INDUSTRY – There is a place in the western mountains where, if you call ahead, a softspoken man with a topknot and flowing beard will greet you when you arrive.
If you’re lucky, he’ll lead you along a gurgling stream to meet a guru in a temple atop a hill.
And in the still, soft silence of the woods, you might chance upon five boys, all under 9 years of age, in a row, bending earnestly into downward dog position. If you ask, they’ll volunteer their names: Manu, Adi, Ramji, Shakti Das and Vishnu.
Hindu names. Vishnu is a god. Shakti is a word for power. Rama was an incarnation, or avatar, of Vishnu. But, though their names and their clothing call up images of India, their blond hair, freckles and talk of Spider-Man remind you you’re still in Maine.
This remote spot is a yogic ashram, complete with two gurus, devotees who wear topknots and Indian clothing, and temples adorned with sculptures of Shiva and Ganesh. It might seem odd at first, but for those who live at Hridaya Hermitage, the Western mountains provide an ideal home.
The 25 people who live and work at Hridaya (pronounced her-dye-ah) are dedicated to the practice of yoga, but not the type familiar to most people. They are devotees of yoga as it is done in India, a spiritual practice designed to unite a person with God, according to Hermitage Manager Hanuman Das.
Hanuman explained that the ashram’s two gurus, along with their followers, believe that to achieve union with God, people must remove “impurities” from their lives.
In yoga, Hanuman said, impurities are any physical, mental, emotional or spiritual issues that prevent human beings from reaching their true potential and from communing with the Divine.
So folks at Hridaya shun drugs and alcohol, caffeine and cigarettes. They eat vegetarian and usually organic foods. They live on little more than $120 per month, per person, and make money by healing others using yogic techniques. Members of the community occasionally use Western medicine, when called for.
They dress in clothes made of natural materials often purchased on the Web from India. They let their hair grow long, do not shave, and they meditate, practice hatha yoga and take saunas to bring their bodies and minds together.
Though they have an Internet site, a generator and television that migrates from house to house, they live off the electrical grid. They live in homes and worship in temples they built themselves, often with hand-hewn wood. They have no running water or telephones, save two cell phones used to communicate with the outside world.
Hanuman explains that people at the ashram believe electricity, cell phones and television waves can have a negative effect on prana, or the life force.
The 40 acres in Industry are reached by a long drive deep into the woods, then down a rutted dirt road and over a metal bridge into a parking lot.
Then it’s another 1,000 yards or so down the path along the bubbling stream to Siddha Loka, the home of the gurus and location of the ashram’s biggest temple.
Ashram means “place of striving” in Sanskrit and usually refers to a spiritual community in a secluded spot where a guru lives with followers. Hridaya was founded by a guru, and is led now by two of them, Bhagavan and his wife, Mirabai.
Bhagavan and Mirabai
Arriving at Siddha Loka for an interview, you remove your shoes before entering the log temple.
Indoors, the wood is all smooth and golden-hued. Soft Oriental rugs carpet the floors while generous windows and skylights let in the sun. At night, kerosene lamps bathe the wall hangings, photographs, paintings and statues of Shiva in a warm glow. The air smells of pine and incense.
Despite the lack of amenities, the gurus’ home, like every building at the Hermitage, is comfortable and inviting. For instance, homes have showers lined with natural materials such as limestone and slate, and skylights or windows facing the woods. But they are operated with hand pumps, and water is first heated by wood stoves, which also keep every building toasty in the winter. Composting toilets give off no odor. Sinks drain but have no faucets.
Sitting cross-legged on a soft couch in their living room, Bhagavan, or Baba as his followers call him, is dressed in a saffron-colored kurta (tunic), barefoot, with his long reddish dreadlocks in a topknot on his head. He is a big man, tall and muscular, with a fair complexion and ruddy cheeks.
Bhagavan had a happy childhood in Rhode Island, he says. He was born Mark Lescault and had kind parents and lots of opportunities for education. But, perhaps like many in the 1960s and 1970s, he spent much of his youth pained by how much misery he knew existed in the world.
Someone must know why suffering existed and how to stop it, he thought.
As a Catholic, he went to a seminary in hopes of finding the answers, but was asked to leave after two years because he asked “too many questions.” The priests didn’t seem to have the answers, anyway, he says. They were “unhappy and confused – not (the) group of happy, enlightened beings” he expected to find.
If truth exists, he says “It has to be real now, when people are suffering,” and not just in some heavenly future he can’t see. He left the seminary at 22.
He says years passed, and he kept questioning – first other Christian groups, then members of Eastern religions. His quest led him to India, where he met Hindu sadhus (ascetics) who personified the happy serenity he assumed would accompany the truth. He began the practice of yoga and says he immediately saw results. “There is a Hindu proverb: If you take one step toward God, God will take 10 steps toward you,'” he says.
He stops to take a sip of water. Mirabai, her long brown hair flowing like a cape around her shoulders, smiles and pats his knee.
By results, he says, he means weird things started happening. He felt happier and healthier, yes, but he also started hearing his guru’s voice in his head telling him, for instance, to go to “such and such a bookstore,” where he would meet someone important. He would obey and, indeed, a stranger would come up and tell him something amazing, he says.
Month after month, year after year, the results kept coming. There was no “dark night of the soul” in coming to yoga, he says. Instead, finding God was almost like falling in love – steady, exciting, unbearably sweet.
From his guru, he learned that the sadhus believe that to find the answers to pain in the world, people must try to get back to their original selves – their essence, before the world messed them up with sickness, jealousy and pain.
It has been scientifically proven, according to Bhagavan, that people only use 8 to 10 percent of their brains. Think, he says, what would happen if people learned to access “the other 90 percent.”
That is what yoga is all about, he says.
That, and getting close to God – which, to Bhagavan, means Shiva. Contrary to popular belief, he says, Hindus are not polytheistic. They believe there is one God, with many different manifestations – like the Christian Trinity.
Kaya kalpa
Bhagavan started a naturopathic healing practice in Farmington and says he felt led to buy the 40 acres in Industry. He eventually moved there, coming to Farmington only on certain days. He stopped taking vacations, buying “toys,” going out to parties. “I’m a 24-7 yogi,” he says.
And then, he says, “people started to come.”
They came slowly. Some arrived out of curiosity, others for healing. Most had grown up in healthy, vibrant families. Some were the victims of abuse. But all of them were searching for something – the answer to a usually unvoiced question.
Bhagavan says he has never solicited followers. But some people, after meeting him, wanted to stay close by.
Eventually, he began teaching kaya kalpa at the ashram, an ancient yogic healing practice originally used only by ascetic monks. Now in his mid-40s, Bhagavan spends all his time as the ashram’s spiritual leader, with his followers carrying on his kaya kalpa and yoga practice to bring money into the community.
In addition, everyone at the ashram practices yoga and meditation themselves.
Hanuman’s daughter, 17-year-old Hridayani, says her day usually begins around 5:30 a.m. She rises, meditates and does yoga until breakfast time. The community eats together, but sleeps and lives separately, one or two families per house.
After breakfast, each person has a job. Hanuman laughs a bit, explaining the division of labor. They didn’t start out emphasizing gender roles, he says, but “in natural societies” like the ashram’s, the men tend to gravitate toward the building jobs, the women toward planting the vegetable garden and caring for the children.
Mirabai said a gender division is seen in the ashram’s religious life, too, in the way they dress, wear their hair, even how they relate to God. The men think of their spirituality like “warriors” trying to “hunt down anything negative in” themselves.
Women, Mirabai laughs, “don’t try to beat themselves. Women open up, become more vulnerable” and more loving, she says. Though she and her husband feel the same way about yoga and spirituality, the ashram’s female guru has different ways of going about it. That division between male and female is glorified in yoga and in Hinduism. Mirabai says coming to yoga was a relief. “I felt I could truly be a woman – I didn’t have to carry the role of (trying to be like) a man,” she says. “I felt like myself for the first time in my life.”
At 17, Hridayani says she loves the ashram. She loves the freedom, she loves yoga and she loves the mixture of age groups. It feels so natural, she says.
The ashram’s two eldest daughters, Hridayani and Bhavani, spend their mornings teaching yoga and telling stories to the boys.
After a communal lunch of Indian-spiced vegetables and rice, or sometimes focaccia bread and salad, the 10 children are home-schooled by parents. In addition to reading, writing and arithmetic, they study yogic texts and learn about the eight branches of yoga. Then it’s dinner time and, afterward, the women have a sewing or knitting circle, where they talk and laugh.
Does the community ever have problems? Do they fight?
Their problems are more mundane than you’d expect, Hanuman says. Someone might get bored with the food or begin thinking negatively.
But the point of Hridaya is not to have a utopian society, or even to live together happily, but to practice yoga, according to Hanuman. And since the point of yoga is to be clear and real and close to God, the small divisions that come up are employed to help followers achieve that goal.
Hanuman smiles and stands up, dark eyes sparkling. He walks outside the guest house where he has been sitting. A shriek pierces the air. Ramji is running up a hill in the distance, with a toy bow slung over his back. It looks like Vishnu is chasing him.
Hanuman walks slowly across a wooden bridge over a stream, and raises his hand. Dappled sunlight hits his face. “You’re welcome here, anytime,” he says. Then he turns and walks back into the woods.
For more information about Hridaya Hermitage, visit www.hridayahermitage.com or e-mail Hanuman at [email protected], or call him at 542-6606.
Comments are no longer available on this story