Tag: Ananda Palo Alto

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My deepest why for practicing

In the courtyard of the Ananda Palo Alto community, back in the day.

I’ve been receiving an increasing number of out-of-the-blue comments from people hoping to hear me play flute more often.

I’m also getting a lot of encouraging feedback about my recent, more regular practice sessions.

Then — to top it all off — I just “happened” to stumble on an old blog post from August 2019, in which I shared something I wrote way back in the early 2000’s, when I was new to Ananda:

“What I want more than anything is to be able to simply be the vehicle for music to course through. I want to be the pipeline and the music the water. And I want to be a wide-open, pure, smooth, silvery pipeline for the sacred water to flow through, not a rusty, corroded, constricted, obstructed pipeline that blocks the flow.”

I can still remember that the inspiration behind writing those thoughts was to more deeply understand (and communicate to others) WHY we need to practice and improve and aspire toward perfection.

Not to impress or to compete or to gratify our ego. But to be an ever more pure channel (or vehicle) for the Divine Flow and, through our ever-deepening attunement, to eventually merge into oneness with that flow of the Divine.

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Wedding memories

  • Ananda Palo Alto – July 5, 2004
  • Ananda Assisi – July 18, 2004

While looking for something else entirely, I stumbled upon a bunch of photos from both of our wedding ceremonies: July 5 at Ananda Palo Alto and July 18 at Ananda Assisi, sixteen years ago!

I had forgotten just how vibrant and colorful our Palo Alto wedding altar was (thanks, Manisha!).

And I think in tomorrow’s blog post I’ll tell the story of my wedding sari and how it came to be (I don’t think I’ve shared the story in a previous blog post, have I???).

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Speaking of Wodehouse

Yesterday I shared how I was introduced to Jerome K Jerome; it was a number of years later that I made the acquaintance of PG Wodehouse.

This was back in the days when pretty much the only place to buy a book was in a bookstore, and one of my favorite pastimes was browsing used bookstores.

Of course, this was before personal computers, so the only way you heard about a book was either word of mouth (like when my best friend in 4th grade told me about The Hobbit) or by reading a book review in the newspaper. Otherwise, you “judged a book by its cover” and hoped for the best (and no going online and reading reviews before deciding to buy it!).

So, somehow, in some used bookstore in San Francisco, I managed to pick up my first Wodehouse book and started reading the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves. It was like Jerome K Jerome all over again! I was in love with another British humorist. At this point, I felt that I was perhaps a little odd; I mean, no one else I knew was raving about Wodehouse or JKJ.

Another number of years later, I found a new spiritual home at Ananda Palo Alto. Imagine my surprise and delight upon attending my first Thanksgiving banquet when, after pie and coffee, we settled in to be entertained by a readers theater version of The Amazing Hat Mystery…by PG Wodehouse! There was much I already loved about Ananda, but in that moment I knew that I had truly found “my people”!

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Sri Yogananda

Recorded during Ananda Palo Alto’s morning meditation as part of a project Rambhakta is working on. It’s so devotional and sweet, I wanted to share. I love how it makes me feel like I’m sitting way in the back of the temple…diving deep into bliss.

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Context

Sometime in the first couple of years of my living in the Ananda Palo Alto community, a photographer friend convinced me to do a spontaneous photo shoot. Predictably, self-critic that I am, I didn’t like the photos very much…except this one.

Twenty years later and it’s still one of my favorites. And I find myself asking, why?

Maybe it’s because, by placing me in the midst of such a luxuriantly lush and flourishing Ananda community garden, my friend (probably unconsciously) made a statement about the correct placement of myself–and my musicianship–in the context of Ananda overall.

I remember looking at it back then and loving the imagery of being surrounded and seemingly almost swallowed up by Ananda. The photo reflected my sense of having come home; Ananda was my new context, within which everything in my life was rapidly realigning.

Fast forward another year or so, my life and musical career had been wholly absorbed by my spiritual path and I was on my way to live and tour as part of the singing group in Italy. Our goal? To “help get the music out”, a project that became my life dharma.