Ram Dass and the Sacred Mountain
I feel like it’s a good idea to tell some stories about my connection with Ram Dass, who died one year and one day ago.
First, I should explain that “leela,” in Sanskrit, is a word for the divine play. Maybe no one was like Ram Dass at taking life and all its aspects humorously, lightly (sometimes angrily); but indisputably mostly laughing at the cosmic joke. When there is trust in love, the energy around suffering can become inquisitive, observant, expansive. Ram Dass embodied this possibility.
Like many, my relationship with Ram Dass was about death and love. Yesterday marked one year since RD died, and I didn’t expect anything unusual to happen. With his passing, I’d moved on for the most part from the crowd of people who surrounded him, and I was left with conflicting impressions about my encounters with the well-known, prolific, seemingly tireless of the spotlight, yogi.
On one hand, the felt sense of knowing and being known by the love that pervaded this man lingers most, digging deeply into my psyche now as much as ever, excavating distrust and cynicism, continuing to teach and ripen me. The love is highly impersonal and very, very specifically for me at the same time. The love is playful, like the moment I went to a waterfall after my first connection with Ram Dass, and the walls of the cavern flickered many times, in and out of form, just showing me that I was living in a hologram that just seemed dense to me. Or the day I needed to fly back to Maui from the Hanuman Ashram in Taos, New Mexico, and clocks and times shifted all day so that I couldn’t believe I actually made it through the 2 1/2 hour drive to Albuquerque and onto my flight. Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaji, Ram Dass’ guru, whose energy pervades the space whenever Ram Dass is around, is a trickster with time and matter, with connections among people, and the experience is ineffable and hard to describe unless you are in the moment of riding that wave.
The love: it’s felt even in his podcast talks from the 70’s, even the dreams where he appeared, once in the 1960’s VW bus that still lies on the Lama Foundation property in Taos, New Mexico, where I told him about my grandfather, ‘he didn’t tell me he was going to die,’ and dream-RD spent hours explaining things about death to me, none of which I remembered, waking with a feeling of light pouring through. Another dream preceded his death and mapped out the path I was going to take during his passing, although of course I had no idea. First, there was a more embarrassing dream about Krishna Das, which resulted in me receiving airline tickets, and oriental rugs, and jewels, and when I described this dream to a psychotherapist who worked in RD’s garden with me, he said, with complete conviction, “Oh; Maharaji is going to provide for you.” It was true that I started to have more resources after this dream; previously I’d been living pretty austerely. The other part of the same dream showed me walking through green-covered hills. “I don’t know this place,” I said in my dream. A voice answered, “It’s Northland.”
Northland, New Zealand, was not on my planned itinerary for my November 2019 trip, but I had many weeks left unplanned, to see what would happen. The first weeks included swimming with dolphins (who were hunting stingrays and way more scary than you would think), and visiting my yoga ashram for the first time since my yoga teacher’s death, and receiving a carved black stone Maori tiki representing a young girl, that I was instructed to bury, along with the karma of an abusive childhood, on the ashram land in Coromandel. It also involved a bruised face from an accidental sex injury, but TMI.
A now very dear friend, who I met at the ashram, invited me to stay at her home in Northland, and I accepted. It was a beautiful place with a view of layered green mountains sloping to the sea. For a week, I watched their cat and oddly large chickens while their family went camping, and felt a sense of discomfort, which I tried to dance and nap away, unsuccessfully. On the last day of this uncomfortable week, another friend arrived in Northland, and drove straight up to get me so we could hike. She took me to a beach, wild with wind; we decided to climb the hill at the western edge. Halfway up the hill, I lost spacial awareness; my body was shaking, and I didn’t know which way was up or down. I asked for a hand to climb up. “I thought you were a hiker,” she said.
“I think we just entered a portal,” I said. In our little circle, we call the feeling of sacred non-ordinary reality the “kombucha effect,” like all the atoms and molecules are fizzing.
For the next hour, we faced the sea, yelling out all the ways our lives were intolerable, how people had hurt us, and what we didn’t want to carry forward. This space is now somewhat familiar to me, having encountered it again in the ocean at the center of the Molokini Crater, and I call it a death portal. A lot of the time we were rolling around on the grassy hill, giggling, especially me, when my friend, in her kiwi accent, yelled that she no longer wanted to be her in-law’s “emotional barf bucket.”
Around about that time, a sturdy kiwi family in hiking boots climbed the hill and sat among us. It was a definite end to our impromptu ceremony. We ran down the other side of the hill, explored another beach and rock-hopped beneath a cliff to reach the car. Actually, she rock-hopped; I kept slipping and feeling out of body. I memorized the Maori name for the hill and we drove back. I checked my phone. “Honey, Ram Dass just died,” read a text. Later, I looked up the meaning of the Maori name for that hill. The meaning was “Protector of the Bridge Between the Worlds.”
Ram Dass, for so many, told us that “death is nothing to be afraid of,” “like taking off an old shoe.” After my brother’s suicide, I flew to Maui, and sat across from him, waiting for any kind of help. “Was your brother suffering?” he asked. “Yes.” “Well, is he suffering now?” he said. “No.” And that was that.
There’s a level of truth that is comforting in these messages from “Soul-Land,” as he calls them. His answer to me about my brother’s life and death was true; it also ignored the years of severe trauma reactions my nervous system would experience, and the guilt and grief for his life that threaten to swallow me sometimes. That answer doesn’t address what my heart longed for – someone who could sit with the pain of what I witnessed throughout my whole life, watching a fragile being unsupported to thrive in the intensity and cruelty of this world. It didn’t cradle this deep pain that broke open the moment my brother shot himself – the feeling that I am powerless to protect the vulnerable, the voiceless, the overlooked, the natural world, the innocence even in myself.
Luckily, there have been many people (usually non-famous women) that have held me in this space. Sometimes we are looking for a parent-figure to heal what broke, but what we get is friendship, and tools to bring about our own healing, within the context of loving community. And we get nature: raw and steady, fracturing, undulating, growing, decomposing, to teach us to be conscious throughout all of its iterations. That’s my curriculum – the natural world is the only teacher I truly trust. And sometimes, in expansive moments, the truth that this is the most accurate reflection of what’s within really lands.
So, fast forward to a year later, after holding my first yoga teacher training, where the lessons of New Zealand and my time with RD became much of the curriculum. It’s Ram Dass’ death anniversary and all I can think about are my teeth. I’ve been drinking dandelion and burdock tea and my teeth are a deep brown color. Nothing, not prescription strength whitening gel, not turmeric paste and coconut oil, can bleach them, and I have an online course to record. I call every dentist’s office on Maui and finally book an appointment with one. I live deep in the jungle, at the end of one of the most epic winding drives in the world, two hours from the office. On my drive out, I stop in civilization to meet a friend, who greets me with a candle at the door.
“We just did arati (vedic prayers) on Zoom,” she said. She’d been watching a celebration of RD’s life online. I wave the candle smoke over my head and sit down. “I dreamed about RD’s cremation,” she said. It made me remember the moments I sat outside the mortuary listening to the flames crackle and roar, without many thoughts.
I drove to the dentist’s office and found that it was situated next door to that mortuary. While waiting, I tuned in to the online celebration again, right when Mirabai, one of RD’s friends, was talking about teeth. “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth,” she was saying. Weird. I turned it off. My bill for the teeth cleaning was $111, a number for universality and continuation. As I drove home, a white owl appeared by moonlight just as Trevor Hall’s song, “The Fruitful Darkness” began to play on Spotify.
A few weeks after RD passed, I closed my eyes, and there he was, joyful and powerful in a way I hadn’t known him before. He smiled and threw a bunch of blue flowers at me. “What are these?” I asked. “Forget-me-nots!” he cried joyfully and disappeared into a wash of stars.
