My daughter Stephanie is in Rishikesh India, the beginning of a pilgrimage of sorts to find herself. She may stay in India, she knows not where, for up to a year, or as long as her saved-up money holds out. She writes after she’d been there for 5 days, “Well India is... no words could do it justice... all you said it would be and more. Delhi is such an intense city. So chaotic loud and overpopulated. The smells change every second from spicy food to urine to smoke to feces to flowers to milk. I think of 20-year-old-you so often and what may have been different and what you would think of all this now.”

She’s referring to when I went to India when I was her age, in 1972, to study yoga with a guru. I stayed for 2 years. I was looking for enlightenment (See Glimpsing Enlightenment, page 18). I understood enlightenment to be a blissful clarity about who I was and what was really going on all around me. I thought the journey to find enlightenment would quench my deep primal mysterious thirst.

I am not sure that’s what Stephanie is looking for. She says she wants to quiet her mind, find discipline and spiritual growth, gain clarity about her direction. Of course she thinks of using Yoga to quiet her mind. She’s been hearing me talk about a kind of Yoga that turns off thoughts her whole life.

She thinks she’ll find all that at an ashram where she can stay a while. The one in Pondicherry where I studied is still operating, but their six month program is already started so can’t accommodate her. Coincidentally (or perhaps not) we write about two residential ashrams very near to Boulder in this issue (A Yoga life, page 22). Stephanie herself visited Shoshoni, one of the ashrams in our story, many times as a little girl when I taught Yoga retreats there. I think it influenced her . . .

Now she’s traipsing around the whole subcontinent of India, adventurer that she is, seeking a teacher and a community of other seekers. She writes, “Yesterday was a blast. With a crew of 8 other white kids we paraded around town (Rishikesh) from restaurant to shops to a few small waterfalls where we took a dip. We hitched a ride back in the cab of a cargo truck squeezing all of us in on the plush rainbow carpet. The inside was colorfully decorated with loads of stickers. It was magical. Then we walked around the remains of the abandoned ashram the Beatles studied at, haunted but cool.”

That’s how I feel too, haunted, with love and pride and a little worry. But cool.