"At that moment I felt as if a key was opening my heart. Since then I have felt that that act of obedience was the beginning of the guru-disciple relationship."

Ans : I had a spiritual awakening when I was 10 years old. It was in 1960 shortly after my father met Swami Chidananda and he was discussing some spiritual points with my brother and me. It was not at all an exalted experience, but it was the turning point of my life as it left me with the conviction that God is the only thing that gives life meaning.

However, this inner feeling remained unexpressed until my mid-teens. At that time I began to question my father about spiritual matters, and over the next few years he shared with me many of the things that he had learned from Swami Chidananda.

We had a very wholesome family life. My three younger brothers and I related more to our parents than to our peers during our growing up years. So even though many of our friends experimented with drugs etc., we were not interested in them. Otherwise, we were very typical kids.

During my teens and early 20's I had no idea of spiritual practices, but I did have a childlike faith that everything is God's will, and that no matter what happens, it is for our highest good. This made me quite centred and mature for my age. However, in university I got caught up with intellectual ambitions and ultimately found that the more I lived in my intellect the less centred I became.

Like most young girls, I wanted to get married. At the same time, an inner question persisted as to whether I should devote my life to God instead. Eventually, at age 23, I did get married, but while the marriage was not unhappy, it ended after two years when my husband fell in love with one of his assistants. For three days I was devastated, and then the thought came to me, "It's not my husband doing this to me; it is God." From that moment, I didn't shed a tear. Although I did everything I could to save the marriage, my only prayer was, "Thy will be done." My husband and I parted as friends.

Sometime later the thought crossed my mind that it might be fun to date again. Immediately a counter-thought came, "That life is finished." Along with this thought came a passion to obey. This passion to obey served as a great protection against temptations during the next five years I spent as a single woman living by myself in the Western world.

A few months after my marriage broke up, my father returned from India for a four-month visit. I was able to spend a lot of time with him and received strong confirmation for what I was feeling spiritually. Then in the spring of 1977, when I was doing a dietetic internship and graduate work in Edmonton, I got a very strong urge to visit India. I immediately wrote my father expressing this urge. On the very same day that I wrote, he wrote to me saying, "If you have ever seriously thought of coming to India, Swami Chidananda will be in Vancouver in August. Why not visit him and discuss it with him there."

I had two meetings with Swamiji during that visit. At the first one I arranged with him to come to the ashram for five weeks in July/August, 1978. During our second meeting Swamiji surprised me by saying, "I like the way you dress." Then he added, "Many women dress and wear make-up in order to attract men." I was taken aback as although I had an absolute passion to obey that inner command, "That life is finished," I was still attached to my appearance and liked to wear make-up. Swamiji, of course, did not suggest to me directly that I should stop wearing make-up, but a strong inner feeling came over me that if I was serious about the spiritual life, I must stop. At that moment I felt as if a key was opening my heart. Since then I have felt that that act of obedience was the beginning of the guru-disciple relationship. Still, it was quite a wrench. With one stroke it broke my identity with being an attractive woman.

I came to India in 1978 as planned, and while here Swamiji gave me mantra initiation. Before I left, Swamiji said to me, "When you return to India, come in the winter." I took this as a guru-command and planned to come as soon as I finished my Master's degree. During the next two years I saw Swamiji three times when he was on tour in North America. However, when I tried to talk to him about my return visit to India, it was as if it had never been discussed! He said that he would let me know whether I could come. He eventually wrote to me in October 1980-the last minute I was able to get a ticket for December when my Master's degree would be completed. In his note to me he told me to come prepared for a short or long stay, which I interpreted as being four months or 16 months. The thought of a longer stay, let alone a permanent one never crossed my mind. My idea was to get established in spiritual practice and then be able to return to university on a sound spiritual basis to get my PHD.

As soon as I returned to the ashram, I knew it should be for a longer stay rather than a shorter one, and Swamiji gave me permission to stay the extra year. Then I gradually began to lose interest in academic pursuits. One day, when I was wondering about my future, the thought came: "You have no future." I was startled as I had no idea what that meant; however, from that moment on I never really gave my future a thought.

Still, I assumed I would be returning to Vancouver after a 16-month visit. It wasn't until I met with Swamiji in February 1982, about a month before I was to leave, that he completely turned me upside down and I realised that he wanted me to stay in India. What was amazing was that one hundred per cent of my conscious mind was expecting to return to Canada, yet I felt absolutely no resistance to Swamiji. Swamiji must have been aware of something that my mind was not aware of, but that my Heart wanted. Earlier, I had had some repeating dreams of returning to Canada and finding that the life there had no meaning, but I had dismissed them because they were dreams. I have never returned to Canada even for a visit.

My first seven years here were spent mostly in meditation and study. Especially important was the time I spent with Swami Brahmananda studying the scriptures and listening to his interpretations based upon his own personal direct experience. I once asked him, "What is surrender?" He answered, "To know that God alone is and that the ego is a zero." Swami Brahmananda was a living expression of whatever he taught and what it really means to be a zero.

During this seven-year period I got a very good grounding in the spiritual life. However, in spite of spiritual experiences, the teachings remained in my intellect. It wasn't until I went through a very difficult period with my mind-and I became desperate to apply the teachings-that any change occurred. Even then, for many years no change was apparent. I was sustained in this darkness by three things: First, I was convinced that I was responsible for whatever difficulty that I was going through, so I had to solve it myself. Second, at the time, I had started to record and transcribe Swami Chidananda's morning talks, and his teachings about the necessity of persistence in the spiritual life, and to never give up, were a tremendous help. And third, once during this difficult period Swamiji asked my father how I was getting along. Dad mentioned that I was having difficulties with my mind. In turn, Swamiji made a gesture with his hand as if to say it was of no consequence. That was a relief; otherwise, I sometimes wondered whether I was going a little crazy.

I never told anyone about these difficulties. Even my father had only a vague idea. Strangely enough I found myself acting absolutely normal despite my mind. Inwardly I wasn't so determined that I had to change my inner experience as I was determined to discover what one's relationship should be to the mind. Gradually over the years through the continued application of the Advaita Vedantic teaching that everything is That-both inner and outer-I began to discover that freedom is in allowing all experiences to be from the most exalted to the most painful. I also found that only from this point of impersonality and objectivity, that discrimination between the real and the unreal can arise.

Over the last few years I have emerged from that darkness, but basically continue the same practices. They are not really different from surrender or disidentification from the mind, or the recognition that God alone is. I believe that through these practices that it is possible to discover who one really is-though It is unknowable to the mind-and that when one eventually becomes established or rooted in this that one acts from a completely different place, a place devoid of ego, which makes the divine life possible.

At my request, Swami Chidananda gave me sannyas on Guru Purnima 1996. Having been living the monastic life for a long time, I had a strong feeling that if I did not take that step, then I was "holding back." I wrote to Swamiji explaining my idea of what sannyas meant, which was a commitment to the practice that everything is That (the Reality) and to ego death. A couple of weeks later Swamiji agreed to give me sannyas and remarked, "You have understood what sannyas is."

One final thought. Before I came to India, I had a fear of boredom after having worked for a period of time at a very monotonous job. This was one of the reasons I remained in the academic world. I especially found research to be extremely exciting and challenging. However, since I have been in the ashram, I have never been bored. It seems as if coming to grips with the fact of God and the real possibility of spiritual freedom, which includes the subjugation of the ego, is the ultimate challenge-as well as being deeply satisfying to the soul. It is an adventure that is never ending.