A Guide to Authentic Spiritual Practice or Sadhana with Mother Maya Tiwari
Mar 14, 2024
Join us and absorb the wisdom of modern sage Maya Tiwari as she shares insightful perspectives on how to connect to an authentic approach to spiritual practice or sadhana. Fondly called Mother Maya, spiritual pioneer Maya Tiwari is an international teacher of Ayurveda and the founder of the Wise Earth School of Ayurveda, the first of its kind in North America. Author of several bestselling books in Ayurveda and self-healing, she has been trained in the Vedas, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Sanskrit and Vedic Chants by Sri Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, and in Ashtanga Yoga and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Dr. Narasimha Rao. Maya served for two decades as a Vedic monk, belonging to India’s prestigious Veda Vyasa lineage. In 2010, she made the radical decision to renounce her monastic title. This decision was made, as she puts it, to “walk a simpler and more accessible life in service of the populations in need” which she continues to do to this day. Maya shares the journey from her early years in Guyana, abruptly contrasted with her arrival in the hustle of New York's fashion scene. We discuss her battle with ovarian cancer, which served as a catalyst for a monumental shift in her life's direction; an exploration of Vedic wisdom, the deeper connections between our health and our lineage, and the power of ancestral memories, which she believes carry both the weight of past traumas and the potential for holistic healing. Maya fondly recalls her disciplined studies in Rishikesh, India with Vedic scholar Sri Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, sharing the transformative effect of Sanskrit chanting and the purifying rituals that have been integral to her path of self-realization. Maya speaks of how we never teach what we don’t need to learn ourselves. The complexities of healing from trauma, she insists, require a compassionate approach that honors the wisdom of our ancestors while discerning which aspects to carry forward on our unique path. Finally, we converge on the simple yet profound practices of self-love and ahimsa. Maya illuminates the path to tranquility, emphasizing the significance of pausing in our frenetic existence, the powerful simplicity of conscious breathing, creating an inner sanctuary amidst life's tumult, and the perennial wisdom of letting go.
Maya established the Wise Earth School of Ayurveda in 1981, with the vision of restoring the long-lost Inner Medicine principles and practices of Ayurveda. Her global conferences and workshops have touched the life of more than 1 million participants. For thirty years, she has inspired and created change in human behaviour, through education, outreach, and service to humankind.
Join us and absorb the wisdom of modern sage Maya Tiwari as she shares insightful perspectives on how to connect to an authentic approach to spiritual practice or sadhana. Fondly called Mother Maya, spiritual pioneer Maya Tiwari is an international teacher of Ayurveda and the founder of the Wise Earth School of Ayurveda, the first of its kind in North America. Author of several bestselling books in Ayurveda and self-healing, she has been trained in the Vedas, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Sanskrit and Vedic Chants by Sri Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, and in Ashtanga Yoga and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Dr. Narasimha Rao. Maya served for two decades as a Vedic monk, belonging to India’s prestigious Veda Vyasa lineage. In 2010, she made the radical decision to renounce her monastic title. This decision was made, as she puts it, to “walk a simpler and more accessible life in service of the populations in need” which she continues to do to this day. Maya shares the journey from her early years in Guyana, abruptly contrasted with her arrival in the hustle of New York's fashion scene. We discuss her battle with ovarian cancer, which served as a catalyst for a monumental shift in her life's direction; an exploration of Vedic wisdom, the deeper connections between our health and our lineage, and the power of ancestral memories, which she believes carry both the weight of past traumas and the potential for holistic healing. Maya fondly recalls her disciplined studies in Rishikesh, India with Vedic scholar Sri Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, sharing the transformative effect of Sanskrit chanting and the purifying rituals that have been integral to her path of self-realization. Maya speaks of how we never teach what we don’t need to learn ourselves. The complexities of healing from trauma, she insists, require a compassionate approach that honors the wisdom of our ancestors while discerning which aspects to carry forward on our unique path. Finally, we converge on the simple yet profound practices of self-love and ahimsa. Maya illuminates the path to tranquility, emphasizing the significance of pausing in our frenetic existence, the powerful simplicity of conscious breathing, creating an inner sanctuary amidst life's tumult, and the perennial wisdom of letting go.
Maya established the Wise Earth School of Ayurveda in 1981, with the vision of restoring the long-lost Inner Medicine principles and practices of Ayurveda. Her global conferences and workshops have touched the life of more than 1 million participants. For thirty years, she has inspired and created change in human behaviour, through education, outreach, and service to humankind.
What we have to do is to understand that the mind and the body needs space, and the wider the inner space gets, regardless of our troubles and difficulties, the healthier and happier we are going to be, and our family as well. These are sadhana. Sadhana is about moving with the tides and moving with exactly where you are.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to the Field Dynamics podcast. We're here to facilitate inspiring dialogues about the nature of consciousness across disciplines, communities and practitioners, all with a holistic perspective.
Speaker 3:
From energy healing to somatic therapies, from neuroscience to meditation. We believe the most interesting things happen at the boundaries of disciplines.
Speaker 2:
I'm Christabel.
Speaker 3:
And I'm Keith.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for joining us today and enjoy the episode.
Speaker 3:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Field Dynamics podcast. Today we're joined by Maya Tuari, finally called Mother Maya. Spiritual pioneer, maya Tuari is an international teacher of Ayurveda and the founder of the Wise Earth School of Ayurveda, the first of its kind in North America. As spiritual pioneer, maya established the Wise Earth School of Ayurveda in 1981 with the vision of restoring the long lost inner medicine principles and practices of Ayurveda. Her global conferences and workshops have touched the life of more than one million participants. Author of several bestselling books in Ayurveda and self-healing, she has been trained in the Vedas, vedanta Ayurveda, sanskrit and Vedic chants by Sri Swami Dayananda Saraswati, and in Ashtanga Yoga and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Dr Narasimha Rao. Maya served for two decades as a Vedic monk belonging to India's prestigious Veda Vyasa lineage. In 2010, she made the radical decision to renounce her monastic title. For 30 years, she has inspired and created change in human behavior through education, outreach and service to humankind. Maya, it is a pleasure to have you as a guest on the podcast today.
Speaker 1:
Thank you, Keith, and thank you for that wonderful introduction and I must say it's such a pleasure to be with Field Dynamics and to continue your conversation in how we can increase our individual and personal awareness because, after all, that is where our changes and our growth and prosperity lie.
Speaker 3:
You have a really unique story. You were born in Guyana to a family of Indian descent and then made your way into the world of fashion design in New York City with some very well-known clientele, before experiencing a life-threatening illness. Could you share a little bit about your journey to this path of healing consciousness and Ayurveda?
Speaker 1:
I think my journey is not dissimilar to so many of us, keith, those incredible people you've been talking to on your podcast. It is always unusual. I think every individual story has an amazing amount of understory or backstory, and my back story is that I came from a village of 500 people landed in Greenwich Village, thousands of creative souls in that little bohemia. At the age of 16, I was there to study and then met Stella Adler, who became my first major teacher in America with the Stella Adler Conferential Survey, where I continued my studies in European literature In Guyana, which was then British Guyana, we had wonderful education, but it was limited to English plays. The whole world circumvented its values to one thing only, and that is extremely British, and so basically moving on to New York was, for me, such a joy.
Speaker 1:
It was early in my life. I did, as you say, have another career. I wanted to break free from the stern and stoic Brahminical background in which I grew up, even though it had been transported by grandparents from North and South India to British Guyana at that time. But New York is still an extremely creative city and what I call home. It's been home for a very, very long time, even though I moved to Asheville, north Carolina. We needed land to prepare the gardens and the organic Ayurvedic gardens and holistic medicine ways, and needed acres and land. So we were there.
Speaker 1:
But New York has always remained my home and, I must say, in light of that too, I'm one of those Flacco followers, the Alham follower, and I thought of returning there, really to Central Park West, which was a very different neighborhood for me because of Flacco being there, believe it or not. And this was just recently, the last several months. But it was not to be. That city has changed, I have changed and we've moved on.
Speaker 1:
Yes, so the early life, I think, led me to many discoveries, to early fame and also to ovarian cancer, and I believe that with those early lessons, I would say cancer was the transformer, was the first major transformer that I recognized in my life of change and realized after that, with the help of incredible mentors, including my father, who was still alive at that time, that it was time to go not only back to the ancestral root but to go forward into what will serve rather than what serves us, serves us in the sense of the superficial. Not that art is superficial, it never is but purpose is purpose and I was fortunate to find mine at a very early age.
Speaker 2:
A large part of your healing journey from cancer, as outlined in the book, is related to connecting to and processing the trauma of your ancestors, and I would love if you could share something about the importance of working with our cultural and familial heritage in terms of our health and well-being, from your perspective.
Speaker 1:
Yes, christabel, that's a very profound exploration for all of us, because we've not only come to recognize the importance of our forebears, but not only their genetic memories, but the way we've been shaped by them and basically we have our own karmas, our own set of values and imprints from our frillions of birth, prior birth, and even if we don't believe in such reincarnation from my audience I'm talking to, it's all right, we have many more lives to figure it out but basically what we need to understand is that we have a responsibility towards the changes and the adaptations that we need to make with our own ancestral memory and our own lineage. No one of our forebears and their activities are flawless. We are all subjected to human trials and changes and circumstances that bend us and, in my case, ovarian cancer at the age of 18 was a very unusual occurrence for a young woman in New York City and with the help of incredible physicians there, and also the background of being trained to go back deep within ourselves and just let things be the hardest thing to do, because at every level of our lives we have junctional changes and obstacles, some of which are extremely abyss-like. We fall into abyss and then we have difficulty, we struggle to get out and we feel lost, we feel disappointed in the trauma of it all. I do believe that there is a simple path that can cut through the morass of our ancestral memories, and that path is to align ourselves with breathing, with awareness, with doing certain activities that keep us moving and keep the mind fluent, whatever they may be. It could be any for many tradition, really, but, as we know, the Vedic tradition has given us enormous amount of practices.
Speaker 1:
But practices alone do not get us out of the morass. We must be able to connect practice to self, and that is a very individual thing. We have to be able in the community of friends, because human beings are not meant to be isolated and live singular lives In this community. We are not there to compete with each other, of course. We are there to collaborate with each other in ways that someone can be a mirror back to us and say look, this trauma has been going on for a long time in your life, this particular passage you are not getting through. And how do we best mirror this back to you in a way that reflects you, not reflect us. So that is what community is about. It is about reflecting this.
Speaker 1:
I don't necessarily think that therapy is the only way to go to get past ancestral traumas. We know what is not working for us In the quiet of the day and the night. We actually know that this is a repetition. It is repetitive behaviour. It is not working. And how do we get it to clear? And we go through the usual portals of blame and victimisation or the feeling of being victimised, blame, and it is all part of the victimisation portal. That is blame and looking outside of ourselves, getting too wrapped up in the circumstances of what is going on in our lives as opposed to what is happening internally.
Speaker 3:
You have written so much on Ayurveda, which is this tremendously broad, diverse, deep, holistic healing tradition from India. What is your reflection now on your experience of having ovarian cancer at such a young age and how do you view the potential reasons of why that arose and then how you unpicked that, and has your reflection about why it was happening different now than it was then?
Speaker 1:
Yes, because in youth we don't have that many years to reflect on, we are just ready to get up and go again. I remember I do so much deep work in women's care and how encouraging our women population of the world to take back their reproductive rights, for instance, from medical science and from whatever has held it hostage for so long in our modern medical time it's always in the forefront of what I do is my own experience, those five years from 18 to 23, going through the many shackles of the many abysses of cancer and the reformation and the hopelessness of it all, and also the fact that I did survive. I mentioned Placo earlier and that has been such a great metaphor really. It's been on my mind and about to do a podcast on the Eurasian owl that freed itself from the Bronx Zoo, or got freed from the Bronx Zoo and lived for one entire year in Central Park West, free, learning to hunt again, and became absolutely such a natural, such an innate sense of the intrinsic sense of freedom. I think when I rose from the ashes of cancer I must have felt that same freedom. But the freedom, the momentum, took me back to the ancestral land, to my Vedic tradition, to the heritage of Vedic Vyasa to becoming a scholar in that tradition. Not that I wanted to be a scholar, but that's the type of education that it was. It was thorough and it was clean and it was pristine and it required intense amount of disciplines. But having gone through a subtle relationship with life and death where we're sort of straddled between the subtle body and the gross body meaning people have what they call out of body experience and the way that I look at it from a Vedic point of view is that the body does on hinge when you're dying and it's about to go I experienced vistas that were incredibly profound that later served the writings that I did and the work that I did and the deeper understanding of it.
Speaker 1:
Then I ran into another juncture of change when I turned 55. I shan't get too much into what that juncture of change was. It was most an external set of things that targeted my well-being that forced me back into that. It's not necessarily the black hole. Let's say it's the event that happens around the black hole. I love that analogy too, because oftentimes we feel like we're in the black hole but in fact if we are, we don't get it. We are on the event horizon when we're there again. It brings back the memories of past traumas, like the ovarian sense of trauma, of being in the hospital and all of the wherewithal. I was for the first time able to truly reflect as a mature individual as to what actually happened then and there at that time and understood again that it was the chest of ancestral memories. It had just this time gotten to a deeper place, a deeper layer, a deeper sheath in the body that we had to sort of now uncover once again. I was unhappy about it. I was in fact very angry about it for a period of time because I felt I had done my work.
Speaker 1:
But the beauty of those of us who take on the purpose, whether it's ours or not, to serve the beauty is that you never finish your work. It's always ongoing until you seamlessly meld with the future of another life if you're to have one. And so, with a great deal of humor, I started to live a very different life after 55, which took me back out of the forest of North Carolina, back into the urban city of New York. And basically what I'm trying to say with this long surrogate story is that I came upon the inevitable. That is our sense of awareness, our sense of who we truly are, not as the product or prodigy of our ancestors and our great roots, but really as the individual that has purpose, is serving purpose and must at all costs find a way to continue to serve that purpose. It's not that it's an external bent that we are out there serving purpose, but purpose feeds us, it nourishes us, it nurtures the soul, it nurtures the place that is the depth of our own self and our body and our mind. And I had never given incredible amount of thought, although we use the word Atman and Brumhain and soul to such a humongous degree as we can in America, we could do wordology until we fall apart and lose the meaning of the word at the end of it all.
Speaker 1:
But for me, understanding myself from the point of view of not who am I, not what am I here to do, not who my people were, and not where I'm going, but what is the content of my own soul? You know the age of it, the content of it, and I know it's always been extremely ancient. I've always been told that my first editor, my first excellent I mean I had many excellent editors but let's say that one that really took no flag, said to me, why do you always love using these archaic English words? And I think I have a bent towards language, towards the language, english language in particular, and Sanskrit as well, and the bent is really I love words that have deeper meaning than this superficial meaning of just communication with each other, words that hit a certain vibration within the body. And if you look at my text or any of my books and I didn't realize I would do this deliberately, because it wasn't a deliberate act. I choose words, and not even carefully, just randomly, that hit a certain and you would say nerve. But it's not nerve, it's, it's the vibrational feel that you could feed through.
Speaker 1:
Now, in Ayurveda, that's how we work, and medicine and I call it in a medicine it's not that we give you a herb because it's going to help this particular condition.
Speaker 1:
No, we are always treating the entire body and our mind annexed to it, and then the deeper level of our ancestral whatever is floating in the bottom of it all, and so we always use a combination of herbs or what we call the, the vehicle that we put the herb in to get into, to actually project into the deeper tissues and, depending on what that makes is it can go deeper and deeper and deeper, into the depth of it all. We're told that we have seven tissue layers, but within that seven tissue layers is the infinity of it all. It's, it's infinitely deep, and that's just the physical body. Science is now finding out about the vagus nerve, and here we go again in the true American way of let's just beat it to death, right, I'm sorry, like we have done every modality that came to our shores, and then we sell this, this beat to death modality, back to the origin the original, original place from which we've imported them.
Speaker 1:
Okay, never mind that you could tell that I have certain very strong social and political bent. I am a revolutionary. That will not change the path of revolutionizing myself is the question you're asking.
Speaker 2:
So many directions in which we can go from that. A myriad of questions are running through my mind. I'd like to return. Actually, the thing that resonates the most to me is that reference you made there to Sanskrit and to the potency and the vibration of words. You were fortunate, I understand, to spend many years studying Sanskrit and Vedanta with Sri Swami Dhyananda Saraswati at his ashram in Rishikesh, which is a special place in my heart. I was able, fortunate enough, to attend and study just a little at one point in my life as well. I wonder if you could talk to us a little about that, because the unhearing chanted Sanskrit sort of live in person for the first time.
Speaker 1:
That touched my soul in a very special way, chris well, that's an unusual question for me in an interview, but I'm so thankful that you visited the beautiful Ganges and that is an especially exquisite part of the Ganges River and all the memories of water that our incredible planet holds, you know, and sacred water is sacred water. You know, the Maori's in New Zealand gave water its identity, a personification and the identity of a person, and this way they felt that the laws would best protect the person of the water, the river, which I thought, oh my gosh, that's such an amazing, amazingly brilliant deduction to make, because we still, as human beings, look at nature as outside of us, something to be used, something to benefit us. And this selfish, young, karmic slant on it all is why we're in the trouble, the troubles that we're in today. But getting back to Rishi Keshe, it was my first home away from home and the first time after 200 years that any one of us had returned back to the motherland. And Swami then, and there, was extremely kind to me in that he not only baptized me back in that river, baptized me in the sense of welcome back to your motherland, not baptized me as anything but just a human individual walking the journey back to India. And so for me that those were profound years.
Speaker 1:
I went between Rishi Keshe and Ashwami in Pennsylvania and then, later on, ashwami in Anikati in the Nilagiri Hills of South India, in Tamil Nadu. But Rishi Keshe was the most special of it all because of Ganga, because of the Ganges and because that Ashwami was the first place in which Swamiji had a tent it started out with him in his teenage years and a tent where he was a Sadhu, just a brahmachari, a young person going towards the monastic life and did his incredible studies. So all of those memories were earthed in that location, that space, that vastu as we say, and for me to be brought back there. The changes were amazing when I took my first vows as a brahmachari and that's not necessarily that you would become a full-fetched monk, but it was very white and walking in the journey of my dedication, a commitment to the studies, a commitment to living a life that this was its highest priority at that time in my life. And that ceremony I wrote about it in Secrets of Healing, where I felt it was a very windy day in the early morning, at 5 am, on the river, and if you've been there, you know that our first set of chanting and prayers begin at 4 in the morning, at 4.30, and it's freezing, cold on the concrete seat of the temple, and then the winds blowing and whatever, and in that light we do our snan, which is the dip into the Ganges, into these incredible waters, you know, and now of course Sains finds out, that the cold dip like that helps the vagus nerve. But anyway, we'll get back.
Speaker 1:
I'm writing a new book and it has to do with the ancient understanding of how, you know, vagus nerve is just a very tiny component of our vatika, of our vata body, and how it all really fits in. So we don't keep isolating pieces, pieces, pieces. You know we're always looking for pieces and they don't fit, and then at the end of the day, we make such a mark out of it. But nonetheless, for years what is it? More than 20 years the early morning prayers and chanting, love to chant. I absolutely.
Speaker 1:
The vibration of it is really phenomenal, because it's not a language, sanskrit is really not a language. We call it Devanagari, the communion between, let's say, the deities and the gods and the goddesses. We all have the God and Goddess aspect within ourselves, the Shiva Shakti, the understanding of our primordial feminine, primordial masculine, and so we're simply clearing air, we're clearing environment, we're clearing the tissue pathways, we're clearing all of absurdly difficult memories that we carry within us and hold on to. And it's not a simple thing. We try to say that it's egoistic and because of the ego we can't get past the challenges. But it's not so.
Speaker 1:
It is true that a certain amount of belief system that this is sacred, my body is sacred, and if I've been raped and if I've been hurt and injured in some ways, then it shouldn't happen and I will resist it. That's a very natural human behavior. We cannot then go and tell this person who is experiencing this incredible abuse that we have to get beyond it and look at it as a lesson and understand. This lesson will bring gems. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that because at the bottom of it all is my teacher was named Dayananda. It is compassion, it's the infinite. Compassion is what it means. Beyond all of it. Our best medicine is infinite compassion. It's not about telling us which lesson we can jump from, because that's not true. This is a very superficial skin over the act of healing.
Speaker 1:
And so Rishikesh yes, rishikesh is a land of the Rishis. That's what Rishikesh means the place of the Rishis of the ancient sages. And the ancient sages were not just men. The ancient sages were also amas and women, but we had different roles, and when I dropped my robe, it wasn't out of disrespect to this incredible tradition, it wasn't out of a lack of allegiance to my Brahminical blood, because blood is blood, and it is so wonderful to have an understanding of our deep ancestral memory that can create gems in the mind for us to like, spill out in words and all of our tradition. Look at the musical traditions of Europe, look at the genius that that carries. Look at the land and the incredible traditions of the ancestral blood of the native people, every native people the Maori, the Australians, the Amazonian natives.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, if we were even to share a percent of it, we would be 100% better off than we are today in every level of our existence, environmentally. So what we're looking at, then, is to cherish that motherland within us, but to also break free from the tethers of what doesn't serve us. And let's look at it this way we're going to put it in an equation Almost 50% of what we carry in our bloodline and in our belief system, tied to that bloodline, is useless and counterproductive, and the other 51% is absolutely necessary for us to create the path of awareness within ourselves. So, when life is sloughing us off, why do we need to take 3 million trillion dollars in birts to get to the place of Ananda, of the Samadhi that we look for? Because this is such a difficult thing to separate, to shed off, to just wean off the dross from the gems, and that's all life is about. This is about just separating the dross from the gems and prayerfully letting the dross be and treat it with ultimate compassion, because dross doesn't want to leave.
Speaker 1:
Dross is attached. Dross is our sense of attachment. Dross is our sense of everything we thought we were. It's breaking the identity into smithereens and that's why it is so hard to let go of it, and we shun't force people to do that in one lifetime. But we can do it in little bits, in grand little pieces and little baby steps in the way that just say I am at honesty with myself, I am in an honest relationship with myself, I am examining the areas that I dislike, I am examining my angst and my anger. I am not trying to make a conclusion of any of this, because we can't. We don't have enough awareness information, honed over however long our karmas have been living, to truly make a conclusion of any of it.
Speaker 3:
You emphasize there the profound value of compassion in our inner journey and just in the general sense of deepening into peace, acceptance and spiritual development. You make quite an emphasis in your work on this other word, ahimsa, which relates to other principles, maybe then compassion, or ties into ananda or dhyananda infinite compassion, as you said. So would you mind describing a bit or talking a bit about ahimsa and why you center a lot of your work around this principle?
Speaker 1:
Because when I started to become a target of some very difficult things and difficult people and you know just whatever that may mean I understood that I most of all need to learn ahimsa for myself, in the deepest, deepest possible space. We never teach key other than what we need to learn ourselves, and when we want to make it a state of art, we become teachers of it because we are learning. We are learning it with deepening or own thinking. I've never written anything other than what I myself needed to experience, learn and to teach to someone else.
Speaker 1:
I don't go into the theory of Ayurveda or the theory of the danta or the theory of a humbrem haas me. I chose not to have an ashram per se and sit in a throne and have followers and you know and continue to dance around that little playing field. And where is I have no judgment, where is I have I can't say it honestly no judgment around it, meaning I can't say that with a straight face that I have no judgment around it, because obviously, from my words, I do. I do believe that you know some of us are well, we sit in one place, some of us are rivers, we flow through communities and different places and some of us are just incredible. Ocean and tsunamis on top of the ocean and I think I am the latter for sure.
Speaker 1:
Revolution and the sense of breaking it all up so that I can again reformat in a place where I lose my loose some more dross, has been actually the, the tempo of my own life from the time I took charge of it at the age of 16 to now at the age of 72. And that has been my momentum and my rhythm, and I think it's important that we learn our rhythm, our own rhythm, and make fun of it when others see it as, oh my god, here it comes again, because our rhythm is our basic beacon, it's the directional light, it is our spotlight, it is what keeps us flowing and moving and going forward. Strangely enough, after a difficult set of incidents that occurred in the forest of North Carolina began there, I actually started to do the Living Hymns at tour. World tour movement was very important to my understanding of what was happening in my life at that time, and also sharing and making these incredible piece mandala with nature's grains, because it was the fastest and most intuitive way that I could work with those I serve and have them appreciate what it is to hold a seed in your hand, a grain in your hand, and put it down with the, with the ahimsa vrata, which is the vow of ahimsa, which is I. You know, I take the vow of ahimsa, I make living, I make in harmony my first priority. Now, this isn't a valour, anybody else, it's just me trying to clean out the lens of my own being so that I can have implanted the seed of ahimsa in my own mind. And after many, many tours through Australia and Brazil and India and and some of the less so in Europe, but in America, almost so many cities here in the UK, wherever I understood that it was taking hold as as my lens, as a lens through which all of my daily experiences must come through.
Speaker 1:
There is a paradox in life that we must come to terms with. We've got to understand the himsa, not just as in harmony and non-violence, but also dealing with the violence, the violence in our thought, the violence in ourselves, the violence in everything these. There is no such thing as peace without the violence behind coming to terms with violence, there is no such thing as us and them, there is no such thing as you're right and I am wrong and I'm right in your wrong, and and this is the premise of the paradox of a himsa. A himsa very much, as was because when, when the first difficult incident started happening and then lasted for years, what happened with me is I so wish I was a warrior again, that I had my sword in hand, that I, you know, I could go out there and defeat the evil of it all. And that's a very violent thought. Let me take a sword, the sharpest sword I could possibly have, and let me be Durga again and you know, and let Kali infuse my very movement. And I realize I had memory of that, but the memory was also due that I no longer had the purpose for that. This that makes sense. So in a way it would have been an important way to go forward for me, because those memories were already used up, they were already threaded out and and not completely going to be what was my main weapon? And the main weapon was one of developing the acceptance of what is happening, of developing and not only the acceptance but creating harmony around that acceptance. So Ahimsa became a very major tool, weapon, the way, my lens for me to be able not only to survive because for a few years I spent just in survival mode with what was happening but to get past the survival stage.
Speaker 1:
Well, it's not a negative thing when we are in that space. You're threading water. You need to. When long ocean voyages, you're swimming the ocean, you have to thread sometimes. Sometimes you have to thread a lot longer. Just let the tides move you, and so that's also how the lens is and basically you get to the point where you can move again forward with your own limbs and your own limbs of mind. So Ahimsa is extremely deep. It's profound. It is, let us say, most of all a paradox. It is that field of sliding, slipping, falling, getting up. We don't have to do any of it. We don't have to get up if we fall down. We don't have to fall down if we get up. The fact is, when you're in your, what is the word cultivation? If you're in a cultivation, you do as it leads you to do so. That's a very difficult and a very strange explanation for Ahimsa.
Speaker 2:
You're highlighting something very important which I appreciate, which is the relevance of humour in our path, in our journey, and the real importance of that, and I also really appreciated your reference to the synonymous nature of teaching and learning. You speak beautifully in your book the Path of Practice, of the chakras, which is something we cover a decent amount of field dynamics when we're working with people, the subtle anatomy, the subtle bodies, causal bodies, when you speak of the seven stages of life, the journey to incorporate and transcend particular energies and lessons inherent to each chakra, as it were, as we move through the stages of life, and I wondered if you could talk a little to this evolution for our listeners.
Speaker 1:
I think it's important that we understand that the evolution cannot happen in one lifetime, that it takes so many lives and rebirths, and lessons and pain to do it.
Speaker 1:
So when we try to make an assessment of, let's say, deeply traumatic situations in our lives, like the wars in Ukraine, russia, the people enduring this, like what happened in the Holocaust, what happened, in every war, what the disasters of it all is that we're not going to find repair, the way that we understand it immediately, but we are going to have to step back in any trauma situation, in any development of the seven layers in our body, the seven layers in our mind, the seven layers in our universe, in any of those developments. We need friendship. We need trust, actual physical people that we can trust the few that we can. We need community. We need to reach out when we feel the most isolated. We need to be able to. We could say self-love, but that means so many things.
Speaker 1:
People beat themselves up. I know women, in particular Christabel, beat themselves up because they don't think they have enough self-love, because all of the preaching about self-love, self-love, self-love. How many baths a day can you do? How many massages can you take? How many yoga classes can you do? How many meditation? Why you're on a tether? We have tethered ourselves to practices that we think will heal us and we keep getting more and more competitive with the tethering of these practices and we take them completely away from sadhana, from the inner medicine-healing value of it, and then we make them into the state of the Olympic arts, of athleticism or whatever, and whereas there's nothing wrong with it, this is not the goal. How do we develop through our traumas from stage to stage? Forget the stages, let us just say that the act of self-love can be just sitting here and doing a simple learn, a simple breathing exercise. Learn a simple humming, like the bumble bee humming, just closing the eyes lightly, closing the ear and the lips and the mouth, and just humming inside like. These are such incredible practices because what it does is it changes the internal vibration, the chanting, as you said before in Rishikesh, that we learned in the ashram, you know, with incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1:
These men have devoted their entire lineages to just the discipline of the Vedic text and chanting them as years back in the Kabbalah and years back in the ancient chants of the native people. It's a lineage after lineage after lineage. It's rivers flowing into rivers, generationally, from thousands and thousands of years, and when you hear their under-vibration, it's incredible. If we do, we could tell everything that's going on in the human body with that sound. It's a diagnostic tool. It's absolutely incredible. We could tell if there's a shimmer, if there's not a shimmer, if there's a deeper vibration, if it's light, if it's superficial.
Speaker 1:
All of these things, a simplicity of our own medicine, of going into nature and looking. Right now I'm in Berkeley and the deer come right up back to the door. And I had a long relationship with the herd of deer in Biskaforos in North Carolina and they came and sat with me for meditation. I gave them pine nuts as their prasadam and they loved pine nuts and blessed them with the light, and then they grew to not only wanting it but looking for it. And in that camaraderie and the very first week I came here in Berkeley, the deer they're back and they're back at the door. So the communion with the animals, the communion with each other, the communion with the light and the animals in our environment, with the spirits that are always there to protect, the spirits that are always there in despair, it's what vibration is about.
Speaker 1:
So can we develop and cut through? Number one we must let go of this idea that we have to have a strategic routine, day after day after day after day, and push ourselves to the max. That does not help us. This routine is good meaning. We're doing this and we're continuing to do certain practices that are important to us, but it has to be untethered. It just has to be untethered, or else we fall into that expectation of the self and beating up the self and whatever. And we have all of these great masters talking about the self-love and talking about how we've got to come to terms with certain things and how we've got to accept it. Well, these mantras they help, but they also create a lot of misery. And the misery that they create is that people feel forced to arrive at a solution before the life will ever allow them to even get a glimpse of what that solution is.
Speaker 1:
What we're accepting is not that we accept that we know, we're accepting that we do not know and we're accepting that in that not knowing we have a degree of faith and the faith builds as we continue to not know but keep accepting that we do not know. But I'm having to be okay with not knowing, with living with not knowing. I feel pressured and in a pressure people do they feel in a pressure of, but I'm not getting anywhere here. But that's not true If we continue to be okay with not knowing. That takes a lot of courage because it takes the word faith.
Speaker 1:
Faith in what? Faith? In the external elements and our parents and God, what we are built in a certain way we are constructed or not to me, as humans are constructed with the power of chit, such chit ananda. The awareness we are built with that, every tissue, every cell, every memory, and therefore that acceptance of not knowing is also built into that awareness, and the awareness is our faith. Building awareness is building faith in our own ability to not only survive, but survival is good. Now we have all these incredible words I want to thrive. Well, you can't thrive when you're in the horizon event. Here and every life, keith, is a horizon event. It depends on whether we're skipping around it and not doing purpose or whether we're doing purpose and crawling around it.
Speaker 3:
As a revolutionary tidal wave. Is it fair to say that you have a target or direction for how you're focusing that energy at the moment, externally in the world versus internally? Where is your purpose, pushing that tidal wave?
Speaker 1:
I just wrote a book, a beautiful book, very different from my other books. Of course, it would be because of experience again, right, and where we come from the age 50 to 70 or where we were at the age 30 to 50. And every chapter of our life, if it's lived to the fullest. And living to the fullest doesn't mean that we're out there playing tennis and doing yoga and meditation and chanting. In fact, in order to thread water, I didn't do as much chanting as I normally would. So there again, we're saying we cannot keep certain things just because they became our practice and our schedule and we have to do it no matter what. No, no, practice is not like that. Sadhana is about moving with the tides and moving with exactly where you are. In Aitnashakti, I love to write, by the way, and for me it's healing. It's always been healing, and I'm so grateful to have so much more time now that I'm not training practitioners to write and intend to continue to write a lot more, many more words than I have before. But for me, what writing is is this In Aitnashakti, the projectile is there and Aitnashakti, it is a book about the patriarchal takeover of the feminine pride and more deal of the Shakti force and what we have to do as men and women to bring that back in a state of balance.
Speaker 1:
That is where I'm going, that is what my projectile is for for what I've been learning and what I've been sleeping in for the last 10, 12 years. And so, yes, there is that projection. I don't really have what you would say, and I never did plan on on what I'm going to do next. It's a luxury to not have a planning as to what we're going to do next, Because my mind alone can't dictate what I'm going to do next. It is the entire being of soul that's pushing me forward and it's pushing me into into writing.
Speaker 1:
I will start another deep book, and I'm Shakti is an extremely deep book and it will go more towards the feminine activism press as opposed to the holistic press. But it's not that my work has changed, it's just the purpose develops it, it grows, it grows where it's growing to go and going to grow. And so, basically, the next is is dancing with death, not because I'm planning on dying or anything like that, but I understand that we do need to understand what the preparation is for afterlife, what you know, and that's a topic too. That's a difficult one for people because of all the brainwashing and all the mistraining and all the misbeliefs and all the tomes of whatever. But that's another deep book.
Speaker 1:
Like I'm Shakti, so I thought I thought in the interval I'm doing the wonderful book on on on what the Vata body is about meaning explaining the vagal nerve in in its context, as opposed to isolated and and the lone and stripped out there. So projectile is about writing. But I didn't start doing that because I just got up one day and said, okay, I got to write again. It just happens. It's just what pushes you from inside.
Speaker 2:
You've spoken a little of this commodification, if you will, of wellness and, to an extent, spirituality, particularly in the Western world, and the appropriation of certain modalities, cultures, teachings, learnings from other cultures and obsession with placing this into silos. You know top tips, you know seven ways of doing this, you know 10 minutes a day, et cetera, and the way in which the Western mindset is engaging with wellness practices. And you've spoken a little bit as well about sadhana in this practice. And I wonder, just in closing, if you could share whatever comes to mind around this ideal of how people might apply themselves in a non-linear, non-mental body sense.
Speaker 1:
All right, we breathe. We have to as human beings. Breathness is so extremely powerful. It is so much more powerful than we think it is. No amount of pranayama practice that we learn can tell us how powerful it is. Just catch ourselves on daily, in a daily way to breathe, to sit back and do nothing but breathing. However, we know breath, but we inhale and exhale or we can do the bramri or bumblebee breath.
Speaker 1:
It'd be lovely to learn a few good breaths, like the fire breath through, let out angst when we have it Like that's it. You know just, it clears angst immediately. It clears pain too, because while you're busy firing out the breath, you're not feeling any of the usual pains. A few breaths, but, most importantly, pause. We don't take enough pause. We exhaust the mind, we exhaust our body. We have exhaustive routines that we live every day, some of which we kind of have to do. We have children. We have to take care of them. The system itself has made the childhood and what they do and the amount of books they carry on their backs. It's just changed everything. It's not the way. We have to start lightening up that. We also are working with the system. We cannot always lighten up when the system is forcing us to do certain things with our children. That's been a very, very difficult place for mothers and fathers alike, and teachers as well. What we have to do is to understand that the mind and the body needs space. The wider the inner space gets, regardless of our troubles and difficulties, the healthier and happier we are going to be, and our family as well. What do I mean by inner space? Inner space means we take 30 minutes at the time of day when we can no matter the deadlines, and we sit and we breathe. We can think if we want, but we are not going to say don't think, because mind doesn't work that way. We try and find a place or focus on a tree, or focus outdoors, or focus on something beautiful or listen to a piece of music that's beautiful, but not intently. Just in the background we pause. These are sadhana. It's called flowing back with the day.
Speaker 1:
Not everybody has the luxury of walking barefoot in the grass. Now the grass is all sprayed so basically we don't know about walking barefoot in the grass anymore. But running stream, putting your feet in the running stream these are difficult things to do when we live in urban cities and urban life, but there's always something there's a sky to look at, there's some rivers in cities, there's a tree, there's a park, and then there's the inner space of your home, a space that we must create, that is free from all appendages, even if it's the size of a corset, that we make it into a beautiful little space, but the place we can just light a little candle or light a little key lamp, or put a flower or put an image of whatever deity or ancestor we want or, and just keep it simple, a space we could sit there to just pose on the inner vibration to be flowing back and forth at us. Inner medicine means we can nourish ourselves at any time, at any place, in any situation and, ladies, especially when you need to take rest, please take rest. You can leave the task and just say I'm going to lie down, I'm going to take rest. We need to get rid of the tiredness, we need to get rid of the push, we need to just take time, junctional time, intermittent time during the day to do these simple things for ourselves. We can encourage our family to be a little less quiet over dinner and not keep the gadgets running the TV, the phone, whatever. We can make rules about that in our home. No phones at the table, no, whatever you know, enjoy our meal, taste our meal, whatever.
Speaker 1:
It is like that simple. We've just come so far from it that it sounds like what a weird set of things to do, but it is that simple and we have to keep creating that simplicity back in our life in a way that works. I have, for instance. I'm back to Keith's deep question. I've been mulling that question to Keith for so long that he did hit a spot here. But on that deep question, you know, you maul what it is that is going to happen next. What I know, not what is coming next, but what is not going to be anymore from the past. That is that my years of training practitioners are finished, my years of running a nonprofit school are done, my years of the things that I've done in the last, however many years beautiful work, beautiful teachings not there anymore.
Speaker 1:
And sometimes it's good if we take the stock of our daily lives, christabel, and the daily things.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes it's better to know, and it's always more authentic that we know what we no longer need to do rather than what we think we want to do or should do or wish to do or project into the future. The present holds a little bit of the past and we could say I don't have any more interest in that, and so we're cleaning up the present, we're cleaning up the present. We're cleaning up the present. We can't always be present, because if we are present we can't do the work we need to do, we can't take care of our children, we can't go out and buy groceries. Because we are so present we can't move forward. So we have to have the edge of forwardness in presence and we have to have an edge of the past in the present. But the beautiful thing about moving forward moving forward doesn't need thought to move forward. Moving backwards moves us forward, meaning, when we're in the present, if we can easily know what we've already done and no longer wish to do, we are moving forward.
Speaker 3:
Beautiful thing to sit with that last sentence there. Where can people find you if they want to view your work? Or is there anything you want to share with the listening audience that you're working on currently?
Speaker 1:
Thank you for that opportunity, keith, just that I'll be around. I will be around. Our website, mayatowaricom, is a good place. We are updating it, my tech girls are updating that, and we still have wiseearthcom and we do have the online courses running at learnmayatowaricom. These are three places that you could keep up with what's going on.
Speaker 1:
I am accepting a few invitations to do conferences. I have not stopped completely. I do appear in major conferences and continue to do some of that, but most of the. My next book will be out probably by the end of this year. I am Shakti and I love doing book tours because it becomes a form of consultation with endless numbers of women and men. My book signings usually last from three to six hours of meeting and greeting. I love that. I love moving about, so you will see me about. I am just so grateful really, for the support that I do get the grace of the universe and your grace as well. It's been an absolute honor to meet you, keith, and to meet you Christopher, and all blessings on field dynamics. It is such a powerful podcast.
Speaker 2:
Thank you so much for sharing those sentiments, and your time and knowledge has been a very much a privilege for us as well. We talking soon.
Speaker 3:
Thanks for listening to the episode. What really supports the podcast is providing a rating and review of the show on your preferred listening platform. This helps us get the message out to a wider audience. If the topics we discussed today appeal to you, do take a moment to subscribe. Lastly, we invite you to check out our website, field dynamics healing dot com, to learn about our training programs, private session work and to see how we're setting the standard in contemporary energy healing. Many thanks and see you next time.