The Adventures of Bindi Girl: (2012) Read Online Free PDF Page B

meditation shrines set against the backdrop of the jungle. (Yes, it is a jungle. I barely managed to avoid the excessive elephant droppings.)
    I could only dream of what it was like to be cavorting around this once-splendid ashram during the late 1960’s with the likes of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. It must have been a crazy, wild, beautiful scene, and this definitely would have been where I hung out! Upon my own discovery of it, I felt a sense of sadness that it was all over, abandoned. It’s almost as if it were too good to be true.
    I was told that most of the White Album was composed here. One can see the old “Number Nine” room where the Beatles apparently stayed, and the song “Dear Prudence” was apparently written for Mia Farrow’s sister, who was holed up in meditation all day. The Fab Four were doing their best to beckon dear Prudence away from her relentless internal quest. “Won’t you come out to play?”
    If one listens closely to the sounds of India, it’s easy to understand the land’s influence on the Beatles’ music. I recall the odd background sounds and psychedelic samples, especially on Sergeant Pepper’s . It’s India! It’s the strange and beautiful concoction of the call of the chai wallah, the incessant bicycle and motorbike horns, the ashram chants over loudspeakers across the river, the clanging Shiva temple bells, the blaring “Bollywood” background music, and so on. Nowhere else on earth is there such an assortment of sounds that actually has a taste, a smell, and a visceral feel—a veritable rock ashram.
    Who could blame the Beatles for being so enchanted?

The Rishikesh Effect
    2 nd of January, Rishikesh
    It’s happened. I have dropped off the spiritual deep end of India.
    For two weeks now, I’ve tried to leave for south India and escape the cold, to no avail. After several thwarted attempts (power outages, rainstorms, missed connections) to buy a rail ticket, I finally surrendered to the fact that—for now—Rishikesh is my home, and I’m not supposed to leave. A yogi friend of mine, Max from the UK, calls this common phenomenon found among folks who get pulled into the vortex, “The Rishikesh Effect.”
    It’s been exactly one month since my arrival in Rishikesh. I seem to have crossed a real milestone. I now feel such a connection to this place, to the locals, and to the rare remaining foreign “pilgrims” inclined to muscle through the cold weather, staying beyond the tourist high season.
    In this holy village, I am having experiences that are seemingly cliché or perhaps simply par for the India journey. Seems as if I’m having a spiritual tune-up of sorts, in spite of my rational mind. In hindsight, I can see that the first few weeks here were really about resistance. I didn’t want to admit to things I was feeling in my body and my heart. I have now determined that my normal mental faculties are useless in India! As the rational mind seems to have turned itself OFF, my real guides are the heart and intuition.
    Things are happening in the energy centers in my body, called chakras (“wheels”). It is believed that the human body has seven main chakras, starting at the base of the spine and going up and out the top of the head. From the bottom up they are root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown chakra, in that order. A decade ago, I tuned into and worked with these chakras in my own body; in the past few years, however, I have been out of touch and lost interest, focusing on other important elements on my path.
    Now, what I am experiencing in Rishikesh is a full-blown reawakening to these energy centers in my body. The heart chakra is opening and expanding, which is significant in that it is the unifying center between grounded earth energies and the higher realms—an integration vortex of sorts. As I live day to day here, I experience spontaneous “burning” in my heart—and, no, it’s NOT the chilies in the Indian food. It