about
Art and Spirit:
I am on a spiritual path and have been for the past six years. My journey has been unpredictable, tremendous, horrendous, and ultimately enlivening to the core. With tears, laughter, meditation, yoga, travel, and art I have moved through years of emotional trauma, encountered strange energies, found the ability to heal, and come to much joy. I am now integrating all that has happened, attempting to collect the varied pieces of my existence and funnel them into a stream of creative expression.
This website is the most tangible piece of that process. In it you will find excerpts of my creative writing which is at the center of my creative practice. There are also drawings I have made and photographs taken from my travels. The blog is a space where my insights and stories about this transformative process can be engaged on a day-to-day basis.
My spiritual teacher is Yogi Bhajan and so I practice Kundalini Yoga and Meditation which he taught. He gave me my spiritual name: Guruvir, which means princess with a brave and wise spirit.
My approach to writing about spiritual growth:
Though my practice is rooted in Kundalini Yoga and Meditation, I do look to other traditions for guidance and inspiration. I have read extensively in the New Age genre of books, as well as in the texts of saints and masters like Osho and St. John of the Cross. I value direct experience of the unseen and so I have also dipped my feet in the waters of other traditions in order to encounter experience at all its horizons. With participation in ritual, pilgrimage and prayer I have found that though the avenues are different and the experiences varied, there is an invisible presence that remains the common denominator.
Therefore, though most of my writing centers around the experiences that have been most powerful for me, those with Kundalini Yoga and Meditation as well my experiences working with healers in the school of Sat Nam Rasayan and in Mexico, I write not to convince you to do what I do, but to encourage you to find your own way. For it is ultimately your journey, through your own life and there are signs for you to read and commitments for you to make. It must happen in your own time. What I write, then, comes from a place of sharing, because I know that being on a path can be an isolating experience, and having a map can be comforting, useful, and energizing. I hope reading might help those on their path to remember to laugh with a process that can be consuming and treacherous at its worst and beyond bliss at its best.
All of our paths seek to bring us closer to ourselves, and in doing so we get closer to each other, closer to the source. There are many rivers, but ultimately just one ocean.
My use of the word “invisible”:
I use this word often, because it encompasses the crux of my experiences in meditation. I find that there are other words that try to label this place, this knowing, this bliss, but what they all have in common is that no else can see them. So I go with that, because then we can all agree on something. Plus, it points to the mystery.
Biographically:
I am from South Florida, graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a major in the Study of Religion, and a minor in English and American Literature. I spent my time there developing my skills as a writer, living in a wonderful vegetarian coop, traveling in the summers to India and Mexico and struggling to balance a super-stressful existence with my spiritual practice. Sometimes I was successful and other times I was not. I now live in Brooklyn and am working on a novel, teaching yoga and healing. Most, I am happy.
I was born to a Jewish family, raised in a New Age home, but only actively started my spiritual journey six years ago when I was a senior in high school. It was at that time that my stepfather died unexpectedly. The resulting grief pushed me inward, and I began looking for ways to go through it, seeking the light that I sensed was beyond it. I made it through my first year of college and then decided I needed a year off to process this grief, to find my path, and to meditate. I moved to Los Angeles and began studying Kundalini Yoga and Meditation; I worked for the Sikh Dharma and White Tantric yoga and began studying Sat Nam Rasayan with Guru Dev Singh. I began to see the depths to which I needed to heal myself. I returned to school with tools, a new world orientation, and a commitment to pursuing my destiny and helping others pursue theirs.