Performing the Gayatri Sadhana
One amazing thing about performing the Gayatri sadhana is that you notice a general rise in your body temperature within the first few days of starting your purushcharana . Don’t be alarmed if that happens. Chanting the Gayatri mantra stimulates the solar channel in our body. Savitur Gayatri, the mantra we are concerned with in this book, has since times immemorial been chanted while standing in the river. For, savitur also means sun. Offering libations towards the sun while standing in water is an age-old practice.
Gayatri worshippers would chant this mantra while standing in a river, lake or an ocean, with water sometimes up to their knees, waists, or even up to their chests, depending on which lineage they belonged to. This is not just physical but psychical heat. The Tibetans call it tummo . I have found that what they do with a set of yogic practices to stimulate tummo , Gayatri mantra accomplishes a nearly similar outcome plus more.
From firsthand experience, I can confirm this mantra generates heat in your body. Once when I was in Canada, I had some time to myself – this was before I renounced. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I had a meeting on a Friday; I heard from my client that the meeting would be postponed to the following Tuesday. I thought, I now had Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday free, and I didn’t want to sit at home and do nothing or just play golf, etc.
Intending to make good use of my time, I decided to go away and do a little purushcharana of the Gayatri mantra. It obviously wasn’t my first sadhana – I had done many purushcharanas by then and I knew how long I could sit, etc. So I figured I would chant the mantra up to 12 hours a day: three stretches of four hours, interspersed with three-hour breaks. I looked online for suitable places to avoid chanting at home or in a hotel room – I wanted a quiet, secluded place.
Fortunately, I found a rental caravan advertised on some website, so I left a message right away but no one called back. After waiting another couple of hours, I found two more places and left messages on their voicemails. No one called back. Meanwhile, it was evening and I went to play badminton. I thought why to waste my evening waiting for a phone call. It was better to get some blood circulation going.
Three hours later, when I finished and turned my phone on, there was a message on it from the caravan lady. It was nearly 8 pm by then. I called her back and she said, “Okay, you can take that place, no problem. But nobody lives there; it’s totally isolated. Are you aware of that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And there’s no running water.”
“No problem.”
“No flushing toilet either.”
“Uh… okay… no problem.”
“It’s next to a lake, far into the woods.”
“Sounds pretty nice!”
“Come to my place first,” she said, “give me the money, then I’ll give you the key.”
It was only 50 bucks a day.
“Fair enough,” I said to her.
I went home and said to my brother – and sister-in-law, who always took care of me as a mother would – “I am going away for a few days.” They were quite used to me heading off on the spur of the moment. My sister-in-law quickly said, “Let me at least pack a quilt for you and something to eat.”
I said, “I won’t be eating anything; don’t bother packing any stuff for me.”
I drove for hours. This place was quite far, and I put it on my GPS. It was way off the beaten track, and the GPS was going haywire. I was feeling bad for driving my brother’s BMW on these unpaved roads. Somehow, I managed to reach the owner’s place after midnight. I knocked on her door, and she said, “I am quite intrigued, because just last week I lost my sister, and she used to spend a fair bit of time in that caravan. Then I got a message from you saying you would like to rent my caravan for meditation. This must be God’s mysterious way and not a coincidence.”
The caravan was 20 minutes away from her place, she told me, and that it was not locked and that there was no key because no one went there. But now that I was at her place, I could give her the rent first.
“Tomorrow morning you can drive back here,” she said. “I can give you bread, milk and juice or something.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t be eating anything. I have a bottle of orange juice.” I had decided that I would take three sips of orange juice a day.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Well, if you change your mind, just give me a call. Don’t die, you know.”
I chuckled and said, “I’ll be fine!”
I went to the caravan and lay down. I thought I would chant for an hour but I was very tired from first playing badminton and then driving for four hours, so I slept after a mere 20 minutes and woke up three hours later, at 4 am. I went to the lake – just remember, I don’t know how to swim, so getting to the lake and filling a bucket for my bath while making sure I didn’t slip into the water was not easy. Nevertheless, I managed. I bathed outside and took another bucket of water back to the caravan, and started my chanting.
The day went well. At night, during my rest period, I felt somebody wearing a hood was looking right at me through the little window of the caravan.
“Who’s there?” I said. Nobody answered.
“Who’s there?” I said again. Still nobody answered.
I flashed a light through the window, but in the pitch darkness outside the flash just glared back at me from the window pane. I heard some noise outside as if somebody was running. I got up quickly and opened the door of the caravan, and in the meantime, whatever this figure was just ran away; I couldn’t catch a glimpse of anything.
Now that I am up, I thought, I might as well do some more chanting. So I chanted the whole night, and did so also for the third night. When I ended my sadhana on Monday morning, something beautiful happened. Before I tell you what happened, let me say that I don’t want you to believe that something supernatural occurred, although I have experienced many such things in my life. This was simply beautiful. I had to do a little yagna . Now for the yagna , I did not have the firewood, nor did I have the permission to light a fire there. Also, I wasn’t carrying any ingredients for the yagna . I just wanted to light a little fire.
Luckily, I had taken some matchboxes with me. I broke off the heads, and the matchsticks became my tiny pieces of firewood. So I did a little yagna outside and when I finished and looked up, there was the most glorious sight of 40 or 50 lotuses by the bank of the lake nearby. They were in full bloom, with pink blossoms and sea-green pads, bathed in gentle sunlight – it was just delightful. I felt that my sadhana was complete. I have no clue why I failed to notice them on the first two days.
I should not use the word sadhana – it was more a mini anushthana but because it was the Gayatri mantra, the heat in my body was so great that I did not know what to do. I lost all my appetite because when there is excessive heat in the body, you tend to lose your appetite. I drove back home, and I didn’t feel hungry that day or the next day. I just wanted to lie down but my mind was active, and my body energetic. I really couldn’t do much.
The Gayatri mantra is one of the reasons I could live in the Himalayas wearing robes as the kind I wear – all cotton. This is actually more clothing than I wore in Badrinath during my sadhana. I was just in my loincloth, and the cold there did not bother me in the slightest. This is because the Gayatri mantra fires up the solar channel in your body.