Hungry in the stomach. Hungry in the mind. Hungry in the heart.

I cannot get enough Indian food. I cannot believe that two or four hours of yoga a day leaves me more hungry than climbing all day did, but there it is.

I mentioned this to another yoga student. A few days ago, her teacher opened the floor to questions at the end of class, she said, and one girl had mentioned that she’s really hungry after class. The teacher answered her with a question, “Are you hungry in the stomach? Or are you hungry in the heart? Or hungry in the mind?”

I’ve been hungry for curries, mostly. The hunt for the perfect Indian meal has had me ordering eggplant curry for breakfast… Not the best idea. I felt like was searching for that one perfect dish, that life-changing meal, that chance to sink my chapatti into something really extraordinary.

And yes, OK, I’ve had other kinds of hunger.

Yoga as westerners know it is just a physical workout. Advanced stretching. But yoga means far more than that in its traditional sense. The word itself means “union.” To be specific, “hatha” yoga represents the union of the “ha” and “tha” energies, the polarities of hot and cold, masculine and feminine, light and dark. These energies are said to spiral through channels that run up the spine, and when you practice yoga, you better allow them to flow from sacrum to skull. The more energy that can flow through your brain, the more energy available to focus on the divine when you meditate. At least, that’s my rudimentary understanding of these things.

Yoga is also, in a practical sense, a series of exercises that keep your back strong and your hips open so that you can sit cross-legged for hours to meditate and manage to think about something more meaningful than, “Damn, this is uncomfortable.”

But yoga and meditation isn’t the whole practice, either. The proper diet for the soul includes chanting and study of spiritual texts as well, according to the texts, like the Yoga Sutras, from which yoga was drawn.


So over the week or so after I arrived, I fished around for those experiences, attending arati, which is like Catholic evensong, and keeping an eye out for meditation classes, lectures, and satsangs, the equivalent of sermons. The arati at one ashram is more show than substance—and they know it. They’ve got the video cameras on hand to record it. At another, the chanting was this lackluster, out-of-rhythm musical chaos. Even when singing about victory for Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who conquers obstacles, they drug the thing into a dirge. There’s next to nothing in the way of meditation classes, unless you day a seven or 10-day retreat.

In between all this poster-reading and religious ceremony sampling, I was eating everything I could get my hands on, because the one thing I have successfully locked into is a good ashtanga class that kicks my butt for two hours every morning. Oh, and then if that weren’t enough, I go to the Sivananda class in the afternoon.

But even when I was full, I didn’t feel full. I still felt like I wanted something more. Something sweet.

I went to the numerous German bakeries up and down the street and stared at the counters and thought, “Maybe the lemon cake will do it…” And the lemon cake was glorious. But I found myself scraping through the napkin as if those last crumbs are going to satiate what I’m searching for. They didn’t.

When you visit a temple to meditate or to worship, you will often be offered prasad, food that has been blessed. You consume those blessings along with what you eat.

“Prasad is very important,” the monk who maintains the Sivananda Temple reminded me as he puttered around, gathering mine on a copyright page discarded by the Sivananda Publications League. He was closing the temple, so I was ushered outside to nibble through a handful of raisins, half a banana, and two cookies, and suck on a couple mango hard candies and even some fat grains of sugar. Prasad is always sweet, one of my teachers at the ashram in the Bahamas said during my teacher training, because the taste of the divine is sweet.

Satsang with Sri Prem Baba starts before my yoga class gets out, so I rush from far end of Ram Jhula to the other side of Lakshman Jhula, and slip in the door just after the singing ends and the lecture starts. Prem Baba, Brazilian by birth, wraps himself in beige robes and sits on a chair with beige curtains. His cloud of a beard has gone white, and his steel gray and white hair is slicked back from his face and lays in ringlets over his shoulders in that way only people of South American countries can seem to pull off. The effect is of these dark eyes floating above a cloud occasionally split by a toothy smile. He reads questions delivered to him from the crowd—more than a hundred people attend his daily satsangs—and answers the question in Portuguese, pausing for his translator.


His lessons are simple, and read a bit like the book of Proverbs.

“By giving, you receive.” “When it doubt, go meditate.” “Know where you are. You won’t get anywhere else by denying your feelings.” “A true anger is worth much more than a fake smile.” “All your fantasies for your future are connected to your stories from your past, but who are you without this past?” “Life is a mystery to be enjoyed with the heart. It’s not to be thought about with your intellect. It is to be felt.”

It’s tender food for the soul, and a comfortable sort of spirituality—just a few verses to guide your ship.

After he has talked for an hour or even an hour and a half, which feels more like 30 minutes, he concludes with, “OK?” Pause. “Let’s sing.” Then the room swells with the music of guitars, drums, a violin, an egg-shaker. People sing and dance in the back aisles. They line up to bring him gifts—flowers, garlands, fruit, letters, their mala (prayer beads) for him to finger and then hang around their necks.

Two afternoons a week, I also go to a satsang with the towering Swami Muktananda. He’s enormous, a tower of a man, and his voice resonates through his body like a call to action. When he makes himself laugh, and he often does, it’s a belly laugh. There’s a physical comedy to what he does, too. Just sitting there in his chair, he’ll roll his eyes or stomp his feet or gesticulate wildly.


His talks pull from Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism, talking about Moses more often than Vishnu. And he laces in contemporary culture and events as well. It was sitting on the floor in his satsang that I first heard of the earthquake in Japan. “Say an earthquake, 8.9 hits Japan and now there’s a tsunami headed for Tokyo. Yes. That just happened,” he said, but it sounded like a thought puzzle. I didn’t believe it was more than a hypothetical—earthquakes at 8.9 don’t actually happen, right?—until he began to dig more into it.

Satsang is like getting directions, Swami Muktananda says. I was where you are, and here’s how I got where I am. See if it works for you. Mostly, though, he says to meditate at the start of every day, find and hold onto that peace.

He’s not compromising about that. Ask a weird, abstract question—all he does is take questions from the crowd, in writing or in person—about something like “Why did we incarnate as animals first and now humans? And what is it that’s reincarnating?” and his response is, “Let’s not break our brain with that level of things.”

What you want to focus on, he says, is “I am.” You are the divine, a spark of God on earth. Go after realizing that with the intensity of a samurai. If a thought threatens to take you away from your focus on that truth, put your sword to it. And yes, he gestures and cries, “Aya!” as he chops that distraction away.

What he says is often just poetry: “Your life is a prayer upon the earth.”

I skip meals to get to these satsangs sometimes, but I never seem to come out of them hungry for anything.

And yet, I think these are often still just the trappings of spiritualism, not the spiritual pursuit itself. In many ways, the gifts, the clothing, the photos taken of and with Prem Baba, the blessings on your mala (I think Swami Muktananda would laugh if you thought your mala needed his blessings and say, “They’re just beads. What does it matter if I’ve touched them? They’ll still just be beads and the problem isn’t with your beads. It’s with your mind.”), even the handing over of your commitment to your spiritual path in writing—they’re all just part of the illusion that any actions on earth matter.

If you want peace, look within. If you want happiness, find it there.

Sing and dance, certainly. Listen and learn. Be coached. And then sit and be still. That is your real work and that is the real journey.

Then you will realize—not just know or understand, but realize—that it was not the Baba’s blessing, the white you wore, the smudge of ash on your forehead that mattered. It was within you, in an interior those things can never touch. And it will go with you, whether you are here or there.