Return to tour history

[Guest guest]

Dear Amma's Darlings,

 

I put down the tour history thread due to Bala's marriage, earthquake, Kumha

Mela, etc. But wasn't really done. Soooo...thank you Manasvini, Ranjani and

Timothy and Vijay for your wonderful contributions on that history. I agree

with Lalitha that it is so moving to read these accounts.

 

So, what I understand so far from this collective comparison of notes is

that Amma was in the Bay area and Mt. Shasta. Did she actually go to LA in

1987? Then she went to Taos. Did she actually go to Santa Fe in 1987?

 

Then she came to Madison. I know for a fact that she did not do a program in

Chicago that first year. The earliest Chicago devotees came to Madison,

including the Nairs.

 

She did go to Boston and NY (Queens). Did she go any place else in the east?

 

So, here is some history from the Madison visit that I thought you might all

enjoy, showing just what a master weaver Amma really is. I only learned this

at our satsang in early December with Rasya and Haran after the Ann Arbor

program.

 

If you look at Swami Paratmananda's (Neal Rosner) first book, On the Road ot

Freedom, about 8 pages in, you'll see that his brother Earl got a letter

from his yoga teacher in Ann Arbor saying "I am very glad to hear that Neal

is practicing the postures as taught by you. He is still young. Why does he

not become a monk an dedicate himself competely to the attainment of the

Self?" That yoga teacher was Barbara, later the mother of Rasya! Eventually

she went to an ashram in India (sorry, can't tell you which one) where she

met David Lawrence, later the father of Rasya. Interesting detail in the

weave: before he met Barbara, he was dating Neal and Earl's sister!( Amma

was going to make sure these 2 met and conceived Rasya in India!!!) I'm not

sure why they came and settled on a farm just outside of Madison (though I

do believe it's part of Amma's plan). But in l986 Earl arranged for

Gretchen/Kusuma to come to their farm to arrange for Madison to be on the

tour. I was one of 4 people invited to come and meet with Gretchen/Kusuma.

That was on the evening of June 26, 1986. When Gretchen started playing that

first video of Amma, I knew I had found the teacher I was looking for. The

Lawrence's farm has been a place of many significant events in my spiritual

life. The first time I went was on my birthday when they were hosting a

spiritual teacher from India. I participated in my first sweatlodge ceremony

in Wisconsin on their farm in 1980. I got my first Devi Bhava darshan there

in 1987 and my husband and I built our first sweatlodge there after that

(the shooting star we saw as we did that was the most spectacular I have

ever seen).

 

In reviewing my calendars for the corresponding dates, I discovered that I

got my first darshan from Amma exactly one year after seeing the video, the

evening of June 26, 1987!!!

 

I was so ignorant (still am). In my calendar to mark the date to go out to

Lawrence's to meet Gretchen, I wrote "Ama Chi", having just heard the name

over "chi" means life energy in oriental langauges. I had also been very

influenced by attending Sundance ceremonies with the Southern Utes near

Durango, and learned that in their cosmology, there is Waa, Maa, and Chi, to

signify the formless, the forming and the formed (very approximate

explanation). Nevertheless, driving back from Sundance the first year, 1983,

a song had come to me so powerfully with these words, "Waa, Maa, Chi". So

there I was driving east down Interstate 80 in 1983 singing a bajan for Amma

4 years before I even met Her!

 

Om Amriteshvaryai Namah.

 

premarupa

[Guest guest]

Thank you so much for the history. I have wondered about Rasya and was told

she was a cousin of Swami Paramatmanada's. It makes us all feel closer to

our brothers and sisters to know the history of our family.

 

Triveni

[ammasshree]

|| Aum Namah Shivaya ||

 

Actually, Amma visited BOTH Santa Fe and Albuquerque in 1987 in addition to Taos and several other stops in NM.