Conversations With Ananda — Ch. 14, Nayaswami Nitai, Bringing Paramhansa Yogananda’s Educational Ideals to Life

Nitai with children in the new schoolhouse at Ananda Village, circa 1973.

 

Nitai: founded the Living Wisdom Schools in 1971 with six students, ages four to eight. The school grew gradually and by 1986 had ninety students in preschool through eighth grades. There are now Education for Life schools in America, India, Italy, and Slovenia.

Q: Can you talk about your early experiences with Ananda, and how you came to be involved with the schools and Education for Life?

Nitai: I was at UC Berkeley in 1966, in the midst of the tumult and craziness of those times, and the very creative energy of the period, and as I was trying to get my bearings, I found myself being introduced to many things.

Nitai, circa 1970.

The teachings of the East were coming to life in America. I had been exposed to meditation, especially Buddhism, and those were parts of that formative period, as I was trying to make sense of life. There wasn’t a lot to go on, because the society was being turned upside down. But in the midst of it all, the idea of meditation began to appeal to me, and the thought that you could find something inside yourself that would give you peace of mind.

Swami Kriyananda was teaching in the Bay Area, and one of the early members of Ananda, Jaya Helin, was also at Berkeley, though we didn’t know each other. Jaya had gone to see Swami teach, and Jyotish was working with Swami in those early days, but I was blissfully unaware of Yogananda or Swami.

I was drawn to yoga, because I felt there was something of value there. But then I graduated from college, and I found myself struggling, with no clear inner sense of direction.

I had tried working with the VISTA organization – it was like a domestic Peace Corps, and I went to the South and worked in a deeply segregated area and helped with the civil rights movement, because of all the things I could think of doing, it was what I felt would be most honorable at the time.

So I did that for a year, but at the end I still had this gnawing sense of emptiness. It had been there all the time, but I was starting to get really concerned. Why can’t I find anything that motivates me that can fill this void?

And then I thought, I’ll travel. I had enough money to travel very simply, and I ended up hitchhiking across southern Europe. But after about a month and a half I realized I was getting bored with travel, and I thought, what in the world am I going to do? There was a real desperation that had started to build, because I couldn’t find anything on this planet that was meaningful to me.

I was in Rome when I hit bottom. I remember sitting on a sidewalk and realizing that I had nothing that was motivating me. And then something clicked in my brain, and I walked into a nearby bookstore and found some books in English, including Vedanta for Western Man, by Christopher Isherwood from the Ramakrishna tradition. I remembered my fascination with yoga from the Berkeley era, and as I picked it up and started reading, I thought, “I need to pursue this. This is the only thing I’ve ever believed might hold a promise, but I haven’t pursued it.”

I thought, the best thing will be to go to India and find somebody who can teach me to meditate. So I continued my journey eastward, and in those days you could go overland, and I ended up in New Delhi about six weeks laer.

I had gotten very sick along the way – I had picked up malaria in Iran or Afghanistan, but I made it to New Delhi, and I was starting to get better. I was sharing a hospital room with a man from California, and we talked, like you will in those situations, and he said, “From what you’re saying, I think there’s a book you’d really like to read. It’s such a good book that I almost didn’t come to India when I read it. It’s called Autobiography of a Yogi.”

The next day I was at a bookstore in downtown New Delhi, and there was the book. So I bought it and took it back to the hospital, and I was entranced.

The timing was perfect, because before my moment of despair in Rome I had always followed my intellect. I was very rational and intellectual, but hitting bottom opened me to a feeling that maybe there was something besides the intellect. So when I picked up Autobiography of a Yogi and began reading about miracles, whereas six months earlier I would have simply put the book down and not looked back, I was willing to wait and see what it might tell me.

I realized at a feeling level that I was deeply drawn to this author and his book, and that there was a feeling of connection, a feeling of peace, and a feeling of support. And I decided I would just let the miracles slide and not concern myself with them, and I would follow the feeling.

By chapter four or five I had started to feel that I trusted this person – even though I hadn’t met him, I trusted him. And I thought, I’ve got to find his ashram, and I probably won’t be going back to the United States. And then a couple of chapters later I saw that, oh my gosh, he went to America, and he lived in California. So it was a chuckle for me, because here I was in India, reading about this guy whose main work was in California.

So I hopped on a plane, and about six months later I found out about Ananda and came up to check it out. And it was only then that I realized Ananda was connected with Yogananda.

I knew I’d found a home, and I’d never thought such a thing would be possible, to find a place where I felt truly that it was a place I could live.

Q: What were your first days like at Ananda?

Nitai: I arrived two days after the temple burned down. There were just the ashes and the embers which were still warm. There were very few people living there, just five or six, and I think everybody had taken off after the temple burned. This was in July of 1970.

There was a karma yoga program, and for my first day on the job I was assigned to help two other guys begin cleaning up the embers, just rake them onto a pile and start clearing the area.

I had just come to Ananda to check the place out, nothing more, and I was feeling kind of cautious. But I was working with these two guys, and one guy had lots of energy, but it was a very nervous kind of energy, and he was trying to direct and control everything – everything had to be put in the right place, and everything had to be done a specific way. And I started to think, ugh, I don’t want to be around this energy.

The second guy was much more low-key, just getting things done and not making a fuss about it. And as we worked through the morning I remember thinking that if the nervous, fastidious guy was a member of Ananda I would probably leave, but if the second guy was in charge I would probably stay. [Laughs]

Well, the second guy turned out to be Jaya, and the other guy got frustrated and left the next day. So there was a resonance, being with Jaya, just with the way he lived, and I felt, oh, this is somebody I can work with.

A couple days later I met Seva, and somewhere in there I met Devi, and I kept meeting the people who were at the core of Ananda, and realizing that I was deeply resonant with them, and it helped me make the decision to stay. Do you want to hear about the early days of the farm?

Q: Oh, sure. I was looking at a photo this morning of the main downtown area of the farm at the time, and it was pretty scruffy.

Nitai: It was incredibly scruffy early on. Swami wasn’t around that summer – I’m guessing he had taken off after the fire to make money to rebuild the temple. But he wasn’t there, and I wasn’t clear who he was, or his role.

They had recently acquired a piece of property five miles down the road from the meditation retreat that was called the farm, and somebody had made a decision that the people at the retreat should go down to the farm once a week and connect with everybody. So once a week in the summer, we would pile in the back of a truck and go down the hill, and it was like going to a foreign country. [Laughs]

Even in the early days, the retreat was very focused. Satya was leading sadhanas twice a day, morning and evening. He would ring the bell, right on time, and we would have a hatha yoga session that he would lead, and then we would have a little chanting and meditation, so there was a real clear focus. But down at the village there was not the same focus, and lots of people were just hanging out. They were nice people, but they weren’t yogis, and I would say that almost everybody was using drugs at that point. It was the hippie era, with the classic hippie commune energy. I remember somebody saying, “If it moves, hug it.” [Laughs]

Q: In the photo that I was looking at, there are all these people in front of Master’s Market. It looks like they’re taking a lunch break, and you can that they’re people who are there because they think it’s a commune. And then, barely visible and almost hidden in the midst of it all, you can see the tiny figure of Parvati in the background, and as I looked at the photo I felt, wow, at least there’s some of that original Ananda energy.

Nitai: [Laughs] Parvati came the same summer I did, and when I asked her why she had come, she said, “We were having a discussion in San Jose. We were talking about various places to visit, and people were saying this commune is a really neat place, this place is good. And when somebody brought up Ananda, one of the women said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t want to go there.’”

Parvati asked, “Why not?” And the woman said, “They just work all the time.” [Laughs] So Parvati decided to come up anyway, and we did work a lot, up at the retreat, but that wasn’t the case at the Village.

It was like meeting people from a different culture, and then we would go back up the hill to our sadhana and service until the next week. But it was a different reality.

I left at the end of the summer, because even though I had felt very drawn, something inside was telling me that I was supposed to bring something with me. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it was some kind of skill, something to contribute. And I gradually figured out, “I think it has to do with education.”

So at the beginning of September I went down to Davis and proceeded to get into their teacher training program, and two years later I came back to live at the Village and started working with the schools.

Q: Had somebody talked to you about the need for a school up there? How did you make that connection?

Nitai: During the two years when I was in Davis, I was close enough to the Village that I could come back and visit four or five times a year. I was friends with a fellow at Ananda who knew that I was studying teaching, and he said, “We really need a teacher here, because the kids need a focus.” It had been on my mind while I was gone, and when I was done with school I saw it as a definite option.

I’d been offered a real job with real pay, teaching at a public school in the Fairfield area, and I knew that if I took this road there would be a salary, with more money than I had ever made, and I could afford a nice car. And on the other hand, if I would go to Ananda I couldn’t even be sure what would happen. But harking back to when I first read Autobiography of a Yogi, I’d learned to listen to my feelings, and I was definitely feeling pulled to go to Ananda.

I didn’t know for a certainty that I would be teaching, but I had a meditation in which Master made it abundantly clear that this was the path and direction I should follow. So I turned down the teaching contract, and when I got to the Village I was told that yes, we do need a teacher. And when I went to talk to Seva, the Village treasurer, about what it would look like, she said, “Yes, we even have a budget for it!”

“Nice. Good. What’s the budget?”

“Fifty dollars a month, and that includes your salary.” [Laughs]

I didn’t mind. I was up for it. But of course my relatives thought I had left my senses. How could I possibly turn down a real job for this? But it wasn’t too much of a struggle for me, and I believe Master made it easier.

Q: How did you get started with the school? Were you in touch with the parents? Did you form it together, or did they trust you to take on their kids and teach them? How did that all play out?

Nitai: At the very beginning there were six kids from four or five families. The word had spread that I was a, quote, trained teacher. [Laughs] A former chicken coop was available for a schoolroom, and we picked a starting date for the school to open. I rang a bell and the kids all came over because they wanted to see who was ringing the bell and why, and if they could learn to ring the bell. [Laughs]

But there was, I would say, a very great lack of focus, because it was the hippie era. “Oh, well, maybe I’ll go to school today and maybe I won’t.” The parents were part of that energy, so I had to close things down for a bit. I talked with the families, and I said, okay, if we want to do this, I need to have a commitment that you’re going to send your child to school unless they’re sick, so we can have some kind of momentum and consistency.

They thought that was a pretty good idea, because the kids had been running loose in the community, and people were complaining that they would get into the garden and pick tomatoes and throw them at the adults as they went by, and then run away.

Swami was there at the time, and after three or four months I went over to see him, because I was trying to figure out what in the world you would do in a school like this.

I said, “Maybe I need to get some more training. Maybe I should go study the Waldorf or Montessori method, or maybe I should go to Ranchi.” Because Master had started a school in Ranchi, India. And I remember Swami saying very clearly, “There’s nothing to learn at Ranchi.”

Then he got real direct. He said, “Nitai:, your job is to learn how to do this from the inside. You have to develop your intuition.”

He wouldn’t give me any more outward direction, and I guess he saw that it was my opportunity to develop my intuition, and that if he told me what to do, it would just get in the way.

Twelve years later, he wrote Education for Life, but in the meantime there was a long period when he apparently saw that the higher dharma was to say nothing to me, but give me a chance to tune in on my own, and it ended up being good spiritual training for me.

Q: Did you feel there was an inner guidance?

Nitai: Yes. It was a very gradual process, as I began to discover what intuition felt like. I realized that when I was moving in accordance with that inner feeling there was an integrity, a clarity, a focus, and a dynamic energy, but when I’d get away from that feeling the energy would get mushy and the clarity would disappear.

One of the things I strongly felt I needed to learn was how to be a good disciplinarian. It wasn’t something I was naturally good at, and I was reluctant because I just wanted to enjoy the kids and have fun with them, and you can’t have fun if you’re telling them not to do stuff.

There was one a in the school who was my teacher – he continually pushed me to draw boundaries for him, and to tell him what he couldn’t do, and I would always get a queasy feeling in my stomach if I resisted the need to exert that kind of discipline.

He was a bully – he would tease one of the younger boys, and he was really good at it, because he knew how to do it so I couldn’t catch him. And then all of a sudden the younger boy would be yelling and angry, and I would turn around and the other guy would be sitting there, looking like a little angel. [Laughs]

It was not healthy for the younger kid, so I thought, I’ve got to do something about this, and I used part of the fifty dollars a month to buy a set of boxing gloves, and then I got the two boys together, and I said, “Okay, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know this is a big enough thing that I bought these boxing gloves, and the next time there’s an upset I’m going to have you put on the gloves and I’ll let you go at it.”

But we never had to use them, because it was enough of a line that the bully stopped bothering the little guy. It was a critical step in my learning how important it was to start drawing a line, and a big step in learning to follow the intuition and guidance that came, even if meant that I might be unpopular. So it was good training for me, too.

Students and staff of the first Living Wisdom School, Ananda Village circa 1979.

Q: During the twelve years that you were basically inventing Education for Life, did it become clearer for you as you went along?

Nitai: It did. In Autobiography of a Yogi, there are two chapters where Yogananda includes ideas for “How to Live schools,” as he called them. He doesn’t give much in the way of details, but he tells you that it’s possible, and it suggested to me that there had to be a way it would work.

And then Swami said, “You can come over and use my library anytime you want to.” So I would go over, and I scanned through all of the articles in the old SRF East West magazines, and I found an article on “The Balanced Life,” with a section on “The Curriculum for the Training of Balanced Souls.” It gave an overview of how to be healthy, and how to work with divine energy, and although he didn’t say exactly how to do it, at least there was an outline of the goals.

And then I found a little booklet in Swami’s library called The Psychological Chart that Master had created as a tool for working with the kids at his Ranchi school.

So I had those hints, and again, they weren’t really telling you how to do it but what to do, and what to shoot for as the goal, and what education should be like, so it definitely helped.

In The Psychological Chart, for example, he breaks down human psychology in terms of energy and behavior. There’s a discussion of how people express the three levels of energy and consciousness that are described in the Bhagavad Gita: refined and uplifting energy (sattwa guna), outward, ego-active energy (rajo guna), and downward-pulling energy (tamo guna), and the various mixtures between them, and what it looks like in human nature.

It was very clarifying for me, because it talked about the sattwic qualities of truthfulness, love, and service, and the tamasic qualities of selfishness and lethargy, and it listed about thirty-five qualities in each of these categories of human consciousness, and that was very helpful, because I could look for those behaviors and learn a lot about the individual child.

I believe Swami helped me understand what Master was saying, and of course he spells it out more clearly in Education for Life. One of the things he stresses in that book is the need for experience, that education has to be experiential and that it can’t just be theoretical, and it came to a focus very clearly for me in a classic story that lots of people have heard from the early days of the school.

From reading The Psychological Chart, but also from common sense, I knew that cooperation is an important skill for kids to learn. We had talked about it at school, and I had told stories about it. So I’d done everything I could think of to help them understand it, and I knew they could understand it theoretically, but they weren’t practicing it.

And then there was a day when it snowed, and of course the kids wanted to go out and play, so I said, “Okay, let’s go out.” And as soon as they went out to play they began fighting. So I had them come back in, and after they’d been sitting awhile somebody asked, “Can we go back out?”

I said, “Why would I want you to go out again, if you’ll just start fighting?” And then the thought came: aha, this is an opportunity.

I said, “Anybody who pledges that they’re going to cooperate, you can go out and try it.”

Of course they all wanted to take the pledge, so we had a little formal swearing-in ceremony – “I will cooperate with my classmates.” And then they went out and they had a beautiful recess.

They were a little stilted at the beginning, “Could I please help you make that snowball?” [Laughs] But then they relaxed and started having a wonderful time. And when they came back in we had a discussion about which recess they liked better, and everybody said they liked the second one. And when I asked them why. “Well, because we were cooperating.” And then I saw that they had learned it, because from that point on they started cooperating and we had a very good time for the rest of the school year.

I remember going over to tell Swami about it, and how he lit up with a big smile and said, “Oh, you’re finally starting to understand something important!” [Laughs]

So I did receive some feedback, and I was definitely aware that he was part of the process of attunement that I was going through, by trying to help me be in tune with the right vibration and align my energies with it. But that was a classic example.

I used to say that he didn’t actually do anything in the beginning. But then he talked to me, and he said, “You know, there are subtler levels of working than outward, with me telling you what to do.” [Laughs]

At any rate, there was definitely a guidance on a vibrational level, and it was part of my learning process, that I had to learn that it was possible to receive guidance that way.

Q: A former student of the Living Wisdom School here in Palo Alto did doctoral-level work in mathematics at a university in Germany, and now he’s teaching at our high school here. He described what it was like to come back and visit the school where he spent his elementary years, and how walking into that environment evoked smiles of joy because there was so much love there, and so much kindness and laughter. Thinking of what you were doing in the early days with chicken coops, and trying to intuit the system, it’s stunning to see how far it has grown seemingly of its own momentum. It seems there’s a force in Education for Life that is cooperating with what human nature wants. From your perspective, did you have a feeling, back then, that it was a movement of major importance in education?

Nitai: No, I can’t say so. [Laughs] Because I was so busy trying to get the plumbing to work, and dealing with daily stuff like that. But I was always aware of a feeling that was powerful, perhaps not least because it had been absent in my own education.

My education was sterile and impersonal. And then to see this vibrancy that the children had, and that if we could keep it alive and growing, great things could happen, was a revelation.

You have these moments when it’s so clear, and when you see the children so differently, for example when we were discovering the value of adventure trips, and how it was so exhilarating to see how the kids’ energy would come out.

I’m thinking of one of the very first trips, where we decided to ride our bicycles from Ananda to Palo Alto, which is about 180 miles. It was a challenge to get the kids’ attention at that age – they were twelve to fourteen. But they were really up for the trip. So we got our bikes ready, and we realized that if we started our nine-day bike ride from Ananda Village we would all die the first day because of the huge canyon between the Village and Nevada City. So we got a ride into Nevada city, and then we hopped on our bikes and went downhill all the way to Sacramento.

I had forgotten about the Coastal Range between Sacramento and the Bay Area, because my map didn’t show elevations. So we got as far as Davis and started west, and then all of a sudden there was a huge hill in the way, and I looked at the kids, and I knew there was no way we were going to get up that hill.

So we were sitting there feeling stumped, when a big truck pulled over and the driver said, “You need some help?”

I said, “Yeah, we need to get over this hill.” And he said, “Okay, let’s do it.” So I hopped in the cab and the kids got in the back with the bikes, and we were going along, and I said, “What happened? Why are you out here?”

He said, “Well, I was meditating this morning, and I just knew somehow I was supposed to get in my truck and drive around today.”

It turned out it was Tom Taylor – it was before he moved to Ananda Village. But it was one of those things that would happen, where you knew you were in sync with the universe and that you were going to be helped.

Q: That’s an insanely great story.

Nitai: Yes, because I was following my intuition, and maybe my intuition lacked the information that there was a thousand-foot elevation gain in that part of California, but it didn’t stop Master from making it happen.

There were countless episodes like that, and every time we did something challenging like that, we would feel a blessing, a palpable protection and guidance, like a bubble that would descend around us, and it would always work out. Other people felt it, too – they would come along on the trips, and we would talk about how the guidance was so clear.

But those adventure experiences made it obvious that we were supposed to stretch the kids, and it’s why we went on adventure trips all over the world, for example going to see the Dalai Lama in India and traveling to Costa Rica. There were so many adventures, and it was obvious that this was something that was supposed to happen with that age group, and it was very reassuring to realize it.

There was a time when the guidance went the opposite way. I try not to have biases, but I did have a few, and one of my biases was against workbooks and textbooks. This was early on – I think we were still in the chicken coop phase. We were learning to read, but we were creating our own books and so on, and it’s a technique that works well for most kids. But there was a little boy who was very restless, and somebody had donated a big box of workbooks. But I hadn’t asked for them and I didn’t want them, so I hid them in the barn. And then this little boy was exploring around the barn one day and he found them, and he brought one of them to me and he said, “Nitai:, can I use this? Can I try this?”

I said, “Well, I don’t really like those books.” But he was maybe five years old, and he took it home and he taught himself to read over the weekend. [Laughs] And I just had to think, “Okay, Master, all these biases have to go, and I just have to be open to all the angles I can.” So, anyway, he had fun with me.

Q: A basic principle of Education for Life is that true education is a hundred-percent individual. You talked about that in the context of discovering the psychological chart and so forth. Has that been a thread for you since the beginning? Did you have a feeling for that side of it?

Nitai: Yes. It was immediately obvious that the vibrancy that is so special about an Education for Life school happens because the kids feel empowered. They feel empowered to explore their own potential, because they’re not being herded into one mold. They’re being empowered to explore what it is that they’re good at. The teachers are constantly focused on the individual child, which is very different from most education, where there’s a prescribed lesson plan for every day of the year, and everybody’s expected to learn the same thing at the same pace.

I realized that it was an absolute hallmark of Education for Life, and I said no, we have to go the opposite way from what most schools are doing today. We have to make it child-centered rather than curriculum-centered.

The teacher’s job is get to know each child well enough that they can understand what the child is ready to learn. What is it that they’re ready to explore? Life wants to grow. Life wants to explore. And for every child, unless they’re seriously traumatized, it’s part of who they are, and it’s part of life.

I remember how Asha said in a video about the Palo Alto school that when the children’s energy is vibrant. academics are easy because you don’t have to push them and they want to learn. And then you can bring in all the outward parts of it, like how to use commas, and so on.

I heard a story recently about one of the Italian Education for Life teachers. In the Italian language there are lots of double consonants, and she was trying to introduce the topic with her kids, which isn’t terribly exciting. But she did it in a way that got them excited, by having them try to discover all the animals that had double letters in their names. So they got really enthusiastic about it, and it became an inspiring experience.

You can apply it in the most mundane parts of learning, if you approach it from the perspective of what will awaken the enthusiasm of the individual child. And when the kids get excited, it definitely makes teaching more fun.

It’s challenging. You have to be awake, and you have to have energy, because you aren’t teaching the same lesson over and over. Every single day will be different, and every year is different, and you’re using these wonderful beings in front of you to guide the energy. And then learning is fun.

Q: At what point did you feel inspired to do something besides teaching within Education for Life?

Nitai: I started teaching when I was twenty-three or twenty-four, and I loved it, but I had always wondered what it would be like to work with adults. So for ten years from 1984 to 1994 I was out of the schools and I worked at The Expanding Light and taught there. It was lots of fun, and then I was in Portland helping get the Portland Ananda center started. But after a decade I thought, my dharma is with children, and helping people work with children. So I came back and had my second go-round as a teacher, for about twenty–five years.

Q: Was that when the high school got started?

Nitai: Yes, my leaving coincided with the first generation of kids in the school reaching their mid to late teens, age fifteen to seventeen.

The first attempts at a high school weren’t successful, because we were trying to work with the kids using the same approaches as when they were younger, and we realized that they needed something different. One of the things I realized they needed was to be able to participate in the decision about whether they were going to be in our school in the first place.

Up to that point, I had let the parents make the decision for them, but there was lots of resistance on the kids’ part. And when we re-started the high school we created a new application with two parts, one for the parents to fill out and one for the student, because they had to convince us that they wanted to come, not just verbally, and they had to agree that they would earn part of their tuition, as a sign that they were on board and they wanted to make the school work. We used the money for the adventure trips, and it turned out very nicely, because it motivated the kids, by letting them see the tangible results of the energy they were putting out to earn the money.

So those were some of the things that became clearer as I gained more life experience, and those lessons were crucial.

Q: What are you doing now?

Nitai: We have an active online high school. It’s small, just five girls, and it’s been fun, because when the coronavirus hit we were able to continue having class as usual.

I teach one class, and I work with the other teachers and support them, and then I offer a growing series of online training courses for teachers. We’ve always had an English-language course, and five years ago we started an Italian class. I’ve recently started teaching the first classes for people from China, and in May we’ll start helping people from Spain.

We’ve had seven or eight courses this spring with groups around the world, and it’s been encouraging to see the strong interest outside the U.S.

But in terms of administering the schools, I’ve stepped back. I served as director of the online high school, but I’ve had very little to do with the school at the Village for almost a decade.

Q: Thank you, Nitai. It’s been a wonderful journey. As we talked, I thought of the Palo Alto school, which is like a big bouquet of roses that have flowered from the humble beginnings of Education for Life. So thank you for sharing the story of this important aspect of Master’s work.

 

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