I am buying a drink bottle in Auckland when I happen to tell the shop assistant that I am off to India. “Don’t buy a drink bottle here, buy a copper drink bottle in India,” she says, and without any validation I take her at her word. So here I am in India buying not only myself but all my nearest and dearest copper drink bottles. In true Taurean fashion, I have persuaded Lil there is nothing as good as a copper drink bottle to drink from, and she too is buying copper drink bo

Today we are going to have lunch with the King of all the Yogis, Swami Kailashanand Giri Ji Maharaj. Giri Ji Maharaji is a spiritual guru, yoga guru, saint, and scholar. He is a writer in Hindu, English, and Sanskrit and the preeminent Vedic master and authority of all the masters of the Vedic world; Thom’s boss, I guess, although he is only 51 and Thom is nearly 80. I am not as excited as everyone else, as I am just a new recruit to this weird but wonderful world, which requ

A Pilgrimage to the Sanskrit Town Our group is very diverse, but having said that, there is only one Asian woman; all the rest of us are white. We are aged from about 50 to 80, with a couple in their 30s. There is a subset called Initiators, funnily enough half of whom are Asian. The Initiators have spent three months in the Himalayas learning the Vedic teachings and meditation so they can spread the word, because the theory is that if enough people meditate, world peace will

There are 70 of us here from all around the world, but mainly from the U.S. and Australia, and surprisingly about a third are men. Every morning we do a sort of salutation to the sunrise, which feels to me a bit pagan. Then we have a group “rounding” at 7, which involves effortless stretching, then breathing in and out through alternate nostrils, then doing 20 minutes of meditation with a five-minute reflection after. Everything is to be effortless, charming, and without atta

Standing there near Thom on the banks of the Ganga, even the pebbles seem sacred. I pluck up my courage and speak to him for the first time. “Guruji, is it okay if I take three pebbles? One for Lil, one for Gigi, and one for me.” I don’t, of course, tell him who they are for. He says yes, and I say, “Really?” and he says, “If I say yes, you can take the pebbles.” And then, as I am walking over the millions of pebbles, I think what a stupid thing it was to ask my newly appoint

In spite of successive invasions by alien hordes, the soul of India has not been enslaved, and if even in the darkest days of her history the spark of Indian culture was not blown out, it was because India did not completely cut herself away from her moorings in spirituality.(T.M.P. Mahadevan, The Cultural Heritage of India , Vol. I, p. 163) In 1968, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Mia Farrow, and Donovan were all, at the same time, visiting an ashram in Rishikesh to study the V

We are standing in the street waiting for a driver to take us to Rishikesh, a region of Northern India where we will enter into a spiritual retreat with Thom Knoles, a Master of Vedic Meditation. As we are standing there, Lil sniffs the air and says excitedly, “I smell oud.” At that very moment, a young man with a fine haircut and a clean look uncommon in these backstreets of Delhi walks by and asks if we would like a ride in his rickshaw. Lil asks him to sniff the air and he

Lil and I share the highway with dogs and cows as we drive to Agra, a town that booms because a Mongol emperor wanted to build the biggest mausoleum in the world for his wife. She died bearing his fourteenth child, and when she wasn’t having his children she used to go to battle by his side. She encouraged him to build this monument to her, and now, 400 years later, she still wins, hands down, as having the biggest grave in the world—where she lies, getting trampled on by ten

Lil and I arrived in New Delhi at 1 a.m. this morning. On the drive in, we saw big men in camouflage gear with machine guns, lonely limping dogs on the sides of the dark highway, and lots of flashing lights in trees, fountains, and on the backs of cars whose drivers honk every time they overtake, as if the cars are talking to each other. We are staying at the Bloomrooms Hotel, which means we are now “blooming across India.” As we check in, there are strange men lurking in the