The first locale of Yoga of Westchester was at our home on Eastchester Road, just a couple of blocks from New Rochelle High School, where my husband taught and my children attended school. After I had been teaching yoga for about a year, I began to hold a short meditation at the end of each class. I was happy to find that a few students wanted to stay and learn to meditate, so I covered a little table with an Indian cloth, set it with a flower, a candle and an incense holder and asked them to sit quietly with crossed legs. I suggested that they concentrate on the flame or the flower.
When the meditation was over, if anyone asked a question, I confessed that I knew very little and just gave a few tips that I had picked up from various readings. Something had kept pulling me to the Aum Centre (Guru, of course), and I did feel good at the end of each meditation, but when any of my students asked me a question I would still say, "I don’t really know much about that."
The interesting thing was that when I started coming to the AUM Centre in Manhattan and it came out that I was teaching yoga, people I was talking with would tell me, “Oh, Guru doesn’t want his students teaching yoga." I thought to myself, “Gee, he’s never said anything to me." Finally I thought, “Well, I’m going to ask him because if he doesn’t want me to teach, I won’t teach." I finally asked Guru one day, and he said, “No, no, I want you to teach more."
Then I realised what the problem was. A couple of my yoga teacher friends came to the Centre and he asked them not to teach. They wouldn’t stop, and they left the Centre. I guess he felt that in most cases teaching yoga is not compatible with the spiritual life, because you become the “Guru." In my case, I never thought of myself as a Guru; I thought of myself as a yoga teacher. And then of course when I met Guru, that was my first allegiance. As I said, if he had told me to stop teaching, I would have stopped.
After a while, there was a new development. One day as I was answering a question, a torrent of yoga philosophy began to flow from my lips. I found myself pouring out a wealth of information, saying things that I had not thought of or known myself, and had never come across before. I asked myself, "What am I saying? Where is this coming from? Is it right?"
After the Aum Centre meditations I would tell Guru, "Someone asked me (such and such) and I told them (this and that), but I don’t know where it came from. Was it correct?"Guru said, "Yes, yes, absolutely correct."
After a few weeks of this, he finally told me, "You do not have to ask any more. It is all correct." I then realised that I had become a channel for this information, which was really coming directly from Guru himself, and as I spoke I was learning Guru’s philosophy right along with my students.
As the classes expanded, we moved the location of our meditation to the farther end of the room. An extra benefit of the change was that it clearly showed the positive power of group meditation. All agreed that the meditations at first were not as strong in the new location, but we could feel the spiritual force building again and growing stronger every week.
A story by Rijuta: The first time I met Sarama, I also met Guru. It was the summer of 1968. Sarama, a dynamic and attractive woman in her early 40s; her husband, Aditya; and Guru came up to Canton, Connecticut, a few miles from where I lived at the time, to the home of a woman who had a yoga centre. I frequently took yoga classes there and heard from a friend of mine that a spiritual man had given a talk and answered questions the previous evening. I agreed to go to a similar session the following evening.
When I heard the name ‘Chinmoy’, it sounded Chinese to me but I didn’t think he looked very Chinese. He seemed quite unusual: he answered questions so truthfully and without hesitation, seeming to immediately pierce through to the inner core of my being.
At the time, I didn’t know anything about spiritual Masters and wasn’t consciously looking for one. Although my curiosity was piqued, I did not even think about the possibility of becoming a disciple, nor was such a thing mentioned.
After Sri Chinmoy gave a short talk and questions were answered, Sarama and her husband engaged me in conversation for quite some time. During our discussion, they told me that Sri Chinmoy had sent a ghost that had been bothering the homeowner for quite some time out into the trees. This news was my first introduction to what a spiritual Master was and the kinds of things he could do. Of course they told me many other important things, but this information was quite striking.
I did not realise until many, many months later that this evening would be so significant: the first time I saw my spiritual Master.
