“Student-centered, not curriculum-centered.”

Nitai is also the author of two books on childhood education: The Art of Joyful Education and For Goodness’ Sake: Supporting Children & Teens in Discovering Life’s Higher Values.

Q: What was it like to work with the filmmakers at Ananda Village?

Nitai: I didn’t get a chance to talk at length with them about the school because I was only there for a weekend’s filming, and we were busy with the shoot most of the time. But Elisabeth Rohm, who plays the lead role in the film, was excited to find out how her daughter Easton, who was five, could benefit from the Education for Life principles we follow in the schools.

The children were enthusiastic about being movie extras until they realized that every scene had to be re-shot twenty times, whereupon they rapidly lost interest. (laughs) Children are spontaneous, and movie-making isn’t.

Q: The segment on the schools was a whirlwind overview. Is there anything you wish you’d had more time to say?

Nitai: After the first take I realized I’d have to throw out about eighty percent of what I wanted to say. In the movie scene, I walk between two buildings while I explain the entire philosophy of Education for Life. It’s a one-minute walk, so I could only say a tithe of what I hoped. (laughs) I realized you can’t go very deep in a movie, because audiences want action and a good story.

Q: Now is your chance to go deep.

Nitai: Okay. I regret I didn’t have time to talk about consciousness in education. In our schools, we work with the child individually, and focusing on their consciousness gives us a foundation to help the individual child.

In the book, Education for Life, Swami Kriyananda talks about how a child’s consciousness can be “heavy,” “ego-active,” or “light,” or a mix of these qualities. The idea of a spectrum of consciousness is easier to understand with concrete examples. Let’s assume we want to help a child develop more wise judgment. When they’re at the “heavy” level of awareness, their energy is low, passive, and they tend to misunderstand. And even if they do understand something, they tend to interpret it in a lazy, superstitious manner. A heavy consciousness implies a low-energy mind that’s narrow, and always looking for the easiest way to get by. It wants to sleep or gaze about and do nothing. It’s consciousness in an undeveloped state.

When a child’s energy rises to the ego-active level, they’re starting to realize that wisdom exists. But even at that stage, they don’t care. They may even mock wisdom. “Oh yeah, those people are soooo spiritual, ha-ha.” They’re somewhat more aware, but they aren’t ready to take wisdom seriously and act on it. If you suggest a wise course of action, they’ll probably push back. “Well, I have my own values.”

Q: They still lack sensitivity?

Nitai: Yes. The notion of considering a wise course of action hasn’t opened up for them yet. They haven’t learned that there are options that will give them more of what they want.

As children rise to the “light” level, they’re starting to understand that there’s more to life than material things. They’ve usually had some hard knocks, and they’re starting to ask questions. They’re anxious to avoid any more suffering, so they begin to want to understand how life works. As they rise out of the ego-active level, there’s a respect for wisdom as a way to avoid the hard knocks and be happier. There’s a sense of looking around and trying to weigh the consequences of their actions and understand life.

When they reach the highest level, they’re starting to be able to live by higher principles. For example, they’re able to reflect on what it’s like to be unselfish, and understand that it makes them feel happy.

Q: In your book, The Art of Joyful Education, you mention Leonard Kohlberg, a Harvard researcher who studied children of many cultures, and how they all pass through the same stages of increasing moral awareness. Does Kohlberg’s scale relate to the terms you’re using?

Nitai: I wrote that book in response to a request from a professor in the late 1970s. My master’s thesis was on the eastern approach to evaluating children’s values, and he said, “You need to tie it to a western model. Go study Leonard Kohlberg.”

I had a strong feeling that Kohlberg must have touched on the eastern view at some point, because his scale matched so perfectly. But he framed it in western terms, with data from many countries.

He talks about the idea that some people are very moral, but they’re very rule-bound. They’re the people who obey all the traffic laws and pay their taxes on time, because obeying rules and laws gives them an enjoyable feeling of belonging and being good citizens. But a step beyond that stage we find people who follow more inwardly directed values – they do the right thing because it feels right and harmonious and personally fulfilling.

Q: In Education for Life Swami Kriyananda talks about how our sense of values evolves. He says it’s not really possible to rise to a higher level of awareness until we’ve realized “with inner knowing” that it’s what we want. In the Living Wisdom Schools, how do you help a child who’s lazy and passive realize that energy is a tool to get what he wants?

Nitai: At the bottom level, they’re not even capable of thinking like that. (laughs) They don’t have a motivation to summon the energy to act and get something better. So you have to provide it. You do it by something we don’t like to call “punishment” in our school, so we call it “removing privileges.” (laughs) It’s the idea that “If you don’t get out of bed and get to school on time, there won’t be any dessert in your lunch box.”

It has to be something they value, and you have to spend time working with them at that level. So, okay, now they’re getting up and getting to class on time. Then the next step is where you offer them an external reward for putting out positive energy. “Bribe” is too harsh a word, but as Shakespeare says, you get them to “pretend a virtue if you have it not.”

If they don’t have kindness, you reward them when they perform kind actions, until they begin to act that way. At first they’re doing it for the reward, but after they’ve done it a few times they’ll start to think, “Hey, I feel better when I do this.” At that point, you’re over the hump and you don’t have to reward them anymore. You can appeal to their desire to feel good.

But they don’t have that experience at the start. And if you say “Johnny, if you share your doughnut you’re going to feel better,” they’ll say “No way – I’m not giving up my last doughnut!” (laughs)

You can’t motivate children beyond what they’ve experienced. At the higher levels of awareness, you can say “Remember how you shared your doughnut and you told me how good it felt?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, now you’ve got some candy and you can get the good feeling again.”

Q: Does this relate to how they apply themselves in school? Do they evolve from being uninterested, to working for a reward, to working because it’s enjoyable?

Nitai: Yes. If they’re fixated on being a four-point-oh student, they’re probably at the ego-active stage. The lighter students aren’t motivated so much by grades. They’re motivated by what inspires them, and what they feel excited about learning. Typically they’ll have lots of things they want to explore, because they’ve learned to love learning.

At Ananda College we have quite a few students who come to us from that stage. Many haven’t excelled in high school or junior college, because the system of external rewards didn’t make sense to them. The materialistic value system – “If you get good grades you’ll make lots of money” – didn’t match their awakened sensitivities, so they might have dropped out or gotten mediocre grades. And when they enter a situation where their individuality and creativity are valued, they blossom and they’re excited about learning.

Q: My college graduating class is having its 50th reunion. I remember how, when I took courses that fed my search for meaning I got excellent grades, but otherwise I wasn’t terribly interested.

Nitai: Who wants to memorize a bunch of facts and spout them back? We named our university Ananda College. “Ananda” means the bliss of the soul. And we gave it the subtitle “Higher Education for Higher Consciousness.” We’re entering our 10th year, and we’re still putting the pieces together, but it’s been an excellent experience.

Q: Are the students happy with the education they receive?

Nitai: We’ve received wonderful testimonials. Mainly the students talk about the experience of discovering who they are, as individuals. It gives them a place to launch from and learn about life and other people’s realities, and expand their awareness of the world.

The testimonials aren’t the usual “chestnut tree and wishing well” college memories. I’ll share what one student wrote:

“It has been the most blissful, challenging, beautiful and expansive experience in my life, by far! Every day is filled with joy and wonder…. Academically, all the classes are stimulating and directly relevant to my personal, spiritual life. I can instantly apply everything I learn in the books.”

Q: As the founder of an alternative school, what do you see as a better direction for education today?

Nitai: We call our schools “student-centered,” as opposed to “curriculum-centered.” There are major implications in those terms. “Curriculum-centered” means that someone sets up the system, and the teacher’s job is to make sure the students meet the demands of the system. The curriculum is set before the student walks in the door, and it has nothing to do with the student. Everybody who walks in is expected to do the same thing, mandated by the committee that sets the curriculum.

A “student-centered” curriculum says that when the student walks in, the teacher starts with them. By getting to know the student, the teacher can adapt what happens in the classroom so it addresses each student’s needs.

It means the teacher never gives the same class twice. Every time you walk into the classroom, you’re adjusting the lesson plan to the student’s particular needs, at that time.

It sends a message that the students are respected as people, where the other system tells them they don’t matter so much, because the system is what counts and they’re just fodder for the mill.

In education, one of the better-known directions today is called “personalized learning.” It’s a big deal in the charter school movement, and it’s definitely a move in the right direction. But it’s a bit narrower than what Education for Life does, because it doesn’t include all of the personal dimensions of the student.

In Education for Life, we deal with the intellect, which every school at least pretends to understand. But then we also deal with the body, which everybody thinks they understand because they have sports and PE. But what hardly ever gets addressed is the heart and will, and an even deeper understanding of the body and intellect. That’s the richness of Education for Life.

Something else I wish I’d had time to say in the film is that it works. (laughs) There’s a page on the Edforlife website dedicated to this, with an overview of our test scores, showing how the system proves itself in academics.

Q: I interviewed Gary McSweeney, the middle school teacher at Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto. We talked about how the children learn math. Gary explained that the students are a lot more engaged because they’re taught as individuals.

He pointed out that the class is more efficient, because the teacher doesn’t have to nag the kids to learn, or manage discipline problems. When I spent time in the class, I saw the system at work. Even though it was the end of the school year, when kids are supposed to be impossible to motivate, they were working with enthusiasm and focus.

Nitai: Again, it works because we respect them, to the extent that we’re willing to adjust the curriculum to serve their needs.

Q: Parents often want to know how the system can address the individual student without losing academic rigor.

Nitai: “Academic rigor” is kind of an interesting term.

Q: Because it suggests rigor mortis?

Nitai: Oh yes. (laughs) Everybody knows that if you’re doing something you’re excited about, you’ll work your tail off. You’ll put in extra time, and you won’t complain, because it’s what you want to be doing. And for more than 40 years we’ve shown that education can be that way.

If you’re beaten down by a curriculum-centered system, and then you leave school and realize you’re free to learn what interests you, you’ll take off. People will spend endless hours working on a hobby they love, and they’ll achieve excellence as a byproduct of that love.

As for “rigor” – it’s true that there’s a certain value in perseverance, concentration, and the doggedness to plow through. But if you’re just being rigorous because you’re trying to meet the demands of a system, it’s probably not education. It’s probably indoctrination.

Q: When people worry about rigor, there seems to be an implication that we’d better brush enthusiasm aside, because feelings aren’t rigorous.

Nitai: It’s amazing how deeply that thought is ingrained in our culture, that education should be painful. Helen Purcell, director of the Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto, told me about a mom and dad who took their child out of the school because, as they put it, “He can’t be learning anything. He’s much too happy.” (laughs)

Even after forty years, we still have to persuade parents that education can be joyful. In Palo Alto, they have a motto “Where learning and joy come together.” It’s true. People learn best when they’re highly enthusiastic, and feel respected and included.

I visited the Portland school for the year-end ceremony, and two sets of parents separately approached me. They said, “My child was so depressed and sad today, and when I asked them why, they said, ‘Because it’s the last day of school, Mom, and I can’t go tomorrow!’”

Further Reading:

• Education for Life system
• Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto
• Education for Life Book

An interview with Mary Kretzmann, on what it was like raising and supporting a family in a spiritual community. 

Q: In the movie, you describe how the community supported you at the time of your husband Tim’s passing. Are there other things you wish you’d had time to say?

Mary: I wish I’d been able to talk about raising spiritual children. I think it was a special calling of ours to help set an example for spiritualizing family life, at a time when it’s sorely needed in the world.
Tim was a peaceful, joyful, spiritual man. His passing was sacred and blissful. It came soon after we completed our sacred journey together of raising our children in a spiritual way. He died when our youngest son was 19 and had recently left home.

The heartache of losing a dear husband and father has moved us to live up to our spiritual potential every more deeply. It powerfully emphasized for us that the meaning of life is to go ever deeper in God. We know this from our spiritual teachings, and now it feels as if our lives can never be quite as comfortable, and that the only reliable comfort will come by trying to feel God’s bliss.

Q: What were some of the things you did to raise spiritual children?

Mary: One of the most important things was that we read spiritual stories to them regularly, along with saying bedtime prayers. From the time our first child was very young, it became my hobby to collect spiritual stories from many traditions.

Another thing was that we involved them in the spiritual life of the community. When Peter was thirteen, I said, “We want you to go to the regular adult Sunday service.” We had been attending special weekly services for school-age kids, and we felt it was time for him to be part of the adult community.

He said, “You want me to do what?!”

I said, “Yeah, we want you to go to Sunday service. Or you can come up with an alternate program of focused spiritual study.”

He said, “Gosh, it’s easier just to go to service.”

He did, and we felt it was an important influence. I said, “The cops would be at my door if I didn’t send you to regular school, and I want you to have some spiritual teaching, too. You can choose Sunday service, or you can come up with another plan, but it has to be at least an hour every week.

We made that rule for all our children. When Krishnabai was young, she would scour the village newsletter for spiritual gatherings – she liked to go to baby showers and other events where there would be chanting and prayer. I would let anything count, but it had to be at least an hour a week, like clockwork. I started Krishnabai at 18 months. We would attend a chanting kirtan on Sunday afternoon together, and I remember how much she loved it.
As the years passed, I realized that the weekly satsang was one of the most important influences we could have on them as parents.

An amusing thing happened when David was nine. For several Sundays, he asked if he could go to the purification ceremony instead of Sunday service, which starts an hour later.
I said, “Okay.” But I was thinking, “Why on earth does he want to go to purification? He isn’t even old enough to sin!” I mean, what was he purifying? (laughs)

I finally figured out that the Sacramento Kings were in the NBA playoffs, and he wanted to watch the games. He was just nine, but he figured out a way to follow the family rules and get what he wanted.

Q: It seems you were fairly strict with your kids.

Mary: I realized that spiritual child-raising isn’t only about the lovey-dovey-kissy stuff. It’s about the mother having some will in her children’s lives. We didn’t force our children to go to service, but the required weekly hour of spiritual instruction, added to our regular daily prayers and spiritual stories, became a powerful influence in our family.

For one thing, the children got used to being part of the spiritual life of the larger community. We gave them an opportunity to express their free will in a positive way, but not in a purely rejecting way. This is where I would often see other parents cave in. If the child didn’t want to go to Sunday service, they didn’t know how to address the situation with creative alternatives.

I was raised Catholic. It’s popular these days to bash the Church, but I got something positive from the experience. I learned to love God, Christ, and the Divine Mother. I felt that love deeply in my heart. Every night after bedtime prayers, I would see a mystical light. It made me feel happy and loved. This went on for my entire childhood. All I knew was that the light came from my loving Jesus and Mary. It was only when I learned of Yogananda’s teachings that I realized I’d been seeing the light of the spiritual eye as a child. And when I had children, I wanted to offer them opportunities to awaken the love of the Divine in their hearts.

I was aware that the church gave my parents a framework for a spiritual life within the family, and I took some of that structure from my childhood memories. I didn’t force my kids to go to church, but I feel very strongly that having a degree of form and discipline greatly helped them.

I felt it would be a disservice to “wait and see” how they might or might not develop a spiritual life. Or let them decide for themselves whether they wanted to be “spiritual” as they grew up. That’s a common thought in the New Age movement. I think we should water the child’s spiritual nature from what we’ve learned. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a parent?

From the lives of the saints we learn that spirituality isn’t about rigid dogmas; it’s the foundation for expansive attitudes such as kindness, friendship, and compassion.

My goal wasn’t to raise kids who would join our path, but to raise kids who loved God. The stories about God that we read together had to be real. They had to be about saints who loved and knew God, and it didn’t matter what tradition they came from.

They learned a great deal from the saints of different paths – Buddha, Krishna, Christ, Catholic saints, and saints of India. I wanted them to grow up so that if they ever felt they had to rebel against me or against Ananda, it wouldn’t even occur to them to rebel against God, because it would be like rebelling against the air.

That was my goal. And then it was a question of working with stories and prayers over the years, and ensuring that they spent spiritual time with the wider community.
We raised them on our path as a foundation for a universal spirituality. I would start them in the cradle, lovingly saying prayers aloud to our Masters. And I would watch for any signs that might help me understand this particular soul’s spiritual inclinations.

Yogananda said we should start children on the spiritual path before age three. I believe he meant we should say prayers and share spiritual stories with them, to awaken a love for God and the saints in their hearts.
I was always on the lookout for opportunities to help them gain insights into questions that would be bound to come up in their lives. A small example was when Peter and I watched a Whoopi Goldberg movie together. He was nine, and we watched Sister Act. Until then, we had barely watched any PG-rated movies, but I thought, okay, I’ll watch it with him.

When the mafia guys started beating up Whoopi Goldberg, I could see that he was getting upset. As adults, we know it’s comedic, but he was alarmed that those men would beat up someone as nice as Whoopi Goldberg. So I paused the movie, and I said, “Do you know how to watch a scene like this?”

He said, “Do you say it isn’t real?”

I said, “No, it’s very real. In fact, it’s way more real than this. The way you do it is you say, ‘Drugs are what pays this guy’s salary. Drugs pay the mafia’s salary.’ And you say, ‘I’m never giving money to those guys! I’ll NEVER DO DRUGS!’ That’s how you watch a scene like this.”

His eyes got real big, like, “Okay, Mom.” And we went back to the movie. I don’t think I was overdoing it, though others might disagree.

When they got a little older and I would pause a movie, they would beat me to my point. But I must say, if you have any moral standards, you really can’t watch many movies nowadays.

You have to take a stand on drugs starting when they’re very young, even in a community like Ananda. We live in a rural area that’s been plagued by drugs over the years, and it’s out there beyond the community’s borders. I modeled my example on the strong mothers in the ‘hood who were determined to keep their kids off drugs. That’s how strong I felt I had to be.

It’s tempting to think, “Of course my kid’s spiritual. After all, we’re living in a spiritual community.” But my thought is, “Yes, and the sharks are just outside the property lines.”

I have a great deal of respect for one of the mothers at Ananda. Her son was energetic, adventurous, and could sometimes be a handful. When he told her he wanted to go to the local high school instead of the high school in the community, she said, “I have to let you know, honey, that if you do drugs we’ll have to find a separate place for you to live.” She said, “If you make that personal choice, we will always love you, but you have to know what will happen.”

He said, “What?! You would choose Ananda over me?!”

She said, “No, honey, you would have chosen drugs over us.”

The easy part of spiritual parenting is the first twelve years, when the parents have more influence. When they reach the teenage years, the need for guidance goes on, but the focus changes, and at a certain point you may only be able to help them by praying for them. Until then, we can consciously water spiritual seeds in our children, through our prayers and by sharing daily spiritual stories.

Even though I’m done with the parenting phase of my life, it continues to have power for me, because it was so blessed. When Tim passed, I felt him telling me, “Our family was beautiful. See it as a cosmic expression.”

Helen Purcell is director of an EFL school, Living Wisdom School, located in Palo Alto, California.

Q: The first Living Wisdom School was started in 1971, in the rural environment of Ananda Village. As director of a Living Wisdom School in a major metro area, do you find you’re able to serve a more diverse population?

Helen: The first question many parents ask is how we can accommodate our very diverse student body. On the spiritual side, we have children from Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian families. We’re also diverse in race – we have Asian, Hispanic, Native American, African American, and Caucasian children. And finally, we have children from broadly diverse economic backgrounds.

But the demographics of our students aren’t actually a concern, because our approach to children levels the playing field. We’re acutely aware of the individuality of each child, regardless of their background. We’ve demonstrated that if you honor the individual child, including those who are academically gifted, wonderful things can happen.

We’re deeply aware that our first task with each child is to love them, see them for who they are, and encompass them in an energy of acceptance, support, and love. This approach cuts across demographic fences, and it’s firmly embedded in a school culture of kindness and compassion. As a result, we’ve seen tremendous growth among the children, often bordering on the miraculous.

Here in Silicon Valley, many families are highly intelligent, and strongly motivated toward performance. When we tell parents that our first consideration is to love the child, there’s often a disconnect for them, because it’s so far outside their own experience. Everything they know tells them that a successful school is one that enables the children to get A’s on their report cards and be accepted by a prestigious high school.

Q: Spending time in the middle school classroom, I saw many examples of individual attention and kindness. How does a system that’s based on loving the children work for them academically?

Helen: When you find yourself in an atmosphere of acceptance and support, it frees you to become better. It’s not just for the students who need help meeting the academic norms. We’ve had our share of students that we might call prodigies, and they aren’t free of issues. They may have no problems meeting our academic standards, but there’s almost always some factor that’s preventing them from being as successful and happy as they could be.

I’m thinking of a student who took advanced calculus in eighth grade. In terms of his intelligence, he was obviously in a class by himself. In fact, we had two exceptional middle school students in math that year, and we had teachers who could challenge and help them. However, that boy needed to learn that he wasn’t the center of the universe. When he arrived, he was very abrasive, because he was so mentally quick, and he’d been used to receiving a ton of special attention. He had to learn to value others who weren’t capable of doing math at his level.

In his four years with us, he became a charming young man, and it was all because of Gary, our middle school teacher, who took an approach that I think was brilliant.

Among other things, Gary encouraged this boy to tutor the other students who needed help, and it ended up humanizing him. The other students loved having a peer that they could go to with questions. And it didn’t affect his academic performance; in fact, it energized him, because he discovered a sense of belonging and being valued at a human level for his teaching skills and compassion.

When I had him in my language arts class, his skills were amazing. His rough drafts were often final drafts that only needed minor polishing. He had an amazing, high-energy mind, but Gary taught him to laugh and discover how his intelligence could help him succeed in the context of his life and his search for fulfillment and happiness.

I ran into his mother recently, and she told me he’s doing extremely well at one of the Bay Area’s most prestigious high schools. She laughed because she said she has trouble keeping up with him. He’s written a commercial computer program that he started working on in eighth grade, and he’s acquired investors and has a start-up in the works.

Thanks to the remarkable gene pool in Silicon Valley, we have amazing children like this boy, and our curriculum serves them very well, because we’re able to challenge them at their level. But our curriculum is about far more than academics. It’s about the whole person, and learning to bring your whole self to everything you do.

We had a girl who was very, very adept academically. After fifth grade, she announced that she wanted to transfer to a public middle school. We said, “Why would you want to do that?” I thought it was the wrong decision for her, and so did Gary. But her mother said, “I have to let her follow her path.”

She told Gary she wanted to be in a big school with lots of kids, and a swimming pool and tennis courts. Gary said, “But you don’t play tennis or swim.” She said, “I know, but I just want that.”

So off she went, and in May her mother called and asked if her daughter could return.

I said, “Great, I’ll put her on the list for next year.” But the mother said, “I don’t mean next year. She wants to come back right now.”

I said, “But it’s May, and school will be out in three or four weeks.”

She said, “Helen, she can’t stay there.”

So she came back, and she had lost some of her spark. It took her six months into the following year to come back to her genuine, enthusiastic former self.

She told us that she’d been placed in a class where the teacher was very rigid. She was capable of so much more than the teacher was asking, and she was very much more personally expansive. But the teacher was wedded to the state-mandated curriculum which says that on such-and-such day everyone will be working on such-and-such page of the book. So they locked horns, and the teacher heaped a ton of negative energy on her.

She was miserable, because it was all about the rules. And it’s not that we don’t have structure and rules, but we’re eager to do whatever it takes to help the individual child succeed and be happy, both personally and academically.

Q: The image strikes me that if you’re training only the intellect, it’s like trying to work as a carpenter without arms. When you’re doing academics, you can’t avoid bringing feeling and will and energy, and your hopes and dreams to it, and not only your reasoning faculties. I sense that you believe modern public education can be harmful if it lobotomizes these other faculties, cutting them off and telling the student to repress them.

Helen: Oh, yes. We had another little girl who was highly, highly intelligent, but she came from a school where she’d been severely bullied, and there was a part of her that was so closed down and tight that she could barely breathe.

During her three years in our environment we saw a remarkable transformation. It culminated in her graduation speech, where she described how she used to be afraid of everything. “And now,” she said, “I am not afraid of anything. I can stand up and talk to any group, no matter how big, and I can ask them questions. I can move through life.” She said, “I am ready for high school.”

Children who’ve been badly bullied are like the children of alcoholics. They desperately need to control their universe because it’s so dangerous and unpredictable. At Living Wisdom School she found supportive teachers and peers who helped her relax and feel accepted and safe so that she could learn. Today, she’s traveling all over the state as part of her high school’s debate team.

You want children to rise to their potential – you don’t want to confine them to somebody’s rigid standards, which are nearly always set too low.

Q: The assumption in education today seems to be that by focusing on the mind, it’s more efficient to transmit academic knowledge. Gary McSweeney, the middle school teacher at LWS, explained how it’s actually much more efficient if you engage the child, which means that you have to work with their hearts and who they are. Observing in Gary’s class, I saw how enthusiastic the children were for what they were doing, and it seemed far more efficient than the typical public school classroom where the students are reluctant and the teacher’s energy is absorbed in prodding them to learn and preventing them from getting out of control. In Gary’s class they were engaged and they weren’t trying to escape the situation.

Helen: Exactly. If you had come to a language arts class where we were doing Shakespeare, you’d have seen that we don’t simply read Shakespeare. We do reader’s theater, where they’re acting out the parts in Elizabethan English. If they don’t know the meanings of all the words, nobody cares, nor do we care if they mispronounce a word. We’re not there for perfection. We’re there for the enjoyment of something that’s terribly worthwhile and wonderful. By the time we’ve finished a play, even the students who had never read Elizabethan English are completely jazzed, because it’s a classroom culture of celebration and learning.

Then I take them to a professional performance where they can see real actors living the play magically. Some of them become perceptive theater critics, because they feel a personal connection and expertise, from acting the play. “This actor was really good, but that one could have done her character better because….” It’s marvelous – just imagine, these are 11- through 14-years-olds, and they’re thoroughly engaged with Shakespeare.

One recent student was deeply involved with drama. We went to see Taming of the Shrew, in a performance that was skewed toward a feminist perspective, and she picked up on it right away. She said, “I don’t think a male director could have done this.” This is a 13-year-old. She wrote a marvelous analysis of the direction of the play.

It could never happen in a culture that requires the students to plow through the book mechanically and “study to the test.” It’s possible because there is such freedom to be who you are. This girl was so excited about drama, and when she asked if she could write a critical review of the direction, I said, “Of course.” Another student might ask to write something completely different, and if it’s creative and expansive, I would encourage it. It’s very far from the “efficient” curriculum of standardized, flatly uniform assignments and testing.

Q: That’s a huge step – writing papers at that level. It’s exactly the training they need for college, much less high school.

Helen: Yes, it is. My goal for the eighth graders in writing is not only that they know how to put together a nice expository essay, but that it has their personal creative engagement, solid content, and a nice, readable flow. So I’m looking for things that I didn’t learn until I was in college. And when we’re talking about style and tone, it often comes naturally, because they’ve had a personal experience of the energy and beauty of the play before they start to develop their analytical papers.

Their research papers for history and science are very real. Sometimes they’re based on a combination of a class lecture, reading, and a field trip. When they’re studying Native American cultures, for example, they might visit a Miwok Indian village. During our annual school play, a huge, all-school production that’s based on an inspiring historical figure, they study the history and culture of the times. After the production, they write reflections on their experience, and they often reference their academic knowledge in describing their personal growth.

Learn more about Education for Life and the Palo Alto Living Wisdom School.

A new type of yoga, Ananda Yoga, is highlighted in Finding Happiness when Juliet discovers a spiritual form of yoga for healing and transformation in body, mind, and soul. She has a private yoga session with Gyandev McCord, the author of Spiritual Yoga: Awakening to Higher Awareness.  

Gyandev is a co-founder of the Yoga Alliance and director of Ananda Yoga, he is a writer, lecturer, travel host, and minister.

Q: You’ve taught Ananda Yoga for thirty years. How did you get started teaching?

Gyandev: I had been meditating for a number of years, and I took a hatha yoga class on a whim. The class was very physically oriented, which was perfect for me, since I was a physically active person. I loved it – until I realized it was detracting from my meditation. I would come out of the classes feeling mentally exhausted and strung-out.

I loved how my body felt, but my mind wasn’t liking it so much. It was only when I discovered Ananda Yoga that I realized there was an approach to the yoga postures that completely supported my meditation.

I took the Ananda Yoga teacher training course without any intention of teaching, simply to understand yoga better. When the course ended I dusted off my hands, said thank you very much, and imagined it was the closest brush with teaching I would ever have. But when the main Ananda Yoga teacher in the Bay Area left, I was asked to take her place.

I moved to Ananda Village and continued to teach, and when the position of director of Ananda Yoga became vacant, my name got filled in, and it’s been filled in ever since. (laughs)

Q: What is it about Ananda Yoga that helped your meditation practice?

Answer: Ananda Yoga brings together three key dimensions of our being – body, energy, and mind-spirit. The ancient philosophy of yoga maps out these connections in a wonderful way that tends to get lost if we view yoga as just a set of physical exercises.

Ananda Yoga focuses very specifically on the mental-spiritual-heart connections. It says, “If the positions of the body can make us feel better, how can we enhance the effect?”

Many people walk out of their first yoga posture class feeling, “Wow, this is great. Something’s really going on here. I feel so different.” They return in search of that experience, but the best results can appear to be random, outside our conscious control. Ananda Yoga asks “How can we participate in the process, and get the results of calm vitality, bliss, and uplifted energy as efficiently and reliably as possible?”

Ananda Yoga addresses how those three dimensions of our being – physical, energetic, interior – link up, and how we can supercharge the process of opening our awareness and finding joy.

The physical postures awaken energy, and with increased energy, it tends to uplift our thoughts and feelings. It’s a down-to-earth process that happens every day. You get good news, and your energy soars, and you straighten your posture and smile. When you get bad news, your energy crashes and you slump and frown. We experience these movements of energy all the time.

Ananda Yoga works from the other direction. It says, “Let’s use physical postures to influence our energy and mind.” It says “Here’s how we can we insert ourselves in the process and use our energy to feel as expansive and fulfilled as possible.”

Q: Is Ananda Yoga concerned with the search for happiness?

Answer: Very much so. Ananda means “joy.” It wouldn’t be called Ananda Yoga it weren’t concerned with happiness.

The sages of all ages tell us that the highest octave of our awareness is bliss. It’s who we are, and it’s what we’re aiming for, consciously or not. We can reap many benefits from yoga – calmness, peace of mind, more energy, and so on. But Ananda Yoga looks at how all of these feed into our search for ever-increasing happiness.

Q: If we aren’t following a spiritual path, can Ananda Yoga help us in more mundane ways – to find relief from stress, have better concentration, and be more poised in challenging circumstances?

Answer: It can. But put it this way, without some form of meditation, it’s like cooking a meal without eating it. To get the benefits of yoga at the deepest, most enduring level, you need to have a meditation practice. Without meditation, yoga isn’t all it could be. Even a small amount of meditation makes a big difference.

Q: If you’re working with energy, does it mean that Ananda Yoga is less concerned with thinking than with feeling?

Answer: It’s experiential. You don’t turn off the thinking process, but you direct the mind’s energy away from restless thoughts and worries, toward a more heart-oriented awareness that’s very uplifting and healing. It’s not emotion, it’s calm perception.

Q: Does it help people feel they’re a better person?

Answer: Absolutely. But they don’t feel like a different person, they feel they’ve suddenly got access to a part of themselves that they weren’t aware of before. It’s a lovely feeling, because you see that you’re more than you thought you were. When people begin to see that they’ve got more happiness than they knew, it’s a very good experience.

Q: You’re accessing a part of you that you didn’t know was there?

Answer: Perhaps you hoped it was there, but you didn’t know how to access it. I think everybody knows there’s something special about them. They can’t put their finger on it, but they sense there’s something special about each soul. There’s a big difference when you start to experience it.

We all want to experience the happiness that’s hidden inside us. The whole of Ananda Yoga is engaged with helping us do that. Not everyone needs to be looking for these higher spiritual benefits. But it’s the ultimate goal. People usually begin with something more basic, like finding peace of mind, relieving stress, having more energy, and reconnecting with a body that’s been neglected.

Those are definite benefits of the practice, and they come quickly. People don’t have to practice for years, or even months or weeks, to get them. But the more you get, the more you realize there’s even more, and it tends to draw you deeper in the process.

Q: It sounds like it’s been fulfilling for you.

Answer: It has. It takes extreme circumstances for me to miss my daily practice. I would say it’s the most important part of my life. I wish everybody had this mechanism for improving the quality of their lives.

Q: If it’s fulfilling for people, is Ananda Yoga growing?

Answer: It is. The popularity of yoga, so far, has been based on the postures. Most classes are still oriented toward the body. But increasing numbers of teachers are emphasizing the spiritual, emotional, and mental benefits.

I spoke recently with some friends from Los Angeles. They were saying how, even in LA, the Mecca of the body, people are wanting something more from yoga. They’re wanting something more than the physical.

If it’s happening in LA, we can pretty much expect that it’s happening elsewhere, or it soon will be. For some, a better body is all they’ll ever want, and that’s fine. They can stay with the physical and enjoy it. But for many, a little practice opens up their awareness of a joy inside, and it stimulates a desire for more. We’ve come to a time when people are looking for joy.

When I started teaching in 1983, not many people were looking for joy. It was harder to communicate the subtle aspects of Ananda Yoga – I would talk about energy, and I’d get lots of blank looks. But everybody seems to have a feel for energy now, and hardly anybody is freaked when I talk about it. It’s easier to communicate Ananda Yoga than it used to be. People are ready for it now.

—

Gyandev’s light-hearted humility shines through his classes, putting students at ease. Follow this link to read a selection of his articles, purchase instructional videos and CDs, and view his teaching schedule. You can also watch a free video, Ananda Yoga for Busy People, on YouTube, with Gyandev and Lisa Powers.

The making of Finding Happiness was as inspiring a story as in the film. Each piece of the puzzle came together in just the right way, to bring Swami Kriyananda’s message of a spiritual way of life to the world.

Q: Where did the idea come from to make a movie about Ananda?

Devi: Through the years, I noticed that whenever Swami Kriyananda enjoyed something, whether it was books, music, or art, he would often create something in the same genre, using that form to convey a spiritual message. He loved music, and he wrote over four hundred songs. He loved books, and he wrote over a hundred books on spiritual topics.

When he heard some Celtic music that he liked, he began to write music in a Celtic vein. Those songs were recorded on two albums, Mystic Harp and Mystic Harp II, featuring Derek Bell, a harpist with the Chieftains group who was a friend of Swamiji’s.

As a young man, he wanted to write plays, and in his last years he started writing screenplays. He wrote a number of scripts, but nobody knew quite what to do with them, because we’d never worked in film before.

Nandini Cerri, who lives at Ananda Assisi and has lots of friends in the arts in Italy, introduced Swamiji to Roberto Bessi, a friend who’s a highly regarded producer, and he and Swamiji became good friends. Then Roberto introduced us to Ted Nicolau, who would become the writer-director on Finding Happiness. Shivani, the executive producer, has lived at Ananda for over forty years and played a crucial role in ensuring that the project kept moving ahead.

There was a feeling that even though we didn’t know where the money would come from, and whether the screenplay would work, it was important to find a way to do it. There were many, many false starts along the way, but we just kept forging ahead and following every new lead.

It was interesting to see how the people who joined the project all had deep respect for Swami. Ted and Roberto knew it wouldn’t be a conventional film, but that it was important because it had the potential to help many people.

I knew almost nothing about the film world. I’d heard that it could be very superficial, high-pressure and worldly, but the crew were always very respectful, and they genuinely honored what we’re doing at Ananda. We had a party at the end of the first phase of filming, and Shivani gave the crew members spiritual names. It was that kind of relationship.

When Swami saw the movie for the first time, he said, “Everyone is so natural. They’re themselves.” We were being ourselves, telling the story of Ananda, and we were able to relax with the film crew. I think it’s a big reason why the movie is so powerful, because it’s genuine.

The crew members saw something beyond the physical community. Several of them live not far away, and after the filming ended they returned and stayed at the Expanding Light and attended Sunday service.

Q: Dave Bingham, an Ananda videographer, shot a ton of footage of the filming process. It’s fun to watch, and it struck me that the crew felt relaxed at Ananda.

Devi: I think they had a good time. Of course, it wasn’t always easy. The first two weeks were particularly grueling. It was mid-summer and over 100? every day. The last scene, where Juliet says farewell to the community, is maybe five minutes on film, but it took all day to shoot. It was 105? in the temple, because we couldn’t turn on the air conditioning while the cameras were running, and the hot cinema lights had to be left on all day. They shot the scene about fifteen times, and we were soaked. We had to take breaks and use hair dryers to dry our clothes.

I don’t know if it’s typical on a film set, but there was never any disharmony. The film crew were just so even-minded and positive, and we all got into that flow. There was a bond with the crew, to the point where we felt like old friends.

I’m hoping the movie will help people recognize a way of life with the potential to give them great happiness. We have no clue if the movie will reach a mass audience, but I’m certain that people who are looking for a more spiritual life will feel, “Wow, I’ve been looking for this.”

Sharing Nature outdoor activity

Joseph Bharat Cornell is a nature educator who works with nature awareness around the world. Joseph’s first book, Sharing Nature with Children, has sold more than 500,000 copies in more than 20 languages.

Backpacker magazine called him “one of the most highly regarded nature educators in the world today.” He currently works with nature awareness groups in the US, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Taiwan, Slovenia, and Great Britain. To date, he has taught his Sharing Nature methods in 30 countries and 46 states.

Joseph was born in Live Oak, a small town in northern California, fortuitously located just five miles from the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area, where he spent countless happy hours exploring nature as a young boy. Joseph and his wife Anandi have lived at Ananda Village for over 40 years.

His latest book, The Sky and Earth Touched Me, will be published in Fall 2013. To learn more, follow the link to the website of Sharing Nature Worldwide.

Q: How can people feel closer to nature and discover nature’s healing power? Let’s imagine that we’re enthusiastic hikers or backpackers, but we feel a sense of separation, as if we’ve been looking at nature from the outside, and we’d like to go deeper.

Joseph: Many people who’ve attended my workshops have expressed this very common longing to know nature more intimately, from a level of the heart.

I have a friend who teaches a mixed class of Caucasian and Navaho children. When he asked them to draw a picture of themselves, the Caucasian children drew covered the paper with self-portraits, drawing their faces and bodies. But the Navaho children drew themselves very small and off to the side of the paper, and then they drew the dry desert wash, the canyon walls, and the sky. They felt that the environment was as much a part of them as their arms and legs.

This is a feeling we can have in nature, that we’re an inseparable part of something much larger than ourselves. In nature there’s no ego, and if you can step away from the usual hearty give-and-take of human society (laughs), it can be a very refreshing experience.

Walt Whitman expressed this yearning when he wrote, “I long to live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained.”

When we go out in nature, we’re drawn to its admirable qualities, such as joy and peace and energy, because we sense those qualities in ourselves and we want to draw them out more clearly. Nature is a mirror for the finer parts of us. There’s a wholesomeness in nature that reminds us of the wholesomeness in ourselves.

But that experience of communion can only grow deep in stillness. John Muir said that in the stillness of the wilderness, “the freed soul goes abroad.” By learning to enter the stillness, we can expand our awareness beyond ourselves in a way that’s very enjoyable and renewing.

That’s really the secret of experiencing nature – to internalize our awareness and become very quiet internally.

The mind is like a shortwave radio that has two modes: Send and Receive. A study showed that people have 300 self-talk thoughts per minute – some sources say we may have as many as 1200. When you’re continually sending, there’s no room to be open and receptive. You can talk to the environment, but you can’t listen. We need to learn how to turn off the self-talk and tune our radio to Receive, because that’s when we can commune with the world around us.

It’s why I created nature awareness exercises that help people stop the endless stream of thoughts and absorb their awareness in the natural world.

A Harvard study in 2012 found that people don’t focus on what they’re doing 47 percent of the time, even if they like what they’re doing! (laughs) So the problem is that we simply don’t have enough attention and receptivity to take nature in.

Of course, sometimes it can happen spontaneously – we’re outdoors on a crisp fall day and feeling unusually receptive, and we sense that everything’s alive. But those moments come and go randomly.

People treasure their experiences of joy and transcendent unity in nature. But those experiences seem to come by a special whim of the universe. We may only have a handful of them in our lives, but if we can quiet the mind with nature awareness techniques or meditation, we can turn those isolated peaks of inspiration into broad plateaus of lasting inspiration. It simply takes focusing our attention fully on nature and opening up to the stillness within.

Q: It sounds like the experience people describe when they’re backpacking, and they start to feel the city fall away. They rediscover a childlike joy, where they’re no longer suspicious of the stranger, because their hearts are open.

Joseph: Colin Fletcher, author of The Complete Walker, described that experience, how the mind by slow degrees falls in sync with nature’s rhythms.

One of the participants in a Sharing Nature workshop was schoolteacher who spends his summers hiking the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails in alternate years.

We did an exercise called “I Am the Mountain,” where one person looks at nature and another person stands behind him and says, “I am….” Then the first person feels the living energy of nature inside himself for a few seconds. Then he might say, “The waving branches.” Or, “The light racing across the water with the wind.”

This man said that in four minutes of doing that exercise he reached a place of inner stillness and communion that it would normally take him a month to get to in the wilderness. It was quite a statement, yet many people have said similar things after they’ve gotten still and interiorized.

The method is simple – it’s simply internalizing your awareness. If you think that nature is “out there,” it will remain out there, separate from you. But if you receive nature inside, you’ll feel that nature is a part of you.

There’s a book called I Was a Savage, by Prince Modupe, a West African whose tribe had never seen a white person. He said, “Deeply felt silences are the core of our religion. During these times, the nature within ourselves finds unity… in the common nature which pervades all life.”

Q: We hear about “going into the silence.” Can nature be part of a spiritual practice?

Joseph: My most recent book, The Sky and Earth Touched Me, uses nature as a focus for a non-dogmatic approach to spirituality. The exercises aren’t couched in religious terms, but they help people have experiences of universal love, stillness, and self-expansion, which are deeply spiritual qualities.

John Muir said, “Nature, God, and beauty are synonymous terms.” In nature you can feel an intense joy. I believe it’s a window to the bliss of God that the great sages tell us underlies all creation.

I kept the nature exercises in The Sky and Earth Touched Me simple, to help people have experiences that aren’t filtered through the mind. Science describes life, but calm, intuitive feeling perceives it directly.

Q: Are people healed by spending time in nature?

Joseph: Coniferous forests give off wood oils that purify the air. The director of the Japanese forest service studied these oils, thinking that they might be healing for people. There are now 44 medical centers in Japan where you can spend two days in the forest and practice “forest bathing.” They give you certain physical tests at the start and before you leave, and they’ve found that being in the forest measurably increases cancer-killing cells and reduces blood sugar, stress, and a bunch of other health risk factors.

St. Bernard said, “I feel taller from walking with the trees.” There’s a Sharing Nature exercise where you enter a forest and stand like a tree, and feel that your body is being nourished by the sun and air. At a certain point you turn over a leaf and breathe the oxygen coming from the tree, and you exhale carbon dioxide back to the tree as you interbreathe with the tree. It gives you a very real experience of the spiritual qualities of trees.

Q: In the Bay Area there’s a place that I’m sure you’re familiar with, Muir Woods. It’s often crowded with visitors, yet when you walk among the redwoods it’s like a cathedral. It’s a vibration of great stillness, and you can feel the healing power of those trees that have stood for perhaps a thousand years. It’s quite wonderful.

It sounds like you’re teaching people to commune with the source from which nature is created, and that we come from.

Joseph: That’s true. If you look at things in a separative, analytical way – “this tree, that stream” – your perspective is limited and superficial. But we can directly experience the common reality that’s animating everything. When you tune in to that source, you feel close to everyone and everything. That’s where the magic of nature is, when you go beneath the surface.

Q: You’ve written a book about the spiritual practice of listening to the creative vibration of AUM. (AUM: The Melody of Love – The Spirit Behind All Creation.) Various spiritual teachings tell us that AUM is the power that manifests the external world. Is that practice a further step that people can take if they want to experience their oneness with creation?

Joseph: It is. Swami Kriyananda said that the way to truly understand nature is to commune inwardly with AUM. Science has discovered that matter is vibration. AUM is the pristine vibration from which nature emerges. It’s the “thought of Spirit.” Spirit is unmoving. It comes forth as AUM to create the cosmos. The vibration of spirit creates this world.

Some religious traditions encourage people to see spirit and creation as separate. Or they don’t understand how the divine Presence gets into creation. Communing with AUM gives us a direct experience of the God who is actively creating the physical world and Who is very present with us.

Each culture has its name for AUM. The Bushmen call it the Hiss of the Stars. The Irish Celtic tradition calls it the Great Song. In Islam, it’s the Amin, and in Christianity it’s the Amen or the Word. Aldo Leopold, the renowned environmentalist and author of A Sand County Almanac, experienced AUM, as did Thoreau and John Muir.

When people are very still they may have an experience of AUM. So, yes, for people with a spiritual interest, AUM can help them commune with the blissful Spirit in creation.

Q: In the movie, you talk about a spiritual approach to stewarding the earth’s resources. Can you elaborate on that? Perhaps you could start with your background.

Atman: I grew up on the East Coast and attended Princeton University, where I got a degree in civil engineering with an interest in energy and environmental issues. After graduation I worked for a consulting firm in Washington, DC, on projects related to energy, sustainability, air pollution, and so on.

After a time I realized that the work wasn’t fulfilling for me, and I decided to do something different for a while. I managed to get a scholarship for graduate study in France, researching environmental energy planning. We happened to be in Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps, so I was able to spend lots of time skiing and mountain climbing. (laughs)

I took a year off to travel, then I returned to the US for further graduate study at UC Berkeley, in an interdisciplinary program on energy and environmental issues.

While I was in Europe I had started meditating. A friend in Berkeley who knew I was interested in spiritual things introduced me to a Sivananda ashram, and I got heavily involved in yoga while I finished my master’s degree.

I was working at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on energy demand analysis, and that’s where I met Helena Norberg-Hodge, a visitor to our department who had started the Ladakh Project. Ladakh is a very isolated region of India, on the far side of the Himalayas, on the Tibetan Plateau.

In the early 1960s China invaded Ladakh, and China and India fought a border war. The Indians managed to push the Chinese back, and at that point the Indian government decided it should make a stronger claim on Ladakh, so they built a road over the Himalayas through Kashmir. In the seventies they opened it to outsiders, and Helena went there with a National Geographic film crew.

She quickly realized how isolated the Ladakhi people had been, and how rapidly their world was changing, thanks to development projects, the introduction of a western-style school curriculum, and tourism.

Helena recognized that it was an amazingly intact culture, with a very strong sense of community, and a strong sense of its spiritual roots in Tibetan Buddhism. It had been a thriving, self-sufficient society until the outside world came in. And now it was being turned upside down, as people were saying, “You aren’t modern enough. We need to get your kids educated.”

The culture was being broken up, primarily by these development programs. They would do things like try to introduce “green revolution” hybrid seeds and pesticides, even though there weren’t really any pests, and the seeds weren’t adapted for growing barley at 12,000 feet elevation. The Ladakhis were very aware of what was appropriate for the harsh environment they were in.

The Ladakh Project tried to help people understand that everything wasn’t as hunky-dory in the West as they were being led to believe – that baking bread on sheets of asbestos wasn’t all that great an improvement, for example, and that what their kids were learning in the new schools was disruptive to their culture. They weren’t even being taught their own language – instead, they were taught three other languages with three different alphabets.

We tried to let people know about the problems in the West: the alienation, the lack of community, and the lack of sustainable ways of doing things. Which isn’t to say that the Ladakhi culture couldn’t be helped, because there certainly was room for material improvements.

I worked on the project for a number of years, and it was from that experience that my wife Bhaktimarg and I became interested in communities. We had seen the benefits of a close-knit community, and we’d observed the remarkable joie de vivre of the Ladakhi people.

At one point we thought about starting a community with the directors of the Ladakh project. We visited various communities, and we looked at land in Spain, and then we found Ananda.

I discovered Ananda rather serendipitously at a Whole Life Expo where I’d gone to hear Timothy Leary speak. I missed Leary’s talk, but I found an Ananda brochure lying on the floor, and I said, “We should visit here.” (laughs) We felt an immediate connection with Ananda, and we started visiting regularly.

I was in a PhD program at the time, writing a dissertation based on my experiences in Ladakh, and examining the contradictions in the sustainable development debate.

I felt we needed to challenge certain key assumptions. For example, that the world should follow a western materialistic model for development, without questioning whether those materialistic values were causing some of the sustainability issues in the first place.

I had gotten a grant to write my dissertation, but then I moved to Ananda Village and never finished my thesis. I worked at the meditation retreat and the Expanding Light guest retreat, and then I was asked to serve as village manager, the position I’ve held for 12 years.

Q: Has living at Ananda helped you integrate your interests in sustainability, communities, and the spiritual life?

Atman: Yes. The most important thing for me was the search for “ultimate verities,” as Yogananda calls it. I felt it was a major defect of the sustainability movement that it failed to address why people have seemingly inexhaustible desires for material things in the first place. It was assumed that happiness comes by acquiring material things, and that we simply need to supply people with those things in ways that don’t damage the planet.

The problem with that view is that human desires are insatiable. And at some point, if you’re really going to create sustainability, you have to address that.

In the film, Swami Kriyananda remarks that what will ultimately help the world is a change in consciousness. We need to start by examining what truly makes us happy, what we really need, and the blessings of a simple life.

We obviously need to find better ways to live on the planet, and we need to do it quickly. We can’t wait for everybody’s consciousness to change. But it’s important to recognize that we’re living in a society that endlessly promotes the idea that happiness comes from outside, and from what we own. I believe one of the major contributions communities like Ananda can make to the sustainability debate is that we should first ask ourselves, “Where does my happiness really come from?”

Yes, you want to have a life that’s comfortable, and you want to have enough to eat. But do you really need all the things the billboards are pushing at you?

I think the real contribution that people can take from Ananda is that you need to question what’s driving your life. The message of the movie is that happiness comes through your relationships with people and your relationship with God, and by simplifying your life – and that these things will serendipitously do a lot for the planet. In fact, I believe they’ll do more than putting up solar panels alone can do, although we do need both.

When I was traveling, I visited North Africa and China, and I realized, “There are no answers here.” Wherever I went, my mind came with me, and I realized it was creating the same patterns of unhappiness wherever I went. So I learned to meditate, and I learned that happiness isn’t about having lots of outward experiences and going to different places.

I had worked in the circles of power in Washington, DC, and I’d realized, my gosh, these people are full of problems, too – this senator’s an alcoholic, and so on. And when I considered that these were the people running the country, it was a bit disillusioning.

I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I had received a very good education, and I could have served the nation in high-powered positions. But I thought, “This isn’t going to do it for me.” Then I found an Ananda, and I realized, this is a lot more promising. This is what’s going to change me, and what’s ultimately going to change the world.

How did you become involved in Finding Happiness?

By divine intervention, actually. About a week before the call came, I was feeling an active longing to deepen my spirituality. My mother had passed away recently. She was a dharmic person and the one I would call whenever I wanted to know the right thing to do. I was feeling lost without her, and in need of guidance.

Once you have a child, you’re even more intent on listening to your inner voice, because you have to guide them. When you lose your mother, you can no longer ask for her advice, so you want to deepen your awareness of the inner voice, and you begin to want to hear God speaking to you.

I was telling God, “I need guidance on a daily basis.” And a week later I got the call asking if I wanted to be part of the film. The casting agent had learned that I’d been exposed to eastern thought as a child, and he wondered if I might have a personal interest in the film – which of course I did. I met with Shivani, the executive producer, and in that moment it became clear that I needed to do this.

I had an appointment to call Swami Kriyananda, and I feared he might grill me about my spiritual qualifications. But he was very brief, saying simply, “I like your eyes. Yes, let’s do this.”

How was it to be with Swami Kriyananda?

When you’re in the presence of someone like Swami, it’s easy to slip into the ego, because you can start to think that you must be pretty profound if you’re getting to be with a saint.

As I tried to transcend the privilege of being with him, and get beyond reacting from a “me” viewpoint, I realized that I was truly in the presence of God and that it had nothing to do with us. God was simply there, and I began to find myself in a quiet place where I could be receptive to the divine experience.

He’s funny and human, which makes being with him simple rather than complex. He is one of those people who make loving God seem very easy and simple.

In the final scene of the movie you are visibly moved. How much of that was you, and how much was it playing the role of Juliet?

I came to the film with a personal, inner quest to deepen as a person. At the same time, I’m always looking for what will advance the story in the most believable and dramatic way. I was aware that what would serve the movie and the viewers is that Juliet comes with skepticism and curiosity, and maybe a little judgment and discomfort with the lifestyle at Ananda.

Elisabeth (Juliet) asks for Swami Kriyananda’s blessing in the final scene of Finding Happiness. (Click to enlarge.)

There were times when I was in character and very out of touch with my personal self, even in the scenes where I spent time with Swami. Because it doesn’t serve the movie if it’s about Elisabeth the actress. But I also wanted the film to have some resonance with what was important to me, and I think that what serves the movie best in that final scene is that I’m myself.

After trying to be as truthful to a character as possible, it can be uncomfortable to put your “real self” on film. But if you’re ready for it, and you find yourself in a place like this, it can’t help but do something to you as a person. “Juliet” didn’t come for that experience, and for her it happened “accidentally.” It might not have happened to me, and if that were the case I would have acted Juliet’s role.  But it happened.

In the last scene with Swamiji I made a deliberate choice to be myself. When I asked him to bless me, it was the first time I was receiving his blessing as Elisabeth. Before the scene, standing and waiting, I thought, “Let them see what you came for. It’s okay. It’s the most vulnerable you’re ever going to be on film, but it will serve people.”

When you see someone experience an opening like this, a completely real transformation that’s captured on film, it’s like the yoga concept of shaktipat, where a saint blesses you and God’s energy goes into you. This movie has that quality. In part, it’s because something very real happened to me at Ananda. For anybody seeking God, whether they want to live in a community or not, I hope that experiencing this movie will be like a jolt of spiritual awakening.

How difficult or easy is it to incorporate your spirituality into the work you do in film?

Over the years I’ve realized that if I’m very quiet before I perform, and if I’m prayerful before I go to work, actively praying in gratitude, I have a much better day and I can give a much better performance. It takes me out of being reactive and enables me to “get out of the way.”

Swami Kriyananda says a similar thing about his writing. “I don’t write – God writes.” I find that acting is more interesting if, before I do my work, I ask, “What is this supposed to be?” – and then get out of the way and let God show me how to do it, so I’m a vessel.

If you can do that, even if you’re playing someone of low consciousness, that aspect of higher creativity will be seen. Ultimately I think you can offer your creativity to a higher power, so that it has a subtle resonance for people, beyond your intellectual choices for the performance.

Do you believe that kind of inspiration can be captured on film, not only visually and audibly but energetically?

Absolutely. Some filmmakers like to work without scripts, or they’ll work with people who aren’t actors, because an unrehearsed authenticity comes into the picture, and it’s energetically more divine, because it’s real.

Because actors are always trying to be real, the results might not always be vibrationally high, because there’s so much thought involved, more than a real and natural quality of feeling.

I think that’s the essential trick for an actor, to let go of the rehearsing, the memorization, and the choices, and just fly. The art of acting can be very high vibrationally, because what you’re learning is to be. When you start to “act,” it falls apart.

Are there any projects you’d like to do?

There are a million things I’d love to do, but I’m trying to stop saying what I want and just continue to receive the things I’m supposed to be doing. It seems that whenever I let it go, I end up exactly where I’m supposed to be, and when I’m trying to make things happen, I end up spinning my wheels, like a car that’s stuck in mud and going nowhere very slowly.

Are there directors that I really love, actors I admire? Absolutely. But it’s ironic how you end up working with whoever you’re supposed to work with. If you look at the puzzle pieces of your life as an artist, you can see how they fit together perfectly.

I love doing TV, I love doing film, and I love writing. When I was in college I wanted to be an author, and I wrote a book and self-published it. I was disappointed with the results, so I threw my toys in a box and said “I don’t want to write anymore.”

But, really, I feel I’m meant to be a writer, and it “just happened” that I got a blog on PeopleMagazine.com that re-awakened that love. Out of that came a book deal that will serve people better than any of my previous books.

You let go of something, and it plops in your lap when you’re ready to do something that’s more valuable.

Do you see acting as a vehicle for spiritual development?

Acting can be a spiritual experience, because it becomes very boring after a while to be thinking of yourself all the time! That experience quickly runs dry, or it did for me. You begin to long to stop thinking of yourself and have something else to put your energy into.

Elisabeth (Juliet; center) with Virani and co-star David Eby during a visit to the Yogoata Goat Farm and co-op at Ananda Village. (Click to enlarge.)

You begin to realize that you’re not this little self – that you have an opportunity to be a channel for something much deeper. I think many people who are highly successful are deeply spiritual, and you can see how they let go when they’re on stage, whether they’re acting or singing. You can see that they’ve completely let go of the wheel. Watching them is an angelic experience, because they are just somewhere else.

So it can be inspiring, and if you’re ready to take that step, you find that being “me” becomes boring. As you move along, you begin to realize that your light isn’t about you – that God gave it to you to serve others.

You might imagine that a 40-person film crew would be an incredible invasion into a meditative community such as ours. But the filmmakers have felt so compatible that I relish being with them daily. Many have some connection to spirituality, or they’re just excellent individuals who were hand-picked for the project.

Elisabeth Rohm and her daughter, Easton, take a break from filming at Ananda Village.

Elisabeth Rohm was invited to play her part just days after she had prayed for a deepening of her spiritual life. Lis and her daughter, Easton, are enjoying themselves. Elisabeth has been a joy to work with, and we’ve been in every scene at Ananda together. In my “other” career as a cellist, I’ve been around celebrities, onstage and off, and I’ve seen what they can be like behind closed doors. Elisabeth is naturally gracious on and off the set, and she’s been tremendously patient with us.

What is this movie about? Primarily, the answers that Ananda can offer to the world, and how small communities can be a viable solution to many of society’s ills. Of course, spirituality is a broad theme (how could it not be?). Finally – beauty. I can’t post any footage, but I must tell you that the way they are capturing the vibration of Ananda is simply stunning. We get to see some of the shots on a monitor (the hard drives are 90 terabytes!), and the way the cinematographers and directors capture the interplay of light and color is amazing. The crane shots give you a sense that you’re flying through the gardens and natural settings.

Swami Kriyananda is featured in two lengthy interviews, and he’s doing fabulously. He’s a natural, though he’s joking that he doesn’t want to be a movie star. But he’s been amazingly patient during the three days of shooting the same scene from various camera angles, including multiple takes, sometimes due to technical problems or to get just the right sweep of the camera.

Juliet (actress Elisabeth Rohm) interviews Swami Kriyananda in a scene at Crystal Hermitage. (L-R: David, Swamiji, Lis, and Swamiji’s assistant Narayani from Italy.)

Swamiji’s answers are spontaneous, insightful, and funny and resonate with truth. In each take he gives a slightly different emphasis and never repeats himself. “Ever new, ever expanding joy.”

The work and the incredible coordination behind each scene are formidable. A scene often includes at least four camera shots: a “master shot” (a wide-angle to give the viewer a sense of where the characters are); a “two-shot” (two or more people in the frame), reverses or “point of views” of the same shot (from behind the characters), and close-up shots of each character. Each shot requires moving massive cameras, lights, tripods, baffles, reflectors, and shades. As an “actor’“ there’s a lot of sitting around while this happens. A scene can take hours to shoot, but then sometimes they’re ready and waiting for us to finish makeup and wardrobe.

So far in the filming we’ve introduced Swami Kriyananda, Lalita, Narayani, Ananta, Alex and Devadasi Forrester, and me as Juliet’s host. The Ananda cast members have done a great job, especially considering that we’re all improvising our roles. None of us are speaking scripted lines; we’re talking naturally from the heart, in our own words. For me it’s not an easy process. I enjoy writing because it gives me a chance to think about what I want to say, try different approaches, and edit to my heart’s content. But everyone seems happy with what we’re doing. I do hope they’ll reshoot the first scene, where I was still in shock about the magnitude of the project.

The entire community has been impacted by the film. We’re trying to stay within a very low budget, so we’re asking people for lots of volunteer help. The community has been very supportive. Many have been initiated into the film business as they volunteer as extras, drivers, assistants, and coordinators. The set has a wonderful vibration, and everyone seems happy to help.

Nayaswami Asha in India, 2013.

Q: How did you get involved with Finding Happiness?

Asha: My role in the movie actually came about by happenstance. I was invited to keep track of the lines that were being said by the “actors,” all of whom were in fact Ananda members, speaking their own thoughts in their own voices. The sole exceptions were Juliet, the principal role played by actress Elisabeth Rohm, and a brief part played by actor John M. Jackson.

We didn’t have a fixed script, and we wanted to make sure that everything the real-life Ananda people who had roles in the movie wanted to say, they could say fully and clearly. The idea was that I would keep track of the content. But as soon as we began filming, we realized that we really needed to frame the scenes a lot more tightly than we’d imagined, and that’s when my role greatly expanded.

We were shooting a feature film, so we couldn’t just let people talk, and come back later and collect their best comments. We simply couldn’t spend that many hours filming, because it would be too prohibitively expensive. So we found a better way.

Instead of waiting until a person had talked for as long as they liked to see if they had said everything they wanted, we began framing out the scenes. I would talk with the “actors” before they want on camera, and they would tell me in their own words what they wanted to say. Working together, we would put a smaller box around it, to avoid any rambling and diversions that could quickly become expensive.

Because we only realized the need for tighter control at the last moment, as the first round of filming started, it felt like we were always hopping a step ahead of the camera. Even during the second filming six or eight weeks later, I spent an enormous amount of time scrambling to figure out what the actors wanted to say, and how they could say it economically.

I was on the set every minute of the filming, literally. Mostly, we would frame the dialogue in the off hours. The actors in a scene would give me their notion of what they wanted to talk about, and I would make suggestions, and then they would give it further thought. I never scripted their words, because we knew that the film would draw its power from their sincerity, spontaneity, and natural expression. It’s why they sound like themselves in the film, because none of it was scripted.

My working method was that I would generally talk to them at great length and take notes of what they said. Then I would go away and pull from their words what they seemed to feel was important to get across. We would discuss how they could express it more clearly and economically, and whether our present choices were right.

So I was deeply involved in the content. But it wasn’t until I saw the finished film that I realized the extent to which every individual was living and breathing their own thoughts from their own reality. And even more touchingly, how they were able to offer it back in a completely natural way, from their own understanding.

Everybody in the film is different, yet each one has pulled from their life at Ananda the bit that works for them. I believe people will sit through the movie, and from one person or another in the cast they’ll receive an understanding that they can put into their heart.

Ananda is a way of understanding life. I believe the movie will be a powerful vehicle for disseminating that kind of expansive consciousness. At first glance, the movie seems to be about a place – you know, “come visit this wonderful place in the country.” But if you truly understand Ananda, you realize the place is incidental. What’s important is a fresh way of understanding life.

At first they love the vibrations of peace and harmony, the beauty of nature, the music, the people, the spiritually uplifting atmosphere. Then you begin to understand, little by little, where the vibrations are coming from. It’s from the way of life, which people can practice anywhere. It’s about “simple living and high thinking,” as Paramhansa Yogananda put it when he spoke about spiritual communities.

Q: Did you talk about the movie with Swami Kriyananda?

A: I had the opportunity to show him an early version. It was the “director’s cut,” not the final version, but it was close, and he was seeing it for the first time. His immediate reaction was, “This movie encapsulates my life’s work.”

In the movie, Ananda is presented by the people of Ananda. So it wasn’t that Swami Kriyananda saw his own understanding reflected. But he saw an original articulation of the principles, and he was deeply pleased that it accurately reflected the principles of Ananda.

It’s no coincidence that his life ended just a few months after the movie was completed. There was a divine harmony in the fact that this new expression of the philosophy of happiness was presented to him in the last months of his life.