Wanderers in the spiritual supermarket

Spirituality is a thriving industry in restless Mumbai, where the average seeker finds it difficult to leave the high-paced, high stakes life at the door when she signs up for the long journey to inner peace. And if any of a multitude of routes can lead there, Mumbai’s spiritual terrain might look like a maze to someone with not enough time or commitment. For a populace used to getting by with low attention spans, hopping from chanting to meditation, Zen to Tai Chi, and Tai Chi to Sri Sri is easy. And so many options, and all the detours that they allow, say those who have tried, is not always a bad thing.

Hunt for quick fixes
Dr Daisy Vasanji Shah of Spiritual Arts, Mulund, was a software engineer. She now teaches Vedic astrology, Vastu, aura reading, past-life regression, Reiki, and numerology. For her, it all started with curiosity, just like with those who now come to her to “understand their energy.” Ninety per cent of them, she says, are only looking for quick fixes, and when they don’t find them, they drop out of class.

“Restlessness is there in every field, and it also comes into play in people’s spiritual practice. But where sticky karma is involved, quick fixes are not possible,” she says.

Her reasons for skipping from one practice to another, however, have to do with restlessness of another kind — of not finding all her answers in one place. “Once, I had a vision about my future self. I didn’t know what to do with it. My Reiki master could not help me. But I was restless.” So she went and met another Reiki master who suggested she specialise in aura reading. She had more visions, which her current practices could not explain. So she also learnt astrology.

As she went from one thing to another, she met other people with similar experiences, who like her, could only make partial sense of their experiences with any one method. “After a while, there are questions that arise in a certain practice that can’t be answered therein,” she says.
 
Mind over matter
“Different schools have different practices, and different reasons bring people to different schools,” says Hariharan Raman, a trainer at the Pranic Healing Foundation of South Mumbai, Tardeo.

“It is like your food habits. Some like Indian, some Chinese, and some prefer continental cuisine — there is no ‘one size fits all’.” And not all schools can cater to the needs of the intellectually mature and objective city person who questions everything and needs to be convinced about the value of a practice. So, in a way, spiritual shopping is like trying to sample a cuisine and making up your mind if it will suit your palate.

There are many people who would like to understand, analyse and validate practices before they come to conclusions, rather than being told that you need to do this because this is good for you. So if a school/practice does not offer freedom of thought, then they tend to shift.

Plus, not a lot of people have the perseverance to stick to one practice for long. “The very fact that people do not understand that seeking God takes time and patience — can be seen as symptomatic of the times. Though a person’s life is fast-paced, it takes nine months for a baby to be born. Nature follows its rhythm,” says Raman. Eventually, he says, it’s about the process of finding a school that fits one’s needs.

Kabir Nagranee, musician, spiritual coach and co-founder of Life is Beautiful, an outfit that organises meditation sessions, says just meditation is not enough. It’s important to be aware where the meditation is taking you. And that, he says, is a process that requires perseverance. While the mind, with its references gathered in the physical world, constantly wants to feel secure and certain – for instance, “people wait for Deepak Chopra’s next book, though all his books say the same things” – the very idea of meditation is to dissolve the mind. “Otherwise one will keep getting distracted.”

The seed is always there
For 45-year-old Ravi Vaidyanathan, an officer at IL&FS Ltd, spiritual hopping began 15 years ago, with yoga. Till now he has gathered techniques from an Art of Living course, Brahmvidya, Reiki, a Landmark Forum course, and is now contemplating Vipassana. Brahmvidya, he says, taught him ways to test his physical strength and stretch his limits.

With Art of Living, he understood his body better, awakened his senses, and increased his concentration levels. Reiki showed him the healing power present in an individual. Landmark Forum taught him ways to take the wheel of life in his hands and drive it the way he wanted. “Whether you are standing in the east or the west, you ultimately want to find your way home.

I take in all the positive elements taught in each of these teachings to make me a much more positive
individual,” says Vaidyanathan.

“The essence of each of these transformational workshops is to
believe in oneself and I have learnt to do that in the real sense of the term,” says Shally Khedkar, a management consultant. She adds, “These lessons work only if one applies them in real life.”

She herself has gone on from Reiki to Feng Shui to Landmark Forum to Who Am I workshop to Past Life Regression therapy, and even checked out Vipassana. “I was searching for an answer about myself that was not written in the management books I had studied,” says Khedkar. Now, 10 years into spiritual hopping, she says, “I am not as restless as I was earlier and I am
clearer about what I want to do in life.”

In the final analysis, everything ends up complementing each other, says 59-year-old VK Prabhakaran. When he was a child, he was drawn to Swami Chinmayananda, but only for his oratory. 

The philosophy was too dry for him then. Then he met Mata Amritanandamayi, in whose “love energy everything is transformed”. But he wanted something deeper, so he went for Tibetan meditation. You go through teachers and practices, “but the seed is always there, it germinates on its own time”.

Even so, a major reason why so many keep shifting their spiritual allegiances is that they have very little disposable time. To meet their needs, every practice is packaged into neat little weekend courses that are fragmentary. “Nowadays, people are learning in fragments, and then, when their knowledge is incomplete, they feel incomplete. They don’t have a comprehensive base to reference their experience on,” says Dr Shah. 

The city energy, says Dr Shah, although it makes it hard to settle down and go deeper, brings out another quality in people. It leaves them with no choice but to stay alert. “It could be a defence mechanism, but it’s a good thing. We should use that quality in spiritual practice in order to raise one’s self-awareness.”