Stanford PhD: The Instant Spiritual Awakening That Healed Her Trauma (Science Can’t Explain) & How Humanity Wakes Up | Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati

I get down to this river and suddenly I'm gifted with the presence of the divine. A merging and melting of light, of energy, of presence. I realized I am not separate from this divinity. Suddenly the God-sized hole had been filled with God. There are certain kinds of spiritual awakenings that can do instantaneously what many of us spend our entire lives trying to conquer and heal from. Sadvi Bhagavati Saraswati is a global spiritual leader. She is an American-born graduate of Stanford University. She's got a PhD in psychology. She left behind her life and had an experience in the Ganga River that changed the course of her marriage, her career, her trauma, and her entire story. You're trained as a scientist. That fundamentally defies all of the laws of science that we've been taught to believe in. I thought there is no way that I actually have just become free. All of the neurosis, bulimia, depression, anxiety around this abuse. I spent the first several months trying to re-trigger myself. People are looking for spirituality. There is violence, there is war, there is oppression, there is division and fear and destruction of our environment. Standing between us and a spiritual awakening is not what we don't have, but what we're holding on to. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be talking about a miraculous spiritual awakening. And when I say miraculous, I'm talking about the fact that there are things that we think we understand about how the body works, how the mind works, how we heal, how we recover, how we process trauma. guess what? There are certain kinds of spiritual awakenings that can do instantaneously what many of us spend our entire lives trying to conquer and heal from. Our guest today had a profound and miraculous spiritual awakening in a moment where she felt divine presence that forever changed her life. Sadvi Bhagavati Saraswati is a global spiritual leader and a best-selling author. She's lived in the Himalayas for 30 years, but her story began in Hollywood. She is an American-born graduate of Stanford University. She's got a PhD in psychology. She left behind her life because her husband was on a spiritual journey. She reluctantly followed him to India, a non-believer, not a religious person, not a spiritual person, and had an experience in the Ganga River that changed her life and the course of her marriage, her career, her trauma, and her entire story. Her book, Hollywood to the Himalayas, is a memoir of sorts, but her latest book is Come Home to Yourself. Simple answers to life's essential questions, which have been sourced from the community that she lives in in India. If you've ever contemplated, what is a spiritual awakening? How can I have a spiritual awakening? Can we connect directly with the divine? Can I hear intuition? What is the higher self? How do I know what my path is in this life? This episode may help you discover it. And I should say, Sattviji is a monk. She has taken vows and is part of an entire community. She actually lives in the world's yoga center. I didn't even know that that was a thing. She's the international director of Parmarth Nikitan, the secretary general of the Global Interfaith WASH Alliance. She speaks all over the world at the United Nations. The Dalai Lama was at her book release party. She's an incredible speaker, thinker, leader, and we're so honored to have her here in person. Sadhvi Bhagavati Saraswati, welcome to The Breakdown. Break it down. Thank you so much. So beautiful to be with you. I read a lot of books for our podcast. You can see them adorned all around the room. Your book took me the longest to read of any book that I've read for this podcast. Not because it's long, which it is, but I'm a very fast reader. But there's something about your writing and your experience that took me a lot of time to process. And I've never done a podcast where I wasn't sure if I was going to get to the end of the book. And I was just really soaking it in. I really was taking time. And it's not a hard read. It's just a deep read. And your story has so many twists and turns that touch on kind of the hottest trouble points and the hottest flashpoints of people's lives. Trauma, sexual abuse, eating disorders, devotion, love, commitment, sex, right? Everything. It's the best soap opera ever, but it's not a soap opera. So I've gone through both of your books, but Hollywood to the Himalayas, A Journey of Healing and Transformation is more of kind of a memoir. Of course. So I want to start there. And obviously, you know, Come Home to Yourself is an extension of sorts. But, you know, every few pages I was saying to Jonathan, you're not going to believe what happened next. You're not going to believe what happened next. So I want to give you the opportunity to tell us what happened in the best way that you can describe it. You had a very, very specific and profound instantaneous spiritual awakening, which continued to evolve. What happened? Grace happened. Really. At that moment. And now 30 years later. And at every moment between then and now, I've been completely sure that actually that which happened was there was an opening in me that I was not even aware of, but that the vow I took on the airplane to India, that I was going to keep my heart open, somehow created in me, in the universe. in the connection between me and the universe, a place into which grace flowed. I believe deeply, and one of, for me, the deepest and corest messages of my book is grace does not discriminate. So I don't believe it brought grace or created grace or anything like that. All it did was open me to be able to have that experience. Because, as you know from reading it, I was not a religious person. I was not even someone who identified as spiritual. I was a scientist. I was an academic. I wasn't consciously looking for a spiritual experience. But on that airplane to India, on what I thought was just a three-month break in my PhD program, I took that vow that I would keep my heart open. And in that vow, it made me, I think, willing to see, feel, accept, acknowledge, sit with, really the truth of our existence. That experience that I had of being in the presence of the divine is an experience of truth. If you look throughout history at the stories and descriptions of mystics, of yogis, of different religious people, different spiritual people from all of the different religions, that's the central piece, is a pervasiveness of, an accessibility of, the presence of divinity. And whether it's bowing to a tree, whether it's in a place of worship, whether it's any one of, you know, hundreds of different experiences, it's always that experience of this pervasive presence. And by some incredible grace, I tapped into it. but it is really important to me that the experience was an experience of truth, that it's not like, oh, this was just my experience, and it was unique to just me and my journey, but I was granted a window into a truth that has been accessed by countless people of countless traditions and paths for as long as we've got recorded history. But for me, it happened on the banks of the Ganges River in Rishikesh, India. The very first place that we went. And you were with your husband. I was with my husband at the time. I was 25. It was 1996, September of 1996. And there was no Google. and we had a 500-page Lonely Planet guidebook. And I vividly remember sitting in Delhi, so pleased with myself that I had found a place that actually served proper coffee rather than just Nescafe mixed into hot milk with sugar, and looked over this guidebook and said, Rishikesh. I mean, it just was like that. I didn't know anything about India anyway, which was partly why I took that vow on the plane, because the entire trip seemed so nonsensical to me. I wasn't drawn to India. I didn't know anything about it. I loved to travel, needed a break from my PhD program. And your husband was seeking. He was seeking. He wanted to go to India. He was committed to going to India. I think he definitely would have gone even without me. And so all of those factors came together to, okay, sure. Along with the fact that I was a very strict vegetarian and had struggled throughout every other place I had traveled with getting pure vegetarian food. And I have lots of funny stories of me thinking that I had properly communicated in French or in Spanish or what, and that which arrived on my plate was so different. Had a mother and a face. Exactly. Exactly. And what I had learned was if I could find an Indian restaurant, I could get vegetarian food. So all of that's what brought me there. And hence the vow on the plane, I'll keep my heart open. So here I am sitting over a cup of coffee in Delhi, open up a guidebook, and it says Rishikesh. I said, let's go. He said, great. I mean, it was relatively close to Delhi, yoga capital of the world, mountains, a river. I've always been a nature person. So that just sounded perfect. And we got there. And I go to stand on the banks of the Ganges River. Like you do. Like one does. But I didn't even know the river was holy. I mean, all of this is so mortifying to admit two, 30 years later, because it seems these days like everyone who comes knows so much more than I do. They have the internet. It's cheating. And they're seeking so much more than I consciously was. And I look at them and I think, why wasn't I seeking? but whatever god's divine plan was i wasn't seeking on any conscious level but i get down to this river that i don't even know is holy and suddenly i'm gifted with this experience of being in the presence of the divine mind balance breakdown is supported by one skin let me tell you about one skin the skincare company on a mission to redefine aging First of all, my favorite thing about them is they are rooted in rigorous science and research. Their products are put through the wringer with their lab and clinical trials. And we love so many of their skincare products. They basically have one for every need. I love their Lip Restore mask and full body moisturizer. That's been really saving my skin this winter and my lips. Honestly, I've never been softer. 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So background stayed river. foreground became this visual experience, but something that touched me on levels so far beyond my eyes and optic nerve and visual centers of the brain of a presence of divinity, a merging and melting of light, of energy, of presence, of existence. It was almost like the molecules of existence. In the background, I could still see them as separate things. But in the foreground, it was one of those like, oh, you think we are separate things. We are not separate things. We You're all one thing and it is all divinity. And it just, it merged together. And I turned my head and the background would change. Now I'm looking at marble steps. Now I'm looking at a telephone pole. Now I'm looking at a family, kids, a tree. Background would change. But that foreground stayed the same of this melting, merging existence of oneness in energy, in light, in presence. That was almost like one of those optical illusion things of do you only see the form or can you see the merging of existence I then at some point turned that vision inward I do not know what inspired me to do that, but I am so glad I did because I turned that vision inward. And for the first time in 25 years, I realized, oh my God, I am not separate from this divinity. I'm not bad, wrong, tainted, dirty, dark, stupid, worthless. All of the things that, regardless of how much we succeed externally, so many of us carry inside, and I certainly did. I'm none of those things. I'm one with this divine presence, inseparable from it. and it knocked me to the ground in tears of truth, of coming home. Yeah, and I knew, I knew that's where I was meant to be. I didn't know specifically where, doing what, why, but it didn't matter. For many, many, many, many days, the entire rational intellectual part of my brain had gone silent. I was rendered pretty much nonverbal. For several days, all I could say was, oh my God, it's so beautiful. Oh my God, it's so beautiful. Oh my God, it's so beautiful. You were that girl on shrooms. Exactly, exactly. And yet, it had no half-life. There was a moment when my husband said, you need to come with me to Missouri, which is a hill station about two and a half hours up into the hills from Rishikesh. I didn't want to go. This was fast forwarding a good maybe seven, 10 days later. I had found Parmarthnikathan. I had found where I was living. But he said, I'm going. And if you don't come, our marriage is over. And there was a part of me that actually thought, well, okay, let's see if this thing has a half-life. Because maybe you were having an experience that for whatever reason resonated around that location. Or as the A-plus student in Phil Zimbardo's psychology of mind control class that I had been, maybe they were drugging my food. Maybe I had been brainwashed. Maybe one of a hundred other things that my heart knew had not happened. But the over indoctrinated part of my academic mind thought, well, you know, I mean, this is the stuff we study about. This is how you brainwash. Maybe, who knows? So as much as I didn't want to go with him, there was a part of me that thought, well, let's see if this thing has a half life. And what I discovered was no half life. Yeah. And an experience that did not in those early days wax and wane or come and go in a way that when it's more chemically based, it does. it was external, it was internal, there was no distinction between external and internal. It all was just the most exquisite, perfect presence and self. Yeah, it's no less miraculous when I re-remember it decades later. What did your husband think was happening to you? Yes, especially in like three days, you just get there. You have this unbelievable experience. You're walking around saying, oh, my God, how beautiful it is. What does your husband think is happening to his wife who used to speak on an airplane and now no longer speak? Yes. So first, he thought it was really beautiful. Yes, he had brought me to India. I think it really was one of those just senses of you've been touched. This is so beautiful. Cut to day three and he's like, bitch, chill out. I don't think he realized the permanence or the fullness. I think he had been with me for the last few years as I had been struggling, as I had been, you know, really working with the bulimia, working with a lot of the issues around abuse. I had been in and out of hospitals long before I met him. So it was already well on my way to healing, but there was also still a lot left to do. So he had really been there through a lot of that work. And I think for him to see me with tears of spiritual ecstasy streaming down my face. He was really happy. I have vivid recollections until we were supposed to go up into the mountains. And I decided after having that experience that I did not want to go. I had a few days later met the incredible being who would become my guru, who was the head or is the head of Paramarthnikathan, the ashram that I live in, one of India's most revered spiritual masters, one of the world's most revered spiritual masters. I didn't know any of that at the time. I just knew that he was the head of this incredible place I wanted to stay in. I had met him. He had said I could stay. So I really wanted to stay back in Rishikesh. My husband wanted to continue with our plan to go up to the mountains. I had suffered very severe abandonment issues throughout my life due to having been abandoned as a child. My husband knew that there was no way in a million years that I was going to stay back if he went. And so he said, well, I'm going, knowing that I would say, OK, I'm coming. But I didn't. And I think that was the first indication that something much more permanent had happened, something much more impactful on not just my life, but our collective lives had happened. I said, OK, if you want to go, go. Well, and I want to clarify here what you felt happened was that there was some transformation, an instantaneous transformation that took the abandonment issues you had that took that codependent clinging and neediness and like, poof, it was gone. And so when he said, I'm leaving, there was not the God-shaped hole that you felt the need to fill with him, whoever the him is or whatever the him is. And you literally felt, I can be okay if he's not here. Thank you. Which is also known as like normal, right? Exactly. For people who don't have those kinds of issues. Exactly. When I had that experience, it transformed how I understood myself, which prior to that moment had been someone seriously lacking. I think this is true for probably most survivors of abuse, but I also think it's much more pervasive than that. I think that being a human in this culture, most of us move through most of our lives, especially our young lives, feeling like I am not beautiful enough, successful enough, smart enough, popular enough, rich enough, athletic enough, good enough on the levels that matter to me. and that I'm full of holes, or as you said, that beautiful God-sized hole, and that I need something or someone to fill it. And that certainly was my experience. The abandonment issues that I was suffering from manifested in such a way that I needed to be sure that I was never abandoned. And if that meant following my husband up off into the mountains, or to India, well, I would do that because as a child, that abandonment had been so traumatic that, as you know, as we move through our lives, working through those issues, we try to repeat them. Exactly, exactly. And try to heal them in whatever the very best way that we can is. Use the best tools and resources we have, right? Exactly. Exactly. And so up until that moment, abandonment had been terrifying to me. And I also want to clarify for those of you who might be like, he wasn't abandoning her. He was going up the mountain. Mazel tov, if that's your experience in life. For some of us, like someone leaving can literally, you know, to use the word trigger, it can make you feel as if you're in a different timeline where you are being left. And it's not just fear of missing out. It's who am I when that person's not here? And trigger is exactly the word, although it's become a little bit overused these days. But that's exactly the word. He was going off to the mountains. But I had had issues with people going off to work or off to school because until you've healed those core childhood wounds, life keeps triggering us. And so for me, abandonment was one of those triggers. Him going off to the mountains and leaving me in a place where I didn't know anyone. I didn't speak the language. I mean, I'm anxious about Jim going to the mountains and I wasn't even next to him. No means of communication. There's no way that my psyche would have been able to handle that. But you felt calm. That's what I was going to say. Exactly. In that moment, after this incredible experience on the banks of the Gunga River, that experience of awakening, of transformation, suddenly there were no more holes. The God-sized hole had been filled with God. God was now in that. There were no holes. and in place of holes was an experience of actually being whole, W-H-O-L-E, whole. And so he was welcome to go off into the mountains. And I had become, as you said, much more normal. That had been healed in me. It was a matter of, oh, he's just going to go off into the mountains. I'll stay here. I'll see him in a few days when he comes back. It's all perfect. You're trained as a scientist. that fundamentally defies all of the laws of science that we've been taught to believe in and build a world on. That when you say became, like the word became is like a process and there's movement and there's a beginning, middle and end. You were struck healthy, like you were struck serene and it stayed. Yes. Because I would be very surprised if I woke up tomorrow, like, you know, a lot of us say like, oh, I'm like a piece of Swiss cheese, you know, and like taking away my defects, like there's going to be nothing left. Right. So I would be very surprised if I woke up tomorrow feeling secure, not afraid, not less than, you know, the inner critic is like driving the bus that is my life. Right. I would be very shocked if that happened. But you also were struck peaceful because it happened through an experience of the fullness of self. The piece that would make you anxious about the experience of no longer being anxious would be the experience of, oh my God, what happened to me? So your mind would have divided the happening as separate from the self. Something had happened to me. Someone had waved a magic wand, fed me something, done something that changed me as separate from the happening. My experience, what happened was me. I suddenly had an experience of the truth of who I was, which was inseparable from this divine presence. And what it did was it transformed in that moment how I understood myself. One of the best ways of thinking about it is a very, very common analogy given in Vedanta of the rope and snake situation. So you see something on the ground. It's dark. You're terrified. Oh, my God, it's a snake. Oh, my God, it's going to kill me. Light goes on. You realize it's a rope. that thing on the floor no longer has the ability to make you afraid. You could turn off the light. You could step on it. But because you now know for certain it's a rope, not a snake, your entire relationship to it has changed forever. Kids wake up in the night screaming. There's a monster in the closet. Mom comes, turns on the light. It's a jacket on the hanger. It's just an alien. Easy. I like that one. Yes, that was funny. So thank you. What I was thinking was the jacket on a hanger. The child is no longer afraid. The light goes off. The kid's not going to again wake up and say it's a monster because the kid knows it's just a jacket on the hangar. You don't know me. My MBLX Breakdown is supported by BiOptimizer. As I've been reflecting on the past year, I realized that one of the best discoveries of last year was magnesium breakthrough and how it's had a really, really positive impact on sleep. Jonathan and I discovered it a while ago, and it's kind of become a non-negotiable in our nighttime ritual. Better sleep sounds simple, but the difference is real. 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And that voice they become a channel for, right? When we talk about a spiritual awakening, what happened to you is something no drug could do. No hospital could do. No healer could do. God is what filled the place that science, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, sociology, every field has tried to tackle who are you, what are you here for, and why is it so painful to be a human? And most of us spend our lives at every pharmacy in town, every doctor in town, every diet in town, every plastic surgeon in town. And that's what's so fascinating to me from a scientific perspective. Nothing changed and everything changed. Absolutely. And this is why, for me, coming from a science background, it's been such a fascinating and exciting journey because although in that moment, everything that I thought I knew was wiped away because the experience that I had had defied everything that I thought I knew. So over the years, what's been really interesting as science has developed is to start to see so much of a very interesting overlap now with quantum science and how much it's beginning to overlap with actually what spirituality tells us. because you listed a whole bunch of fields that did not have the ability to fix me. They got me to the place where I could manage my life. And that was exactly where I was when I went to India, where, and it's a place I think many of us are at, where we use, whether it's the local pharmacy, whatever it may be, but we use something external or our minds or a way of setting up our lives or our relationships to manage our lives, to turn the unmanageable manageable. But we've got, and I know I certainly had, a death grip on that management. So you're moving through the world with a death grip on life. And everything has to be just so because, hey, this is what you need in order to be able to manage it. And I had gotten to that place where I was managing. Your white knuckling life. Exactly. Exactly. I was managing my food and my meals and my relationships and my school. I was taking 21 units a quarter and getting A's and managing all of that. But no one ever said, hey, you can be free. Like this is not the highest goal. It's certainly better to manage your life than not manage it. But there is a stage, a possibility far beyond management. But all of the different schools of science that you listed can help us manage our life But where spirituality comes in is it says follow this path and you will actually be free because all of this suffering is because of false identification I mean, this is kind of core Buddhism, and I am most definitely not a Buddhist scholar or expert. in the Hindu Vedic tradition, but there's a lot of overlap. The Buddha, of course, was born a Hindu. And the core teaching around life is suffering. Why? Because of our false identification and the attachment with that identification. When I had that experience on the banks of the river, it blew apart my identification. I had walked down to the river with a whole host of identities. This is who I am. On a physical level, on a history level, on a personality level, on a neurosis level, on a success and achievement level, on a relational level. And in that moment, it wiped it all away. You are none of that. You are inseparable from this pervasive presence of the divine. And when that got wiped away, what are you going to what are you going to grab on to? There's nothing to be attached to because the very things I was attached to no longer were me. You open Hollywood to the Himalayas with I believe it's your guru's, you know, kind of example of this sort of freedom, you know, that is waiting. And you tell a story where you're asked, are you this pen? He says to me one day, early days, he picks up a pen and he says to me, you are not this pen. And yeah, I laughed like I'm a PhD student. I mean, there's a lot in the world I don't know, but I do know that I'm not the pen. And he looks at me quite seriously and he says, you laugh because you know you're not the pen. But you still identify as that physical body, as the history, as where it's come from, as what's happened to it. Even though I was no longer suffering, there was still a sense that had come back after those first few days of just melting and merging into the energy of existence. a sense of me had reformed. And he said, you still identify as that. And he said, there will come a time when you will laugh in the same way. When I tell you, you are not that body, you are not that history, as you do when I now tell you you're not the pet. And that's the core teaching of the spiritual philosophy. You know, one of the most core mantras, prayers that we chant says, oh God, or divine source, cosmic intelligence, lead us from the darkness of ignorance and illusion, the falsehood of thinking that we are this physical body that is born, that changes, that dies. And in that darkness of ignorance and falsehood, we suffer and we bring suffering to others. Lead us from that to the light of truth in which we re-remember that we are that which is never born and never dies. And I know that sounds really far out and kind of hard to grasp. A way of thinking about it is even just in this life, if you go back to the first moment that you can remember saying I, me, or mine. Most of us were around two. It's why we say terrible twos is it's when we start, the ego starts to have that sense of me, my, I. It's also when we learn no and we learn, you know, the difference. I am this autonomous being separate. Then you fast forward to kind of your teenage years and you think about some time during your teenage years when you identified I, me, mine. What did that mean to you? Where were you? Fast forward to a moment in your 20s and you can go decade by decade. coming back to what did I, me, mine mean to you at that time? Who was I? Who was me? What was mine? And you can go through all the decades of your life, and what you realize is what I understood as I, me, mine has changed dramatically from the time I was 2 or 3, then 11, 12, up till 54. It's changed dramatically. But the idea, the inner felt sense of I has stayed constant. There's never been a break in it. I'm just as able to go back and feel I, me, mine, even though it meant something totally different. That consistency, that thread that weaves through all the changes of the body, of the roles, of the relationships. That's that sense of I. But we believe that it isn't just in one incarnation, in one changing body, but that it actually stays life after life. It's beautiful and very freeing. What happened when your husband went to the mountains? Yes, he went to the mountains, I moved into Parmarthnikathan pre-cell phone days or pre-us owning cell phone days. And when he came back, he was quite distressed because I had already made that ashram my home in just a few days. He wanted to be tended to in a way that my mind and attention was no longer. I was certainly excited to see him, happy to see him, but not to the extent where I was prepared to abandon that which I had just begun to experience. He wanted me to move out of the ashram, to move back into the hotel. It was a push-pull, how much is she still mine situation. Also, he said something that many women, I think, and some men may be familiar with hearing, and he repeated it kind of a few times. He said, this is yours. Yeah, I don't want it to be about you. Like, it's always like, we don't know your, your given name, but it's always the that show. And I want my own thing. I want my own guru. I don't want your guru. I don't want to rotate around. And like, he says it a couple times. And I felt that sting of like, you saying I found something for us and him saying that's yours, not mine. That had been a dynamic in our relationship. He had definitely felt like I was the attention grabber, magnet of that. And that had been an ongoing issue. And so when he arrived back from the mountains after a 10-hour journey, unwell, you know, returned from this long odyssey, there had been an expectation, totally understandable, natural. He was my husband, after all, expectation that I would drop everything for him. But because of what had happened to me over the last week spiritually, God took away the need for you to do everything. Exactly. I had become so anchored internally. And so. Committed to living in this spaciousness. So when he came, I was super happy to see him. as I was also super happy to keep talking to the people that I was talking to standing in the middle of the ashram. It became this push-pull. I think that was really when he realized that this was going to be a lot more than he had bargained for. Now, it's important to mention when I had first had that experience and in every moment up until basically when he said, either do these things or our marriage is over, It had never occurred to me that this was going to be something that separated us. I really had thought he's on a spiritual path. He's looking for a guru. He's looking for an ashram. I have found it. It's obviously the right place. He will come to realize that as well. It will make him happy as well. After all, he was the one who had wanted this. I never thought about it as something that was going to be that or my marriage. But we had different dharmas. Our dharma was just not to be together forever. My dharma was to stay there, to walk a path of monastic renunciation. His path was to come back and start a fantastic business and get married and have two beautiful children and build a wonderful life for himself. So for us, that became the transition moment. But yes, so he did not take it well at all, as you can imagine. That was then when he said, you have to come with me up to Missouri. That was the Missouri half-life journey after that. He traveled around India for the next few months, sending me facts after facts, back in the days of faxes, facts after facts about the women he was sleeping with, who were, you know, real women and able to meet him on the level that he wanted to be met by a woman. Did that hurt in your new state? Because I'm curious, like, how profound was this spiritual awakening? Yes, yes. Like, did you have jealousy? Did you have hurt? What did it feel like? I had zero jealousy whatsoever. Zero. I was so happy. And I remember, but this had begun even earlier. When he said to me, you need to come with me to Missouri or our marriage is over. I remember so vividly walking into Swamiji saying, I was cracking up. and I said, he says that if I don't go with him, our marriage is over. And I know that I should care, but I don't. And Swamiji said, go to Missouri with your husband. Like he made me go. Otherwise, I'm not sure if the fascination about a half-life would have been enough to actually get me to go. But with my guru now saying, you must go with him. Okay. So I had zero jealousy whatsoever. What I did have, though, was still a sense that he knew me better than I knew myself, which had been the dynamic of our relationship. He was an expert in everything, including about me. And so when he said things like, this is not really a spiritual experience, and you are not really, you know, the things that, you know, you think have happened to you, because in my mind, he was the expert. And you need to be with me and scathing faxes, 14, 15 pages of them about why I was making such a mistake, why this wasn't real spirituality, why all of that which had happened to me wasn't real, etc. And I walked into Swamiji one day holding this 15-page scathing fax, and I said, I am so sorry. And I was very hurt. I said, I am so sorry. I am not really having authentic spiritual experiences. My husband has just explained to me why they're not really authentic spiritual experiences. And I've wasted all of your time. And I am so sorry. And I'm going to be packing up and leaving today and going to meet my husband. So your husband was still able to tap into that old software that had been installed that said, I don't know what's best for me. I don't know what's right. I'm really broken. I need a lot of help. And this is a fantasy. This is some sort of psychotic miniature break. Well, you know, when you said how difficult it would be for you to digest if this had happened to you, it was like that for me. After I had that first experience and then after Swamiji sent me into the river to give up all of the anger and all of the pain that I had about the childhood sexual abuse, about the abandonment. and to really forgive. After that, I thought there is no way that what just happened just happened. And I did something that maybe you will be one of the few people to whom this doesn't sound crazy, which is I looked for it. I thought there is no way that I actually have just become free of all of the neurosis, all of the bulimia, all of the depression, all of the anxiety around this abuse, around this abandonment. It must still be there somewhere. And I spent the first several months trying to re-trigger myself because the bulimia went away immediately. I literally, and I was someone who I know you've read the book, but listeners have not probably. I was not a weekend bulimic. It was not, oh, I ate too much at a party on Friday night or Wednesday night. I'm going to throw it up so that I don't gain weight. I was in and out of hospitals with tubes and IVs because I was throwing up 20 times a day. I was super, super sick. My doctor had said, this is going to kill you, literally. So this, it was not a joke. I was not a half-hearted bulimic. And it disappeared. I went from being someone who, as I said, was managing white knuckling, meals, food. I was physically getting okay, but mentally still completely wrapped up with it. I went from that to sitting in a row on the floor, cross-legged, with young, beautiful boys studying the Vedas, chanting and singing and clapping as our food is served to us out of metal buckets with big ladles that you have no idea what it is until it lands on your plate. And the rule is you have to finish everything on your plate. I had never had a rule like that. My mother was anorexic. And so we did not have a clean plate club in the house. And the idea of you must eat what's on your plate was brand new to me. And yet, I had no problem with it. Sat in this row with these beautiful people, clapping, singing, food is dumped on my plate, I'm eating whatever is served. And it literally went away. So fast forwarding back, was he able to tap into that? He was able to tap into the pattern of thought that said, I must be wrong. I am the broken one. And I was actually on such a weird level, so glad to have him now finally explain that what I thought had happened hadn't happened. And so I bring it in to Swamiji and I say, he has now explained to me why this was not really a spiritual experience. And I have wasted your time and I need to leave from here and go to meet him. And Swamiji looks at me and he says, he says it so you believe it. He said, that's it. He says it, you believe it. And it was the very first time that it had ever occurred to me there was an alternative, that he actually could say something and I might not believe it, that he actually might not be the authority or expert on my life or my experiences. But I had never actually thought about that. And so Swamiji says, months of deep, powerful, real experiences of God and one bitter husband is going to make you doubt all of that. I exhaled and laughed and realized, of course, how I had gotten caught up in the illusion, in the drama, in the story, in the ease of giving away my power to someone who was all too happy to be the expert of me. Also, that's a trauma response. Of course. It's fawning. I mean, essentially what we're doing when we give away that power is we're saying, as long as I don't upset the apple cart, none will fall out. And it's a fawning response. It's even if you're hurting me, don't leave. Eventually, of course, there was an ultimatum of come and meet me in this place or our marriage is over. And by that time, it was a couple months later, I had gotten to the point of realizing that what I had found was so much realer, truer, deeper than anything I had ever experienced in my life, that although I really loved him and wanted to stay with him, if this was how it was meant to be, so be it. And yeah, there was not one moment of jealousy, as crazy as that sounds, not even a moment. All I wanted was him to be happy, was just, oh God, make him stop suffering. And you give a dedication to him in the book. Like that truly, like that's what it's like to see that piece through. From the time that you have this unbelievable experience on the banks of the river, you're now in this state of ecstasy. Have you met your guru yet? What was the moment where you see this man that ultimately you dedicate your life and he supports you on your new path? Yeah, we've jumped all around the plot, which is actually fun and beautiful because the journey, although it has a plot, is so much more than the plot. So it fun to jump around But yes so on a plot sequence I come to Rishikesh have this incredible experience of transformation and awakening on the banks of the Ganga, first day that we got there. About a week later, I finally met Swamiji, who would become my guru. For the first week, I was going down. we were staying in a hotel and I was going down to the river every day having these incredible experiences. During that week, I had walked through Parmarth Nikiton as just a pathway to get back to the hotel we were staying in and had heard a voice, hence the reference, that said, you must stay here. And in my entire sphere of reference, the only people who heard voices were schizophrenics and Joan of Arc. And I was certainly not Joan of Arc and certainly hoped I was not schizophrenic. And so I ignored it. And I kept walking. And I heard it again. And I looked around me. And there was no one. And it did not sound like an inner voice. it sounded to me like someone from outside had spoken. And I look around and no one. And I was just about to ignore it for the second time when I remembered the vow I had taken on the airplane to keep my heart open. And the other side of the vow was if I couldn't keep my heart open, that I was going to go back to California. That even though I had not registered for this semester of my PhD program, I could still easily start to get practicum units. I could start to put together my research and dissertation. There was a lot of work I could do that was meaningful. And so I had created this situation by this vow in which either I had to keep my heart open or I had to get back to Delhi and get on a flight to San Francisco because I've always been very tough with myself, especially around truth. And I don't let myself off the hook around truth. And so there was no way that I was going to pretend I hadn't taken the vow, pretend that I forgot about the vow, pretend that I hadn't heard the voice. And so when I heard it the second time and remembered the vow, I thought, all right, Well, I don't want to go back to America. And I looked up and I saw a sign that said office. And I went in and said, I want to stay. I obviously did not tell them I've heard a voice. And they said that I needed to meet the president. And Parmarathnikathan now is one of the largest interfaith international religious centers of India. We have a thousand rooms. We are, you know, the place that when King Charles, then Prince Charles lands in India that he comes to first with Camilla. It's a very, very internationally renowned place. But it's very traditional. And 30 years ago, it was super traditional. It was founded in 1942. And it's a very old traditional lineage. And at that time, you could not be a random foreign girl who just walks in and says, hey, I want a room. Like a white girl from America. Exactly, exactly. So you needed permission. And nobody there was going to grant me permission. And they said I needed permission from the president. And he was currently out. And so I said, well, when is he coming back? And they said maybe tomorrow, which not knowing Indian culture the way that I now do. It could be two months. Now I know that. Now I know that. Now I know that it really meant, I actually don't have any idea, but I'm going to say something that sounds good and hopefully you'll be happy hearing it and then you'll go away. I actually thought it meant maybe tomorrow. It's called how we can do it all the time. Well, you guys are going to fit in perfectly in India then. So I came back the next day and I said, is he back? And they said, maybe tomorrow. And this went on for many days. And finally he came. And in my mind, I had pictured president, a guy in a suit and tie with a briefcase who was going to judge the merits of my worthiness in some way. And it had never occurred to me that he was this incredible spiritual master. And so when I get brought in to see him, expecting to see a man in a tie at a desk, and instead I see this saffron robe clad, extraordinary being of light sitting on the floor at the front of a room surrounded by lots and lots and lots of people. It was most definitely not the scene I had been expecting. and immediately though, I felt this incredible presence of love. But of love that was not centered. It was not the, oh, I saw you across a crowded room type of love. It was a love that just pervaded. It was like I had stepped into an ocean and y'all get wet. and everybody who walks into the ocean, you know, gets wet, not by any merit of their own, but because the ocean is wet. And I walked in and I could just feel this presence of love. And finally, we get to go up and meet him. And I explained that I want to stay. I also don't tell him I've heard a voice. He says, welcome home. He says, I am going to be here for the next week and then I'm going to be leaving to go out of town again. But he said, don't worry, I'll tell them to give you a room. You're always welcome. This is home. And I walk out still thinking I was going to go off to the mountains with my husband. and I get right into the middle of the ashram where we have this hand pump that's the central pathway of the ashram, and I'm just about to turn to go out toward the hotel, and my feet literally get stuck to the ground of the ashram, and I look down, and I feel like I've stepped in crazy glue, or quicksand or chewing gum or something. And there's nothing. And I'm barefoot. So I would feel it if there were. Nothing is there. But I can't pick up my feet. And I then think, oh, my God, I've contracted some awful disease. Like one of those vaccinations I got didn't work. And I've got polio or I've got tetanus or I've got some awful disease. and then I realized, eh, diseases probably don't come on like this. I had no pain. It wasn't that I had lost feeling. I just couldn't pick them up. And I then think, all right, maybe they've just fallen asleep. I was sitting on the ground. I'm not used to sitting on the ground. That's not how feet work, though. Exactly. But you're trying to make sense of it. Of course, I'm trying to make sense of why can't I pick my feet up off the ground. There's nothing on the ground, and why can't I move them? and you've got to picture the scene. I'm in this huge ashram, center of the ashram, white girl from America, of whom there were very, very few those days in all of Rishikesh, none in the ashram, and I'm flailing my arms. I mean, as it is, I attract a lot of attention, just the fact that I was young and white, but now I'm literally flailing my arms, trying to move, and my legs, I can't move them, cannot pick my feet up off the ground. And a few moments later, a group of kids comes running down the central pathway, just playing tag, and instinctively I move back. And I realize, oh, I'm free, I can walk. But I cannot move forward. And the scientist in me then says, a moment I'll always be proud of. It says, well, then, okay, we have just walked backwards. You must have some illness in which you can only walk backwards. Did you try to turn around? I did. That's exactly what I did. That's exactly what I did. I was like, I will just spin around and walk out of this ashram backwards. And so I spin around and cannot move in that direction. and my mind says, all right, we've just eliminated three of four possibilities. You cannot walk out of the ashram either facing forward or facing backwards. We know that you can move away from the gate moving backwards because I had just done it when the kids ran by. can you move back in the direction of swamiji's room facing forward because i now was facing forward i had spun around to walk out backwards this is very scientific of you exactly but literally i mean this was how my brain works every possibility and i mean i had already tried to activate the whole neuroscientist in me to get the legs to lift up i had really tried to picture the whole thing in my brain for the amateurs out there there's not a part of the brain that controls backwards walking. Right. Obviously. Obviously. No. And when I first was reading this in the book, I was thinking like, oh, which particular, you know, like which, where is it going through the ponds and how is it? But I was like, no. But for those of us who have been overeducated, it's our default mechanism. I'm going to figure this out. There must be a rational scientific explanation to this, because if not, it doesn't exist. We live within the confines of if it can be measured, if it's got a size, a weight, an area, a volume, if you can see it under a microscope or in a telescope, if you can cook it in a crucible on a Bunsen burner, it exists. And if not, then it doesn't. So my intellectual educated brain was trying to sort this thing out rather than just surrender to it, which, of course, is what spirituality teaches us is science is great for everything that can fit in a beaker or be seen with a telescope or microscope. and there is an entire scope of existence out there, including something as basic as love that you cannot measure, but that no one doubts exists. And what spirituality helps us learn, and what it took me a while to learn is, these are the moments where you just surrender because there is no figuring it out. The mind cannot work beyond the mind. And if you're having an experience of heart, of spirit, of soul, the mind cannot do it. The mind only can function in something that is separate from it. If you can hold something at an arm's length, a checkbook, a balance sheet, a map, a list of pros and cons, another human being who I'm going to objectify on the basis of looks or gender or what they're wearing. Mind can do that. But the mind cannot do self. And those are moments where it requires surrender. So still in my brain at that moment, I realize, okay, well, so the only possible explanation remaining is that I'm supposed to walk forward back in the direction I just came from. And of course, I could easily. So I walk back into Swamiji's room. And all of, you know, maybe five, six minutes have passed since I walked out, telling him that we were going to go off to the mountains. And I would come when we got back, even though he wasn't going to be there. And I walk back in and say, I think I'm supposed to stay now. And he says, welcome. So that's the chronology of it. I want to pull out for a second and explore what do you think was happening if you have to put a meaning to it. And some of the ideas that initially come up for me are there's some sort of God force that has a plan for you that you don't know about that is guiding you or in some ways controlling you because you weren't able to make a choice that your mind wanted to make. And if that is the case, to what end? Meaning, is it simply so that you could have the experience of this unbelievable divine transformation, removing the ways in which that you had experienced addiction and suffering and trauma? Is it to be a messenger? Like, why is this happening to you? And what sense do you make of it as it relates to all the other suffering in the universe? Great question. This is what we talk about as Dharma. I definitely see it as a divine force energy, but you could also simply call it universal intelligence. Interchangeable. You don't have to believe in the presence of a divine who actually interferes in our life. You can simply think about it as the same intelligence through which a caterpillar at some point stops crawling on the ground and climbs a tree and then goes on a branch and weaves a cocoon and sits in the cocoon for a stipulated period of time and then breaks free and somehow miraculously knows how to fly even though it's never flown. You could think about it as the same wisdom in which a seed underground waits until the ground is no longer frosted over from winter until it's soft enough in summer to actually sprout. Because somewhere there's an intelligence that says if I try to sprout now in a cold, hard, frosted ground of winter, I'm going to die as I try to break through the ground. So there is an intelligence in nature. And it's not necessarily an anthropomorphized intelligence. No, not at all. That's not what we're talking about, that seeds are thinking. That's not the point. No, it's a sign. It's a signal. I'm not saying that in the cerebral cortex of the seed it makes a decision. But there is an intelligence through which it all operates. And in some species, it's going to arise as just a chemical signal. Maybe it's a sign. Who knows? I have no idea how the caterpillar knows when to get up off the ground and climb the tree, but it knows. And that is the same divine intelligence that I think of as that which gave me the voice that said, you must stay here. the experience of not being able to walk out of the ashram, all of these experiences were to push me toward walking my dharma, my purpose. And we all come onto earth with dharma, with a purpose. And those purposes on what you could consider universal dharma is all the same. every single one of us is here with the highest purpose being to realize experientially the truth of who we are to wake up out of the illusion out of the narrative out of the story of my drama my history my body my relationships my bank account into the truth of soul spirit consciousness whatever word we use. But then we all also have individual dharmas. And this is where you have so many situations where parents or teachers or culture tries to make musicians be business people. And no matter what a good business person they may be, they are miserable. Or I see it so frequently in Indian families, tries to turn so many people into doctors or engineers who want to be artists or want to be musicians or want to be kindergarten teachers or gardeners or whatever. When we are not living our highest truth, there is suffering. So I think that the purpose is twofold. I think the purpose was on the individual level of let me find my purpose. But I also hope that the bigger picture was through that, that my purpose, my dharma was not just I should stop suffering, not just I should overcome my identification as a survivor of abuse and abandonment, as someone who was depressed and addicted, but that actually through that experience, I should help others. And that's been the exquisiteness and the incredible joy of going from someone who just had her own healing to actually being able to be someone who shares and who offers and who can teach tools and techniques and ways of coming into presence that enable others to be healed. Because my journey, my dharma was to go literally from Hollywood to the Himalayas. But you don't have to take that journey. we're gonna hit pause here on our conversation with sadviji there is so much more in part two that we cannot wait for you to hear she's going to talk about the power of holy and sacred places she's going to talk about the physical process of letting go of anger and trauma how do we know if we're actually doing a spiritual bypass in our healing journey she's going to talk about what's actually holding us back from spiritual experiences and a spiritual awakening happening around the globe right now. What will it take to get to a tipping point where humanity wakes up? Head over to Substack for content you can't get anywhere else. And we cannot wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Sudviji from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's Maya Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.