Swami Kriyananda Stories — Ch. 12: Swami Kriyananda Guides My Relationships

Ishani and Swami Kriyananda
Ishani and Swami Kriyananda in the courtyard of Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California, after he gave a Sunday service there, late 1990s.

I discovered Ananda through Swamiji’s book Cooperative Communities – How to Start Them, and Why, which I found while browsing in a bookstore in Palo Alto.

Ananda seemed the answer to a prayer. I had always thought how wonderful it would be to have a community where disciples could live and worship together, with “job, church, and home in one place,” as Paramhansa Yogananda advocated.

As an SRF member living in Los Angeles, I had often wondered why the lay disciples didn’t take the step, which seemed so obvious and logical to me, of finding a way to live together in a community of some sort, perhaps in an apartment building.

The idea of a community that would resemble an actual small town never entered my mind. Yet it made perfect sense for devotees to live together, serve together, worship together, and raise their children in an atmosphere that would encourage their highest aspirations instead of mocking them.

I wasn’t able to move to Ananda Village immediately. I had a divorce settlement to pay off, and I wanted to come to Ananda unencumbered, with my membership fee fully paid.

When I sent the final $100 check toward the $1000 membership, I asked an artist in the publishing company to decorate it with flowers.

(The fees went toward paying off the land. At the time, a sizable chunk was still owed on the main property.)

I made the move in February 1976.

I had ordered an authentic Native American tipi from a company in Idaho, and Lodgepole Pine tipi poles from a company in Oregon. A roommate drove me to the Village in his truck with the tipi and my few worldly possessions.

I set up the tipi in a remote location on the Ananda land, determined to lead a life of solitary prayer and meditation.

I never spent a single night there. (The isolated spot where I had set up the teepee was directly in the path of the big forest fire of 1976.)

On the day I arrived, I was asked to live in a run-down farmhouse at the entrance to the Village and help care for an eighty-year-old former SRF nun who had been living there alone. After several months, my space in the house was needed, and I began sleeping on the floor of the Publications building.

At the time, Swami Kriyananda was writing his autobiography, The Path. Most nights, the door of Pubble would bang open at 2 or 3 a.m. The lights would flash on, and Kalyani, a supercharged nun, would march in and begin furiously typing the latest corrected manuscript pages.

An hour later the process was reversed – the lights went out, the door slammed, and Kalyani dashed off into the night to deliver the pages.

I wanted to be a monk in the worst way. My idea of life at Ananda was that we would spend most of our time meditating and thinking of God, and work just enough to keep the place going.

But Swamiji’s vision was different. He didn’t encourage my dreams of a hermit’s life – witness how I ended up serving an ancient nun and sleeping on the office floor.

Our life at Ananda reflected what Master had told Swamiji his life would be: “work plus meditation.”

At one point, I asked Swamiji point-blank if I could join the monastic order. In truth, I didn’t ask him – I pestered him, “I want to be a monk!”

Swamiji looked at me kindly and said, “I think it would be great.”

I grasped his meaning – there was no way under heaven that Rambhakta would be a monk. But I found it difficult to accept the truth in my heart. I thought, “Yes, it would be great,” even though I knew it was not to be. As the years passed, I slowly accepted that my greatest need was to learn to expand my heart to include others.

Soon I was spending time with a woman whose name was Sahaja. It was a platonic relationship – we were really no more than friends. Swamiji didn’t say a word for or against it.

At one point, many Ananda members, including Swamiji, were having their past lives read by a psychic who lived in the Napa Valley. During my reading, the psychic said that Sahaja had been my mother in a former life.

Well! – that wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I longed for a romantic relationship, but not with Mom from a past life.

In a conversation with Swamiji, I told him what the psychic had said. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said, “You should view all women as your Divine Mother.”

Well, that wasn’t the advice I’d have preferred, either. The impasse was resolved when the woman left Ananda.

When I mentioned the past-life reading to Asha, she asked to borrow the recording. She said that Swamiji was resting from his labors on The Path and that he might like to listen to it.

The psychic had said that I needed to learn to “get along with all kinds of people.” When Asha returned the tape, she reported that Swamiji had remarked, “She (the psychic) really knows what he’s like.”

Over the years, I would learn priceless lessons through relationships. With Swamiji’s approval, I married a wonderful woman. Speaking of my wife, Seva, the head of the women’s monastery, said, “She has a very good heart!”

Soon after we began spending time together, Nitai, the head of the monastery, told me that Swami had said to the monks, “You may be surprised to hear me say this, but look how happy Rambhakta is in that relationship. It has been really good for him.”

Sometime during that period, I asked Swamiji for his advice about how to open my heart. I thought he might suggest that I do something impressive – that I chant many hours a day, or that I return to school and become a doctor, or join the Peace Corps.

Instead, he said, “Bring your wife flowers.”

I realized that it was advice on a scale that I could manage while leading a normal life, and that doing small things for my wife would open my heart in a natural way. I remembered something that Mahatma Gandhi had said – that the small things we do to expand our hearts may not be of world-shaking importance, but that it is very important that we do them.

After fifteen years of married life, my wife and I parted. Our karma was interesting, to say the least. We shared the same birthday, January 21, though my wife was nine years younger. When I was seven or eight, my mother had a still-born baby girl with red hair that she had named Julia – my wife’s name, and my wife had light-red hair. My mother and my wife’s mother had birthdays ten days apart, and my father and her father had birthdays four days apart. Our relationship had a strong brother-sister flavor.

After we parted company, in 1995, I moved to the Ananda community in Mountain View, where I spent two years serving with the legal team that defended Ananda against SRF’s lawsuit.

In 1999, Ishani and I became friends. It was a whirlwind courtship – the romantic phase was over almost before it had begun. It soon became clear that Divine Mother wanted us to roll up our sleeves and get busy with the hard work of expanding our hearts.

For the first eight years that we were together, we had a terrible time. On virtually every weekend there were excruciating misunderstandings. It was the most difficult experience of my life. God was no longer gently coaxing my heart to open – He was ripping out the seams, forcing me to open myself to embrace another’s realities.

After years of soul-searing struggle, we reached a point where we were exhausted and ready to throw in the towel.

I asked Nayaswami Asha for her guidance. I respected her as a reliable channel for Swami Kriyananda’s help.

When we met, she said, “We were talking with Swamiji on the phone the other day from India. He said, ‘Ishani is a wonderful woman. I am so happy that Rambhakta and Ishani are together.’”

What could we do? We had no choice but to stick it out. Fortunately, the days of torment were numbered.

Some weeks later, I met with Asha again.

I said, “Whenever Ishani and I have a disagreement, there’s one thing I can reliably do that will always help make everything better. If I go driving in the hills and chant and pray for an hour or longer with all my energy, it expands my heart to a point where Divine Mother can guide me to the right path.”

Asha was silent. I knew that she was asking Swamiji to guide her next words. Then, hesitantly, in a subdued voice, almost a whisper, she said, “If you could go to Divine Mother in the moment…”

The guidance was given gently, as if she wasn’t sure that I was ready to receive it. But it proved the answer to ending the terrible pain that we had endured for so many years.

I could always tell when the storm clouds were gathering on the horizon – there would be a crackling tension and a festering disharmony in the air.

The next time I felt it, I turned inward and prayed to Divine Mother with all my heart and soul and will power. “Divine Mother,” I said, “I will do ANYTHING to create harmony in this situation. But You MUST guide me!”

I took myself forcibly in hand, rejecting the slightest urge to respond in anger or to justify myself, or argue or try to ignore the issue. And it worked.

In the years that followed, by God’s grace, I began to feel deep compassion for Ishani. We had known from the start that our natures were very different. Just how different was a revelation. Over time, I came to appreciate that her nature was very beautiful. The experience of our lives together resolved into a great blessing. I realized that it was the Divine Mother Herself who had come through Ishani to help me learn a spiritual lesson of immeasurable value. I am endlessly grateful to her for the years of trial during which she loved heroically.

My story of relationships is a small one, but it showed me once again that Swamiji was a reliable instrument for God’s guidance. He was always eager to help us open our hearts to God’s love.

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