FOREWARD
This is the story of me, J.R., a Midwestern Caucasian Hindu born into an upper middle class Baptist family, with English, German and Portuguese physical roots, and spiritual roots from past lives in India. The Baptist faith lost its grip on our family after my childhood ended. Higher education, along with an interest in science and philosophy, had undermined the Baptist message. Although pleasant, religion was not upheld as an actual guide in life for our family. Although the Baptist church did not affect the goals of our family, I wished to become a minister. However, our family favored higher education in secular law, and I became a lawyer rather than a minister. Still, from the Baptists I learned to follow my own conscience to discover religious meaning directly rather than through obedience to a church hierarchy. I, J.R., loved my childhood Baptist experience—the wonderful organ music fortified by the highly accomplished university musicians in the community; the uplifting sermons about love and social justice; and the privilege of baptism by total immersion at age twelve. I attended church until I graduated from high school. I gave the invocation at my high school graduation. But my parents did not attend church at that time. They provided nice family holidays with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
I took a hatha yoga class at age seventeen and was astonished by my experience. I did not have a sexual awakening in my teens for members of the opposite sex. I already had a romantic awakening in second grade for girls. I felt a major spiritual transformation from the yoga class and I knew I wanted more of that experience. I couldn’t go back to church. Yoga was the religion of my body on the earth. I realized this was pre-destined. Past life experiences began coming into my awareness. Midwestern culture itself was bringing many clues about India’s new influence in the Midwest on popular culture and music. My appetite was for deep yoga culture.
I moved to California at age twenty, seeking a chance to be on my own and to explore my identity away from my family. I was seeking greater connection to my spiritual roots in India and honest gender identity. While in California I obtained my first mantra from Transcendental Meditation, which downplayed a connection to Hinduism. The seeming purpose of TM was to make meditation convenient and non-threatening to people outside of India. It was marketed as a stress reduction and disease management tool. It emphasized health benefits rather than spirituality. Then I saw a poster on a telephone pole for a yoga class at the Prana Yoga Ashram in the Berkeley hills. There I discovered the science of the life force—prana. I took hatha yoga classes again, as I did in Bloomington. These bodily stretches, postures and breath exercises brought me deep relaxation and peace. I was anxious about the meaning of life on a deeper level than anything discussed at the Baptist church, or with friends and family. The Prana Yoga Ashram emphasized the practical, but it was a profound level of practical mysticism. I needed healing because I had air hunger. At first I thought it was caused by air pollution in my new environment in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was very homesick.
At that time I was surprised when I was accepted at UC Berkeley as a transfer student. I had decided to be an historian. I liked nineteenth century American social and intellectual history, with its emphasis on utopian thinking between the 1840’s-1860’s and progressive thinking at the end of the century. Existential novels interested me and I read many including those by Kafka, Kierkegaard, and Camus. Although my air hunger was not a medical condition, I strained to take a breath. I would put both my hands on the desk surface in front of me, and use that to lift my shoulders. Still I could not get enough air to enter my lungs to make a deep breath, and I would sigh in frustration.
My yoga classes emphasized rapid inhaling and exhaling breath while holding each yoga posture (asana). I learned a healing chant. There were only about six students in each yoga class, compared with thirty thousand students attending classes at UC Berkeley.
By the time I graduated from UC Berkeley, I had a link to yoga. A yoga center was the first thing I looked for in a new community. I moved back to Bloomington, Indiana, and heard about a local guru and went to visit him. That was the start of my practice of kundalini yoga, with open-eye meditation. This yoga involving receiving spiritual energy by staring into the teachers eyes on a daily basis. I had to plug myself into another person’s energy, which felt like an appliance plugged into a wall outlet. I eventually tired of that bondage. The energy, along with coffee, helped me complete law school with relative ease. I moved to Boston in a final attempt to look into the teacher’s eyes, then realized that living in a cult was not for me.
Rather, I liked the wide open earth and needed autonomy. The guru path had become distasteful to me and I have kept my distance from gurus since then. My air hunger went away. All at once I realized why spirituality had lost it’s prestige in the world—it was used for delusion. From that point on I practiced spirituality for my own enjoyment and satisfaction and I read many spiritual books in the Hindu tradition.
