Titania Veda |

A Year of Whimsy: Stumbling Onto Spirituality

Jay is 19. He wants to be a monk. When we found mice floating in a bucket of water, the recycling manager asked us to dump them in the compost along with the decomposing heads of rotten lettuce, uneaten oatmeal and the remnants of last night’s dinner. But Jay couldn’t bear to deny the drowned rodents a proper burial. So we buried the mice, Jay and I, beside the compost heap, and held a moment of silence for their little souls.

After a week as a WWOOFer (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) at the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Ranch, I no longer batted an eyelid at such incidents. By the time the first snow fell, I’d grown accustomed to the quirky residents of this upstate New York ashram, which blends yoga, meditation and permaculture (a ecological design system for sustainable living). After all, stumbling across eccentrics has always been the highlight of my travels. Such people see the world differently. The best of them can change history. The worst can’t even change themselves. It wasn’t until now that I questioned whether I truly welcomed these differences without prejudice.

Most of the ashram’s staff members are 20-something bourgeois men. Many find their way here for a dose of earthy escapism or spiritual guidance. Others, like Andy, treat the ashram as a rehabilitation center.

Andy comes from a nice Jewish family of lawyers from New York’s affluent Upper West Side. Following his graduation from a prestigious prep school filled with others like him, the lanky 20-year-old dedicated himself to smoking weed. Since he entered the ashram in September, Andy tells me, he hasn’t touched the illegal herb.

Following a desire to “get out of the box,” Andy chose an alternate lifestyle from his prep school (and now college-educated) peers. While they’re burying their heads in books at Columbia and NYU, Andy is spending his collegiate years as the ashram’s kitchen captain, washing the dishes.

Before the ground became blanketed by snow, I had spent a day digging a swale near the staff trailer with Andy’s roommate, Chris. A wretched youth with unkempt hair and bad teeth, he firmly believes that meditation during copulation is divine. He’s also sexually frustrated. He seemed mortally wounded when I suggested that most women aren’t eager to contemplate life while in coital alignment with a man. I refrained from further comment.

Rishikesh, a yogi and newcomer to the ashram like myself, pitched in with his opinion. “You should try the real world first before you come here,” he told Chris. It was advice Rishikesh took as well. After spending the last 30 years as a musician and yoga teacher in Los Angeles, he had hit hard times and resorted to strumming his guitar on cruise ships where suicidal Filipino deckhands would occasionally jump overboard. Finally, the New Jersey native decided to abandon all hope in his lost music career and headed east towards the ashram and possible salvation.

Chris took no notice of the yogi and was soon bemoaning his penniless state to anyone within hearing range. “Do you know where I can get some money?” he asked. But later, as he prepared to straggle forlornly toward the pantry for sustenance, I spotted poverty-stricken Chris gathering his $300 iPhone off a bale of hay.

As we watched him leave, Rishikesh shook his head. “Where can I get some money?” he said, imitating Chris. “Work!”

Being a yogi, it seems, didn’t make Rishikesh any less human. He couldn’t help looking upon the youngsters with a certain degree of disdain.

I swallowed my own contemptuous thoughts but agreed that living in an ashram to avoid college, a job or responsibilities can be hazardous to one’s future. I fear our companions will grow up indolent, ignorant and broke. But as I stood there and judged the residents of this ashram, I was forced to admit that my contempt for these youths may have stemmed from the similarities in our mutual desire to lead a different lifestyle.

I, too, hail from a bourgeois family. And throughout my life I’ve always strived to live “outside the box.” As a teen, I wanted to be a hermit, like Thoreau, and create my own Walden Pond. Maybe if there was an ashram nearby, I would’ve run toward it.

By questioning what these boys will amount to, I have become the very people who criticized my own decision to be different. This was my version of stumbling onto spirituality at the ashram — facing my own hypocrisy.

In the end, I realized there could be worse places for such young men to end up. Sivananda, on the other hand, offers a refuge for youths like Jay, Andy and Chris. Having singular views is not frowned upon here but embraced. At the ashram, outsiders are the insiders.

The purpose of my travels may have been to open my mind. But on this particular journey, I found instead just how narrow it can be.

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