Guruji by Guy Donahaye

Author:Guy Donahaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429980425
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

New York City, 2000

Graeme Northfield

Graeme Northfield began yoga in Australia after learning that he had a rare spinal condition. After completing his training as a nurse, he went to Sri Lanka, where he met Heather Troud’s mother, who asked him to look in on her daughter in Mysore. In Mysore, Graeme met Gary Lopedota, who introduced him to Guruji.

How did you become interested in yoga, and when was that?

I met some Tibetan Buddhist monks when I was still at school—[I was] probably about sixteen or seventeen—who were giving an introduction to meditation. I went along to that. What they were talking about sounded familiar and I was interested, so I started doing the meditation that they prescribed. Then it was some time, maybe a couple of years after that, I was training as a registered nurse, and I came across an Indian sect who were, actually, Ananda Margas.

They had meditation and chanting and I was really interested in that, and started looking at their way of life. But at the same time, I was still looking at other Christian religions, and Catholicism, and sort of exploring for myself. I guess what started me questioning was that my father died quite suddenly when I was fourteen. This hit me with a lot of questions: What’s it all about? What’s the purpose? Why do we die? What does it mean? So that’s what set me off questioning: What’s going on?

Around the same time I met the Buddhist monks, I had pneumonia, and when they did the X-rays, it showed that I had a certain condition in my spine that, they said, there was nothing they could do about. Basically [they told me] to sort of give up. As a teenager, it was like, “Sure, I’m going to give up everything!” And then later on, around the same time I was nursing, I experienced a lot of back pain from that condition. So I started exploring, and got into chiropractors, acupuncture, etc. I soon realized that this wasn’t the way, and that I had to look at this myself, and what I could possibly do. So I started exploring exercises for strengthening and ways to go about it. I’d always been physical and enjoyed working my body. So I was working at that stage on how to strengthen and work my back so I didn’t have the pain.

Getting to India was interesting. I was finished with my nurse training and was working in a hospice where people go when there’s no more effective treatment for them. They’re going there for the purpose of dying. And that whole scenario brought up much more of that feeling and questioning and “What’s going on?” One of the patients there had a picture of Swami Muktananda in her locker. I was really drawn to it. I started asking questions, and it so happens that the nephew of this elderly lady was a journalist who had sent her that picture because he had been assigned to interview Swami Muktananda during his tour of Australia.

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