Issue: March/April 1997
Author: Lynda McDaniel
EARTH WISDOM
Maya Tiwari has gone back to the sources of ayurveda to reclaim ancient techniques that resonate with nature's rhythms.
An old log cabin in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina is perhaps an unlikely place to find an Indian brahmacharini teaching ancient Vedic healing secrets. But this small house set on a wooded hillside near Asheville is home to Bri. Maya Tiwari (Bri. is an honorific abbreviation of brahmacharini), a former New York fashion designer whose ordeal with cancer led her back to the traditions of her ancestors and ultimately to a life as a spiritual renunciant.
Before the cancer, Maya led what some might consider a charmed life- growing up in a loving family of Indian immigrants in British Guiana (now Guyana), graduating from college at age 15, and moving to New York City, where she enjoyed a meteoric rise in Manhattan's fashion industry. Strikingly attractive and impeccably stylish, she became well connected in a scene frequented by the rich and famous. Then, at the height of her fashion career, still a young woman of only 23, the cancer struck.
An unrelenting regimen of surgeries and treatments followed, yet Maya was still plagued by the disease. Without hope, she retreated that winter to a small cabin in Vermont and began what was to become her life's work. "If I was going to die, I had to set certain things right," Bri. Maya states with a conviction still strong after so many years. "As I kept the wood fires burning, I ceaselessly poured out my heart and agony into a tape journal that grew to more than 100 tapes. I wept until my tissues were cleansed of my fears, pain, hopes, dreams, and disappointments. Days ran into nights unnoticed. I understood how death had become an unconscious solution to my grief. I saw how well I had manipulated my life, and I begged the forgiveness of the Lord for having tampered with the vital force of my life."
During her winter sojourn, she slept for only three or four hours a night and fasted for a month on water, juice, and vitamin C crystals. She explains that this was not a deliberate fast-she was simply too miserable to eat. Once she began eating again, she consumed only vegetables, fruits, brown rice, and beans.
It was a time of powerful visions. She felt her estranged father the strongest. Stoic and serene, his spirit reminded her of her childhood studies of the Hindu scriptures. Later, when they reconciled, he told her vivid dreams he had had about her trials with cancer and how he had sent energy to her. In another vision, the Mother Goddess manifested as a bluebird, summoning her to follow it out the window. "I said to the bluebird, 'You can fly, but I cannot,'" Bri. Maya recalls. "'If I step out the window, I will fall.' Then I received a transmission that I would not fall, so I went, and I did not fall. Rather, I was suspended, and there was beautiful light, incredible luminosity, and translucence. It was at that point that I felt my cancer turn, because after that I felt lighter, at ease with my self."
As winter waned and spring's first shoots appeared, Maya gained strength and inner calm. "I still felt it was the peace you receive before dying," she says. "That was a period of roaring silence which was anything but silent. It was the raging tornado, the hurricane wind, my body coursing through the desert. The divine had hunted me down, and the seclusion gave life back to me. I knew that every step in my life led me to this place where it became inevitable to bow to the divine."
Eventually, with the last traces of cancer banished, Bri. Maya began living her new life. She reconciled with her family, from whom she had been estranged for 12 years. She learned to accommodate and forgive the people who caused her pain and to forgive herself for her own trespasses. Little by little, her quiet time increased. She practiced yoga asanas and meditation and discovered macrobiotic cooking, Asian healing systems, and, finally, ayurveda, which she regards as "the mother of all healing sciences."
>From Farm to Fashion
As we sip licorice tea in her spare but artfully furnished living room, beneath a wooden image of Ganesh flying overhead, I ask Bri. Maya about her early life, and she begins talking in her elegant, almost archaic style. ("We had English foisted upon us for so long that we came to love it," she remarks.)
Her grandparents were brought to British Guiana as priests to a community of Indians shipped there by the British as indentured laborers. Maya was born in the early 1950s into a Fourth World country, 50 years behind modern technology. This "backwardness" was a blessing, she says, because it allowed the ancient rituals to be kept intact. She watched as the elders farmed the land, threshed and pounded the grain, and rolled the dough for chapatis as they had for centuries.
"Being close to nature and living within its rhythms is what kept my people safe in their hearts," Maya explains. "The observance of nature's cosmic rhythms was deeply rooted in my country, even more strongly than in India, because these people survived the treacherous crossing of two oceans under inhuman conditions, on ships where women were molested and brothers and husbands and fathers were cast off to sea or left on deserted shores. Though they arrived in British Guiana in savagely broken spirits, they clung steadfastly to the faith and rituals they had brought as Hindus to a new land. So living close to nature's rhythms has been a natural journey for me."
Her family was large-11 children by two mothers. They cooked in earthen fireplaces and lived without refrigerators or telephones. Yet she describes her father as a modern man-a visionary, entrepreneur, and stickler for education. "We were sent to British schools. That was a wonderful sort of education, and I never regretted it," Bri. Maya recalls. "It was a joyous process, because our native teachers melded the harmonics of the Indians and the rhythms of the Africans with the British system."
Following its independence from Britain in the early 1960s, Guyana was split by a vicious four-year civil war, something her father had prepared for by sending his older children to schools in Canada, England, and the United States. Maya landed in New York City to study law, but soon after her arrival she met Stella Adler, one of her many teachers along the way. ("The grace of the Lord has sent me great teachers all my life," she says.) Adler ran the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and quickly she and Maya, who loved English literature, formed a bond. While Maya studied drama with Adler, she also became fashion director of a major clothing store at age 16. From that point her life began its worldly ascent, an intoxicating crescendo that held something new at every turn.
The world of fashion came easily to Maya, probably, she surmises, because of a similar career in a former life. "I found a solid partner in someone Stella knew," Bri. Maya recalls, "and soon we had a store on Madison Avenue. It became an immediate success. Jackie O. bought from the store, and most of Hollywood was dressed from it." The line was called Maya, a distinct style of simple elegance created in natural-fiber stretch fabrics. Top fashion magazines presented her clothes on their covers; Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, and I. Magnin featured Maya boutiques; and Mary Rheinholz, then-editor of Women's Wear Daily, called her the "high priestess of fashion." "Later Mary told me, 'Never mind this industry-it's too small for you. You should become a religious leader.'" Bri. Maya laughs her deep, joyous laugh. "Little did we know how close to the truth that was." Soon after, the cancer turned her life around to face that very direction.
To Mother India
If the cancer directed her life back to her roots, her father's death drove her deeper down into the ancestral soil. "My father was the human I revered most in life. When he died, I felt profoundly alone. As I watched him burn in the sacred fires of his cremation, whatever remnants of the false and unsacred remaining in me were lifted from my spirit. Before his death he began preparing me for the dramatic turn in my life that he foresaw as my natural path. In truth, he firmly handed me the beacon that led me to serve the divine." That beacon came in the form of a dream, in which she saw her father from behind, seated cross-legged in his priest's clothing. But when he turned around, he had another man's face. A month later, she met Swami Dayananda Saraswati and recognized him as the man in the dream. "It was as if my father was saying 'I'm gone; here's your father.'"
One of India's few living masters of the traditional teachings of Vedanta, Swami Dayananda was reluctant to take her as a student because she did not know Sanskrit and had grown up in a foreign culture. But she persisted. "I know you're my teacher," she told him, "I have no choice in the matter." Finally he assented, assigning her to learn two years' worth of Sanskrit in two months. Thereafter she lived for two years with him in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, at his ashram, Arsha Vidya Gurukula.
Nine years ago, Maya and Swami Dayananda made the long journey back to her ancestors' home, a trip she found essential to heal herself as well as her ancestors. "I was the first of the family to return after more than a century. When I stood in the Ganges for the first time, it was incredible that I was in the land of my people. The smell that I had smelled on the elders when I was very young was the smell of that river, the smell they brought with them. It was there I understood that I would take my vows as a monastic person. Somehow I had always known that sacred river was awaiting my arrival."
It would be three more years before she would again stand in its swift current to take the vows of a brahmacharini renunciant, a "student of Brahman" or Infinite Consciousness at the level preceding swami. It was not a life that she chose-rather, she states, it chose her.
The day and night before her ceremony were spent awake, in silence and prayer. At sunrise her hair was shorn, old clothes were put away, and she was given a simple yellow cloth to wear. During the traditional Vedic ceremony, which lasted about 20 minutes, Swami Dayananda read passages from the Vedas and gave Bri. Maya her personal mantra. She describes that day she took her vows in her second book, Ayurveda: The Secrets of Healing: "The cool waters of the Ganges rush steadily over my feet, I hear God's voice in the raging thunder. The whirling sands, supported on the wings of the driven wind, take the forms of my ancestors' faces. Little do I know the true purpose of my visit to India until I stand transfixed in boundless space and infinite time. I behold the faces of my beloved people whose blood and spirit run through me. I hear the cries of my ancestors finally silenced, as the debt for their estrangement from the homeland more than a century before is paid."
Bri. Maya renounced worldly life in favor of service to the divine, accepting a simple life of devotion without attachments and adornments. Other traditional precepts include celibacy, daily sadhanas, ablutions, and studies of the Vedas.
Three more years of study and several trips to India culminated in last year's four-month silent retreat. This occasion marked the 21st year since her initial retreat into silence in Vermont, a significant number, she explains, because at the end of each seven-year phase, a natural cycle in nature allows the human body and mind to completely renew itself. In Nepal, just outside Kathmandu and near a large Shiva temple, Bri. Maya found a small flat. After a week of settling in-there was food to buy, there were people to meet, basic directions to learn-she chanted for a few more days and then entered complete silence. She laughs when she recalls how the sign she placed on her door reading "silence" did little good. Visitors pounded on her door until she answered, offering them a smile but no words, and eventually they would leave. She did not read or write or indulge in any distractions. She walked and observed the markets rich with the purples and yellows and greens of fresh fruits and vegetables; she ate once a day, drank herbal teas in the morning, slept about six hours, and meditated.
"It was not difficult to allow my thinking mind to submerge into silence. It happened naturally and easily, and it was a joyous time," Bri. Maya says. "I reflected and understood that in silence we do not need the mind to think things out. Sadhana transcends the thinking mind, and silence is our greatest sadhana. Silence is not simply the ridding of mental activities. It is the observance of the dynamic, rhythmic patterns of the universe. Mindfulness of our cosmic biorhythms brings the gift of profound silence, which is how we fulfill, complete, procreate, secure, heal, and make perfect our life source."
During the months of silence, a kind of knowing she calls cognition became heightened. She knew what she would see before turning the corner, because she had already seen it in her morning meditation. And she saw beautiful light. "Silence has its own light. I saw flashes of deep blue light and golden light. Very splendid it was."
Sadhana and Silence
Bri. Maya's path led her to study the Vedas with many esteemed teachers and on her own, digging into ancient versions of Sanskrit texts to unearth long-forgotten practices. As a result of this study and the awakening of her own cognition, she has developed a vast and detailed grasp of ayurveda and a unique understanding of the meaning of sadhana.
The sadhana that forms the basis of Bri. Maya's work is not the sadhana of 20th century India. "Sadhana has come to be defined as a religious or spiritual practice," she says. "As a result, sadhana has been practiced mostly as a mental and physical exercise, becoming a rote practice, losing its essential well of cognition. I have redefined the word, taking it back to its root origin, sadh, to reclaim that which is divine in us, which intends us to heal nature, heal ourselves, serve, give, rejoice. Sadhana is replicating what is sacred in nature, through wholesome practice that brings us in harmony with nature. It represents the differences in every one of us, yet reflects the seamless synergy with each other. "When we observe these cyclical rhythms within every activity in our life, then we are living in sadhana, in harmony with nature. As a result, every tissue, cell, organ, and memory of our body becomes refined, evolved, divinized into a cosmic being. When we live within the practice of sadhana, we are able to invoke our deep well of personal cognition, that is, our cognitive memories and memories fathered by the individual through the cycles of all rebirths."
It was through her own journey back to nature's cosmic rhythms that she discovered three templates through which she defines sadhana-sound, breath, and food. Together they form the basis of all life. According to Bri. Maya, cosmic sound is pure consciousness, or God, because, in fact, without it life could not be born. Cosmic sound is the vast vibrational tapestry into which all of life is intricately woven. Through it, we are able to harmonize our being, replenish our soul, feast our vital tissues. "Nature provides an elaborate field from which we can harmonize our personal vibrational basis. This includes the sounds of nature itself, such as the trickling of a brook or the howling of the wind, and the sounds we generate from the use of our body when we pound grain, for example, in a rhythmic motion, which in turn stimulates the natural rhythm of the heart. Other manifestations of cosmic sound include the way we use our speech and our mantras, recitations, and chants. Composed by the early seers, these ancient sounds still yield phenomenal powers of healing."
As for the breath, or pranayama, template, Bri. Maya explains that when our vibrational field is in good order, our breath is in good order. On the other hand, when we are subjected to dissonant or static vibrations, our breath goes out of balance and produces chaotic movement, not only in the body but in the mind. She teaches ways of maintaining our breath in harmony with nature's cycles, such as activating the left breath at dawn to balance the effects of the rising sun and reversing to the right nostril at night to balance the lunar effects. "When the breath is disharmonious, thoughts flourish in the mind. When the breath is calm and centered, thoughts subside and the serene state of meditation can be attained," she says.
Finally, the sadhana of food not only nourishes our body but replenishes our memory of all things on earth, because the sense of taste is our primary receptor for accessing cosmic memory. Because every good seed (as opposed to genetically altered or chemically treated seeds) holds the memory of the entire universe, natural food transfers this wisdom to us when we eat. With each meal we are reminded of and renewed by its vastness.
These practices allow us to find the dynamic silence within us, a silence that "underpins all the motions and sounds of life, strengthening our sadhana practices until they flow like a river through our being." This silence is the primary healing practice: "In that silence the mind is stilled and our personal cognition can be found."
For those who find silence difficult to achieve, Bri. Maya recommends practices like pranayama, meditation, wholesome foods, and the observance of thoughts. "In observing the mind, thoughts cannot just be locked out; they have been with us so long, jabbering in our minds. And so the first sadhana is to sit and to observe them and let them go. When they come back, let them go again."
The Wise Earth
When she came out of her own extended silence, Bri. Maya knew she would be returning to it regularly throughout her life. It did take some time, though, before she was ready to speak. She eventually made her way back to Asheville, where she has made her home for the past nine years. Soon after her return, while shopping at Earth Fare, a busy and abundant natural food grocery, she was greeted by frazzled employees trying to catch a bird trapped in the building. Bri. Maya simply stepped forward, stretched out her hand, and the bird flew into it. She held its throbbing body close, then took it to a tree outside. "I hadn't even thought about the fact that I couldn't approach the bird," she recalls with a smile. "It was such a wonderful synchronicity. The first thing that entered my mind was to help the bird, and then I thought to myself, I need a garden. I long for nature, I miss the earth."
That flash of cognition was the seed that came to fruit as a 14-acre homestead overlooking Pisgah Mountain outside Asheville. "The Native Americans called this the valley of the herbs," Bri Maya tells me as we walk out onto her land. We climb the hill behind her cabin, through a woods of oak, poplar, beech, and birch trees, then turn toward the afternoon sun shining through yellow leaves. "Look at the light!" she exclaims. She plans to build a school on the ridge at the top of this hill. "The purpose of Wise Earth School is to establish in one location the ayurvedic nature-based facilities for healing. The vast and dynamic therapies for healing, called panchakarma, were once performed on the earth itself in the womb of Mother Nature. Having traveled throughout the East, I have yet to find within any one place the whole replica of the earth sadhanas as practiced in ancient India. They have become defunct over the past 500 years."
The school will be small, with facilities constructed in accordance with vastu shastra, or Vedic architecture, taking into consideration the elements, the sun and moon, the wind direction, and the configuration of the land. Among the buildings planned is a preclassical ayurvedic fomentation hut and sweat lodge. The use of these wood-heated huts for cleansing bodily waste is ancient, and today they are even more important, she says, because we are so removed from walking the earth and living in nature. A large vegetable and herb garden and fruit trees will provide food and medicines. This winter Bri. Maya is again in India, this time to seek out a rishi to teach her the traditional agricultural mantras that were once commonly used to enhance crop growth. She will use them in the Wise Earth garden.
Ayurvedic sadhana courses for teachers and healers are now taught four times a year, averaging 12 to 18 participants at a time. Bri. Maya shows me photos of last summer's course, during which the students learned to administer a karshu sveda treatment, an ancient pancha karma therapy. They dug a pit in an auspicious spot on the earth according to the moon cycle, consecrated it with prayers, burned special wood and herbs to drive heat into the ground, and then buried the patient, who had prepared with several weeks of dietary and other practices, up to her neck in the pit. It was during this same course that the om-ing cows were discovered. Each morning the students would begin their day with mantras, and soon the cows with whom they shared the meadow began joining in the chorus, adding their rich bass oms to the human ones. Bri. Maya is delighted by this story, confirming as it does her conviction that each species of animal holds a particular form of cosmic memory, the cow's being to protect the sacred scriptures.
Students for the school are chosen by Bri. Maya as she travels the country assisting cancer and, more recently, AIDS patients, offering personal spiritual guidance, and lecturing at centers like the New York Open Center and Interface. "The teachers go back home and implement what they have learned and network with each other, forming a sadhana community. That is how it should be-the ultimate aim of the work is that it is taken to the community. I have chosen to keep it small. It is intimate work that cannot be taught to thousands. In sadhana we know that one good seed can produce millions of very fertile and very rich seeds. My school is like that. I have no larger vision. My only prayer is that my life become simpler and simpler."
Bri. Maya's daily life is testimony to her teachings. For nearly half the year she lives on the road, teaching and lecturing. Amid her hectic schedule, she steadfastly maintains her sadhanas, finding time to cook for herself and those who host her. The ancient practice of sadhana is as timeless and ineffable as our spirit, and she insists that we must make room for it in our lives. "We need to reorient our thinking to cognize that the practice of sadhana in our lives is requisite care for our heart and soul, regardless of the constraints of time, space, and historical events. As long as we live within the primacy of nature, we must respond to her cosmic laws. So-called ancient practices were honed, made perfect, through the patterns and rhythms of nature. When we put these practices in our lives, we harmonize every cell, tissue, and memory of our beingness with nature."
Bri. Maya admits to being a creature of habit, with mornings beginning well before sunrise with meditation, ablutions, chanting, a cup of herbal tea, and light stretches, followed by a period of writing or studying. In the late morning, she responds to letters from students and those in need of help-as many as 15 pieces of mail a day. Afternoons may include more writing or a long walk. She is currently finishing up her fourth book, Migrant Spirit, to be published next spring. It's a "lesson book" and record of her life journey. She tries not to work at the three junctures of the day, sitting for half an hour in observance of sunrise, midday, and sunset. A few hours after her evening meal of grains and vegetables, she does yoga, followed by a short time of reading or studying the scriptures. But she is quick to state that this is her life, not one she advocates for everyone. "As we grow and transcend the various passages of our life, as we get past certain things, our cosmic maturity blossoms. That maturity is really the essence of beauty in the universe. As we get older, as we begin to understand our journey, we are able to become more quiet within. Experiences do not have the same fascination anymore. When our minds are cluttered, there is no room for silence. So the natural form of replenishing our spirit, mind, and body is to know silence," she reminds us. "The practice of sadhana brings us closer to the ineffable silence."
At the end of our visit, Bri. Maya walks me down her long driveway, the brilliant colors of Pisgah Mountain before us and the air rich with the scents of autumn. We come upon a meadow where a black-and-white cow grazes lazily. "There's one of the om-ing cows," she says fondly and walks to the fence. "Oouumm," she calls to the cow. The cow raises its head and sets out at a trot toward its beloved brahmacharini. "Ooouu," it bellows heartily, as if remembering at last the meaning of its own words.
Lynda McDaniel is a freelance writer living in Asheville, N.C. She has written magazine articles for publications including AmericanStyle, Blue Ridge Country, and American Cinematographer.
RESOURCES
Wise Earth School of Ayurveda, RR1, P.O. Box 484, Candler, NC 28715; (704) 258-9999.
Maya Tiwari's Ayurveda: Secrets of Healing and Ayurveda: A Life of Balance are available from Yoga Journal's Book & Tape Source at
http://www.yogajournal.com/
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