Excerpt
Nice Girls Don't Win
1Flight“C
atch her!” my mother whispered urgently as she pushed my two-month-old body out of a window to my father who was waiting for me below.
“Got her!” he whispered back.
My mom dashed inside to grab a few hastily packed belongings before running out in the pitch-black of night to the car where my dad had me buckled into my car seat, engine running for our quick escape from the commune they’d been a part of for the last five years.
My parents had both been young seekers. My mother, twenty-five, and father, thirty, joined the Kashi Ashram—or “the Ranch,” as everyone called it—before I was born. As was the mode in the late 1970s, the community was informed by Hindu spirituality, yoga, and mysticism. Perhaps the most unique aspect of the commune was its fierce, almost otherworldly female leader, Ma Jaya Bhagavati. (More on her later.)
Before they joined the Ranch and met each other, my dad was living in New York City, and my mom, thousands of miles away, was living in Berkeley, California. My dad, Mike, was an explorer with sparkly blue eyes, brown moppy hair, a lean, muscular physique that worked well with his shorter stature, and a sharp, sarcastic wit. As soon as he could, he hitchhiked his way out of his quaint hometown of Colebrook, New Hampshire—population two thousand—and landed in the vibrant buzz of New York City for school. He’d also gotten work as an EMT. Dad’s a Scorpio and by nature loves diving into the depths of the mysteries of life and death. So, before he even met the Ranch’s leader, he’d already forged his way into the inner circle of the yoga and meditation scene in NYC. He told me that he would lose all track of time in his apartment, sometimes meditating for up to seven hours a day and entering trance-like states without the assistance of psychedelic drugs.
My mother, Gale, grew up in a very religious Catholic household. At church every Sunday, she gathered in community and participated in ritual communion—ingesting the symbolic body of Christ, confessing her sins to the priest, and becoming one with the mind of God through call-and-response chanting in Latin. She said the rhythmic, repetitive chanting would induce a sort of hypnotic trance and provided her earliest experiences of a deeper spiritual connection with transcendent one-ness—and she loved it. All was well until her teen years, when the constraints of Catholicism became more apparent and suffocating. At one point, she recalled wanting to join her friends at the Freemason Princess Ball, but the Catholic church forbade her, saying the Masons were against Catholics. When she left Catholicism she noticed a void in her life, and she longed for connection with the mystery and magic of God.
Mom’s Irish roots blessed her with mermaid-long dark-brown thick hair, hazel eyes, and a milky complexion. Her widow’s peak makes her face look like a heart, befitting a woman who lives to serve. Her kind and giving nature is balanced by a strong critical mind that prevails in high stakes, life-or-death situations. Not that she stays calm in these moments, but she certainly knows exactly what to do to contain the fire and put it out. She left her own hometown of Alameda, California, at eighteen, and at nineteen years old was working at a drug rehabilitation center in Berkeley, fielding calls and saving young lives with her every waking breath. Her nervous system was wound tight from her turbulent childhood and the intensity of her days at the rehab center, and she desperately needed some relief. Berkeley was then—and still is—a place that draws in great minds who wish to explore the cutting edge of altered states of consciousness. So it makes sense that Ma Jaya Bhagavati prioritized that stop during her big recruiting tour for the Ranch.
When the raven-haired, mysterious guru came along and held her events in their respective cities, my parents went. They said they each had extraordinary mystical experiences in meditation with the Guru and felt called to learn more. The cultural climate of the era supported this kind of seeking. People were disenchanted with the rigid and divisive policies of religious organizations and there was a growing distrust of government institutions. The outrage over the Vietnam War and the “free love” movement of the hippies of the 1960s was fertile ground these spiritual teachers used to grow their communities. The once stable structures people had relied on for decades were crumbling, and they were reaching for anything they could to help them find something to rely on—something to help them make sense of life and have direction for the future.
Born Joyce Green in 1940 into an impoverished Jewish family in Brooklyn, Ma got married and became a housewife in 1956. After having three children she struggled with obesity in her thirties and enrolled in a weight loss clinic. There she learned some simple breathing exercises for weight loss. After practicing the breathwork at home she claimed to have visions of Jesus Christ.
Ma skyrocketed to fame in the New York City new age scene after sharing her big news: Jesus had visited her and activated her spiritual powers. Ma’s best friend, Bina, verified that she’d personally seen Ma’s bloody hands with the marks of stigmata. Though only Bina had witnessed the mystical event, word traveled fast that there was a new guru in town. Ma connected with highly regarded spiritual teacher Hilda Charlton, an American transplant from London. Hilda was a dancer who’d studied Eastern mysticism and meditation in India for fifteen years before moving to New York and was teaching what she’d learned to hungry seekers. Her lectures had grown organically from two students in a tiny apartment to thousands, filling churches on the Upper West Side of the city. My dad was one of Hilda’s early students. Like my mother, his Catholic upbringing had opened him up to the world of ritual, mysticism, and miracles. But, when the Catholic priests wouldn’t allow my teenage father to participate in a high school singing event because it was hosted by Protestants, he bailed. He wanted to be a part of something magical that would help him transcend his little worldly existence, not one that got caught up in petty labels. A religion that wouldn’t let him sing with his friends seemed ridiculous, no matter what kind of blissful afterlife they promised.
When my dad found Hilda, he found the transcendence he was looking for. She helped him learn meditation techniques where he’d sit for hours and lose himself in ecstasy. Hilda also shared her knowledge with Ma, the budding spiritual teacher, and introduced her to spiritual seekers in the area. Dad was interested.
Later, Ma said that the well-known—and recently deceased—Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba had chosen her as his student from the beyond. She said she’d had visions of him and in these visions he was sharing sacred teachings with her. Baba’s teachings revolved around the need to release attachment and ego to realize God. He said that “a learned man and a fool are alike as long as there is attachment and ego in the physical body.” He advised people that the ultimate freedom in life comes from surrendering to God’s will above everything. Ma touted this message when promoting herself to her followers as a guru, the direct link to God. And, in this way, she gathered devotees like moths to a flame. Devotees like my parents.
Ma’s teachings blended breath techniques that induced altered states of consciousness with interfaith philosophy, tantra, and meditation. She had some powerful, time-tested tools and potent charisma. The physical teachings, meditations, breathwork, and yoga she shared had their roots in Kriya yoga, a style of yoga that has produced powerful health benefits and altered states for centuries. In other words, she wasn’t just making this stuff up from thin air. But a lot of her lectures and philosophies were emotionally manipulative fabrications based on her need to be seen as special, aimed at gaining power and control.
During her spiritual awakening and rebirth as a teacher, she relinquished her role of housewife, divorced her husband, and engaged in a controversial romantic relationship with another one of Baba’s devoted students, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass). Ram Dass was crazy about Ma, and enthusiastically endorsed her as the real deal. Sometime into their relationship, however, Ram Dass became disillusioned by her. He ended the relationship by condemning her powers as fraudulent.
