‘Your mind was too busy – you were anticipating this. We’ll get to sleep later,’ says Chopra, referring to the subject matter of sleep, not saying that the woman would literally ‘get to sleep later’.
The next question is ‘Can your brain heal lesions?’
‘Yes, you can regulate the body and brain – we’ll get to that later.’
Later in the day, a neurologist who also teaches yoga asks Chopra a question. I am intrigued that a member of the medical community is engaging with the New Age. Via another audience member, I pass a note to the neurologist after the tea break. You’re really interesting, I write. I like your question. Let’s talk.
He rings me at the end of day one. ‘What did you think of today?’ I ask him.
‘It was good,’ he says. ‘What Chopra has done is distil a lot of the knowledge from the Veda [a large body of texts originating in India and mostly published in Sanskrit]. He’s distilled the lessons from the top hundred or so texts and presents them in his own way to a Western audience.’
So this is nothing new.
In the lunch break the following day people start queuing up to have their book signed by Chopra. I ask one woman, Sharon, why she is here. ‘My mum had one of his books. I read it and it opened my eyes to the idea that this’ – she gestures to the half-empty lobby of the convention centre – ‘is not all there is to the world. There’s something else.’
Chopra himself says, ‘Most people are not alive – they are walking around in sleep, like in a computer program. We need to wake up to the fact that we are living consciousness that is destined to have an infinity of experience.’
I leave Chopra’s event early, very much feeling like I am walking around in sleep. I check in to my hotel in Fitzroy, turn on the bar heater and by 6pm I am in bed. I lie there feeling mortal, helpless and ill, and try to remember the mantra Chopra taught us to stop the ageing process.
It’s a nice fairytale before I go to sleep.
*
The year I see Deepak, 2016, I step up my search for serenity – in part because I am researching this book, but also because I still haven’t quite got there. I’m after a way to balance the hedonism that I love and the serenity that I crave. Is there a way to make them co-exist? For so many people it’s an all-or-nothing thing. They shun all partying as a gateway for toxins and the road away from wellness that leads to ruin. In this world, hedonism is seen in moral terms – it is bad, and to succumb to life’s base pleasures is to show a moral weakness. But I am looking for a way to integrate (that word again) the two – to party and celebrate when the mood takes me, and also be serene and able to go inwards. Do they have to be mutually exclusive?
Apparently not, as I’d find out in Thailand.
Via word of mouth I book into a rustic utopia that takes more than a day to get to. You can fast while you’re there, or take any number of alternative healing workshops. Or you can just sit in the bar all day and drink Bintang, then head to the beach at night for parties that go until dawn.
It’s a ridiculous and wonderful place all at the same time. In the cafe on the first day, while drinking a thick vegetable juice and sweating profusely, I eavesdrop on two men, one Australian and the other English, both in their thirties.
‘I had Shiva come and speak to me for six hours and guide my meditation – and Shiva would just be saying, “Love your body,”’ says the English guy in the sort of faded voice you get when you’ve been fasting and feel really weak. He has a shaved head and small John Lennon glasses, with beads looped around his neck.
The humidity is high, the sea is flat and there is no breeze. A ceiling fan chops at the thick air with little effect.
The Australian guy sitting across from him is shirtless, with a thin, toned body, high hair and red string wristbands. He’s sipping a carrot juice and making ‘yeah, uh-huh’ noises.
‘And then I would be in thoughts and memories and Shiva would say again, “Love your body.” Six hours and I connected with the masculine archetype and now with the masculine/feminine thing as well and I feel safe with it, and it takes me to the place I need to go.’
‘Yeah, uh-huh.’
‘One time he took me to the lower chakras and that’s where hell is. He said, “I can take you there,” and I was just being lazy and unfocused, and I was like, “No, Shiva, I don’t have to go there.”’
‘Yeah, uh-huh.’
Since the 1990s this place has evolved from a backpacker’s hot tip to a place where hedge-fund dudes, Silicon Valley types and Bondi trustafarians drop in for weeks and months to live the good life. The good life is a beguiling mix and muddle of wellness and hedonism that somehow holds the contradiction in place without missing a step. Here you can party all night in the jungle, drink delicious cocktails, eat cake and then switch into detox mode with healthy juices, massage, yoga classes and fasting.
‘You go and just connect,’ the general manager tells me when I pull up on the sand with a suitcase and order a beer. We are sitting at a table facing the darkening sea. He takes his two peace fingers and points them at me. ‘Connect.’
‘On drugs?’
‘No, there’s no drugs here. Through the eyes, you have a connection with people.’
I sign up for ecstatic dance, thinking of Gloria’s Sufi dancing in Bali, and how some cultures believe that serenity comes not through stillness but through movement. At dusk I make my way along the trail. Backing onto the jungle, the hall is all lit up with fairy lights. There are around eight of us and we all sit in a circle, with Darren as our guide. He is Australian, from a small town outside Sydney, and has hair so blond it’s almost white. He wears those Thai fisherman’s pants with the complicated knotting at the front and more billows than a bagpipe – yet he carries it off. He has a sort of regal bearing.
‘I take people into the jungle and we do ancestral movement and games,’ he explains. ‘Everything in the jungle speaks to us. I’m interested in rewilding the human being.’
Darren has gone into the jungle earlier in the day and picked mushrooms. They are mixed up in a murky brown drink in the middle of the circle. I am not sure if the mushrooms are hallucinogenic or if they are just mushroom mushrooms. Music is playing. It sounds vaguely tribal. Darren passes around the drink and asks us to say what we are grateful for. There are several fasters in the group whose gratitude seems deeper and more profound than the gratitude of the other people (the eaters), who stick with banal statements such as ‘I am grateful to be here’. The fasters are grateful not just for being here, but also for being. In the darkened room, the whites of their eyes are illuminated like they’re wearing novelty contact lenses. Their number includes a hypnotist, a lawyer and a traveller who had previously worked in the arts and culture sector in Darwin.
Over the next ninety minutes we lose ourselves in an ecstatic dance, starting with all these Polynesian-style movements and clapping, then call and response, and then, after an hour, once I drop into it, I am dancing in my sweat-soaked, now yellowing white linen shirt. Massive Attack is playing and then Kanye, and Darren plays African drums and guitar and then a flute and we all lie on yoga mats and the candles around the room burn and sharp yelps come from the jungle, and the mushroom drink, if it has any effect, is to make everything smooth and even and lush and just-right – serene, even. This feeling lasts for a while after the music stops, then there’s a spoken word bit; this guy comes on, speaking in an Indian accent and sounding very far away and mellow, saying, ‘Be grateful for everything. Be grateful for everything.’
I think of all the varied, gorgeous surfaces on the Earth I have walked in the search for serenity and I murmur, ‘I am, dude, I am.’
Then one day, I get a call. It’s a fellow journalist. He has a challenge for me. Would I sign up to an intensive, week-long group psychotherapy retreat in the bush?
‘You’ve done a lot of travel journalism,’ he says. ‘Think of it as an incredible, wild, sometimes scary but hugely rewarding journey, but the journ
ey is not to another country, it’s into yourself.’
‘Wot?’ I say. ‘That sounds kind of awful.’
My passport is full of stamps. I am constantly leaving and arriving. The departure board at the airport flickers and updates and flickers and changes, even in my dreams. I’m greedy to see it all. Yet a journey of the internal kind? It scares me. This promises to be different from the other retreats I’ve done. It promises to be more intense and to go deeper. It seems an edgier, more dangerous road. There is to be no yoga, no oms or incense – instead we will be working with our own dark material. It’s called Path of Love.
Do I want to go there? Not really. But … maybe it is time. I am curious about what I might find. Maybe serenity, finally?
So after thinking about it for, like, ten minutes, I sign up.
Almost everyone I know is against me going on this retreat. It freaks people out more than when I went on the multi-day hike while emotionally fragile and physically unprepared. Friends pensively riff on the theme of ‘don’t change’ or ‘don’t let them change you’. I meet my boss Emily from the Guardian for a drink at Circular Quay the day before I go ‘in’.
‘You know you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,’ she says. We are drinking good sparkling wine and the good harbour is sparkling before us. Why disturb the universe when it’s all humming along nicely? ‘Make sure they don’t take your phone, in case it’s dreadful and you need to ring and get someone to pick you up.’ She’s had to rescue me from stories before. She’s called me back from swimming in shark-infested waters, from hospital beds in Far North Queensland and all manner of strife closer to home.
Apart from one couple who did a workshop called the Hoffman Process, none of my friends have done any self-development courses. It’s uncharted territory. And if they have done it, they’ve kept quiet about it. There is scepticism – and a degree of disapproval.
‘I won’t change,’ I promise people before I go in. Yet I get the sense that whatever happens in there, I won’t stay the same.
*
I am met at a lonely country station by a Path of Love volunteer, who drives me and three other participants to the retreat centre in the Hunter Valley. One participant, a woman in her sixties, is particularly garrulous, talking at speed about the treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, and then some dude or thing called Osho. What is Osho? It sounds like a clothing label. The rest of us are mostly silent – jaws set at a certain point of tension, eyes out the window as the landscape rushes past: scraggly ghost gums, the shapes of kangaroos in the mid-distance, the sky a crinkly blue, a thicket of trees whose highest points bend into each other like a bush cathedral.
So what is the Path of Love? It’s a global phenomenon, with retreats in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. The vibe is a mix of Eastern spirituality and Western psychotherapy, drawing on the works of Sufi mystics, Jung, the teachings of Buddha and Jesus, the cartoons of Michael Leunig and the writings of Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. And Osho.
I later find out that Osho is not a clothing label (although you can get Osho T-shirts and other branded products). He is a big deal, a crazy controversial spiritual guru formerly known as the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He was an Indian spiritual teacher in the 1960s and ’70s, and later in the US, where his teachings commanded huge – rapt – audiences. He had the largest collection of Rolls Royces in the world, and preached sexual liberation and materialism. But he also believed that every human was his or her own god, and had within them the divine. Science and spirituality should both be embraced; they were not exclusive. And also this – life should be fun. There is no god other than life itself.
Osho died aged fifty-eight in 1990. Some of his teachings are carried on today, at a centre in Pune, and with strains of his work running through the Path of Love workshops.
Established in 1996 and running in Australia for twenty years, the Path of Love can loosely be described as a self-development course. In Australia, it’s run by Alima Cameron and Samved Dass, who have worked in counselling and psychotherapy for more than thirty years. They spent time around Osho in the early wild days.
People come to it by word of mouth, often when facing a crisis – stress, a bereavement, unhappiness or anxiety. But some come just out of curiosity or a desire to explore aspects of themselves that have been cut off or repressed over time. ‘They are seeking a wider view on what life is,’ says Samved.
Participants are screened via an interview and a fairly exhaustive and probing questionnaire. ‘People need to have a certain ability to move and need to be psychologically stable enough to do the work,’ says Samved. ‘People need to have a degree of functionality.’ The work we will be doing is emotionally difficult – and physical. You need to be strong to get through it, although there is a lot of support. It’s very well run and organised and there is a large staff – a ratio of almost one to one during much of the week.
There are around thirty participants who will be doing the week-long course with me. They are mostly Australian but some have come from other parts of the world especially for this course, which is run here twice a year. Our ages range from thirties to sixties, although Samved tells me that people in their twenties right through to their eighties have completed the Path of Love.
At the start of the week, we are encouraged to leave our outside life at the door. Phones and iPads are collected with the promise that they’ll be returned to us at the end of the week (I don’t hand mine in – but I cannot get signal out here). We then sit in a smallish seminar room and wait for our facilitators. There is a palpable air of fear. Some people are sort of sniffling or quietly crying and I’m immediately freaked out. Why are they crying? It hasn’t even started yet. There are boxes of tissues at various intervals around the room. It’s human nature to turn your attention to people who are crying, and I try to look around discreetly. I’m scared. Maybe I should leave now, before it’s too late.
Then it’s too late.
Samved and Alima come in and congratulate us on the brave decision to do the program (there is nervous laughter at this) and then take us through some of the central tenets that we are to keep returning to over the course of the week. These are things such as ‘I am willing to face where I am afraid’ and ‘I am willing to really look at what is missing in my life’. There are rules. We will be on time for all sessions. We will not use stimulants. We will not be violent to ourselves or each other. We will not have sex with anyone while we are here (or any participants or helpers for three months after we leave).
While I’m here to write a story, I also think it will be a good opportunity to turn over a few things in my life and look at them from different angles. There are some ‘areas’ where I need to clean up my act. There are patterns and habits and beliefs that I hold that no longer serve me. I try not to feel too scared about how exposed I will feel, picking up these rocks of mine and watching spiders crawl out. Or how defensive I’ll feel when others pick up those rocks, or how vulnerable I’ll feel with others watching all my spiders scuttle out. I tell myself I’m lucky to have this opportunity to take a week to look deeply and fully at my life and pull it apart. This won’t hurt a bit, I think, knowing that it’s not true.
*
It’s getting dark now and a north wind is blowing. We are led into a hall and divided into three groups of around ten people each. I take them all in quickly – their faces are blank, some smile (but they are nervous so it looks like rictus), others keep their eyes to the ground. Everyone in my group seems to be in their thirties and forties. There’s a mix of men and women. Some wear wedding bands. Some look exhausted. No one appears to be what you would call ‘relaxed’. Everyone is wearing the clothes we were asked to wear: comfortable, loose, exercise-y gear that can withstand a lot of movement.
First we must each stand up and tell the group why we are here (a story about what’s going on, what’s gone wrong) and that we are committed to change. Others
in the group are meant to stand up in support when they get a sense of the person’s commitment and authenticity. I don’t really want to expose myself to a bunch of strangers. There are dissatisfactions and disappointments in my life that I can barely admit to myself, let alone to people I have just met. And this commitment to change … that sounds kind of hard.
When it’s my turn, I stand up and babble a bit about why I am committed to the process that we are about to undertake. When others have stood up to speak through their tears, snot and terror, it’s only been a few minutes before we have all been standing in solidarity. But I’ve been talking for ten minutes or more and no one is standing up. I’m getting desperate. I’ve run out of things to share. Stand up, you fuckers, I think, and possibly say. Stand up. I have nothing left to say, so I just stand there in front of the group and shrug. I couldn’t feel more exposed if I had completely stripped off my clothes. Stand up, you fuckers.
Usually I love speaking in front of groups of people I don’t know. My ideal audience is five or six. I’m good with glib jokes and anecdotes. But none of it works here. The members of the group are stony faced.
I take another breath and dig deep and say the first thing that comes to my head. It probably emerges confused and garbled, but I’m so obviously uncomfortable that it transmits as authentic. One by one the group stand up, and, traumatised, I’m released from the stage. I feel like sobbing from relief.
We are then told to get close to each other and gravitate towards someone we feel a connection with. They are to be our ‘buddy’ for the week. I gravitate towards a younger, good-looking guy with puppy-dog eyes. Familiar terrain. I can’t help myself – even here.
In the next round of ‘sharing’ we have to stand up and people in the group say what they think of you. ‘We all have our conditioned personality, which is set up by all the pain from our childhood,’ says Samved. ‘We put on our personality mask and that is obscuring our ability to be natural and relaxed.’
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