Packing my bags & going back
I’m packing tonight because I’ll be at the prison till late tomorrow, and Friday I’ll be leaving after class for…Massachusetts. Old friends, cool weather, and a workshop on Women and Film at Kripalu.
I love film, as anyone who reads this blog knows well; I love all Deepa Mehta’s films, including Water, which seems to be the centerpiece of the workshop, and I admire the women involved in this workshop, but I probably wouldn’t have chosen to attend if I didn’t cherish friendships with a group of wonderful people in western Massachusetts who keep in touch with me by email (here I come!), and if I didn’t have a long and rich history with Kripalu.
Kripalu was my haven of sanity, respite, and nourishment during the six years I taught at Smith. Smith was, for me, a toxic workaholic environment. Within months after I began working there, I realized that the culture of the institution fed the worst aspects of myself: the need to prove myself, fear of inadequacy, a sense that no matter how many hours I worked, it would never be enough for what those young women’s families were paying to send them there. I feared I’d been a hiring mistake till I learned that many of my colleagues had that same feeling. There is something about teaching at an ivy league school that does that to teachers who’ve arisen (if that’s the right word; shades of Educating Rita) from the working class. Like many of my colleagues on the faculty, I suffered from depression, exhaustion, and occasional suicidal ideation the whole time I was there. (One of my colleagues committed suicide the same week I resigned.)
My friends and Kripalu saved my life. I went to Kripalu for at least one weekend just about every month throughout those six years, and for week-long or even ten-day programs during longer breaks: for yoga, meditation, “personal growth” programs of one kind or another, and for the hot tub, the spectacular beauty of the Berkshires, the vegetarian food, overheard concerts at Tanglewood, and the community. I know the contours of the hills beyond the lake, the sound of the creek by the red maple tree, the subtle fragrance of old-growth pink peonies in spring, the taste of mulberries in early summer and wild blackberries in July, the blaze of autumn hillsides, and the crunch of blue-lit snow. I know the “old guard” at Kripalu, the gray-haired administrators, the people who were there from the rosy-eyed beginnings of the community in its hippie hey-day, the people who remodeled the former Jesuit monastery and vacuumed up the infestation of flies and hung the first curtains and created the rules. In the late 80s and early 90s, Kripalu offered respite, nestled in indescribable natural beauty, for me and for many working people who went there to regain their health and sanity.
After I got the Fulbright for Nigeria, and couldn’t go because I was allergic to malaria preventives, I went to Kripalu to wait till a new plan evolved. It was in the hall phone booth at Kripalu that I learned I was going to Lesotho. “OK, sure,” I said to the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars woman who called to tell me where I’d been reassigned. And then, “where exactly is Lesotho?”
After the two life-changing years I spent in Lesotho, while I waited to see if I would get the professorship I’d applied for in South Africa so I could emigrate there and live with the two girl children I’d adopted, I returned to Kripalu to live as part of the celibate residential community–in 1994. That meant I was living there, making beds and cleaning toilets, when Kripalu went through its agonized guru-stripping. As Yoga Journal put it, the upheaval revealed the “dark side of the guru paradigm with Amrit Desai, who over two decades evolved from modest yoga teacher to spiritual director of an ashram with 300 live-in followers. In one of the more startling and consequential scandals to hit the U.S. yoga community, Desai was ousted from Kripalu…after admitting to having sexual affairs with five followers.”
Kripalu feels more like “home” to me than anywhere else I know. But like most homes, it has had its dysfunction. I was there for the guru’s last birthday celebration at Kripalu (he was subdued and sad, and the rumor circulated that maybe he had cancer); they hung him and his pictures with garlands of marigolds, and everyone lined up for darshan and brought him gifts and knelt at his feet and accepted his blessing. I was there a few weeks later on the day the renunciate community learned the news of the guru’s misconduct and responded with such fury and disappointment that they smashed and splintered his throne-like seat and the pictures of him in the main hall. I was there for the fire ceremony at which long-time residents burned their mala beads, for the mass “rebirthing experience,” and for the daily lunch-time open mic for sexually abused women. I was part of the parade of shocked meditators who walked, chanting, to the guru’s house at dawn and came to silence as he opened his door and stood with his head bowed. His wife, known to the community as “Mataji” reached her arms across him protectively and wept as she cried out, “He is just a man. He make mistake. Please, forgive him.”
I was in the room of over four hundred people who heard Amrit Desai’s public apology and resignation. It had been the custom for everyone to bow when he entered the room, for him to sit on a kind of throne, and for everyone to “Om out” with him and bow again when he left. That day, when he and his adult children entered the hall and sat in folding chairs next to members of the board of directors, a few die-hard young women in white bowed and crooned, “Jai, Gurudev,” but as they did so, a yoga teacher I respected shouted in rage, “Don’t bow down before a rapist! Don’t wish victory to a rapist!” Later, when the former guru finished his speech of apology, he bent toward one of the management people and whispered something. That man then said over the microphone, “Gurudev–I mean Yogi Desai–doesn’t know how to leave the room. We have a very large crowd here in a small space. Please respect each other and let him leave without incident. Please–no bowing and no shouting.”
Kripalu has since become a kind of upscale spa featuring many of the same purveyors of “self-actualization” who make the circuit at Omega and Spirit Rock. Some of these teachers are wise philosophers of great heart and wisdom; others may well be snake-oil salesmen. I’m not always able to tell the difference.
A bed in the dorm, for the years while I was at Smith, was $36 a night. Now it’s three times that. Back then, the dining room was strictly vegetarian, meals were eaten in noble silence, and all the work on the place was done by unpaid devotees who took vows of poverty, obedience to the guru and his hierarchy, and celibacy. Now the menu offers “more variety,” a paid staff runs the kitchen and cleans the rooms, and pictures of the guru have been replaced with pictures of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks.
I always maintained a few degrees of separation between my politicized spirit and the long-haired yoginis screaming as they experienced kriyas, the yogis with their kundalini (or whatever) rising, and other shenanigans that seemed to me over the top. I was a “disciple”; I had an Indian name; I went through “initiation” and still value the meditation and yoga techniques I learned. But I never believed “we create our own reality.” I’ve spent too much time among prisoners and people in the poorest places on earth to believe that apolitical mind-candy. I whooped with recognition when I got my latest edition of the Human Kindness Foundation newsletter, because in it, Bo Lozoff debunks “The Secret” calling it “pseudo-spirituality that is not just a little self-indulgent, it is primarily about selfishness and materialism.” He goes on to call it akin to Satanism, which is also a little over the top from my perspective, but I have long quibbled with “New Age” philosophies because they offer easy comforts, a kind of soft-headed pollyanna view of the universe (the words “visualize your abundance” make me gag), and no grounding in critical thinking and discipline. That’s why I’m a Buddhist and not a “self-actualization” advocate. Buddhism is built on a Hindu foundation, and the unadulterated wisdom of the Hindu traditions (before my hippie brothers and sisters got hold of them) is still profound, just often misunderstood. But this whole paragraph is material for another day.
I’m going back to Massachusetts and to Kripalu this weekend. I called today to ask if they have computers available for guests to use. They don’t. They’re wired, if you bring your own laptop, but I have neither a laptop nor a cell phone (should I admit that in public?). I know where the residents’ computer room is, but the people who might give me access to it have probably died or moved away by now, or we might not recognize each other. Thirteen years is a long time. So I guess I’ll be offline for the weekend, unless I grab a few minutes at one of my friends’ houses. I’ll see. If I don’t quit blogging right now and go finish packing I’ll be up all night tomorrow, so I’ll Om out, bow, and go pack that suitcase.
Tags: Books and Movies, Massachusetts
Kendall
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