Day 40 of the So Purkh Global Sadhana

Sat nam beautiful ones,

Day 40 of the Spirit Voyage Global 40 Day Sadhana Challenge: So Purkh. Final count: 360 women, 6 men and 26 countries.

I am humbled and honored to have shared every story, every question, every dream, every hope, every tear, every fear, every victory, every smile, every prayer, every word, every ounce of joy and love and peace with each and every one of you who has walked on this path with me.

What started as a birthday present for Harnam Singh grew and grew and never seemed to stop....like love, like God.

I thought perhaps 10 women might join with me and walk along this path of prayer, but God and Guru Ram Das had very different plans. And I find myself now, not at the end of a road but at the very beginning of one…my heart is wide open and I have gained prayer partners in parts of this world that I could never have imagined. Just like I have made friends with parts of my heart that I never thought I could touch.

I bow to each of you for your bravery. Some of you have finished valiantly. Some fell and had to start again, bravely dusting yourselves off and deeping into your commitment to yourselves. Some have had miracles, some fell in love, some released years of tears, some left relationships that no longer suited you, some saw profound changes in the men you prayed for, some experienced tremendous pain, but all of us -- all of us -- have experienced the power of the Infinite at the center of a prayer within our own hearts. It is not always easy to make a commitment for 40 days and keep it. But it is always worth it.

You have in me a prayer partner for life, a coach and cheerleader in your journey through this crazy age. You have in Spirit Voyage a family and tremendous resource on your path of life and growth. Spirit Voyage will always be there for you, sharing the music and the teachings that we know can help.

Everyone at Spirit Voyage is amazed by every one of you. I am in awe of your trust and love, letting me into the deep stories of your hearts. I prayed for all of you that contacted me in pain, and for all who reached out to me with joyful news. I am honored to be your teacher, and I remain your student.

Some say a woman's heart is a treasure trove of secrets. You were brave enough to clean out those secrets, some privately, many publicly. Many of you reached out for help when you needed it, either to me or to your fellow So Purkhers. The ripple vibration of the field of love and light that you created, and continue to create, cannot ever be measured in human terms, but I am sure that the furthest reaches of the Universe feel the power of 366 of us unified in praise of the Divine. There is more Light on this planet today, and I believe there is also more Love in our hearts and the hearts of the men we prayed for. Prayer works. Mantra heals. Miracles happen.

Although Spirit Voyage will not officially be leading the So Purkh past day 40, I will personally be continuing the So Purkh, as it is a part of my daily spiritual practice. Many of you plan to continue on, and I hope you forge bonds of friendship and sisterhood in this process. I will let you know when Day 90 has come, should you choose to continue.

Spirit Voyage and I, joined by special guests, will be leading another 40 Day Global Sadhana Challenge (to be announced soon...you are going to LOVE it!), and I hope that you join me in creating another powerful global field of prayer and meditation. It will be another amazing opportunity to deepen into yourself and into the teachings of Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan.

I thank Nirinjan Kaur for her amazing recording that so many of us use to bond to the sacred Naad of this technology of the So Purkh, and I thank her father Hari Singh for producing it. I thank Nirinjan Kaur, SatKirin Kaur, and Snatam Kaur for their kind words of wisdom and encouragement that they sent to us throughout this journey.

I thank my team at Spirit Voyage, especially the amazing Jeanne, who set up so much of the technical wizardry behind the scenes (including the UStream Live Video Recitation) and works so hard, and Danny, who shipped out each of the So Purkh cds to all of you. I thank Patwant Kaur who translated everything into such beautiful Spanish and opened up this sadhana to a whole other part of the world. Hargobind, Karan and Guruganesha Singh at Spirit Voyage have all been watching you every step of the way with pride.

I thank sweet Harnam Singh, for his inspiration to do the So Purkh and to share it with all of you (Happy Birthday!).

I thank my master Yogi Bhajan for sharing this amazing technology with the women of the world. And I thank the great Guru Ram Das for writing these transcendent words of tender devotion. I bow at your feet in gratitude.

Most of all, I thank you all for participating. Each one of you made this so special and it would not have been the same without you. Thank you for being my soul's companions. Thank you for keeping up.

Congratulations.

Peace to all, light to all, love to all.

So Purkh nirinjan, har purkh nirinjan....

Waheguru,

Ramdesh Kaur

Your Inner Harvest and Gobinda Hari

The leaves outside my window have begun their gentle transformation from brilliant emerald green to rich golden yellows and warm plum-toned reds. I regretfully close my window to the chilly air, taking a final whiff of the woody, pine scented breeze. The season is changing and our hearts undergo their own transformations.

Too often we develop an idea of ourselves that we forget to update. We give ourselves and our lives labels…what we do, who we are…and treat them as if they are static and stable. But the leaves on the tree of our hearts, grown from the roots of our karma, change color and fall to the Earth in one last, glorious dance. Our hearts are microcosms of the beautiful world that surrounds us. Ek ong kar. The creator and the creation are one.

The fall is a time of harvest, and we have an opportunity ourselves to take a moment, center ourselves into our breath and reflect. Hit the pause button. Take a deep breath. Be here now. What have we done this past season of action and growth? What have our lives become? Who is better off for our having been in this world? Often we don’t want to reflect because we are afraid of our own answers, afraid that we won’t measure up to the expectations of the world or of the little critic that lives inside of our own minds. But if we look with different eyes, determined to our fan instead of our critic, we can also find moments of goodness and grace. We can find times where we lived up to our potential and smiled in the face of adversity.

This world, for all its chaos and challenges, is a beautiful world. The leaves could fall off the trees with no real fanfare, but instead they change into a rainbow that circles the globe, each leaf falling at its own time, spinning and twirling to the ground in graceful tumble. Humans are like that, too. Our lives could just exist and end without any real trace left on the world, and often we feel like that is exactly what is happening. But we grow and expand, we change our colors from green to yellow and red, we sway in the wind, and then finally we dance home to arms of our Creator in our final flight.

In this time of change, I can feel myself changing. I look at the leaves and feel my own transformations in my heart. I see the harvest brought in on the farm down the road, the glorious orange pumpkins, the blue gnarly squash, and the knobby and humorous yellow gourds. What have I created this year within me? I can feel the pulsating, warm pumpkin shaped joy inside me, created by chanting and mantra and yoga and most of all love. I can see a few blue gnarly squash created my moments of sadness and loss. And there are the funny little yellow squash from times of laughter so intense my sides might have split to reveal the seeds within!

This season for me is contained within the mantra “Gobinda Hari”. Its words are simple, like falling leaves, Gobinda Gobinda Hari Hari. Gobinda is the aspect of God that is the Sustainer that has kept us going all year. But it is also the aspect of God that is beautiful and lovely. Hari is the aspect of God that is the Creator, that is action, but it also the healing force within us. When we chant Gobinda Hari, we connect with the beautiful harvest within ourselves and we connect with the creative aspect that accomplished it. It’s like saying, “Beautiful! Beautiful! I did that! I did that!” We connect to God in a way that allows God to experience His own creation through us and our lives, and allows us to connect to the beauty of our own experience. Gobinda Hari also allows us to heal ourselves and feel security in a deep place in ourselves through a connection with the knowing that God is a sustaining and healing force at the center of our own hearts.

For 11 minutes, cross your hands over your chest at the wrist, right over left, palms resting near the shoulders. Close your eyes and chant “Gobinda Gobinda Hari Hari” feeling the grace and the kindness of the One who lies in the center of your own Being.

When you are finished, look outside with fresh eyes. See the bountiful harvest of the Universe. See the play of life in all its cycles and rhythms. Then look inside with fresh eyes, and see the beauty of God’s harvest within You. See the miracle of every breath you take and every smile you give. See yourself as a leaf in God’s forest -- unique, beautiful and bright. Happy to sway in the breeze until that day when we all fall into our last dance, embraced at last by the One.

Gobinda Gobinda Hari Hari.

The Ocean

Recently, my father had surgery. He'd been in a lot of pain before the surgery and upon waking up, although he was in additional pain, said that he felt a kind of internal release, as if a long held grimace had left him.

Now my dad isn't really the kind of man who gets involved in yoga and chanting. You're more likely to see him watching Fox News than a kirtan concert and more likely to hear him listening to the Rolling Stones than Snatam Kaur.

But when he woke up from the surgery, just a short time out of recovery, he called me closer to his bed and said in a kind of whisper, "On the way to the hospital, your mom played some music in the car. They were singing about the ocean. Who was that? What were they singing? It was really nice. Made me feel peaceful."

Once I got over my shock, I realized he was talking about Mirabai Ceiba's Ocean. The words he was referring to are "The ocean refuses no rivers, no rivers. The open heart refuses no part of you, of me. Guru Guru Waheguru Guru Ram Das Guru." Somehow, despite his constant vigilance against public participation in the overtly spiritual (I promise not to tell anyone about how he meditates silently every morning with my mother, owns a tarot deck, and loves to juice veggies so much that his juicer has a name -- Penelope), he felt within him something move and shift when listening to Mirabai Ceiba. Not surprising of course, given the power of their music to heal. But I felt like in spite of his growing curmudgeony-ness (that CANNOT be a word), the healing energy of Guru Ram Das pierced through his veil and brought him comfort.

I cannot pay a higher compliment to Markus and Angelika of Mirabai Ceiba. You got my dad to open his heart and heal. And his new hip is doing just fine, too. And that takes one heck of an Ocean.

(You can listen to a clip of this song, or purchase it for yourself on SpiritVoyage.com at this link: http://www.spiritvoyage.com/yoga/Ocean/CDS-001910.aspx)

A Falling Star

It has taken me awhile to write this blog. Grief and shock go hand in hand, neither lending themselves to an exalted piece of writing. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that I don’t have to write something miraculous…nothing that I write with stale words could ever do justice to the vibrant life of a friend.

Lindy “Morningstar” Morris was a dear friend. A master of living off the land, she revered animals in a way far too few do today. She knew the old ways of living, of brain tanning your clothes and making fires in the outback of Australia. She taught a return to the wisdom of living with a small footprint. She heard the voices in the wind and the trees and the brook and the hoof and the scale and the feather. She lived on the leading edge of thought and remembered the divine each and every day.

She passed in a flash of lightening and a fallen oak, deep within the forest of her adopted home. She was surrounded at her end by mutual loved ones. I wish I could have been there to hold her hand and remind her, needlessly, to be brave. She was always brave.

I can offer her no stunning eulogy, no worthy prose. I can offer her only the Akal, the chant of a tradition that was not hers, but which she would have appreciated. Chanting “Akaaaaal” is said in the Kundalini Yoga tradition to help liberate the soul from the dense field of the earth, giving it a boost into the peace of the divine beyond. Akal means undying, and it is the truth of the soul.

Shine like the Morning star, dear one. We will meet again.

Akaaaaaaaaaaaaal.



(Want to use the Akal for your loved ones? There are two beautiful recorded versions. One by Snatam Kaur available as an MP3 free download, and one by Simrit Kaur on The Sweetest Nectar, both on www.spiritvoyage.com)

Clean! Clean! Clean!

My last few days in India have not been what I had hoped. I suppose that a last hurrah at the Golden Temple and parties with friends in Amritsar just wasn’t in the cards.

Food poisoning. There is nothing, my friends, nothing like food poisoning in this country to make you homesick. Horrible, intense food poisoning no less. I think I threw up nearly thirty times in a 24-hour period, accompanied by severe diarrhea. I had a high fever and was sweating out of nearly every pore of my body. The headache and body aches couldn’t really compare with the knives stabbing me in my stomach, so I hardly noticed them.

My friend Ravinder Singh went to the chemist to get me some medicine. It promptly made me throw up again. But knowing he was checking on me from time to time as I lay moaning in my bed made me feel safer, because certainly he would get me to a hospital if it looked like I was on my way out.

Two absolute angels showed up in my life. Siri Atma Kaur and Balwant Kaur, both from South America, stayed up with me rubbing towels dipped in ice water over my body to draw out the fever. Balwant gave me a few hours of reflexology to try to stop the vomiting. They spoke to me softly and gently, keeping my mind off of how sick I felt. I literally fell asleep on them. After a beautiful night’s sleep thanks to these angels, I’m strong enough to go to the airport at least.

Thanks, India, I think. You have a way of cleaning the poisons out of people. (Although, the reverse is also true, for you always have a way of putting poisons into people.) When I was studying with Ustaad-ji one day, he looked at me and said “Ramdesh Kaur! You have to clean, clean, clean your insides! Clean your body! Clean your mind! Only then will you be able to sing!” I guess I wasn’t moving fast enough for the universe. I’ve never been the best housekeeper. India thought, “I know! I’ll clean her up!” and promptly polluted my body just enough to make me think death was a possibility and then pull me back.

What an end! If nothing else, it helps mitigate the nostalgia. It is easy to romanticize India. Easy to make it a land of red and pink saris, of painted elephants, of sadhus with their hair wrapped up into rishi knots of the top of their heads, of naughty monkeys cavorting in the branches of banyan trees, of magical rivers and hidden caves. It is all of these things, but it is also the opposite. It is a land of incredible poverty, of terrible corruption, of extreme pollution. Anything you can say about India is true, and at the same time, the reverse is also true. That is, of course, one of its greatest lessons. It’s all God, all the time: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly. Most of these states are just human judgments anyway. Let go of judgment, and you feel the presence of the Divine.

Ek ong kar: the creator and the creation are one. You and I are one. Thanks to India, I’m a leaving a little cleaner than I came. Thanks to Oneness, so are you.

Mata-ji, Guru-ji

One day in Rishikesh, I decided to have a vedic astrology consultation. I found the man who was considered one of the finest astrologers and went for an appointment. I provided the details of my birth date, time and location. He calculated a complex chart.

For the next half an hour he proceeded to tell me about my life in great detail. I felt like if I asked him what I ate on June 12th the year I was 18 for breakfast, he could have told me. After some general advice for the future, he asked me if I had any questions. Here, in the land of India, ripe with stories of Baba-ji at Kumbha Mela and fresh from reading The Autobiography of a Yogi, I asked him who my guru was.

He looked back at my chart. I anticipated perhaps Yogi Bhajan or even the name of an ashram in the hills I should go to in order to find my guru. When he looked up at me again, he smiled. “Your guru?” he said. “Your guru is your mother.”

It struck me hard in the gut as truth. Obviously, she was. My mother is a lovely woman. She is a dynamic minister and the inspired leader of an interfaith spiritual community. She taught me how to pray, how to meditate, and how to find God in everything. She taught me to reach out to the divine and ask for help, and to trust that the universe is always conspiring for my good. If a guru is the teacher who shows you the way to the divine, then obviously, she is my guru.

But I think, really, all mothers are. If your mother was awful and abusive, then she drove you into a place of such inner darkness that you could not help but reach for the light. Her cruelty drove you into a search for something more. She put you on the path of light.
If your mother, like mine, was a delight and a treasure trove of strength and faith, then she laid the path to Infinity beneath your feet like a yellow brick road. And she, too, put you on the path of light. How amazing mothers are. Despite their limited human personalities, whether full of light or full of darkness, they cannot help but be so connected to the great cosmic mother that they put you back on the road to her arms, one way or another.

I honor you, mothers of the world. I honor you, for better or worse. I honor your role in setting us all on the path of light, whether consciously or unconsciously. I bow and touch your feet, honoring the guru in your heart, the flame of the divine mother, which burns and burns and never stops.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mama. Happy Mother’s Day, Guru-ji.

The Leper of Sandhu Colony

On the outskirts of Amritsar, away from the clamor and din of life around the Golden Temple, tucked into a little suburb called Sandhu colony, is an enclave of houses frequented by western Sikhs. They all come here, as I did, to study with a great master of Raag and life named Ustaad Narinder Singh Sandhu, lovingly called Ustaad-ji. They are usually all musicians, mostly singers with albums of Western-style chant music, or devoted Sikhs who come to connect with the shabad guru, the teacher in the song. Me? I can play piano, or I did in high school. I do not, however, have any apparent vocal talent.

Here is where you say, “Oh, she’s just being modest.” Everyone says that. They say the best singers always say they are the worst. They say I’m just being self-deprecating. Maybe I am being self-deprecating, but I’m not being modest. I’m not good.

When Ustaad-ji sings, he whirls up and down the scales, rolling notes and half notes and quarter notes and sixteenth notes around and around his velvety throat. The class follows, half of them crying tears of bliss at the beauty of his voice and the sweetness of the holy songs.

One day, after singing a particularly lovely raag, he stopped the class. He gestured for me to come closer to him and to sit in front of him. I did so and we started singing again. He stopped the class a second time. He looked at me, eyes pregnant with too much to say. He sighed. “Your blood is stuck in your neck. It is stopping your voice. I’m going to have to touch you. Tee kay?” “Sure,” I replied. We started singing again. Then he hit me hard on the back of my lungs. I practically choked. The other students’ eyes widened into quarters. Then he pinched the back of my neck, closing off some blood flow. I made a face, a mixture of confusion and pain, and kept singing. For a moment he looked triumphant. Then his face fell again.

“Guru has sent you to me as a test.” This didn’t sound good. He continued, “You play harmonium so beautifully. Your hands are so musical. And then you sing. And no, your voice is all over the place. Up and down, over and back.” He looked near tears. He wiped the sweat off his brow. The room so hot it was like sitting under the interrogation lights you see in bad cop movies. “God has sent you to me to test me.” He looked like he was struggling to find a polite way to tell me that I was the worst student he ever heard. I knew he was trying not to let me in on exactly how bad I am, but I know it.

I knew it before I ever came to him. I have known it every day since I lost my hearing and with it my beautiful singing voice. His heart was only now breaking where mine had broken many times before.

“It will take so much work to fix this, Ramdesh. This is a very big problem. So much work.” And he sighed. “Who sent you to me?” he demanded.

“Guru must have.” I said. (Isn’t that the right answer? When in doubt, blame it on God.)

“Gurumustuk Singh?” he interjected.

“No. No. Guru,” I said again, a little concerned to name names, as if he was expecting me to say the angel of death had sent me to bring him home.

“But Balwant,"I said, gesturing to another student in class, "She says my voice is like a butterfly, flittering about all over the place, but so pretty when it lands on something.”

“No butterfly. So much work.” He held his head in his hands. That was a bit disappointing…no butterfly even? I looked around at all the beautiful singers in the room and wondered if my presence in class was making it harder for them to learn. My ego reared its ugly head, and I felt lost and alone. I felt like the leper of Sandhu colony.

I held my head up high and told him he was up for the job. I smiled brightly. But inside I cried everything except tears. When I was young, before I lost my hearing, my voice would soar out of me so easily with perfect pitch. I remember when I was the best singer out of every class. It is a profound and humbling experience to watch yourself in life go from the best to the worst.

It happens sometimes. Perhaps as you go from high school to college, and realize that while you were the star quarterback in rural Montana, you can’t hold up to the standards at your major university. It happens if you are a surgeon, and you develop a hand tremor. For me, it happened in Amritsar, where I could see myself as a child singing circles around my peers, and then watched myself as an adult struggle to sing a scale.

We need that, though, in life. I need that. You cannot appreciate being the best unless you understand what it feels like to be the worst. Humility is a virtue that needs careful honing.

What a privilege it is to be disappointed, really. For one, it means that you are still full of enough light to have dreams. It means your heart is open and searching for more. It may also mean that you have attachments to things that you would do better to release. Disappointment may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is a good medicine for the ego.

His sadness on my behalf burned bitterly that night, during class. But under the gentle shade of the leaves on the tree of passing time, my wounds have cooled. And I find a lightness there that wasn’t there before. By seeing his sadness for me, I let much of the sadness that I had for me go. Singing for me was always a bittersweet event. Although I loved it, I was always haunted by the thoughts of what might have been if history had been different for me. Once Ustaad-ji told me, “You must put your emotions to the side and do the work, Ramdesh. Give me the responsibility. You have so much emotion weighing down your heart about singing, give me the responsibility to make your voice good. Just do as I tell you to do, and let the heart be free from worry. This will help the voice.”

The baggage of lost dreams that I carried on my back like a dowager’s hump, I left at his feet. And it is funny, in that very Indian way that whatever your plans are never have the result you intend here. I went to Amritsar to learn to sing, but there I laid down the banner of sadness and loss, and suddenly I am realizing that with it, I laid down the shackle of attachment to an old dream. I have other talents and other gifts. I have other songs to sing.

I may be a leper and a schizophrenic, but my heart is healed again. At long, long last, my heart is whole. And that is something to sing about, isn’t it?