I grew up in the US and came to India for the first time in 1987, a couple of years after I first started meditating (or trying to meditate!) on my own. Learning to meditate-especially “insight meditation” and Tibetan Buddhist meditation—revolutionized my life and at the same time fit me so well that lots of things starting falling into place.

I had grown up loving my inner life and community in a Christian context, and as a young adult I even considered becoming a minister. But meditation, partly because of being from another culture that I did not need to adopt, freed my spiritual life from the half-heartedness and systemic gender and other biases of the white churches I knew growing up.

I finished my studies of art and religion at Harvard and returned to India in 1990 with a Radcliffe grant to study women's folk art collectives. I also sensed an inner directive to find access to continuous wisdom teachings—whether from inside or outside myself. On the first day back in Delhi, a woman whom I considered as an elder on the path told me about Poonjaji (Papaji) in Lucknow, and I knew I would go to meet him as soon as I could.

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When I first went to Lucknow in 1991, I never planned to stay on so long, but I spent most of my next 6 and a half years immersed in Papaji's teachings-- Advaita (nonduality), humorous yet radical play, and incandescent power. The deep sparkle in his eyes -- and the way his heart seemed to have no border -- stay with me wherever I go. I learned a lot about being around a teacher, as well—both interpersonal dynamics at play (which Poonjaji would sometimes stir up), and the wonderfully non-linear contradictions, from his own history as an ex-army miner who would sometimes dress in saris to meet Krishna...to the way he would tell people not to meditate as postponement of freedom now, and yet would himself sit cross-legged on his bed several times a day.
 

Meanwhile I became friends with a local person, a family man, whom I also came to regard as a teacher. As the Papaji sangha dispersed to other places with his passing in 1997, I enjoyed self-retreat and was welcomed as part of the family by this teacher, who preferred to work in a quiet and low-key way in Lucknow. His support in every way has taught me, especially by example, about radical love, honesty, and awakening.

To read more on what I have experienced with teachers and teachings, and the volatile, tender and important areas involved in relationships to teachings, please read here, in my blog.

In 1998, partly to help fill the void left by Papaji, my insight meditation teacher Christopher Titmuss invited me to start teaching Dharma. I always assumed that this initiation would be a measured process that would happen some day (maybe never, if I was lucky!) when I was in the UK or in a meditation center in the US somewhere, a few years off in the future. So I agreed.

But in February 1999, at the first Sarnath Dharma Gathering, I had the honor and terror of offering teachings along with a rich and varied team, and gradually over the next few years flowed into a rhythm of leading silent meditation retreats about once a month in gorgeous and sacred places around the world.

By about 2002, it had become clear to me that most people get in their own way in meditation—with trying too hard, pressure, competition, and the exhaustion and reactivity of heart-impoverished and fast modern lives. And I began to introduce and share the way that meditation happened best for me—lying down.

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I love to sit as well, but lying down takes my practice so much uber-deeper, that I gradually dared to say it out loud, out of a kindness that is beyond any personal ideas.