Conversations With Ananda — Ch. 47, Nayaswami Shanti

Shanti serves as a co-director of Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California.

I think of myself as being two things in this world. First I’m a minister, and I’m also a physician. I’ve never been sure that they’re terribly different. But I was trained as a physician in internal medicine, and for many years at one point I had the third-largest practice in the U.S. – it was a huge practice of medicine. (Photo: 2020)

Before I went to medical school, I had been a nurse for many years, and I loved it because it perfectly suited my nature, which is that I love serving people and taking care of them. It may sound trite, but it’s profoundly true for me. Ever since I was a little girl, the way I’ve found the deepest satisfaction is by giving something away. So I went into nursing and I loved it, but it soon occurred to me that if I was in charge, I could serve people in a much better way.

I had begun to explore holistic medicine in its truest form, as the healing of body, mind, and soul. But I knew that I wouldn’t be able, as a nurse, to manifest that form of medical practice to any great degree, and if I wanted to continue to pursue that direction I would have to return to school to become either a PhD or an MD.

My husband I were living in Southern California, in a little town called Leucadia, which is next door to Encinitas where Paramhansa Yogananda had his hermitage. I was in my late twenties, and I didn’t know anything about the spiritual path, but we were runners, and whenever I was running on the beach below the hermitage I would always have to stop. My husband would say, “Are you tired? Did you hurt yourself?” And I would say, “No.” It felt like an unseen force was pulling me to stop, because I was compelled by that place.

In the middle of a run one day, it suddenly came to me what I needed to do. I went home and said to Barry, “I am definitely supposed to go into medicine. It’s like I heard it on the beach. And I need to go to an Ivy League medical school, because I’ll be practicing in an unusual way, and I need to have really good credentials.”

He said, “Great. What do we do?”

I’ve never been an intellectual person. I’ve always been a bhakta, a devotee. But I knew, because I heard it that day, that I was supposed to go to an Ivy League school. So I applied to Duke, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and many other schools – and I didn’t even have an undergraduate degree! But I got accepted everywhere, and I went to Stanford.

A few weeks before I graduated from medical school, I was scheduled to give the address at the graduation ceremony for our class, and the dean called me in. We’d become friends, because I was ten years older than everybody else, and I was meditating and on a spiritual path, so I was an unusual student. Certainly not a straight-A student, but very present, and I loved medicine, and I was really thriving.

He said, “We have a problem.”

I said, “What is it, John?”

He said, “Well, we can’t find your undergraduate degree.”

I said, “I don’t have one.”

He said, “That is impossible! Stanford would never accept anybody without an undergraduate degree!”

I said, “I don’t have one. I never got one.” He said, “How did you get in here?!” I said, “Well, you accepted me.”

I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that I was on my knees under the Swami’s place in Encinitas, because I knew he’d think I’d lost my mind!

He said, “Well, we can’t give you an MD without an undergraduate degree.”

I said, “Then you’re right. You do have a problem.”

So I got an honorary undergraduate degree from Stanford. I mean, it was all so guided, in the way that God puts His arms around us and doesn’t let us go, even when we’re not terribly conscious of Him.

So I went to Stanford, which was a completely wonderful experience for me, but in a unique way. I was never somebody who was going to excel intellectually the way Stanford expected me to. But I eventually went back to Stanford and taught there during a chief medical residency. It’s not that I wasn’t accepted, but I was always a bit of an enigma, because I could just as easily teach yoga postures in the med school, or talk to people about vegetarianism. My third year, I taught a course called Health Alternatives for the Whole Person, about eating well, exercise, meditation, and yoga. But I trained in internal medicine, and I did a medical residency.

Q: You must be pretty smart.

Shanti: [Laughs] You know, I’m smart enough to have gone to Stanford and done well, but I’ve never been an intellectual. I’m not enamored with knowledge. I’m really taken with people and their experiences and knowing them. But that kind of knowing is a much more intuitive process.

I’m a really good diagnostician, but I’m often diagnosing things beyond my knowledge, where I’ll simply feel that I’m being inwardly guided. I’ll get an intuition, and I’ll know something’s going on.

Q: Do you ask for help?

Shanti: I ask for guidance all the time, over and over. I’ve had miraculous experiences, and I think they’ve happened because I’ve been willing to practice being quiet and just listen with my heart. Now, before I walk into a patient’s room, or while I’m sitting with a patient, I often won’t know what to say, so I’ll stop and pray, “Okay, Master, I need to know what to say to this person, and how to say it so they can hear, and so it helps them take their next step.” And then the words will come, and diagnoses will come. I’ve received much more credit and applause in my career than I deserve. And I just want to say to people, “This has nothing to do with me. You don’t understand.”

Before I was in medical school, we were at a bookstore in Southern California, and a man was eavesdropping on a conversation that my husband and I were having about moving up here. He said, “If you’re moving to Palo Alto, you’ve got to go right away and find East West Bookstore!” He said, “I can tell by your conversation that you will both love it.”

Right after we moved here, we visited East West, which was in Menlo Park at the time. We walked in, and Prahlad and his brother Danny were there¸ and it was perfect for us because my husband and I were these very Jewish souls, and we bumped into Danny and Prahlad who were also very Jewish souls.

I began incorporating yoga and the spiritual path into my career, while always making sure that I was learning a lot about medicine and becoming a fine physician. Because I knew I had to be respected and trusted in order to incorporate all of these things.

My service now is what I call transformational medicine. It’s working with people to help them accept what comes to them in life, and help them take the next step. But really, what I’ve become is a spiritual coach.

As we’re talking, I’m sharing an office with Connie Hernandez, a naturopathic doctor and fellow Ananda member. I’m also the medical director of a large drug and alcohol program. I’ve always been involved in chemical dependency, because it’s the one area in medicine where you can come out of the closet and talk openly about God.

When you’re looking at a twelve-step program, it’s based entirely on a spiritual understanding of the world, that we’re part of something bigger, and that we need to evolve toward it or else we cannot get well and stay well. I’ve been blessed to have a wonderful career – it is truly a ministry, and I often feel deeply attuned spiritually while I’m at work.

Q: You spend lots of time helping out at Ananda Sangha. From your perspective as a person who loves to serve, what are people missing when they don’t give of their time and energy to help God and Guru help people through this work?

Shanti: The question is how well we understand the absolute truth about spiritual growth, which is that it has to do entirely with giving away the little self that we’re so attached to. How can we develop the courage, or the grace, to let go of what we’ve known, and all that we’ve been taught? Because that alone is what will bring us joy, and everything that we truly want.

Our great delusion is that the more we exert our will and our ego, and the more power we can amass in the world, the happier we will be. It’s such a flagrant lie! But it’s the delusion of the material age in which we are living.

When I give talks, I often tell people that the only problem with the way we’re trying to find what we believe we want is that we’re looking in exactly the wrong direction. We’re so focused on looking “out there,” and if we truly want the greatest happiness, we need to turn around and come back inside.

People think that the more they give away, the less they’ll have, but the simple truth is, the more we give away, the more we have.

We aren’t being asked to give away anything that’s been serving us well. We are all looking for joy, but we’re so far off the mark! It’s totally understandable that we’re afraid to let go of what we have, and everything that helps us feel sane and grounded and successful and safe. And it’s a very big deal to walk into a place where people are suddenly saying “No – you need to do exactly the opposite.”

Time and energy are huge issues for people. For many years I’ve been involved with helping people volunteer at the Sangha, and very often, when I’ve said to people, “How would you like to…” I’ve seen them immediately say, “No, I don’t have the time. I don’t have the energy.”

I often think that the best way people can learn about service, and the feelings of upliftedness and joy that it brings, is by watching others who serve, and who live for it and love it. I often say, “If you want to know these teachings truly, and not just grasp them with your mind, come to church and look at the people in the front rows. Look at their faces and ask yourself, ‘Would I like to have a piece of whatever is helping them feel what is written on their faces?’” Because there is so much joy on many of those people’s faces.

Q: What about people who think it’s just because those folks meditate a lot? It seems to be a common assumption. “I’ll meditate, and once I have God’s joy in my heart, I’ll give because then I’ll have something worth giving.” It’s difficult to understand, at first, that joy comes in the giving, even if it’s only by serving in tiny ways.

Shanti: It’s unfortunate. It’s really very sad. When I was thinking about going to medical school, my husband said something to me that was very wise. After you finish medical school, you go through a year of training during which you’re working 120 hours a week, every week, and in that year you get just two weeks off. It’s life-and-death situations, it’s intense, and you aren’t sleeping. I was on call every third night, sometimes every other night, and you stay up all night. It’s a very complicated and rigorous path to become a physician. But my husband said, “I will support you in this the entire way, if you can hold on to the understanding that we love the path, and not that we think we’ll be happy when we get to the end.”

It’s exactly the answer to your question. I don’t feel that our connection to God, which is our connection to ourselves, and our connection to joy, happens only when we attain ecstasy. Our ability to know joy, and to feel inner peace, and absolute safety happens when we give to God, without waiting for Him to give to us.

I’m speaking to you with great passion. I certainly do forget about God for moments with my conscious mind. But the instant I turn back, and every time I go, “Oh!” and ask for guidance, and ask for help, and acknowledge a divine presence – every single time, I find that I’m knowing and affirming and expanding that joy.

I think that if God were waiting for us to be perfect, He would be very lonely indeed. God is in the practice. He’s in the effort. He’s in every step of the way. We are there – really, in a way, we are there already.

Q: When people begin to serve, do they find that Master is with them more because they’re serving? And that he’s helping them serve?

Shanti: I see that people come to Ananda because they’re on a spiritual search, and they want to feel “something better” within themselves. And they truly begin to find what they’re wanting when they become involved with this path.

A couple came to the Sangha recently, and they were feeling immediately that it resonated with them. So they began coming every Sunday, and one day I said to them, “I want to ask you to start volunteering a little, because when you volunteer you’ll instantly feel more a part of this family. You won’t keep feeling like you’re always just visitors.”

They said, “Great!” And they helped set up the fire ceremony before service. I taught them how to do it, and I left them on their own. Later, they told me, “Doing this just once, we feel so much more a part of Ananda!” The husband is a physician at Stanford, and his wife is an accomplished business person. They could be doing a lot more than putting cotton balls and alcohol in a bowl. But the experience of belonging and of a greater joy happened instantly. They said, “We want to do this every week while you’re looking for other people to help.”

I think the concept of “service” has more meaning in the Sanskrit term, seva. When we talk of “service” and “commitment,” it sounds like hard work. But it’s not work. It’s knowing the blessing that comes from surrendering our hearts and offering them to something that is so much larger than we are. I’m always looking for ways to convey the joy that serving brings.

In India, they have many white marble statues of spiritual figures, most particularly the chariot that Arjuna rides in, which is pulled by big white horses in front. There’s a moment in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna tells Arjuna, “You have to be willing to accept this charge. You have to say ‘Yes, I want to move down this path.’” The statues are portraying the moment when Arjuna takes the reins from Krishna. And looking at these big marble statues, you get the feeling that all we have to do is say “okay,” and you feel these horses sort of coming into line to go where Krishna wants them to go.

The instant we say yes, in whatever is our own way, in whatever way is given to us, we begin to feel the Guru’s power flowing through us and helping and blessing us.

The spiritual path is not only or even centrally about seeing great visions; it’s about the little stories where you feel God’s presence. It’s very much like being a child, where you keep trying and you keep talking to God, and you keep cooperating with the Divine Mother. And in the end it’s all so simple and beautiful.

 

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