yoga

Getting through hard times: a timely message from Ganesh Baba

Eve Neuhaus 26 Comments

Last Friday a friend and I went Emmaüs, the big thrift store in Carmaux, an old mining town near here. All thrift stores are magical, but this one has a particularly good record.

I headed straight for the bins of old framed pictures. I was hoping to find something to hang in a niche in the bathroom. I found it, and I also found this:

It’s a framed, hand-painted postcard. The delightful Indian gentleman riding right out of the frame is Ganesh Baba, the scientific psychedelic kriya yoga guru. He appeared in my life late in 1979, intending to stay three days. Instead, he stayed in my orbit for three years, staying three days at a time, until the dream was over.

Now, he roared back into my life on a motorbike to remind me of his core message.

Ganesh Baba was the real thing. Look him up. The Wikipedia entry is good though outdated. There is a newer, much more explicit book on Ganesh Baba and his teachings available now. Written by another student of Baba’s, Keith Lowenstein, it’s called Kriya Yoga for Self-Discovery.

Baba’s essential teachings can be encapsulated into four actions. He reminded me in my meditation today is that practicing the four will get you through the hardest of times. The full system is more complex, at least eight steps if not twelve. But the first four are what’s needed today.

Posture

Hold your head high, your spine straight, rib cage open.

There’s a reason the military and the old aristocracy made the straight back essential. It changes your perspective, among many other benefits. Your spinal cord is your antenna.

Reconnect with the physical world.

Breath

Your breath is your connection to the life force. The more air you can breath in and out, the better you will feel.

Reconnect with the biological world.

Attention

Practice controlling your attention. Meditation does this particularly well, but any serious practice, spiritual, mental, or physical. can achieve it. Those who can direct their attention are better able to maneuver in worlds beyond the physical.

Reconnect with the mental/psychological world.

Mantra

Using a mantra, a sound or phrase repeated internally or aloud, is a time-tested method for changing one’s vibration. Now more than ever, the world needs humans to raise their vibration.

OM on the in breath, OM on the out breath is simple and potent.

Reconnect with the spiritual world.

That’s it, and it’s enough. Practice each one separately and do them in combination and all together. It’s efficient and effective.

In fact, it’s magic.

An elephant in the room: a dream

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments

November 2, 2024

A yogi lives on a corner near my home. I’ve known he lives there for a long time. You have to cross the baseball diamond to get to his place. The neighborhood is all white bungalows and the streets are dusty. The yogi is an old hippie, an American with long dark hair and a long dark beard. I’ve never been to his place before, but now there’s something I want to share with him.

It’s written on a small piece of very old paper, the kind made of fabric. The paper is soft and folds around my fingers.

The guy—his name is something short—John? Russ?—lives simply. He doesn’t even label the jars he keeps his food and herbs in, he tells me, laughing.

He’s old, but not much older than me, and he is wearing a lungi.

We sit on low round stools, 4 or 6 inches off the dusty floor. At first he doesn’t give me a chance to ask my question. Instead, he talks about the wonders of living there. An elephant lives in the baseball diamond. I know that. Sometimes it comes to him. Then the elephant comes. He had called it.

The elephant walks into the hut, which is now large enough to accommodate it easily. It lies down on a dusty carpet and looks at us. After a time it gets up and leaves.

I give the yogi the paper, which has a verse on it. We talk about what it says.

A white horse runs by on the street, kicking up a cloud of dust. The yogi and I laugh. “I didn’t think it was real when I first saw it around here,” I say. “But now I’ve seen it many times.”

“Yes,” he says. “It’s real.”

More people are in the room so I decide to go to the baseball diamond to use the toilet. There’s a game going on. I don’t want anyone to see me using the toilet, so I return to the yogi’s place.

I sit before him. He puts his hands on my shoulders and back and pulls me up to stand facing him. He tells me to inhale and exhale as slowly and deeply as I can. We breathe together for a while.

More people are coming, including Tom. When the yogi notices how many there are, he looks at me deeply and says, “That’s enough for now.”

I wake up.

(I remember so many details about this dream but not the message, the most important part!)

November 6, 2024, noon

Upon reflection, I think this is a dream about the American election, that archetypal battle that was just won by the elephant. The elephant stays in the baseball diamond. A vision of progress, the donkey, transformed into a white horse, rushes off into the future.

Values are changing. The words written on ancient paper, though they used to be very important, are forgotten by the dreamer, and replaced with the suggestion to focus on the wonders of the world around us. The white horse is real.

All the same, as my friend Robert Sachs said about the dream, “This is no time to piss around.”

Instead, return to the wise ones. Sit at their feet and they will lift you up.

And remember to BREATHE.