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So I went to the chant the next morning, all full of resolve, and the Gurugita kicked me
down a twenty-foot flight of cement stairs—or anyway, that’s how it felt. The following day it
was even worse. I woke up in a fury, and before I even got to the temple I was already sweat-
ing, boiling, teeming. I kept thinking: “It’s only an hour and a half—you can do anything for an
hour and a half. For God’s sake, you have friends who were in labor for fourteen hours.. .”
But still, I could not have been less comfortable in this chair if I had been stapled to it. I kept
feeling fireballs of, like, menopausal heat pulsing over me, and I thought I might faint, or bite
somebody in my fury.
My anger was giant. It took in everyone in this world, but it was most specifically directed
at Swamiji—my Guru’s master, who had instituted this ritual chanting of the Gurugita in the
first place. This was not my first difficult encounter with the great and now-deceased Yogi. He
was the one who had come to me in my dream on the beach, demanding to know how I inten-
ded to stop the tide, and I always felt like he was riding me.
Swamiji had been, all throughout his life, relentless, a spiritual fire-brand. Like Saint Fran-
cis of Assisi, Swamiji had been born into a wealthy family and had been expected to enter the
family business. But when he was just a young boy, he met a holy man in a small village near
his, and had been deeply touched by the experience. Still in his teens, Swamiji left home in a
loincloth and spent years making pilgrimages to every holy spot in India, searching for a true
spiritual master. He was said to have met over sixty saints and Gurus, never finding the
teacher he wanted. He starved, wandered on foot, slept outside in Himalayan snowstorms,
suffered from malaria, dysentery—and called these the happiest years of his life, just search-
ing for somebody who would show God to him. Over those years, Swamiji became a Hatha
Yogi, an expert in ayurvedic medicine and cooking, an architect, a gardener, a musician and a
swordfighter (this I love). By his middle years, he had still not found a Guru, until one day he
encountered a naked, mad sage who told him to go back home, back to the village where he
had met the holy man as a child, and to study with that great saint.
Swamiji obeyed, returned home, and became the holy man’s most devoted student, finally
achieving enlightenment through his master’s guidance. Ultimately, Swamiji would become a