Shree Ma and Yoga Samadhi

Tara and I have a natural tendency to meet interesting people. It just happens. I’m not really sure why, except that we’re in the habit of following our bliss, as Joseph Campbell used to say, and we try to remain as open as possible to whatever the Divine offers. Many of our friends often comment on this knack that we have of running into fascinating spiritual individuals. A previous teacher of mine once walked up to me during the break in a Zen seminar that he was giving and out of the blue said, “You have a talent for meeting interesting people. You should make use of it.” One such individual, that we met soon after arriving in India, is a woman named Shree Ma.

One night, after a long day of shopping in the heat, Tara and I went out for a walk in the neighborhood around the hotel where we were staying. Enjoying a stroll in the cool night air scented with jasmine flowers, we turned off the main road and headed down a side street that curved past houses that looked like remnants of India’s colonial past. As we neared a small office building, I noticed in an upstairs window several religious objects and the word “Sai” written on the wall. Stopping to take a closer look, I asked Tara if she thought it might be a Shirdi Sai Baba temple and then we proceeded down the street. As we passed the next driveway, we nearly collided head on with a group of five exuberant young men who burst upon the street. When they saw us dressed in our white kurta and punjabi, they asked where we were from. I replied, “California.” They asked, How do you like India?” I raised both thumbs and exclaimed, “We love India, It’s our favorite country in the world. India is number one.” They asked how long we were in India for and when we told them we were here for one year to study traditional Indian healing, they asked who we were studying with. We told them that our guru was Shirdi Sai Baba. They said that Shirdi Baba was their master too and suddenly we were all chanting together “Om Sai, Sri Sai, Jay Jay Sai.” They told us that they were in the diamond business and to consider them our spiritual brothers, adding that if we ever needed anything while we were in Bangalore to come to them and they would do whatever they could to help us. We thanked them, pranamed and started to leave. As we walked off into the night, they called to us and asked us to come the following day for tea.

The next afternoon, Tara and I decided to stop by to see our new friends. When we asked for them at the security gate, we were ushered into an office and introduced to a lovely woman with lotus eyes and a beautiful smile. Her name was Shree Ma and we hit it off right away, discovering that we shared many spiritual interests. We soon became friends with Shree Ma and spent hours engaged in fascinating spiritual conversations with her, mostly centering around the lives of saints like Sri Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi.

Shree Ma was from Calcutta, had met her guru at the Kumbha Mela and then lived by his side for three years at his ashram in the Himalayas. She had been trained by him to perform yoga samadhi, where you leave your body for three days. Some masters do this above ground but, in Shree Ma’s case, the yoga samadhi was done buried in a hole underground for three days. Shree Ma was the first Indian disciple that her guru had trained to perform yoga samadhi.

Tara and I were familiar with her guru. We had seen a movie about the Kumbha Mela that showed a Japanese disciple of his performing yoga samadhi. Since we had read in a book that Sri Kaleshwar periodically performs yoga samadhi, during which time he leaves his body for long periods of time, Tara and were interested in asking Shree Ma how she had learned to perform it. She told us that her training started by sitting for short periods on a small platform at the bottom of a 10 foot square hole in the ground that was then covered over with metal sheets, blankets and finally a foot of earth. The time was gradually increased until, eventually, she was able to sit in samadhi for 72 hours. Entering into samadhi, a state where breathing stops, was a prerequisite since, if you continued to breathe, all the oxygen would be consumed and you would die. Shree Ma said that it was also essential to overcome all fear, because snakes or scorpions could enter the hole through the earth walls and sometimes water seeped in covering the floor. I asked Shree Ma if she had asked for a boon (divine gift) for performing this sadhana (spiritual practice). She replied that she had done the yoga samadhi twice in public and that one time she asked the Divine for assistance for orphans and the other time she asked for help for farmers suffering from drought. Finally, I asked Shree Ma if she had made an arrangement with her guru regarding where her soul would travel to when she left her body during those three days. She looked at me, smiled and said that her guru had placed his sankalpam (divine intention) on her yoga samadhi practice but that her destination was secret.

Shree Ma had mentioned to us that she was planning on returning to the Himalayas in order to spend the rest of her life there. The last time that we saw her, she casually mentioned that if we ever needed to store any of our belongings while traveling, we could leave some boxes in her office. At the time that she made this offer, we had plan to travel and didn’t foresee any need to take her up on her offer. However, upon returning to our hotel, we discovered that Swami Kaleshwar had taken all the university students on a Power Journey and, if we wanted to go, we’d have to travel there the next day by car. Now, only a few hours after Shree Ma’s offer, we indeed needed to store some excess baggage to make our traveling easier. Early the next morning, we dropped off several boxes and locked them in Shree Ma’s closet. We weren’t able to return to pick them up for about a month. When I eventually returned, Shree Ma was gone, the office was closed and the security guard could offer no information regarding how we could contact her. He said that our boxes were still safely locked inside her office and gave us a phone number of a man who Shree Ma had arranged to unlock the office for us. Every time that we’re back in Bangalore, we stop by to see if Shree Ma has returned but there’s no sign of her, or any information of where she’s gone. It seems that Shree Ma, the woman who leaves her body for three days, has vanished as quickly as she appeared in our lives.

We want to clarify that what Shree Ma told us about her experience of yoga samadhi has nothing to do with Swami Kaleshwar or his teachings. It was not related to our education at Swami Kaleshwar’s Soul University. Shree Ma is an interesting woman who we happened to meet in Bangalore, who had a guru in the Himalayas.