Articles
Pilgrimage to the Cave of the Heart
Follow the journey with a copy of the Yoga Sutras at hand and read the corresponding sutras. (References from The Essence of Yoga by Bernard Bouanchaud)
- Sutra 2.1
- The yoga of action is a way of discipline involving self-reflection based on sacred texts, and surrendering the fruits of action to a higher force. (Kriya yoga is Tapas, Svadyaya, Isvarapranidhana.)
- Sutra 2.43
- By eliminating impurity, a disciplined life brings perfections and mastery to the body and the eleven sense organs. (Tapas)
- Sutra 2.15
- The discerning person sees that all is suffering, because of changes due to the passage of time, to worries and conditioning, and to inappropriate manifestations of the constituent qualities of nature.
- Sutra 2.44
- Union with the chosen divinity comes from the study of self through the sacred texts. (Svadyaya)
- Sutra 2.45
- Contemplation and it powers are attained through worship of God. (Isvarapranidhana)
- Sutra 2.18
- What is perceived has clarity, movement, and inertia and is made up of the elements and the eleven senses. It can lead to sensory experience and to deliverance.
- Sutra 2.54
- Withdrawal of the senses occurs when the sensory organs, independent of their particular objects, conform to the nature of the mind.
- Sutra 2.55
- It is then that the senses are perfectly mastered. (Pratyahara)
After hiking a mile and a half along a mountainside, we finally arrived Babaji’s cave, where the great immortal initiated the great teacher Lahiri Mahasaya. Our Indian guides judiciously covered our boots and packs as we inflated portable meditation cushions. One by one, we clambered into the small cavern, trying to fit all eighteen of us in the space as we arranged ourselves choc-a-bloc on the rocky floor. Chanting “Om Babaji, Om Babaji”, the adjusting and shuffling continued until we settled in for a two-hour meditation. After several no-show swamis on our itinerary thus far, I think we all secretly hoped we would have a vision or a visitation by Babaji himself. And why not?! We were in the Himalayas, where the veil between worlds seems thinner, and the spiritual force is stronger.
This was a Kriya Yoga pilgrimage to sites associated with Babaji (the source of the Kriya yoga transmission brought to America by Yogananda) and other venerable gurus. I am familiar with the Kriya yoga from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (Sutra 2.1) but not initiated into the Kriya Yoga practices of this lineage. This group from Ananda Assisi (founded by Swami Kriyananda) was comprised of Italians, Americans, and Germans. Fortunately, there were also two Indian guides leading and negotiating our journey from Delhi through the Himalayas.
Despite the challenge of travel, especially in a culture so different from our own, everyone was gracious and good-spirited. Thankfully this continued throughout our pilgrimage – the whiners had stayed home. Understandably, we did have a certain catatonic, deer-in-the- headlights look at the dinner table sometimes after very difficult travel days. But we truly took each challenge – discomfort, variations in diet, the physical rigors of long travel, language differences, sleeping in a new place night after night, hunger, the patience and surrender required to function as a group – we took it all as Tapas, discipline for purification (Sutras 2.1 and 2.43).
Thank goodness we took it on as yoga, otherwise we would have made ourselves miserable. It was not easy to face white bread and instant coffee morning after morning. Graciously, no Low-Carb. devotee started beating their chest, despite a vegetarian diet full of white bread, white rice, sugar, potatoes and very small amounts of protein! Hot, running water was sporadic; and hotel rooms either lacked air-conditioning and were too hot, or were unheated and too cold depending upon the altitude.
By far the biggest challenge for some of us was the inescapable noise – such as the honking of horns and road noise that sometimes awakened us at 5 am, or the generator engine to keep electricity flowing when the power was off. And during the weekend of Gandhi’s birthday we were subject to loud Hindu chanting over a loudspeaker booming over the entire town until 10 pm, which resumed at 4 am the next morning. That was the limit of my Tapas, as I groused to my equally outraged husband beside me in bed. At breakfast the next morning, several commented on their new understanding of how religious wars get started!
Travel in India has built-in, inescapable Tapas. You can take it on “for purification”. Or you can restlessly cast about - driven by your unfulfillable addictions - pissing and moaning, suffering (Sutra 2.15). This is the gift of travel. You are unmoored from your home port and denied instant access to familiar ways of medicating and soothing yourself. Your samskaras (conditioned patterns) rear their ugly heads, like unwelcome pimples.
Our adventure-travel journey to Badrinath was supreme Tapas. It included two ten-to-fourteen hour days of travel, a 4:30 am departure, rerouting around two washed out roads, jettisoning our bus and luggage, walking down and up a ravine with day packs, three flat tires, changing jeeps four times in one day. It finished with careening in a new jeep driven by a young hotshot, where we truly feared for our lives as our vehicle clung to an eroding road with a thousand foot drop below. One woman in our jeep buried her face in her pack, shielding her view and her nervous system from the precarious route. In one grueling day, we passed a giant boulder sitting atop a crushed jeep, a thirty foot section of the road completely missing, and a bus which had gone off the road killing sixteen people and injuring thirteen – all of which occurred hours before our passing. “There go I, but by the grace of God.”
Miraculously arriving in one of the four sacred sites for Hindu pilgrimage, Badrinath (10,000 feet, twenty-five miles from the border of Tibet), our priority was to visit the main temple. It is open to non-Hindus, so anyone can visit. Outside the entrance, various sized trays of offerings for the deities are sold.
As we entered the temple, there was a man at the entrance offering a bindu (dot on the third eye) for a donation. We all submitted our foreheads and rupees. Next around the circuit was a station to ring a bell (more rupees). Then another spending opportunity to receive some holy ghee. It went like that all around the perimeter, including the chart of costs for pujas (rituals) by the priest. I felt the force of Martin Luther course through my Protestant veins. What is this commerce in the temple? How can you subcontract and buy your way to freedom? What about a direct relationship with the Divine?
This was an opportunity for strong and unexpected Svadyaya about my religious roots and attitudes (Svadyaya: Self-reflection, classically through scriptural study, Sutras 2.1 and 2.44). I often feel like a weak and doubting Christian, still confused and reluctant about my connection to this religion. Jesus is good, but I do not trust the Bible the same way I trust the Yoga Sutras. “The Bible and the institutions of Christianity have all been modified and used for ‘political’ ends, but the Yoga Sutras are a pure, unbroken oral transmission for at least 2,500 years,” I’ve said in private counsel with Christian pastors. I have tried to sort out my beliefs prompted by my yoga teachers’ exhortations to explore the faith of one’s birth.
Despite these definite opinions, I realized in this most holy Hindu temple, there was much I did not understand about the practices and culture. I knew that my judgments and ideas might be based on ignorance or faulty perception. I also felt the powerful vibration from the devotion of all the worshippers and the clarity of the Himalayan abode. This pilgrimage was a strong foil for me to discover my roots and resonance. What key does my tuning fork vibrate to? Who is my personal manifestation of the Divine (Istadevita, Sutra 2.44)? And can I be okay if I am in a place which is not my place, with people who are not my tribe? Is my heart spacious enough to accommodate all the gods, confident enough to be gracious and not judge differences?
In this awesome setting, we saw swamis living only with a loincloth while we shivered in our fleece. We witnessed pilgrim families walking to Badrinath instead of riding in a vehicle, and renunciates with only a brass receptacle for food and water and the clothes on their back. In comparison, we felt like soft and pampered Westerners, seeking comfort and pleasure over the rigors of spiritual transformation. We met a 112-year-old swami with dreadlocks to his waist and wearing only sackcloth. He extended an invitation to stay and study with him for two to three years. There were no takers. Whatever commitment one has made to yoga and spiritual work pales in comparison to those we met! How humbling to stand before a true yogi when feeling that one is mostly a bhogi (Sutra 2.18 – living for experience and pleasure instead of for liberation)?
The biggest challenge for us was the constant necessity to surrender, Isvarapranidhana (Sutras 2.1 and 2.45). We were confronted daily by situations in which we were clueless about what was going on, or for which we had to accept the group flow, or the forces of nature. Almost everything was beyond our control. It was most obvious when we were trying to achieve some task or travel to some specific destination. Western minds always like to know “Why?” and the Indian guides were often not telling us or didn’t know themselves.
What shall we surrender? Our own egoic desires and agendas. To what shall we surrender? To a power greater than ourselves – to the group, the experience of our Indian guides, and our pilgrimage dharma; to fate, guru, God, Gaia, the Tao, Divine Mother, Mother India. Being so deconstructed and vulnerable in travel, one is constantly confronted by the necessity to just “let go!”
We meditated in several sacred caves. Vyasa received The Mahabharata in one, Shakaracarya received a vision of how to unite the Hindu religions in another cave, and Jesus appeared in yet another. I marveled that -- even in those ancient times of relative quiet from phones, loud speakers, motor engines – great yogis still retreated to the peace of a cave for deep inner work. How could we hope to experience any degree of the profound quiet and withdrawal of the senses in the modern world (Pratyahara, Sutras 2.54 and 2.55)? Members of our group compared notes on high-tech meditation headphones to filter outside noise!
In all of these holy caves, with the best of intent and in field of powerful vibrations, I can’t say that I had revelatory or particularly deep meditations. But I did receive a gift from the Kriya yoga of the trip and the feeling of the cave. I discovered that the cave is really in my own heart. Since I’ve returned from India, I’ve felt a space in the center of my chest. When the world is coming at me, I can be there sheltered in the cave, knowing I have space to respond instead of reacting. When I feel the beginning of contraction in reaction to challenge, I pause and remember this space for me apart from the weather of life -- that I am surrounded by a rock wall of protection, and nestled in a womb of space. Through the pilgrimage of my daily practice, I can return to the cave of my heart.
Our meditation in the cave of Babaji was interrupted by a torrent of rain. We tried to focus as the water pelted the plastic covering our things outside. Distracted by the elements, we left one at time, tiptoeing through the remaining medititators. Each extracted shoes and pack with great plastic rustling, and then slid down the muddy trail through the deluge back to the bus. Several of us took a wrong turn, got lost, and then were guided out by a teenage boy. Some said he wasn’t getting wet even though it was pouring rain. Some thought he was Babaji. He escorted us, then pointed the way and disappeared into the mists.