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The retreat ended two days later, and everyone came out of silence. I got so many hugs
from people, thanking me for having helped them.
“Oh, no! Thank you,” I kept saying, frustrated at how inadequate those words sounded,
how impossible it was to express ample gratitude for their having lifted me to such a towering
height.
Another one hundred seekers arrived a week later for another retreat, and the teachings
and the brave endeavors inward and the all-encompassing silence were all repeated, with
new souls in practice. I watched over them, too, and tried to help in every possible way and
glided back into turiya a few times with them, too. I could only laugh later when many of them
came out of their meditations to tell me that I had appeared to them during the retreat as a
“silent, gliding, ethereal presence.” So this was the Ashram’s final joke on me? Once I had
learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully embrace my inner Key Host-
ess—only then could I become The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, after all?
In my final weeks there, the Ashram was imbibed with a somewhat melancholy last-days-
of-summer-camp feeling. Every morning, it seemed, some more people and some more lug-
gage got on a bus and left. There were no new arrivals. It was almost May, the beginning of
the hottest season in India, and the place would be slowing down for a while. There would be
no more retreats, so I was relocated for work again, now placed in the Office of Registration,
where I had the bittersweet job of officially “departing” all my friends off the computer once
they had left the Ashram.
I shared the office with a funny former Madison Avenue hairdresser. We’d do our morning
prayers together all alone, just the two of us singing our hymn to God.
“Think we could pick up the tempo on this hymn today?” asked the hairdresser one morn-
ing. “And maybe raise it to a higher octave? So I don’t sound like a spiritual version of Count
Basie?”
I’m getting a lot of time alone here now. I’m spending about four or five hours every day in
the meditation caves. I can sit in my own company for hours at a time now, at ease in my own
presence, undisturbed by my own existence on the planet. Sometimes my meditations are