I won’t write long today - I’ve already written pages and pages and pages in my little notebook, but I wanted to share a bit of my experience here with you before I go back offline.  In fact, I wasn’t expecting to have internet access here, but they do (as one of the monks said upon seeing my iPhone, “Oh, you should download the Om Meditation 108 app!”  I laughed … it’s a modern ashram, indeed).

Mostly I’ve stayed off my laptop (this is the first time I’ve really typed in a week), preferring instead to write longhand, but I’ve certainly checked my email - just not the way I used to check it (every fourteen seconds), I’ve texted, I’ve even talked to a few people on the phone … but I’ve kept my electronic communication entirely in check.  You know, I think we’re all liable to make these great proclamations about technology: that it’s a force for good (relaxation or peace or contentment) or a force for evil (stress or anxiety or worry).  But technology is just like anything else - it can be either, it can be both, and it’s probably somewhere in between.  The goal is to use it wisely, not to let it distract us from being completely and joyfully present.

So after exactly a week here, how am I?  I don’t really know how to begin to describe what’s happened in words.  It will probably take me weeks, if not months, to process this.  But to say I found what I was looking for would be an enormous understatement.

I am peaceful, almost euphoric in my contentment for the first time in a very, very long time.  It’s not just the three hours of meditation and chanting daily, or the four hours of hatha yoga, or the long nature walks I take, or the incredible home cooked vegetarian food that I dream about at night or the interminable stretches of time I spend just sitting outside in the bright sunshine (like I am now) and thinking, or the half dozen books I’ve read since I got here … it’s just this all-encompassing feeling of love which resonates in this place, and now, within me.  I feel strong here.  I feel whole.  And yes, I feel very, very close to God.

Life is funny like this … you beg and beg and beg for something - whatever it is that you crave, you’re not even really sure - and then sometimes, if you listen, if you “assume custodial maintenance of your own soul” (as Elizabeth Gilbert says), life actually gives it to you, even if you couldn’t articulate what was missing previously.  Life, in fact, almost always gives you exactly what you need.  Whether you like it or not!

And this is exactly what I needed.  Don’t get me wrong - I cried the first three days I was here, stuck in the past, beating myself up for my failures, for my missteps, for my mistakes, for what I didn’t yet have, for what I felt like I needed to make me “happy.”  But just like hatha yoga, when you breathe into the pain, it does, eventually, dissipate.  So that’s what I did.

Perhaps more important, I finally forgave myself - I forgave myself for all of the relationships I felt I had screwed up, for all of my character defects, for my sadness, for feeling so inexplicably lost.  Then I let go.  I said goodbye.  I allowed myself to breathe - and then I felt it. I felt my soul relax, and, yes, I felt God rush in.  It felt like every cliche in the entire world, every love song, every aphorism, every spiritual awakening.  I cried tears of euphoria, because the wonderful thing about accepting yourself and God’s love is that it doesn’t require anything from you.  You just have to show up.  To clear room in your soul, to allow yourself to live in the present, without obsessing about the past or worrying about the future.  To just be.  And that’s the most freeing part of all.  You cannot be rejected; you are always enough.

So here I am, exactly as I am. I wear the same clothing almost every day, a pair of ratty moccasins which have seen better days, some black Lulu Lemon yoga pants and one of the various thin cotton American Apparel tops I packed in my suitcase along with a dozen books and ten pounds of vitamins.  No makeup - I didn’t even bring any - no curls.  No heels, no bras.  Nothing standing between me and nature, really.  It’s wonderful and freeing and healthy and I feel like I’ve fallen back in love with the world.  And it feels good.  Really good.

I will be staying here until May 26th (I was originally scheduled to go to London, but I will be doing all of the required interviews by phone so I can stay here).  If I could remain longer, I would (my father and I will be spending memorial day weekend together for his college reunions).  My goal in the next ten days is to figure out how I can take this feeling - this calm, this peace - home to Manhattan with me.  I don’t know the answer to that yet, but, like everything else I’ve learned in my short time here, I know that it will come to me.  It will work itself out, if I just let go.

If I let it unfold. :)