. The books were all Paul Brunton. (Paul Brunton, an English author who, via his works, introduced many readers to Eastern religions.) Frank was very involved with Paul Brunton, his works and his group. Over the past fifteen years he had written to him and visited him several times in Switzerland. I was on the fringes of that. I think I got a lot of grace from him as Paul Brunton gave it to Frank, and it filtered through to me.

When I went to the meditation course, I was well and truly ready for it. I don’t think it was a terribly good course but the moment I heard the mantra, (mantra: sacred words/sounds, invested with the power to transform the individual who repeats them. In Siddha Yoga, the chief mantra used is: “Om Namah Shivaya” – “I honour Shiva”, Shiva denotes the inner self.) that was it for me. I don’t remember a single word that anyone said. It was the traditional cliché in Siddha Yoga – I heard it, and felt that all my Christmases had come at once. Not only did they present the mantra to me, but they said I could take it home and use it! I felt at last I had something to hang on to, something tangible and real that was there to help me.

I took to japa with great gusto. The next day, I took four little children to the beach. I remember walking up and down thinking, “Wow, I could do something, I could say this mantra”. I said it, and said it, and said it, and the more I said it, the better I felt. Nothing happened, I just felt good. That was just the first day. I started to read The Inner Reality by Paul Brunton, and I felt very enthusiastic about his practices. He said that we should meditate every day, so I thought, “this is it, the big thing – meditation is going to start”. I didn’t realise at the time that I’d been meditating all my life. In the course we were told that it is best to sit on the floor. Funnily enough, that was the biggest stumbling block, having to sit on the floor cross-legged. It sounded an affectation. But I did it.

So I went to a quiet spot. I sat cross-legged, and I started to say the mantra, and I immediately started to have an experience. I was suffused with white light. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but I suppose, when I look back, I had been building up to this. I immediately jumped up and ran downstairs saying, “Frank, Frank, what have you done to me, what’s happening to me?”. He could guide me at the time, and tell me what was happening, because he’d read so much about it. He was enthusiastic and terribly happy. He explained that this was a spiritual experience. So I felt slightly reassured, but disbelieving about it happening instantly. But that was my sadhana at that time. My early sadhana was that I got everything instantly.

I took to meditation with incredible enthusiasm. I decided to work out exercises for myself. I tried to concentrate my mind totally on nothing. I did mantra squares, then I put my concentration inside them, and my thoughts outside them. The room where I was meditating was next to the kitchen, and I could hear the fridge. Initially, I thought the noise of the fridge was distracting. Then I found it helpful. If I could focus on the noise I wouldn’t think. Actually, I had read somewhere that Buddhists put new people under a waterfall for the same reasons. I didn’t know that at the time, but I latched onto this fridge noise. It was wonderful as it really helped my meditation. I’d start to meditate, and I always felt good and full of grace. It doesn’t sound very dramatic, but from the depth of my depression and misery, to sit down and feel none of that misery, but feel good, was splendid for me.

For a fortnight I did that. Then, I bought a tape of the mantra and I started to play it for about fifteen minutes just before I’d meditate. While I was listening to the tape, I would focus my mind on the letters of the mantra, so that no thoughts could intrude. I was totally, absolutely focussed on the mantra. One night, as I was meditating like this, I received shaktipat. (shaktipat: in Siddha Yoga, spiritual awakening, the transmission of spiritual power from guru to disciple. It is often associated with strong movements of kundalini energy and hence with intense experiences.) I was suffused with grace, with God, with golden light. I felt completely elevated, uplifted, full of immense ecstacy and bliss. I called Frank, and said: “What have you done to me, what’s happened to me??” He was totally dumbfounded, but I still thought he had done something to me. I said: :Did you go out for your walk in the bush?” He said, “Yes.” I asked: “When you were out there, what did you do to me?” He replied: “I did nothing to you. I don’t know anything about this.” He had not read anything about shaktipat, so he didn’t know what had happened. I stayed in that state almost all night. I would go and walk and talk, and I would go back and sit in meditation. It didn’t matter, I couldn’t shake it. I sat like that, in this wonderful state, for hours. I didn’t talk to anyone about this experience, but I didn’t feel frightened by it. It was too wonderful to feel frightened about. I knew it was connected to a much higher consciousness.

Some weeks after that, this guru person that they talked about came to Sydney. I thought it was a great coincidence, but obviously it wasn’t. They talked about her at the meditation centre and I thought perhaps I would go to see her. I enrolled in the Intensive. (Intensive: a two-day workshop, consisting of talks, videos, chanting and meditation, aimed at transmitting the guru’s grace to the disciple.) I thought, if I’m going to do the Intensive, I’d better go and check her out first at an evening programme. I had a very negative feeling about gurus, I didn’t want one, I didn’t even think of one. I felt she was a bit of an intrusion into these wonderful experiences I was having. I went to the programme out of curiosity, mainly to get my money’s worth out of the Intensive. The Intensive cost $200, and we couldn’t really afford it. I thought, if I’m going to pay that much money, I’d better get used to her first. I was totally mercenary!

As soon as she walked into the room, I had the most amazing reaction to her. My hair stood on end, my body rippled with expectation and delight, and I totally fell in love with her. I don’t remember a single word she said, just my own inner reaction to her. She gave a talk, and then there was a meditation with her. It was a wonderful meditation. There were tiny blue lights twinkling and suffusing me, I felt superb. (Blue lights are significant in that Swami Muktananda has experienced visions of a blue pearl whilst in deep meditation, and many meditators in his tradition experience a vision of blue light in meditation.) Going home, I couldn’t shake this wonderful experience of love, and divinity, and bliss.

The next day, I was driving around, feeling that nothing could ever touch me, speeding down the road going to work, thinking life was so superb. It was a scintillating feeling, everything was wonderful. I was a very timid person, I could never express myself properly, but suddenly I was doing it, with gusto, and enjoying it. But I was also feeling detached from it. I went to the public programme again the next night. I couldn’t stay away. One night I couldn’t go to the programme, because Frank was working and the children were at home. I did something I’d never done before in my life – I left my children unattended. I trekked out to an unknown place about fifteen kilometres away. I ended up completely lost and missed the programme, but my desire to be with her was so great that I had tried to be there.

During the Intensive, she touched me very gently, (During Intensives, if the guru is present, s/he touches everyone present on the head, while they are meditating: shaktipat, the guru’s grace, may be transmitted by this touch.) and stroked my head. On the second day, all I could think of was the most total, overwhelming and unbelievable love. It wasn’t directed to her, it was just directed towards everything. I thought how can anyone feel this love, can it really be happening? At that time, I was too timid to go to darshan, (darshan: literally, seeing a saint or sacred idol, which bestows blessing.) I wouldn’t go up to her. I would sit in the hall during the breaks, I wouldn’t go out for a tea or coffee, I would look at her. But I was still too timid to actually go up formally and pranaam to her. (pranaaming: bowing down – either on knees and hands, or flat on the ground. A gesture of great respect.) I was just too frightened of her, of her position more than anything. I’d moved into the ashram to do the Intensive, and when I went home on Sunday night, Frank said: “You’re glimmering with blue light, it’s pouring out all over you I can see it glittering from you”.

For the next couple of weeks, I couldn’t come out of meditation. I’d try to go shopping, and I’d sit in the seats around the shopping centre totally drugged and heavy with this bliss of meditation. Whatever I did was suffused with total meditation. I just couldn’t function. I could talk, and do everything, but the meditation was very powerful. I was bursting with it. I thought this was the best thing anyone could ever do. I felt uplifted, and absolutely connected with this higher consciousness, and with the guru. I only had to look at her picture and I’d fall into bliss. So pictures started appearing all round the house. I had no mental commitment to her, just an inner commitment. I didn’t think of her as my guru, just as someone I loved to look at.

My spiritual experiences started getting much more intense. It was the norm to have them every time I meditated. I would go to the ashram and meditate, and I would just suffuse, and my body would levitate. I’d go to school – I was a school librarian – and I’d have meditated and chanted all the way in. By the time I got there, I literally could not put my feet on the ground. I literally floated on air for the first two hours in that library. It was amazing. I wouldn’t know what was going on, but they were sublime experiences. I felt very close to God. I thought this was normal, everyone was doing this. Everyone had the mantra, and this was what happened.

Frank had never had a meditation experience. He started getting very intense, and borrowing books from the library on Buddhism and contemplation. He started practising all sorts of things in a desperate attempt to meditate, and to hang onto Paul Brunton. I took him to a programme at the little centre, and he was disgusted. All this chanting and singing. It wasn’t what he perceived Paul Brunton to be advocating. His was a much more English, stiff upper lip style of spiritual practice. You did these things quietly, by yourself, behind closed doors, and didn’t talk about them. You certainly didn’t sing about it, or display it, or do puja. (Puja: ceremonial worship.) It was merely his closed perception of meditation. So he wouldn’t go back for a while. I had to fight that, because I thought he was the last word in spirituality. I had to believe there was something there for me even if he disapproved of it. It was terribly difficult for me to do that. But when he started seeing that I was experiencing all the sorts of things the saints had experienced, he was terribly supportive and enthusiastic. But he also felt a bit forlorn about it all, wondering why he had been left behind. He still feels that, to this day. He still has never had a spiritual experience, though he is the most spiritual person I know and the most committed, loving and good person.

I started reading books about Siddha Yoga, and I wanted to go to Ganeshpuri. We went, taking our youngest son as we thought his brain injury might be healed there. We had read in a Siddha magazine that Baba could deny you nothing if you asked for it in his samadhi shrine. (Baba: term of affection for saint. Swami Muktananda was/is often referred to as Baba. Samadhi describes a state of meditative union with the Absolute. Baba’s samadhi shrine is where Swami Muktananda’s body is buried.) We thought we had nothing to lose, so we took him. In fact, he was very hostile. He was nine, and he thought it would be boring. So we bribed him by telling him that we would buy him a television computer game in Singapore.

We had the most harrowing trip. All sorts of catastrophes – there were floods, the taxi broke down, and it took us eight hours to get there from the airport. We went straight into an Intensive with the guru. She touched me again, several times. That was a great start to that trip. I was in very deep, constant meditation.

After having a very intense inner connection with her, but never having been to darshan, I had gone to Ganeshpuri wanting to make an external connection with the guru. After reading all about Baba, and his books, all the Satsang books and Play of consciousness, I had no doubt this was for me. (Swami Muktananda wrote many books, including Play of Consciousness – his spiritual autobiography, and the Satsang books, which are collections of devotees’ questions and Muktananda’s responses.) And of course, I sat there demanding an external relationship with her, and she wouldn’t give it to me. I wanted to have her as a friend. In my experience, when I made a commitment to a person, they would generally be friendly back to me. They would talk to me, and we would have a nice external relationship. I was prepared to say, “Okay, you’re my guru, now start connecting with me on this external level”. It was a misunderstanding of the role of the guru. I’d only had one set of experiences with people, and I was applying them to the guru-disciple relationship, wanting it to be the same.

It was a very intimate group of about one hundred and fifty people. Often the darshans were only twenty or fifty people. I was close to her all the time. The more I internally demanded attention, the more she would turn away and not give it to me. This caused a great crisis inside me. I started to feel puzzled and hurt and unsure of myself. I thought that Siddha Yoga is wrong, she is not my guru, I’m in the wrong place. Surely if she were my guru, she would give me more attention. She would acknowledge me.

The crisis came after I’d been there about two and a half weeks. We’d been given a video to watch on Saturday night, of the guru laughing and being friendly to people. I just sat there disgusted, and thought that it was all just a pretence. So I stormed off in a big rage, thinking I didn’t belong in Ganeshpuri at all. Then, the very next morning, the talk was by a swami who read a letter written by Swami N ityananda. ( Initially Muktananda appointed two successors. Nityananda was the second one) Part of it was: if you’re climbing a mountain, you come to chasms. When you come to one that looks too deep or too hard to cross, you can either turn around and go back, in which case you won’t get to the top of the hill, or you can chance it and have faith – jump across the chasm and get to the top of the hill. “In sadhana” he said, “it’s exactly the same. You come to a chasm in your sadhana, and you can either give it up and say it is too hard, and go home and say, this is not for me. Or you can jump over it, and have a leap of faith, and say, I don’t understand, but I accept.” The timing was wonderful. It was exactly what I wanted. I sat right in front of her, which I was usually too frightened to do. I started to cry, because it was exactly how I felt. This crisis had come from her, whether she was my guru, or whether she wasn’t. I formally accepted her inside, in front of her, even though I didn’t tell her.

We went from that programme into lunch. I was sitting in the dining hall cross-legged meditating and waiting for lunch to come, and she came through like a whirlwind. As she was leaving, she threw a mala into my lap. (Mala: string of prayer beads, similar to rosary) It was a rudraksha wrist mala with silver on it. (rudraksha: dried seeds from which prayer beads are made.) It was the one mala that I had really wanted, but we couldn’t afford it. It was the most amazing gift too, because it had her perfume impregnated into the rudraksha beads themselves. I only had to put it to my nose, or just hold it, and the smell just wafted. That afternoon, I arrived at darshan late from my seva. (seva: work done for the guru. All residents of Siddha Yoga ashrams do several hours seva per day, as a spiritual practice that also maintains the ashram. Types of seva at Ganeshpuri range from polishing marble courtyards at 3.00 am, to chopping vegetables, cleaning public toilets and bathrooms, or helping to administer the ashram.) Everyone was there, and there was total silence. Because of my physical deformities, I can’t pranaam properly, and I always try to do it with a group of people. Usually, I’d have just snuck into the back and sat down. But this time, in front of everyone, I went up to her and pranaamed, as a formal acknowledgement. And so she had acknowledged me, and I had acknowledged her formally, though neither of us had spoken a word.

Six weeks after coming home from Ganeshpuri I started having the ultimate spiritual experiences. It’s difficult to describe them. Since shaktipat, I’ve always felt the kundalini energy going through all my chakras, and coming out the sahasrara. (kundalini energy: in Siddha Yoga, the personal aspect of the creative force of the universe, which lies coiled like a serpent at the base of the spine. Spiritual practice leads to a movement of this energy up through the subtle energy channels of the body, with accompanying experiences that range from ecstatic to horrific, as the energy encounters and clears blockages. Chakras are subtle energy centres located along the channels, and the sahasrara is the topmost spiritual chakra located in the crown of the head, said to be the seat of Shiva and symbolised by a thousand petalled lotus.) I would feel this tangible energy in my heart chakra. It would whirl, and I would feel the most immense love and bliss. My whole being would be absorbed in that sometimes light, always love, always a feeling of absolute ecstasy. I would love everyone to go out, so I could go into the meditation room and just be absorbed into this wonderful ecstasy – totally and absolutely lose myself. I would start to meditate after dinner and I would stay there till 2 or 3 am. I think I was in samadhi some of the time. I hate to say that, because it sounds pretentious, but I was. I felt the difference between me and God was a fine line. I wish I had known then that these experiences were not going to last, and that they were as profound as they were, because, though I appreciated them, I didn’t appreciate them as much as I do now.

These experiences lasted for six months, then they stopped, within a week. I’d always felt very frightened of Frank’s sadhana, and I’d always tried to push him away from it. I hated to share the guru with him, I felt jealous and resentful when he came anywhere near her. This was always going on, and I was trying to keep him away from anything that my conscience would allow me to. But my conscience wouldn’t allow me to do that very much, because I felt in my mind he had a right to this. It was my emotions speaking. I’ve never told anyone this, except the guru. I feel ashamed of this, but that’s the way I felt. So what happened was that he got a very loving letter from the guru giving him a present, just flower petals, and giving him a name. (students in Siddha Yoga, as in other spiritual disciplines may ask for a spiritual name, which is given to them by the guru.) I didn’t have a name. I freaked out. I thought that she must like him more than me. She couldn’t love us both, she could only love him or me. So she had chosen him, and that was it. My mind blocked the experiences. So they totally disappeared in the course of a weekend.

And having had those sublime experiences, and now having them taken away from me, I went mad. Absolute panic and fear at night. I thought that all I could do was commit suicide. I tried to restrain myself from doing so. I was in total fear. I’d find myself walking around the bush in the middle of the night, not knowing what I was doing or where I was. It was as much as I could do to say the mantra, and even to do that brought fear and terror to me. I couldn’t look at a picture of the guru without the most intense terror overtaking me. I didn’t know what was going on. I knew that kundalini was involved. I knew that it was partly samskaras coming up, (samskaras: past impressions – ie. feelings, memories, personality characteristics from past lives.) and that there was some connection with Frank that I didn’t understand. All I knew was that I needed help. All I could do was go to Ganeshpuri to ask her what was happening to me. Within a couple of weeks I went.

She arrived a week after I got there. I was quite unable to go up to her and tell her what had happened. I was intimidated, and overwhelmed by the people round her. Looking back, it seems ridiculous, but it was so. I tried to steel myself to ask for a private darshan, but I couldn’t. She was watching me intensely all the time, but she was so ferocious with me. She’d look at me, but never with a smile. I kept thinking, “What have I done?” People would say, “You turned your back and walked in there, and she was watching you”. It was a cat and mouse game. One day she walked around giving things out to people, and she just ignored me and gave to the next person.

I didn’t know how to take that. I went home in disarray. Only when I was leaving did I go up to her, and ask her to bless the mala I had. She asked about my family. I thought, “You knew all along how I was, and you treated me like this. You knew what I was going through, and you did this to me.”

I came home. The sense of panic and terror had dampened down to a tolerable level. It would come up when I started to meditate, but I could stand it, I could half control it. I would have experiences, but whenever I saw Frank, or thought about him, they would wipe totally. But how could I do sadhana without seeing or thinking of my husband? It became a nightmare, intolerable. I started to treat him very badly. It was not his fault that I was suffering, but in a sense I was blaming him. I became a monster – I would criticise him, ridicule him, attack him. The more I did it, the nicer he was which made me feel even worse. If he’d given me something back, I could have handled it, but because he was so nice to me, it became really difficult.

The tension at home became unbearable. I would go walking by myself at night in the bush, and have these wonderful experiences of peace and God, and meditation, and I’d come home, and it would all be wiped. I tried not to talk to Frank about it, it hurt him an awful lot, because he had done nothing to justify it. In fact I didn’t talk about it to anyone. In the end, I decided that the only thing I could do was to leave. I couldn’t live like this any longer. So I resigned from my job, and wrote to the guru and told her everything. I told her that I had felt too intimidated to talk to her in Ganeshpuri. I said that the only solution I could see, for my sadhana’s sake, was to leave my husband. After posting the letter, somehow the blocks I was experiencing were slightly released, and I began to feel good again.

Two weeks later, she telephoned the ashram and said that on no account was I to leave my husband. Everything was all right and I was just to do my sadhana. I accepted what the guru said. Not only did she tell me to do that, but I felt as if she had come into my home. Funnily enough, about four days before that phone call, Frank and my youngest son had left for Ganeshpuri, so I was at home by myself with the two older boys. The guru gave me grace – it was as though she was always present. She was certainly meditating on me. I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling incredibly strange, as if she was with me and I was with her. She was pouring grace into me, and I was in a very high spiritual state for those six weeks until Frank came home.

When Frank came home, the experience faded, but I was determined, somehow, to try to live with this. My sadhana became my only interest in life, my total preoccupation. I saw the role I had as my dharma. (dharma: duty, action which is moral, right, appropriate.) I performed my functions as seva, as an offering to God. I had to try to include Frank in it somehow. It became liveable, but my experiences dampened down.

In September 1985, my son and I went to Ganeshpuri for three months. One morning, I went up to the guru in darshan, and told her that I still had a problem with my husband, that I still felt jealous. I asked her for help.

We had a discussion and she said that I should talk to a particular swami about it. He said that I was psychotic, and that I should give up sadhana, go into psychotherapy, and when I was okay again I could go back to it. That devastated me, so I wrote to the guru, and told her that it had been no help whatsoever. I gave her this letter in darshan, and the next day one of her swamis knocked on the door and told me that the guru wanted to speak to me.

A private darshan was arranged – best clothes, buy a coconut – an elaborate production. (A coconut is given to the guru as a symbol of the ego, which needs to be cracked apart to find the sweet inner essence, ie. the absolute within.) She talked a lot about my son, about his illness. She said that he would be healed – she had looked at his future. I had to do nothing with him but look after him. In fact, I was just his caretaker. She was concerned about the medication he was taking, its side effects. Then she said it was my sadhana and my seva and my dharma to look after my children, and that I would have to stay with them, and my husband. She wouldn’t talk about this jealousy thing with Frank. She didn’t say it would resolve itself. She kept laughing and saying, “You worry too much”. She was very loving. She put a scarf around my neck, and she kept stroking my head. She was implying more than saying, “It’s alright, your sadhana is well, don’t worry”. She did not mention the swami’s statement about psychotherapy, and I forgot. Your mind doesn’t function too much when you’re having a conversation with her.

Just after that, we came home. I had to work to pay for the trip as we’d run out of money. I worked for nine months in an accountant’s office in the city, which drained me. Frank went to see the guru, it was his turn. While he was away, I went to see a psychic person. The first thing she said was, “There’s a man in your life”. All I could think of was that everywhere I go everyone makes a fuss of my husband and ignores me – even my guru, even my sadhana. Now I go and have a reading for myself, and the first thing she says is, there’s a man in your life! It’s not Frank, he doesn’t choose that, it’s what happens.

She said, “You are peas in a pod”. She explained the whole thing. “You are the same soul, you are the same person. You are both totally at the same level. You are like Siamese twins.” Our sadhanas are the same. We chose to do it this way, because we had a chance of it being our last incarnation. With the double sadhana, we have double input into this one. We can do it, if we do it together. If we were to split up and go our separate ways, both our sadhanas would die. Our whole incarnation would be wasted, and we’d have to go back. She explained this out of the blue, off the top of her head. She didn’t know what the guru had said. The guru had known this, but didn’t tell me. She had just said, “Stay together”.

I accepted what the psychic said, because it made sense of my total experience with Frank. He is the other part of me. We are the same person, we think the same, we breathe the same, we do sadhana the same – we are totally connected. I’d always felt this. Understanding it has helped a great deal. We can joke about it now. It hasn’t got rid of the jealousy totally, but it’s almost gone now. Frank is still blocking off my meditation experiences – it’s like a reflex. I start to go into meditation and, “Oh, no, you can’t do that”, I come out of it, and it’s irritating. But I recognise that this is just a reflex. It’s also my ego fighting back. I was getting too close, so the ego is blocking it. ( “too close”, ie. too close to transcending the ego.) I see it as a major obstacle in my sadhana, but I have to resolve it by myself. It’s resolved a lot by my including Frank in my love for my guru, worshipping Frank as God. It’s a ploy I use, and it helps my relationship with him. I’ve been extremely hard on him, blaming him for all this. Of course, he’s blameless. He would have done anything to help me through it, even given up his own sadhana. He’s a very sacrificing sort of person …it’s almost a burden to have someone like that.

Things have settled down a lot now. I have occasional moments, weeks in my sadhana where I get a lot of fear and panic coming through, but I understand that as being part of my kundalini activity. Sometimes I’m almost frightened to say the mantra, because the kundalini shakti starts whirring away inside me. (shakti: in the Siddha Yoga tradition, the divine cosmic energy which projects, maintains and dissolves the universe.) Sometimes it brings up ecstatic bliss, and sometimes desperate fear. It’s just whatever I have stored. I have endless nights where kundalini activity whirls and burns through my body. It concentrates in a particular chakra, and I can feel it whirling. Sometimes when it does that in the stomach particularly pain and fear come out, and I know that it’s a very old samskara. I will attach the fear to whatever I happen to be concentrating on at that time. I will say, “I am frightened because of X”, but in fact I’m not. I’m getting samskaras coming through from this intense kundalini activity. It makes me upset, but I accept it as part of the ups and downs of sadhana. It’s taken a long time to be able to recognise this, and to look back, and to think, “well, that’s really all that’s happening”, and to accept it.

Sometimes I can’t even say the mantra, because the kundalini burns me so much that when I start to say it, I hear a lot of nada, or noises in my head. (nada: divine music/ sounds; sounds heard during advanced stages of meditation.) I hear bells ringing, and conches blowing and drums beating. They’re the noises of Arati. (Arati: a ritual of worship involving waving lights, incense to the guru. Accompanied in Siddha Yoga by drums, conch shells, harmonium and bells.) It all becomes a little too much when I try to sleep at night. It’s a joke in the family. Sometimes when I look miserable, Frank asks, “Is the Arati in full blast?”

My first six months of total God and bliss was a spiritual honeymoon. Because it was so wonderful, I could never give up sadhana, no matter how difficult and gross and intense it becomes. Sometimes I feel I can’t stand it. It hurts so much, it’s so painful, so hard – I feel so frightened and negative. But I have to grit my teeth and get through it because if I don’t get through it this time, I will only have to come back and get through it in my next lifetime. I just have to stop and remember how wonderful it really is, and it keeps me plugging away.

I remember one private darshan when the guru told me I couldn’t stay with her in Ganeshpuri, that it was my duty to go home. As much as I wanted to be around her, I wasn’t allowed to be. Then she asked if I lived close to the ashram. I told her I live a long way away. She suggested that we move closer to the ashram. We had wanted to move to a smaller house. So we decided that if we were going to move, we may as well move next door to the ashram, which was why we bought this house (In Hamden Street, Hurlstone Park, about fifty metres from the Sydney ashram) and not something else on the North Shore.

The move hasn’t been as good as I thought it would be. I thought being close to the ashram would be wonderful, and would outweigh having to move into a grotty neighbourhood. In fact, I don’t think on balance it has. We’ve all missed the big house and the space and the trees and the ambience of the North Shore. Also, living near the ashram, we have observed all its politics and that’s not been very edifying.

However, being here allows us to do our sadhana at the level we want while still keeping the family together. Frank likes to watch the Sunday night movie with the children as a family activity. It’s our dharma to do it. We can zip over to the ashram, watch the guru on the video, and come back and sit down with the family. They’re all brushing their teeth and getting ready while we’re at the ashram. We can go to the chant on a Saturday night, and come straight back home. Saptahs you can go to as much as you like. (saptah ; long chant, generally held on special occasions, usually continuing from one to four days) So we can combine our family life, our dharma as parents and as householders, and our wanting to live a spiritual life, as long as I am very careful not to get too involved in the squabbles.

I’ll stay in this area because my son was fortunate in being accepted by a nearby private school. Because of his illness, he has to be driven to school. When we were in the North Shore, he went to school at Waitara which was miles away, so we were constantly driving him backwards and forwards. Here, though he’s taken to school, he can walk home. So that’s a great physical load off me, not to have to do all that driving. So while he’s at school, we’ll stay here.

When I move, I would like very much just to be with the guru. It would be my total focus. As much as she will allow it, because she doesn’t allow me to do that very much. She questions me whenever I go near her. “Should you really be here? Shouldn’t you be with your family?” She knows where my interest really lies, and she won’t allow that. I would still like to be with Frank, but I don’t think he would take to it too readily. He dislikes institutions, ashrams. He refuses ever to live in one. He finds the regimentation appalling. He goes along with it, but would not be happy inside. I don’t mind it at all. I’m far more docile than he is. Because you see, she anaesthetises me. I’m with her a couple of days, and the grace, the shakti – they’re cliché words, I’m trying to find other ones, but I don’t know what to use – descend on me. I feel this bliss with her, and it pervades everything. I walk around, and it doesn’t matter what I do, I’m in such a great state. So who cares about regimentation.

I do some seva now, but not a lot. I feel my main seva is here with the children. I meditate regularly. We get up at 5.30 every morning. Frank wouldn’t miss meditation literally if the house was on fire. I use the mantra, but sometimes it’s too intense. I hate not using it, I feel like something’s missing, but if things get too painful, I don’t. I do all my work around the house as an offering. I try to do it as my dharma, not as a job.

We see friends occasionally, when it’s necessary. We have no recreational social life – only the ashram. We rarely go out anywhere else. My mother lives in Perth. She is a little disgusted, thinks our preoccupation is an aberration, and hopes I’ll grow out of it. Frank’s parents also think it’s an aberration, and hope that we won’t be too rampant when they’re around. They don’t like coming here, and wherever they sit, they put their backs to the pictures of the guru. But recently, they’ve done a Learn to Meditate course, and they’re a little more tolerant of it.

I’m totally focussed on the guru. In the past, whenever I’ve gone to Gameshpuri, though I’ve never met Baba, I’ve felt fairly connected with him. I’ve actually seen him in visions, and he’s been in my dreams. But the last time I was there, that had gone completely. I went to greet the guru when I first arrived. I trampled on all the darshan girls and lobbed myself at her feet. (darshan grls: women who sit at the guru’s feet, receive the presents from people in the darshan line, and help regulate access to the guru.) I looked up at her, and she looked down at me. Her face seemed to expand – her cheeks went out – I dissolved into her totally. I looked at her, and I started to talk, and talk, and talk. I don’t know what I said, it was just to stay there. When I felt I was looking and dissolving into her, she was pulling me into her. So we had a spiritual embrace. It was as if she had filled the whole ashram for me. I couldn’t find Baba at all. It was all her, everywhere. Her in the flowers. Her in the samadhi shrine. She filled the ashram, and she filled me with herself – in photos of her, I’d see me, in photos of me, I’d see her. It was just her.

An immense change has taken place in me since I started doing sadhana. It was as if, before, I had a hood over my head. I didn’t have a clue what life was about. I was just buffeted and wanting, and not knowing why on earth I felt so unhappy. Mundane existence was too mundane. It was empty, I was miserable and unsatisfied. Sadhana, or spiritual life, suddenly made life wonderful. It’s incredibly intense and focussed, as if the hood has gone and I can suddenly see everything. There’s a reason for living, there’s love. Though the intensity is very high, it’s also very low, and I experience the swings of the pendulum between those extremes. Still, there’s an intensity and a light and a depth that there wasn’t in life before. I feel I can handle any misfortune that comes my way. I can be detached from almost anything. It’s just simply a play, a happening, and who cares anyway. Before, I was a victim of every thing. Now it feels as though nothing can touch me.