Eat, Pray, Love

living Yogic master, and I’ve experienced that before. But many longtime devotees agree that
it can also sometimes be a distraction—if you’re not careful, you can get all caught up in the
celebrity buzz of excitement that surrounds the Guru and lose the focus of your true intention.
Whereas, if you just go to one of her Ashrams and discipline yourself to keep to the austere
schedule of practices, you will sometimes find that it is easier to communicate with your
teacher from within these private meditations than to push your way through crowds of eager
students and get a word in edgewise in person.
There are some long-term paid staffers at the Ashram, but most of the work here is done
by the students themselves. Some of the local villagers also work here on salary. Other locals
are devotees of the Guru and live here as students. One teenage Indian boy around the
Ashram somehow really provoked my fascination. There was something about his (pardon
the word, but.. .) aura that was so compelling to me. For one thing, he was incredibly skinny
(though this is a fairly typical sight around here; if there’s anything in this world skinnier than
an Indian teenage boy, I’d be afraid to see it). He dressed the way the computer-interested
boys in my junior high school used to dress for band concerts—dark trousers and an ironed
white button-down shirt that was far too big for him, his thin, stemlike neck sticking out of the
opening like a single daisy popping out of a giant flowerpot. His hair was always combed
neatly with water. He wore an older man’s belt wrapped almost twice around what had to be a
sixteen-inch waist. He wore the same clothes every day. This was his only outfit, I realized.
He must have been washing his shirt by hand every night and ironing it in the morn-
ings.(Though this attention to polite dress is also typical around here; the Indian teenagers
with their starched outfits quickly shamed me out of my wrinkled peasant dresses and put me
into tidier, more modest clothes.) So what was it about this kid? Why was I so moved every
time I saw his face—a face so drenched with luminescence it looked like he’d just come back
from a long vacation in the Milky Way? I finally asked another Indian teenager who he was.
She replied matter-of-factly: “This is the son of one of the local shopkeepers. His family is
very poor. The Guru invited him to stay here. When he plays the drums, you can hear God’s
voice.”
There is one temple in the Ashram that is open to the general public, where many Indians
come throughout the day to pay tribute to a statue of the Siddha Yogi (or “perfected master”)
who established this lineage of teaching back in the 1920s and who is still revered across In-
dia as a great saint. But the rest of the Ashram is for students only. It’s not a hotel or a tourist
location. It’s more like a university. You must apply to come here, and in order to be accepted
for a residency, you must show that you’ve been studying this Yoga seriously for a good long
while. A minimum stay of one month is required. (I’ve decided to stay here for six weeks, and
then to travel around India on my own, exploring other temples, Ashrams and devotional