“Suzanne,” Indra said, “what’s the last thing you remember?”
I thought about it for a moment, and then told them about the dream.
“But what was the last thing you remember before the dream, the last thing you can recall from class?”
“Bastrika.”
“Do you remember which moment during bastrika?”
“Lou said to engage the mulabanda, and I did.”
Lou put his hands together in namaste, and nodded. “It was probably a kundalini rising, Suzanne.”
“What is that, though?” I asked.
Lou pressed my hands between his while he spoke. He said something about how when there’s a blockage of energy at the base of your spine, it can be released through pranayama or meditation, and then it causes a surge of prana to move upward through the sushumna channel … and then I spaced out thinking about what a great word sushumna was. He said that it causes spontaneous asanas, mudras, and kriyas.
“It looks like a seizure,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s a spiritual breakthrough.”
I felt like I was floating in Indra’s arms, like all the tension in my body had been released. I wanted to stay there forever. But I was also confused. “So—what happened?”
Indra gently squeezed my shoulders. “Like you were saying, it happened right after Lou asked you to engage the mulabanda. You were sitting up, erect, and then you fell over to the right, at which point you exhibited signs of heightened neurological activity. Your limbs shook, your eyes rolled back, and you gave your brothers and sisters a bit of a fright.”
“Wow,” I said, and it occurred to me that wow was a perfect word. Like mom, only upside down. I squirmed happily against my teacher. “I love you,” I said. Indra stiffened slightly, but then she squeezed my shoulders again. Lou clapped his hands together like a little boy and laughed. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh before. I smiled at him and he smiled at me. We were a couple of happy campers.
Class ended early. Jessica and I were very quiet as we walked home along the river, and stayed that way down by the pool with Jason and Lara. And now we’re sitting on the veranda, each with her own journal, and I keep taking breaks from writing to watch Su distribute her offerings to the temple in front of our house.
The altar looks like a large throne. Like a throne for a god. Su chose one banana leaf dish with its rice and flowers and candy and left the rest stacked on her tray on the bottom step of our veranda. She’s placed the dish on the altar and lit the incense, and now, holding a lotus flower between her fingers, she dips the flower into a dish of water and sprinkles it on the altar with a graceful curve of her wrist. She closes her eyes as she makes this gesture, then brings her free hand between her breasts in prayer, bowing her head. It’s a lovely, simple dance, one I’ve seen her perform every morning since we’ve been here, but today I find it mesmerizing. She’s transformed by the ritual. This shy, giggling girl looks older. More grounded. Reverent, as she attends to the invisible.
There’s something familiar about this offering dance Su performs each day. And something familiar, and pleasant, about the peculiar yearning I feel watching her.
What would it be like to believe in the invisible? To believe in it wholeheartedly?
She lifts her arms. She brings them back together in prayer. She bows her head. She’s strange, her dance is strange, and yet so familiar. Her offering doesn’t look like a chore now, the way it did when I first got here. It looks like something I once wanted to do, before I was told that I couldn’t because I was a girl.
Jessica sits across from me under the light, which flickers with the wings of a half-dozen moths. She’s writing in her spiral-bound journal, looking up at me occasionally with half-focused eyes, smiling at me as a mother might smile at her child after her first day of kindergarten. Su is gone now, and the sky is dark. There’s the green forest around us, the blue shimmer below that is the pool by day. The ants of morning are replaced by the moths of evening, and the roosters are upstaged, for the moment, by the croaking of geckos.
The world is transformed, unrecognizable. Here I am. Me, not quite myself.
4. Awakening, Reawakening
The world is deep,
And deeper than the day could read.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper still than grief can be:
Woe saith: Hence! Go!
But joys all want eternity–
Want deep profound eternity!
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,
Thus Spake Zarathustra
God, how I’d love to end my story here! If I could, I would join the ranks of the redeemed, my spiritual journey immortalized at its apex. But that would be a fiction. My kundalini breakthrough was not the end of my spiritual journey, though it seemed that way for a while. No, it was the beginning of a journey that would only get harder, the spiritual switchbacks more frequent, the veil of illusion as thick and obfuscating as Seattle’s darkest, most threatening cloud cover.
This was what I had been looking for in religion: seizures. I had waited all my life to be seized by a spiritual practice, and now, it seemed, I had been, quite literally. But what caused the seizing? The whole notion of a kundalini experience implies that there is some spiritual order to our world and our bodies, doesn’t it? To believe in my kundalini experience, I might have to believe in the designer of such an experience. Was this change purely physical? Me, experimenting on my mind and body to cultivate a more expansive consciousness? Or was I tapping into something eternal? I didn’t know. I still don’t know.
In the summer of 2009 I met a woman who I believe is a spiritual therapist. I didn’t know that when we sat down together—I thought she was just a regular therapist. We met over drinks after a show in Memphis, and soon got to talking about Bali and yoga, and when the subject of my kundalini experience came up, I played it down. I told her I wasn’t sure about it, that I wasn’t sure I believed in any of this stuff at all. I really wanted her to believe I still had my wits about me. So I said it was possible I hyperventilated, that it might have been a neurological reaction to hyperventilation. Or, I said, smiling to let her know I was kidding, it could have been a seizure brought on by a brain tumor that’s gone dormant in the seven years since. I chuckled at my little joke, and then found myself troubled, wondering if it was a brain tumor: Am I dying?
Sometimes I’m embarrassed by my kundalini event. My kundalini awakening. My awakening of kundalini shakti, I mean, my God, is there anything more embarrassing than saying, “I’ve awakened my kundalini shakti”? It sounds like next I’m going to invite you to join me in a wheatgrass enema.
The trouble is that no matter how much I employ my brain in analyzing the experience, I can’t convince myself that it wasn’t a spiritual breakthrough. Meditation became easier afterwards, and for a while I felt like I was on the road to real spiritual progress.
“You know what your problem is?” the therapist said. “You’re afraid of being duped.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice; I knew exactly what she was talking about. It’s something I think about, being duped. I don’t want to be duped. But sometimes I wonder how much it matters if you do get duped. If I were to spend my entire life believing in a system of faith, one with an omniscient creator and an afterlife, only to die and there be no heaven, no God, no reunion with my grandparents, would it matter?
No. I would be dead. I wouldn’t know the difference.
In the meantime I’d have all the benefits that come along with faith—peace of mind, an ability to live in the moment without always fearing death. A system of values to keep me honest and disciplined. If a placebo works to cure the symptoms of disease, who cares if it’s just a sugar pill?
Well—I do. That’s the problem.
It would be great if I could just blame my fear of being duped on my parents. Everything’s easier when I can just blame them! I come from a mixed marriage, you see. I was raised Catholic, but my father is Episcopalian. Wh
en my father asked my mother to marry him, she said she would—but only if he’d agree to raise a Catholic family. He said he would, but with his own condition: he wanted his children to attend public schools.
Thus my parents began a familial experiment designed to form open-minded but faithful adults, a hazardous experiment considering the profound influences of both the Catholic Church and the public schools. We grew up surrounded by people of many faiths, attending Mass on Sunday and public school on Monday, and at the end of the day, three of my parents’ four children were confirmed in the faith.
My father wanted us to think for ourselves. Every day of my childhood, he’d come home from his law firm and transform our dinner table into a miniature debate club. My father trained my siblings and me never to accept an assertion at face value; received opinion was the enemy of our round table. If we couldn’t back up an argument with proof, he threw it out. I listened to my father spin his arguments and wanted to be just like him—in part so that I could more effectively vanquish his cool-headed economic arguments with my bleeding-heart social ones. But I didn’t want to be emotional, or to claim opinions I received from other people as my own. I wanted to think for myself.
My mother is dreamier, more spiritual. She’s a musician, and when I was young she worked hard to be a good Catholic mother, vigilantly protecting her daughters’ virginities and reminding us that divorce and abortion would never be options. But now that her kids are all older, she’s slowly letting her true self out of the closet, revealing an unorthodox Catholic who follows the rules she believes in and disregards the rest. She always did her best to represent the scary Catholic God, but even as a kid, I knew her faith was really an artist’s faith; she finds her God in beauty, especially in nature. Every summer my family spent a week at my grandparents’ place on the coast, and at sunset my mother would take my siblings and me on long walks by the ocean. We would gather shells and rocks and watch the tide come in. And every night, just as the sunset spilled over the sea, she would take our hands and look toward the waves and sky and breathlessly proclaim, “This is the proof that there is a God.”
My siblings and I say our mother’s line over beers, now, or in reference to the movie Showgirls. It’s one of our favorite lines: This is the proof that there is a God. But when I was a kid I would look at the purple and red sky, the wet gold of the setting sun spreading along the horizon, and ask myself, Is it? And I would search my gut, my intuition, my senses, looking for some proof: Do I feel God when I look at this sunset? Do I sense His presence?
A few years ago I went to see Amma, the Indian hugging saint. I didn’t know much about Amma, except that she was a guru who dealt in unconditional love. Her thing was hugs. She’d give a hug to anyone who lined up to receive one. But what differentiated Amma’s hugs from the type junior-high kids give one another is that her hug was spiritual. The simplest expression of the connection between mind and body.
Chubby and smiling, she looked like a female Yogananda, like a cuddly guru who liked her sweets. She received her audience from a throne in the Pavilion at Seattle Center, surrounded by her moony disciples, most of them white and glassy-eyed, wearing yellow and ivory robes.
I had heard that a hug from Amma could awaken the spirit. That it had healing properties. That her hugs changed lives. I was in the market for all of those things.
There was live music, and chanting from the disciples gathered around her. The chanting reminded me of my time in the wantilan in Bali, as if this cold convention hall had been warmed by the collective hum of Sanskrit appeals. I felt hopeful that maybe I’d be able to recapture something lost.
At one end of the pavilion, a movie played on a screen above the stage as Amma gave her hugs. It was a movie of Amma giving people hugs: Amma hugging earthquake victims, Amma hugging tsunami victims, Amma hugging cleft-palate victims, Amma hugging Bill Clinton. The other end was packed with tables and bins of stuff to buy, like a citywide rummage sale. I was there with an old friend, Keisha, and while waiting for our turn to join the darshan line, Keisha and I poked around the bins of coffee mugs, pens, key chains, and magnets with Amma’s face on them. I bought a magnet for four dollars. Keisha was entranced with the stacks of photographs of Amma. She picked one up and caressed it with her fingers.
“Stop that!” one of the robed devotees said, a white woman with gray hippie braids and milky eyes. “If you get fingerprints on the photos, we can’t sell them.”
Keisha looked at the woman as if she were crazy, and I started to get nervous. When Keisha is angry, I always end up feeling like it’s my fault. She turned away from the disciple and said, in full voice, “Amma, save me from your followers!”
Keisha left shortly after that, but first she looked over at Amma and back at me and said, “You know, it must be easy to love everyone unconditionally when they treat you like a divine mother.” I laughed, and Keisha shrugged. “I mean, not that I’m jealous or anything.”
We said good-bye, and I was left to experience Amma on my own. I was fine with that—I wanted to find out if I bought it, if I could put my faith in a so-called saint. I wanted to see Amma for myself.
There were people in line who were counting on miracles. Parents with children in wheelchairs. Women with their chemo scarves on. These were people who needed all the faith they could get. As I moved up the line, I saw Amma hug an infant with tubes in his nose, and tried to steel myself against the image; who can be objective when Amma is hugging a sick child? And not just one hug, like she gave to everyone else in line. The baby might have been her own, the way she snuggled him to her chest, rocking him back and forth. I wanted Amma to be powerful, seeing that. I wanted her to be a miracle worker.
I didn’t have quite the same response to the seemingly healthy people, like me, in line. The shiny-happy-Seattlites who acted like they’d been struck by lightning after hugging her. They stood around with huge smiles on their faces and tears in their eyes. Really, the demonstrative post-hug bliss-fest was a bit much, I thought. But there must be something terribly wrong with me that I wanted to punch them all in the mouth when all they were doing was enjoying some unconditional yogi love.
The darshan line began at the back of the room, and once you were in it you took a seat and then scooted up a row every few minutes. When you arrived in the inner sanctum, where about seventy or so followers sat meditating and beaming at one another on their soft cushions, you had to hand over your ticket, your purse, anything that might get in the way of your hug. Creeping up toward Amma on my knees, I felt ridiculous, looking up at her as if to say, Yes, Master?
She grabbed me and pulled me to her breast, chanting something in my ear that sounded like “Glug glug glug glug.” She smelled terrific, like clean laundry and sandalwood. I could smell her on me the entire walk home.
You can buy Amma’s perfume at a lot of health food stores. It’s called Amma’s Rose.
Walking at rush hour along Mercer Street, I didn’t feel changed. It wasn’t like what happened in Bali. But maybe that was my fault. I didn’t let go and give in to Amma’s hug. I was too busy thinking, Is this real? Do I feel something? Is Amma the proof that there is a God?
I couldn’t come up with a yes. Amma was like the ocean, like the sunset; I didn’t feel that she was all that aware of me.
I’ve read that there are saints who see special potential in one devotee and enlighten them with the touch of a finger. That’s pretty much what I was looking for.
That, or another Indra.
What happened in Bali was different. My kundalini experience—it happened to me. There was no time for me to question it or look for proof—it was its own proof that there was something to this yoga business. I had laughed at the idea of a mindbody; that mind and body were actually one entity. But now this physical-spiritual experience made it all clear: the division of mind and body was a false one. And if this division was false, then what about the division between me and the rest of the world?
So, was my k
undalini experience the proof that there is a God?
Not exactly. But it seemed to suggest that there was something to the science of yoga. That my mind went deeper than I knew. Meditating after my kundalini experience was like spelunking into crevasses in my mind I discovered fresh each day. And the deeper I went, the more I felt some kind of presence in the world that could only be described as god-ish. Not the God I was raised with, but something—well, something loving and beyond the everyday world. Something god-ish.
Lou told me to pay close attention to how my body felt later that day—that if I had a headache or sore muscles, to tell him, because it could mean that the seizure was something more neurological than spiritual. I had no such problems. Instead, I felt like I finally understood everything, and that it was so simple: everything in the world needed love. I was going to save the world with love. If I’d known about Amma at the time, I would’ve told my yogamates and the entire village of Penestanan to line up for hugs.
Lou did deliver one warning. He told me that I must try not to hold on to my kundalini experience. I must let it go. He said that if I tried to repeat it, I would only backtrack. He said to start fresh every day, to approach my next meditation as if I had never had a kundalini experience, as if it were, in fact, my first attempt at meditation. To be disciplined about not letting my ego wrap itself in a new cloak of spirituality.
I thought it was the silliest way of thinking I’d ever heard. Let go of my kundalini experience? Go back to how I felt before it shook me free? Why on earth would I give up this euphoria, this fearlessness, in order to revert to a version of myself I couldn’t wait to relegate to the past?
It occurred to me that maybe I should follow my gut, which told me I had had enough of feeling uncertain and afraid, and now that I had this clarity, this power, I wasn’t going to give it up without a fight. Plus, so long as everyone looked at me as if I were a real-life sage, why on earth would I disabuse them of the notion?
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