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The Making of a New-Age Therapist 203
meditation. I had prayed to Baba that he teach me how to make my practice worship so that I would never forget him. I had picked up skills and insights from my psychiatric study, but they had been limited. Now I wanted to sacrifice all that and take Sai Baba as my only teacher—to apply his teachings in every aspect of my profession. It just wouldn’t do any more to refer to other teachers—Freud, Jung, Maslow, Perls— during my professional life and Sai Baba only while at home in my devotional room. It was time to transform my work into worship so it served as part of my continuous devotion to him.
Yet it was early in my relationship with Baba, and I fumbled about and made mistakes. During this hour with the graduate student, I was feeling spacey and high from my breath-control exercises and meditation on so-hum, and was using the client’s energy to heighten the inner experience of meditation. And so if he got angry, confrontive or defiant, I chose not to address those feelings directly, but tried to use the energy from these feelings to promote and intensify the meditation. I was finding a way to connect feelings with breathing and actually breathing the feelings in, to energize the meditation.
This young man began sensing my distance and got angry. And I, trying to see the outer world as delusion, and to see Baba behind every act, and seeing everything as energy to breathe in for the meditation, said to myself, “Oh how wonderful, this is not really a young man getting angry at me, but you, Swami, showing your love in another form. Let me use this wonderful energy to promote and intensify the meditation.” I sat there smiling. My client became irate—”What are you smiling for?” Again I said inwardly, “Oh swell, you’re going to test me—to see if I’ll get caught in appearances and forget that all is you. But, no, I’m not going to react—I know this is just a disguised way of your expressing love—and I’m going to use this lovely energy of love to increase my meditation and my immersion in your glory.” I continued smiling peacefully.
Now, as I look back, I see that I was naive and foolish—a child learning how to walk and stumbling. So engrossed with the inner world, I had lost some sense of proper relating to the outer. My client, not understanding my seeming indifference, became angrier and angrier, “You’re just like my parents! Why are you taunting me like this—not answering—just smiling—Why are you acting like this?”