Years ago, as a new meditator on a course at Humboldt, California, I had a chat with Brahmachari Satyanand. He studied with Maharishi in the late 1940s and early 1950s under the guidance of their teacher, Guru-Dev. Satyanand was everyone’s favorite: a tiny, kindly, helpful uncle.

“Satyanand-ji,” I asked, “What is it about food?

In the 1970s, when we were in college in Victoria, we decided we needed a better diet. But we had friends who were into various diets, including the Zen Macrobiotic Diet, the Mucusless Diet, the Paul Bragg Diet, the Atkins low-carb high-protein diet, and the vegetarian diet, among others. Each diet specified foods you should eat and foods you should avoid.

(Continued from last post)

The door swung open. Light poured into the room. The silhouette of a tall man stood there. Blood rushed to my head. I jumped two feet, a trapped thief. But it was one of the farmers, so I covered myself by saying, "Oh, hi Mr. Jenklin, what kind of rifle is this?"

In the summer of 1958, I joined the 4-H club, the agriculturally-oriented youth club similar to Scouts. 4-H has an inspired guiding principle: Learn by Doing, which often means giving a young boy or girl the bonding, real-life experience of raising an animal. So, this helpful Dutch farmer who’d showed me how to milk cows gave me a week-old, black & white Holstein bull-calf to care for. I christened him Bobby.  

My tres cool great-nephew, Stephen, grandson of my sister, Gemma. Stephen is a Pilot with the Canadian Air Force, with which he completed a degree in Aeronautical Engineering.

Three years ago, I revisited an old health practice: cold baths. When we lived in Switzerland in the mid-1970s, young men like me, who fancied ourselves brahmacharies (wannabe celibates), treated icy baths as a badge of honor. And in the old, mountainside hotels we lived in, cold meant glacial: could freeze a polar bear.

On Michael Oliver’s runabout, with Neil Paterson and Keith Wallace, heading from Salt Spring Island to Montague Harbor on Galliano Island. So much fun on these islands this time of year!

Sailing from Salt Spring Island on Vince Argiro’s grand sailing boat, Avvento, with my sister Margaret and Nancy Walker. 

The San Juan and Gulf Islands off the pacific coast— over 200 of them—make for the best sailing in the world. 

Another 55th reunion for the Rishikesh TTC, class of 1970: 
Al Bruns, Prudence Bruns, Olga Campbell, Gordie Hamilton and me.  In the Karma restaurant, Vancouver, celebrating our special bond.

We may live in different parts of the world, but we will always be together.

Me with Vince Argiro on car-ferry from Vancouver to Victoria. The ship slowed down so everyone could watch the Orcas sport in the ocean: magnificent animals, family oriented like Elephants.

~ John

On Ganges Harbour, Salt Spring Island, with Michael McBurnie’s beautiful sailing catamaran. 

See group picture inside cabin from left to right: Gregg Wilson, Garrison Smith, Berenice Nelson, Deborah Rubin, me, Michael, Ruth Smith.

Strike flint against stone: ignite fire.
Marry melody to poem: give birth to a song.
Blend thinking with feeling: mother emotions—
Those cyclones
that
corkscrew
me
rapture
or
gloom.

Flint or stone alone? Sometimes useful;

Long-term, primordial stresses (from my last post) are harmful party crashers, and often they don’t want to leave.  

Maharishi shared an example (not his exact words): say a dirty, torn, worn-out couch is in the middle of our clean and beautiful living room. It doesn’t belong there; it restricts what we can do in the room. But…if it’s been there a long, long time we might have become attached to it. We know it’s not good, but it’s become a part of the room’s identity.

I'm interested in traumas: how they got into me and how I can get them out. In the next few posts, I'll tell you what I’ve learned about those semi-sentient entities that get inside us and shut down our natural, happy song.

I had an untimely craving
for hot, buttered popcorn
just before going to bed.

“Come on! It’s just
a bowl of popcorn—
You had a tough day.”

Now, temptation & me
are an uneven match,
and it usually argues and wins.

Body awareness isn’t just for trauma—it’s also powerful for cravings. I’ll give an example from an encounter I had with Eckhart Tolle. Originally from Germany, he lives in my hometown, Vancouver, and on Salt Spring Island where I live now. I’ve met him several times; now and then I run into him on the car-ferry from Vancouver to Salt Spring. Lovely, unassuming man, and you can tell he speaks from deep.

Clarification: body awareness is a tool to be reached for only if needed—not as a daily practice like meditation or yoga postures.

At a symposium at Queen's University in Ontario, 1972, Maharishi explained how it worked. He also pointed out that even if someone doesn’t learn to meditate, just understanding this one thing—you can deal with negative moods by feeling them in the body—can be profoundly helpful.

Rishikesh, Cont. from May 15 post

Yogi Ramacharaka didn’t just propose that the body’s organs are simple conscious entities, he recommended a form of body awareness (more about that later) to communicate with them.

In chapter 19 of Hatha Yoga (click link below), he describes how the conscious mind can engage directly with an organ, especially one that’s not doing its job. His example?

Cont’ from May 10 post:
India, Spring 1970

Maharishi’s dazzling cosmic metaphor for the systems within the body— gods within gods within gods— had opened a new dimension for me: a profound and poetic glimpse into the living and intelligent parts of our bodies.

Then I found another way of understanding that truth.

One summer, on a hot day, I snuck downstairs to the basement, opened the big, white, top-loading freezer, and dug into the forbidden stash of gallon-sized ice cream tubs (ice cream was strictly for desert at meals; we were eight kids so raiding goodies was a felony).