Meeting my Guru
- Caroline Carrington
- Apr 7
- 2 min read
My journey with my Guru Neem Karoli Baba started by reading the book Awakening the Buddha Within by Lama Surya Das back in my 20s. I was preparing to spend 6 months traveling through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore, many of which are Buddhist countries. In my 30s, I was at Harbin Hot Springs and a guy trying to chat me up invited me to a private kirtan (call and response chanting). I could hardly sleep that night, the practice so enthralled me! The next day, I went to a public kirtan at the Harbin temple and was enraptured by the ecstasy of the practice. I was introduced to the Hanuman Chalisa (a 40-verse chant) for the first time. The Hanuman Chalisa was given to the devotees of Neem Karoli Baba as a practice when the first Western devotees went to India and has now become part of my daily practice.
A few years later, I was at a spiritual gathering in Joshua Tree and saw pictures of an old man in a blanket and asked who it was - people told me Neem Karoli Baba. A few years later, I was on a spiritual pilgrimage to explore classical Tantra, Bhakti Yoga, and Nada Yoga, where we focused on meditating on the sounds of the music even before the mantra - quite sublime!
During my first three days in India, after a brief stop in New Delhi, we headed to Vrindavan, the town where the divine lovers, Radha and Krishna, shared their love play. On my first day in India, exploring on my own felt edgy. The rest of our group had gone to see the Taj Mahal, but I went to meet the little girl, Aditi, whom I was sponsoring to go to a local school helping to pay for her food and medical care but this was my first time meeting her in person and seeing the school.
Afterwards, I decided to go to Neem Karoli Baba's ashram. Unfortunately, I didn't know the temples in India close in the early afternoon and it was shut when I went. Thankfully, after some begging, they let me in. Just inside the entrance, I sang the Hanuman Chalisa, the monkey God from the Hindu tradition. Deeper inside the ashram was a meditation room filled with pictures of my Guru on all the walls. At the time, I felt Him literally looking back at me through his eyes in this picture (yup, the one above). It remains my favorite picture of my Guru to this day.
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