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Richard from Texas has some cute habits. Whenever he passes me in the Ashram and no-
tices by my distracted face that my thoughts are a million miles away, he says, “How’s David
doing?”
“Mind your own business,” I always say. “You don’t know what I’m thinking about, mister.”
Of course, he’s always right.
Another habit he has is to wait for me when I come out of the meditation hall because he
likes to see how wigged out and spazzy I look when I crawl out of there. Like I’ve been wrest-
ling alligators and ghosts. He says he’s never watched anybody fight so hard against herself. I
don’t know about that, but it’s true that what goes on in that dark meditation room for me can
get pretty intense. The most fierce experiences come when I let go of some last fearful re-
serve and permit a veritable turbine of energy to unleash itself up my spine. It amuses me
now that I ever dismissed these ideas of the kundalini shakti as mere myth. When this energy
rides through me, it rumbles like a diesel engine in low gear, and all it asks of me is this one
simple request—Would you kindly turn yourself inside out, so that your lungs and heart and
offal will be on the outside and the whole universe will be on the inside? And emotionally, will
you do the same? Time gets all screwy in this thunderous space, and I am taken—numbed,
dumbed and stunned—to all sorts of worlds, and I experience every intensity of sensation:
fire, cold, hatred, lust, fear... When it’s all over, I wobble to my feet and stagger out into the
daylight in such a state—ravenously hungry, desperately thirsty, randier than a sailor on a
three-day shore leave. Richard is usually there waiting for me, ready to start laughing. He al-
ways teases me with the same line when he sees my confounded and exhausted face: “Think
you’ll ever amount to anything, Groceries?”
But this morning in meditation, after I heard the lion roar YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW
STRONG MY LOVE IS, I came out of that meditation cave like a warrior queen. Richard didn’t
even have time to ask if I thought I’d ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him
eye to eye and said, “I already have, mister.”
“Check you out,” Richard said. “This is cause for celebration. Come on, kiddo—I’ll take
you into town, buy you a Thumbs-Up.”