My India Experience

By Ava Schlesinger

I was left speechless. We communicate with language, so after a rather impulsive two-week spiritual journey to Rishikesh India with a group of complete strangers, my friends and family naturally wanted and deserved to hear my story; but there were no words.

I tried. “It was interesting…dirty…the dustiest place I have ever been…the food was awful…the people I traveled with were fabulous…the crowds were abundant, relentless, vibrant, overwhelming…the room smelled like mothballs…it was a virtual kaleidoscope of colors all day, every day…it was interesting… there wasn’t really a shower…they only had spoons…a beautiful, mysterious Jewish woman was the Swami’s sidekick...the word cacophony was actually used repeatedly in casual conversation…so, yes…it was really interesting.”That’s it? I essentially had a constipated, whiny word salad formed of shadow, with a weak twinkle of sacred fairy dust. So when Philip asked if any of us wanted to write about our experience for The Catalyst, I felt no particular calling and I certainly had no conscious plan to try and put my wordless experience into some orderly, readable format.

But here I am at 11:06pm on the 2nd Friday night since my return watching a very disturbing, provocative episode of Girls thinking why? How come?

As I think about the why and the how, I begin to recognize that throughout this trip I was consumed with a rich, internal multi-faceted dialectical process. I was in meditation as I experienced continuous distraction; I was physically and at times emotionally in community, while being deeply and exhaustively alone; living each moment of each day demanded profound courage, while I was acutely aware of equally profound terror. My effort toward integrating these apparently conflicting states has dominated and defined my spiritual unfolding. My seeking is somehow dependent upon the presence of these infinite riddles, which engage my mind and penetrate my very soul.

And yet…I am really not that deep. I can prove it: as I wandered around the beautiful gardens of the Parmarth Niketan ashram, I remember being tortured as I looked down and saw that my white flip-flops, bought to wear with my aura-expanding white Kundalini “outfit,” had turned almost black from the unavoidable and completely ubiquitous Indian dust. Fraud!

I am seasoned enough to understand that the human experience, or at least my human experience is peppered with blackened flip-flops so that I can confront and then expand my own humility. If I am God, if I am Brahman, and I am also a fraud, the untenable tension leans hard against my ego, forcing me to my knees in humble surrender. And it was on our knees in this asana or that asana, that surrender became a major theme of our group’s attendance. We were a group of 14 extraordinarily kind-hearted, diverse, strong, smart, awakening individuals with assorted experiences, struggles, gifts and talents, attending the “17th Annual World Famous International Yoga Festival.” We were in residence with about 800 others, at what should have been called the Best Exotic Parmarth Niketan Ashram Hotel -- a pink oasis on the banks of the sacred Ganges River. To one degree or another most of us were faced with integrating India’s gift to westerners visiting for the first time: the immediate obliteration of the illusion of any control whatsoever. Once that veil is lifted, living in the moment and manifesting the courage to let go and let God is a matter of survival. My first real connection, borne of necessity after our first night in the ashram, was sitting with my beautiful friend Brooke and validating for one another that we could and would survive this adventure, even if we didn’t sleep a wink for the entire two weeks; this after the 4:00am dynamic meditation class thunder-clapped us out of our beds that first morning. Surrender or die became my personal mantra; and although a truly surrendered person would be grateful to enjoy dal for breakfast, dal for lunch and dal for dinner, my own humility wasn’t quite as refined and available as I might hope. My first Diet Coke midway through this journey was way too delicious and the irony of that is not lost on this yogi.

And yet, there were the moments of sweet and tender resonance with the elder wisdom keepers, mothers, fathers and wide-eyed, inquisitive children in the remote and beautiful villages, schools and orphanages we visited after the yoga festival ended. Our intention was to be of service with the understanding that there was a need for our help and presence. But my own experience was that I received abundantly more than I gave; it was a gift to visit what I perceived as unsullied, wholesome communities that perhaps were borne or sustained on a foundation of insufficiency, but somehow had undercurrents of joy and love that fed me at a time I was managing a high degree of my own vulnerability. As a social worker who has been immersed in the work of healing and holding space for insidious and intolerable poverty and trauma for the last 20 years, the face of poverty and trauma in developing countries has repeatedly struck me as different than here in the west. My observation has been that threads of resilience seem to weave together more organically and genuinely, somehow supporting and inspiring the natural, human inclination toward hope and healing.

I suppose these are some of the words that had been lost. Maybe not lost; perhaps just stuck. I think I was somehow worried that giving life to my experience would disappoint or somehow diminish the deeply spiritual and absorbing experiences many in my group had described. But to be fair, I am just not that powerful. This morning as I planned to throw away my blackened flip-flops, it dawned on me that maybe I could wash them. With a little bit of soap and a scrub brush, the deeply embedded earth I had transported back over my 7,000 mile journey home, lifted, simply and easily; the last vestiges of my personal India gone, just like that. I was somehow touched in a very tender place as I engaged in this cleaning ritual; it was the final note of what had become a spiritually complicated adventure. I know in my heart that India will never be the place I call home, but I am so very grateful and blessed to have had the opportunity to visit. And I am undeniably richer and more complete having met my 14 new friends along the way.

Photos: Top: A sweet, beautiful woman who radiated joy, wisdom and peace, touching my heart in a very deep way exactly when I needed to be touched. Bottom: My finally clean feet immediately after returning home to NYC.

(If you like to stay informed about future Shift trips to India and other locations, click here.)
 

Ava Schlesinger lives in New York City where she is a licensed clinical social worker and ordained interfaith minister. Ava has been married to Steve for 28 years and is the mother of two adult children. She is currently working as the supervising social worker at Legal Services, NY, recently having left her position as the Clinical Director of a domestic violence & sexual assault agency. Over the past 20 years Ava has developed a clinical expertise in the area of sexual assault, trauma and dissociation. Her current path is deeply directed toward philanthropy, advocacy and grassroots service in the arenas of poverty prevention, economic justice and human and women’s rights.