Invitation to Participate
Dear Community,
I am writing to invite you to participate in a project that I have actively been working on for the past year and that I have silently been called to work on for the past seven years. My project is a novel about a spiritual journey that works to detail the struggle and joy of encountering deep experiences in a modern world. It is a story born of my own experiences with Kundalini Yoga and Meditation.
I recently graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor’s Degree in The Study of Religion and Creative Writing. During my time at Harvard I was investigating the use of language by mystics, novelists, poets, and writers of magical realism in order to understand how to best bridge the gaps between thoughts and experiences. What I have found is that there is no steady bridge. Rather there are stepping-stones between the realms and one of the most powerful stepping-stones is the written story.
With this information in mind, I began work on the book about a year ago. In April of 2007 work on this book abruptly stopped due to intense pain in my arms. I was diagnosed with acute tendonitis and was promised it would clear quickly if I rested. With rest, summer solstice and a juice fast the pain did not clear and I began to pray for help and for answers to narrative questions that I felt were also creating the physical block.
By winter solstice the pain was gone and I received the answer to one of my biggest narrative questions. That is, how do I write about Kundalini Yoga and Meditation, White Tantric Yoga, Yogi Bhajan and capture the essence of our experiences? How do I express the invisible dimension of experience? The answer came during a meditation and it was quite simply that the community must have a voice within the book and this voice will use the metaphors and symbols that are the closest to this invisible dimension. What I learned, then, was that this book could not just be about my story.
This new voice will speak with certainty in the same way we would speak to each other, assured that there is an invisible presence that guides us, that our Teacher is with us. This voice will draw forth the images of our community that have been found in dreams with the Master. This voice will speak of what it has seen in meditation. This voice is your voice.
In turn, I invite you to share with me your stories, so that I may collect the visions, metaphors, meditative experiences, and profound dreams and use them in the book.
Thank you for being my family.
With all my love,
Guruvir Kaur