Eat, Pray, Love

Guru himself. Over time, his Ashram in India grew from three rooms on a barren farm to the
lush garden it is today. Then he got the inspiration to go traveling and incite a worldwide med-
itation revolution. He came to America in 1970 and blew everybody’s mind. He gave divine
initiation—shaktipat—to hundreds and thousands of people a day. He had a power that was
immediate and transformative. The Reverend Eugene Callender (a respected civil rights lead-
er, a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. and still the pastor of a Baptist church in Harlem) re-
members meeting Swamiji in the 1970s and dropping on his knees before the Indian man in
amazement and thinking to himself, “There’s no time for shuckin’ and jivin’ now, this is it...
This man knows everything there is to know about you.”
Swamiji demanded enthusiasm, commitment, self-control. He was always scolding people
for being jad, the Hindi word for “inert.” He brought ancient concepts of discipline to the lives
of his often rebellious young Western followers, commanding them to stop wasting their own
(and everyone else’s) time and energy with their freewheeling hippie nonsense. He would
throw his walking stick at you one minute, hug you the next. He was complicated, often con-
troversial, but truly world-changing. The reason we have access now in the West to many an-
cient Yogic scriptures is that Swamiji presided over the translation and revitalization of philo-
sophical texts that had long been forgotten even in much of India.
My Guru was Swamiji’s most devoted student. She was literally born to be his disciple; her
Indian parents were amongst his earliest followers. When she was only a child, she would of-
ten chant for eighteen hours a day, tireless in her devotion. Swamiji recognized her potential,
and he took her on when she was still a teenager to be his translator. She traveled all over
the world with him, paying such close attention to her Guru, she said later, that she could
even feel him speaking to her with his knees. She became his successor in 1982, still in her
twenties.
All true Gurus are alike in the fact that they exist in a constant state of self-realization, but
external characteristics differ. The apparent differences between my Guru and her master are
vast—she’s a feminine, multilingual, university-educated and savvy professional woman; he
was a sometimes-capricious, sometimes-kingly South Indian old lion. For a nice New England
girl like me, it is easy to follow my living teacher, who is so reassuring in her propri-
ety—exactly the kind of Guru you could take home to meet Mom and Dad. But Swamiji... he
was such a wild card. And from the first time I came to this Yogic path and saw photographs
of him, and heard stories about him, I’ve thought, “I’m just going to stay clear of this character.
He’s too big. He makes me nervous.”
But now that I am here in India, here in the Ashram that was his home, I’m finding that all I
want is Swamiji. All I feel is Swamiji. The only person I talk to in my prayers and meditations is
Swamiji. It’s the Swamiji channel, round the clock. I am in the furnace of Swamiji here and I