Surrendering to India
India greeted us ALIVE and FULL. She said “Come swim in my pungent spiced waters. See rainbow candy bright saried brown skinned goddesses play against a backdrop of pervasive grey smog shadow as thick, as this land is steeped like good hot chai. Join in prayer, mantra, raga and rasa thousands of thousands of years deep.”
Ganesh guided our rickshaw through cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, trucks, carts and other rickshaws, and across streets without the constraint of lane lines so that as many beeping vehicles could fit side by side as possible, and then, one more. and We exhaled an audible sigh as we veered onto a dirt road headed for the beach and reached the venue that would host us for the “More Truth” gifted us by an angel of a woman named Zenobia.
To the sounds of ocean waves, birdsong and a light wind, we entered the healing vortex of the Master through Ian’s heart. About midway through the day we shared the Prema Agni. The love in the room was palpable. Any barriers between our perceived different worlds dissolved as the Fire of Divine Love embraced us and the earth herself met our love with hers.
Everything in India seemed to be bigger somehow, and manifestation was instant. We were being followed by a walking kalpatarus (wish fulfilling) tree and looking through a magnifying glass made of crystal hardened by tropical fervor.
We conducted the Prema Birthing Teacher and Practitioner Training and the Rising Star Practitioner Training at Krishna Land.
Sureka, who encouraged us to come to India and helped organize our stay there and our classes, had been in the temple at Krishna Land when she saw the Prema Agni in her minds eye. She had also felt Arch Angel Micheal’s presence there and had an experience of cord cutting.
When she returned home she searched the internet with the key words “Arch Angel Michael” and “cord cutting” and quickly found “Prema Birhting” which lead her to SQ Wellness. To her surprise the symbol she had seen while meditating at Krishna Land was on the opening page of SQ website. She immediately emailed some SQ practitioners of which I was one. I answered her email right away. Within a few hours I was speaking to her on the phone and she requested that I do a Prema Birthing session on her the next day. It was the Friday before “Labor Day” weekend. I called a few members of SQ for guidance and miraculously I was able to get in touch with Brook Still who offered to overshadow the session, the next day. Before the session I spoke to Sarika on “Skype” with video. Sarika wanted to stay connected on skype during the session. I told her that she needed to be lying down, so she took off her headphones and actually positioned the camera so that I could see her throughout the session. I kept my headphones on without realizing it. When the session began a lot of static came through the line. I quickly realized that it must be the energy of the session which was incredible to me. Even more amazing was the fact that the session progressed as if Sureka and I were in the same room and I was indeed preforming the session with her in person. In fact, at the exact moment that I finished the session Sarika realized the session was complete as well and sat up to discuss what had happened. Sarika had such a beautiful feeling of well being that she began to talk about wanting to learn the modality and wanted to experience Rising Star as well.
This lead to a lot of back and fourth logistical questions with SQ who patiently answered all the questions that Sarika and I had regarding remote training. teach Prema Birthing. I had met Ian asked A About a week later I headed Joshua Tree where a small group of us were doing Seva for SQ. We had a booth and were offering “Prema Agni”s and “Prema Dharmadhatu”s. Ian and Bernadette, two other SQ members were in the booth beside us offering the book they had just completed “21 Days to Enlightenment” and Ian’s CD “I Choose Love”.
I had never met Ian in person, but I knew of him and of his music through SQ Wellness. I had experienced deep healing while listening to Ian’s song “I choose Love” in a “More Truth” with Stephanie Azaria, and since having heard “I choose Love” I had played it 50 times or more and had experienced a warm glow of healing energy each time.
I felt an immediate connection to Ian when I met him. He was sure that we had met before. At Bhakti Fest the one lecture Ian was able to attend was one on Hindu Gods and Goddesses. It lead us to a conversation about India, where he said he’d always wanted to go.
Sarika had been in touch since her session the week before and within a week after I returned from the desert it was decided that I would go to Mumbai, India to teach Prema Birthing and that I would bring another teacher with me to offer “More Truth” and “Rising Star” Initiations. I immediately thought of Ian, wrote to him and he replied instantly with an enthusiastic yes. Six months later, we were in India.
It was not only perfect, but divinely orchestrated that we were allowed to conduct our classes in a beautiful room on the second floor of the temple.
I attended both the 4:30 a.m. and the 7:00 a.m. programs in the temple the morning we facilitated the Prema Birthing class. The temple was fairly squarely located one floor below and directly in front of and a little to the right (when facing it) from our room. There is a hotel at Krishna land, but we were housed in the temple with all the imitates and a few other guests. While the stars still shined brightly over the courtyard, I walked past the door attendants’ greeting of “Hari Krishna” I replied the same in kind bowing with my hands in prayer position. I felt the cold tile on my bare feet as a walked into the courtyard watching a small sea of men in white and sometimes orange robes flatten their bodies to the floor in front of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s shrine.
The women, dressed in beautiful sarees with matching scarfs on their heads prostrated by kneeling and touching forehead, nose,two hands, two knees and the toes of both feet to the temple floor. The soft hum of devotion filled the perfumed predawn air while bells softly chimed. “Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hari Hari; Hari Rama, Hari Rama Rama Rama Hari Hari”
A slight breeze drifted past me, and then, the conch shell, the sound of the earth meeting the sea and reaching out to all celestial bodies woke up the Divine in the temple, and in our hearts, calling us home to ourselves and welcoming the day. Bell and drum answered the call of the conch as the doors to the temples opened as the icons were cheered and hands were raised in praise. Beautifully painted ceramic gods glowed and appeared alive as they were fed and gave us darshan. Sri Sri Gaura-Nitai – Jai!, Sri Sri Radha Rasabihari – Jai! and Sri Sri Sita Rama Laxman Hanuman – Jai!
A rose on a woman’s wrist was held for us to breathe in its fragrance. We presented our wrists to her and she perfumed it, then dropped an intoxicating white rangoon flower and a spicy marigold into my hand.
The god tree was presented, one to the men, and one to the women. It’s tulsi, Krishna basil, encouraged to grow into a small tree. There is a delicate brass bowl and a spoon. We each circle the tree three times. On each pass we create a circle with our own bodies – a circle within a circle and then we touch a leaf from the tree lovingly and pour a spoonful of water from it. We touch the soil and touch our foreheads, then our hearts.
As the sun comes up we chant the mantra “Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hari Hari; Hari Rama, Hari Rama Rama Rama Hari Hari” our chants join together and permeate the air like nectar.
When I finished chanting “Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hari Hari; Hari Rama, Hari Rama Rama Rama Hari Hari” 108 times, I went back to the second floor balcony just outside our room and lay with my back against the white tiled floor resting to the soft hum of devotion in the temple below and watching the sky turn from purple black to slate blue.
At the 7:00 service the world was more awake, there were more voices, and more dancers as everyone from the world outside the temple comes for darshan and prasad. The monk gave darshan by touching a gold crown to everyone’s head and then gave us a spoonful of sweet prasad which we took in our outstretch hands and presented to our mouths. On the day of the Prema Birthing I was given a beautiful garland of orange and yellow marigolds by the presiding Swami.
Our “students” arrived for our Prema Birthing class on the eve of Shivaratri with open hearts. Sureka brought 2 “Happy Birthday” banners and balloons. Ian got yellow roses from a vendor outside the temple gates and we arranged the room. We felt Derek’s guidance and presence the entire time. We saw his essence walk through the room, approve of the altar we put together and smile at us. There were always yellow roses available and present on our altar signifying that Lady Linda also joined us.
We began the class with the Prema Birthing Video. We wanted to give people who had never experienced Derek a sense of who he was and what we were offering.
The energies of Mother Mary, Durga and Krishna were felt very viscerally as we were all re-born into love and embraced with blessings of “Happy Birthday”! After the video we sounded 3 Oms together and then began to work our way through the manual. I demonstrated a Prema Birthing session from start to finish on Ian.
We say that the clients divine mother over shadows the practitioner as they work. I actually feel like I incorporate the energy of the divine mother. Perhaps it is because I feel the energy so viscerally, though I can’t help thinking that my cultural background in incorporation makes it so this is naturally what I do to a degree. In India I felt the Divine Mother in an entirely new way. I felt like the goddess of creation and destruction was living inside me. I felt alive with primordial blood. Life was pouring into me and out of me from the womb of the earth itself. I felt creation and destruction, life, death and rebirth at the same moment, like I was living thousands of lifetimes in an instant. I felt my mind reach for something to hold onto and attempt to ground itself in time and my heart laughed and my mind screamed from somewhere inside myself. Time was clearly the grandest illusion. It did not exist. Creation, destruction, the entire cycle of life, death, and rebirth were figments of my imagination. From somewhere deep inside my being, I understood that everything I knew as earth, everything that I knew as life, or as real, was an illusion, a hologram, a projection of my thoughts. All was Maya. The me that was in the room performing a Prema Birthing session on Ian seemed like a far away dream, or an idea about a potential possibility for an event and yet, I knew that this being I thought of as me was, in a room in the Krishna temple preforming a Prema Birthing session and teaching a class and that me was split in two. Everything my mind identified as me began to panic that I would loose hold of my purpose. Not only was I starting to wonder what I was doing, I was starting to forget who I was, and was amused that there was someone somewhere in a corner of my vision desperately attempting to perform some type of ritual. My heart was compassionately witnessing what my body was doing while it swam joyfully in the primordial blood of a being who was everything and nothing at once.
At some point I realized I was soaked in sweat. It was like my body was the very core of the earth with all its pressure and all its heat condensed into the smallest atom and expanded to what was beyond all creation in the same moment.
After the session I was surprised to notice that my clothes were completely dry and a sweet essence permeated my clothing. An intoxicating scent similar to what I experience emanating from Amma is still carried on the scarf I was wearing that day. When all of this seems like a dream I had and I start to sink back into Maya, I sometimes go and wrap the scarf around me and I know, again, that there is one moment, now. Nothing else matters. Nothing else is real.
The energies of Mother Mary, Durga and Krishna very felt very viscerally as we were all re-born into love and embraced with blessings of “Happy Birthday”! We noted that Ian held the space of the father at the birth. In our physical births, none of us had had our father present, so it was a blessing to be welcomed into the world by a human male and the Divine Aspect of Krishna.
With the initiations into Rising Star, the profound synchronicity of Christed energy woven into the Divine Aspect of Krishna moved through us all the more freely, clearing and cleansing anything that had held us back from aligning our physical and emotional bodies with our light bodies and our higher purpose. The love offered was so powerful that it met me at my very roots with the challenge and the offering “meet this love”. When Ian demonstrated the Rising Star on me I looked upon Krishna. Samadhi saturated every cell of my being.
As the ancient, celebratory sound of the conch shell met a chorus of bell and drum and became forefront to the soft chanting from the temple below, our bodies felt the sacred vibration of a universal hum blanketing us in grace as we stepped forward into a new level of being.
