The spiders are my friends now. I couldn’t imagine killing them at this point. Only peace and love to those spiders.

In fact, I’ve spent so many days being vegetarian that I might as well just keep doing it. And the full immersion into yoga and meditation makes me feel like this would be a very, very good habit to break, and I don’t want to break it at all.

I bought some malas (the beads) for myself and for my loved ones as souvenirs. When I go back, I will share all the wisdom and knowledge I have accumulated, if they want to hear it.

I do believe I am more centered now than I have ever been. I’ve done years and years of internal work to get to this exact place. And it does feel, in a strange way, like everything is unfolding exactly as it should.

I do love my life of vices. It’s fun, and there’s always something to do. But when I’m here, I feel something very different.

I feel as though, in my past life, I was doing this work and it got interrupted, and I’m picking right back up where I left off. It feels natural and smooth and easy.

My intuition suddenly makes sense. My empathy is no longer a handicap. And my thoughtfulness becomes a strength. My natural contemplative nature is not discouraged like it is by the external world. Here, it is encouraged. My presence and mindfulness in everything I do are celebrated and not seen as dissociative. In this place, being quiet is a good thing. Feeling and spreading peace is the most rewarding thing that you can do.

I say these things because time and time again, I’ve had to fight my authentic nature to fit into a world that has different priorities for how people should behave. I guess something to take away from this would be that I should never let what the world wants prevent me from being who I really am.

But do you know what else is against my very authentic nature? Waking up at 5:45 a.m. to make the 6 a.m. meditation session.

—

Today we had a restorative yoga class. If you don’t know what that means, they basically just teach you different sleeping positions. And the one man in the room picked the spot right next to me. If you read my Day 1 post, you may be able to guess exactly what happened next. And I can’t say I had any more inner peace this time around. There’s something about a loud noise when you’re in a complete meditative trance that just disrupts the entire system in a very negative way that I cannot tackle yet.

—

[Skip to the next section if you don’t want a feminist rant]
I went to Satsang, and they were showing an old video of their guru. He was saying pretty regular preachy things, but then he said something that made me feel negative emotions.

He started talking about how if you give your husband too many kisses, the novelty wears off and he will look for it somewhere else. As if there is some invisible rule that women must follow, otherwise it will certainly lead to the husband cheating. As if they have no agency of their own. After the video was over, I calmly left.

There was also something else that I noticed in his mannerisms in the video. He had too much ego, and he thought he was too clever, with very little humility. And I felt this long before the other remark. If I’m being honest, I’m a little bit disappointed because outside of this, I was having a very enlightening experience. Ultimately, my feminism will follow me everywhere, including places like this, and I must reject these old teachings.

Can you imagine all these women looking for hope and light and the truth, and their guru spews this kind of, frankly, bullshit at them? He should feel plenty of shame for teaching such things and putting the onus on women to manage their husbands’ behavior. As soon as I heard this, I felt the collective pain of every woman who has ever believed this lie.

He was attempting to say that too much of anything can turn into a bad thing, but I don’t see a world where too much affection for my loved one can lead to infidelity. And for somebody to be saying these words in this way, so confidently and with moral authority, genuinely makes me upset. It’s irresponsible. I do believe there is a right and wrong thing to teach.

Ultimately, this has always been my problem with religion, with preachers, and with teachings. They can potentially guide you out of the darkness, but they lead you toward one particular light, which is theirs, and which is not necessarily a universal truth.

They were teaching us in yoga that God made us fallible, so we cannot be upset when we falter. They also taught us that everyone’s bodies are different and we all struggle with different asanas (yoga positions). Just as I believe that every individual has their strengths and limitations, I also believe that we must each live according to where we are in the journey of life, rather than following some universal laws that come from an outdated ideology. The world is swiftly changing, and we must change with it.

I understand this video was from 1965, and the world was different back then. But the world has never favored women. And it hurts me deeply to see one more example.

It’s a little bit crazy to fathom that an organization and a human devoted to peace and love and light would still show this video so irresponsibly. I can only imagine the women in either audience sitting next to their husbands, having all sorts of complicated thoughts after hearing this message. Wondering if they should withdraw their affection, starting to calculate the equation of their marriages. It breaks my heart.

His own wife left their arranged marriage for someone she loved before him. He should take the responsibility of examining himself and ensuring that he’s healed, rather than potentially projecting his wound onto the audience he vowed to serve.

Looking back at my entry from earlier in the day, I realize that although my gifts (I’ll call them) are accepted here, I do believe they would also be accepted in a different space where I can make just as big of an impact without being tied to an institution I don’t necessarily believe in.

—

I went on a bit of a rant. I don’t want this to spoil my trip, however. I still learned a lot here.

Today, I also learned that I have always had access to the witness, who is me. I asked my meditation teacher: when I’m chanting in my mind, and the chanting is going and going and becomes automatic, and I slip into a meditative state but notice that the chanting is still occurring without my consciously doing it, am I still meditating? And she asked me, “Well, who is hearing the chanting?”

She implied that I was already the witness and that meditation is just a means to find the witness, who is me. There’s a lot of work to be done after the witness is found. Don’t get me wrong. But I feel pretty good about what I’ve uncovered. At the very least, I know where I am and where I need to go from here.

I believe my trouble is that I can continuously observe my thoughts, but the emotions the thoughts elicit still have an effect on me, rather than me being a neutral observer of the thoughts. And I believe this is what meditation is meant to teach.

—

Today, I don’t feel like I have the confidence to write the same way because I feel disappointed in how I let my emotions affect me. As opposed to yesterday, I don’t feel like I’m writing from a place of a clear mind and heart. Today was particularly difficult. And I am glad to be going home to my normal life tomorrow.

I do question, however – are emotions the enemy? Today I had a lot of awareness that what the Guru said made me angry, but I wanted and consciously chose to allow those emotions to come through. I did not want to be the sky. I wanted to be myself with my passions, and beliefs.

I am human after all.