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Wilderness Medicine Conference

The fabric of my life, and of my illness, was woven with threads that extended back to my childhood, and even further back to the lives of my ancestors.

BA buh, buhm, BA buh, buhm, BA buh, buhm. The thick, slow call of the bonding drum in Bri Maya Tiwari's hands beckons to her audience through what she describes as the vast vibrational tapestry into which all of life is intrinsically woven. "Listen deeply," she says in a low, steady tenor, deftly guiding her mallet to the time-worn sweet spot again and again, invoking the primal rhythm to travel where words can never go. "This is the sadhana of sound."

Gently rocking to and fro, rapt in this texture of timelessness, Bri Maya's sturdy, petite frame, clad in a vibrant blue shawl, has become the embodiment of her intention to teach through experience the divine connection to our ancestral memory--all we've ever been, are now, and will be. At this particular moment, more than 300 people at a New York City conference on cancer are standing and swaying, intellectually idle yet sensibly enriched. They've overcome their initial reticence. Whatever it's about, it feels good to be up and out of their seats. If it feasts their vital tissues, so be it.

Bri Maya Tiwari (Bri is the honorific abbreviation of brahmacarini), affectionately known as MayaMa, is an internationally renowned Vedic monk honed in the ancient Ayurvedic teachings of health and longevity rarely found even in India for over 500 years. She is also a cancer survivor.

Her home base at the foothills of the Smoky Mountain range is well in sight of beautiful Pisgah Mountain in North Carolina. There, MayaMa runs her Wise Earth school, teaching doctors, nurses, holistic health practitioners, and interested lay people how to live, heal and be healthy in their everyday lives through the time-honored practice of sadhana.

As a way to serve at-risk communities, Bri Maya also conceived the Mother OM mission, now in its second year, offering Path of Practice as a way to nourish, heal and empower. The program has proved quite successful. "Somebody recently pointed Out to me that we're truly a MOM and POP organization," Bri Maya says with a zestful laugh.

Sadhana, as Bri Maya teaches it, is not the sadhana of 21st-century India. "So much of sadhana today is by rote," says Bri Maya. "East or west, people have lost touch with how this practice is intended to deepen our well of cognition, connect us with our buddhi, our faculty of wisdom and intelligence, our intuition."

Bri Maya has written three books to help explain the teachings; A Life of Balance became a best-seller. In her newly released work, Path of Practice, she explains in great detail how our buddhi is our inner knowing. Most of us connect with it intermittently--the person that calls the day we think of her, the feeling that someone close is in need. It's little different than the wellspring of knowledge energy intuitives access naturally and claim resides in each of us. As we practice, we connect to our buddhi in more conscious ways.

Exhuming essence

A person diagnosed with cancer, AIDS--any disease really, but especially a life-threatening one--knows what it's like to be churned to change, to go through stormy waters to get to the shore of his or her soul's right location and dig deep in the soil of the mother. When you meet Bri Maya, you can tell right away that who she is came from someplace raw and deep like that--someplace ace once raging turned peaceful, once fragmented become primordially whole.

"I discovered that serious illness can offer extraordinary opportunities for healing and self-knowledge," says Bri Maya, looking vibrant and quite a bit younger than her nearly 50 years.

A former life

Fame can be folly. Bri Maya's former life is a distant memory, she says, which she reluctantly shares with me to illustrate how transformational her work is. This renowned spiritual leader who shares the stage at an United Nations international peace gathering is so far removed from her "famous" youthful pursuits that the comparison is almost lost.

Bri Maya Tiwari was only 23 years old when doctors told her she had just two months to live. At that time she was the celebrated Maya, a New York City fashion designer with boutiques in most of America's high-profile fashion stores. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the acclaimed young Guyanese immigrant enjoyed a stunning career with many accoutrements of fame and fortune. Quite a different scene from the colonized Third World country she was born to, 50 years behind modem technology, a faraway village of no more than 500 people, and in 1968, headed toward civil war. Bri Maya was only 15 when her father sent her to this country to be spared the bloodshed and hatred that would ultimately rage on for four years.

"My dreams were haunted. The fires and blood of the racial wars in Guyana invaded my sleep. I ignored all the news of Guyana, estranged myself from my family, and tried desperately to rewrite my past by creating a present that utterly shut it out. I ought to have known that I could not sever the connections to my ancestral roots or ignore my inner anxiety and lack of mooring. As civil war tore through my country, cancer began to wage war in me," she says.

The path and the past

It seems the only concern modern science has with our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents in regards to our health is whether or not an aberrant gene got passed down through the line--a gene that maybe a doctor can locate and, through the use of biotechnology, modify out of the system. But how can they remove memory? They can't. New Harvard University research validates this.

In Bri Maya's words, "When we honor our ancestors and remember what they represent to us, their journey, their memories, we stand on their shoulders. When we forget who they are and what they represent in our lives, and how they have influenced our lives, we carry them on our backs." In these times, when so many of us live as if the story of who we are is not nearly as important or as interesting as what we own, where we live, and what we do, Bri Maya teaches that the bridge across our modern-day disconnect is sadhana.

Somebody raises her hand. "How do you spell that again, s-a?" Smiling, Bri Maya patiently pauses and backtracks. It's a pretty common question.

"S-a-d-h-a-n-a. Sadhana. It's a Sanskrit word meaning to reclaim that which is divine in us, our power to heal, serve and rejoice." In Path of Practice, Bri Maya writes: "A life of sadhana flows easily and gently. Not because it follows a strict set of rules or strictures, but because we learn to move within the currents of sound and energy that surround us. And we honor where we've come from."

A connection to cancer

"The fabric of my life, and of my illness, was woven with threads that extended back to my childhood, and even further back to the lives of my ancestors. In order to find my way out of the confusion that my cancer represented, I had to untangle the knots in those threads and look closely at the colors and textures, their twists and frays.

"To me, Guyana was a mysterious land, layered with Indian harmonics, African rhythms, and British hierarchies. As a child I was not fully aware of my grandparents' and parents' experiences, but I had an intuitive sense of their emotional pain. By the age of 6 or 7, I had a strong impression that my own innocence had been violated, even though my people never spoke of their past. Somewhere within me, I carried an unconscious memory of the atrocities endured by my elders. The kind of ancestral memory locked away, re-enacting itself generation after generation in some form, some manifestation. The form it took in me was ovarian cancer."

Going home to die

The doctors said the cancer could be cured. "Something told me they were wrong, and I was scared. But I look back and realize that my fear was not a fear of death. I was most afraid of the changes I sensed I needed to make in my life."

Five years, 12 surgeries, including a complete hysterectomy, and rounds of chemotherapy later, the weak and tattered young woman was told there was nothing more doctors could do. "They wanted to know, did I want them to medicate my pain? I said, 'No."'

Bri Maya retreated to a friend's ski cabin in the snowy wilderness of rural Vermont to get her life in order. It was December and Bri Maya found the serene, undifferentiated white of the snow the perfect landscape for soul searching. "Imagine, the outward picture of meditation is a soft expanse of snow. It's a natural state of bliss, or at least that's how I related to it, as a deep form of meditation," she says.

After a frenzy of busy agendas and a flourish of fame in which Bri Maya says she had lost track of the sacred in her life, "All I wanted was to live long enough to discover my true spirit. I was determined to meet my maker with whatever dignity I could muster. I was dying. I had no doubt about that."

Time became seamless in front of the constantly burning fire. "I wrote voluminously, and wept until it seemed as if I had no more tears to shed. In my journal I wrote page after page about my personal and spiritual history and poured out the most closely guarded secrets in my heart. I rested and dreamed and I had many visions.

One vision, in which her father appeared, proved to be a turning point for Bri Maya. "He shook me to my stubborn core. His words were a clarion call to awaken more fully to my true identity. He showed me that I had been killing myself spiritually, shutting out the nourishing energy of my people by cutting myself off from my roots. I wept for weeks following my father's appearance, until the fears, grief, anger, hurt, humiliation and guilt were lifted from my spirit. After four months of reconciling these inner conflicts, my emotional and physical pain dissipated. Gradually, I saw where I had deceived myself, where I had allowed myself to become out of balance."

Like a lotus

Spring came. "At first I thought I was experiencing the peace the Divine Mother gives just before death. But one afternoon, as I walked outside, the crunch of the dried brambles beneath the melting snow was precisely the invigorating sound my body needed. That was the day I came alive again." (Today, whenever Bri Maya works with people with sluggish or stuck energy, she uses that same sound to reinvigorate them.) Two months later Bri Maya returned to Manhattan. She was 28 years old, weighed only 90 pounds and constantly shook from a fierce inner chill. Doctors could find no sign of cancer anywhere in her body.

Bri Maya quotes poet Rashini: "There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken. There is a shatteredness out of which comes the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief, which leads to joy. And a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being."

Sadhana every day

It has been more than 20 years now that Bri Maya has been teaching the healing practice of sadhana, the ancient roots of Ayurveda, the well from which Ayurveda flowed and hasn't been practiced in hundreds of years.

"What I love is that when we bring the wholesome practices of nature back into our lives, understanding its rhythm and memory, our personal consciousness rises naturally. Not as a prescriptive that just sort of fits in between busy schedules, you know, healing that gets squeezed in between busy schedules and meditating long hours battling our thoughts."

Bri Maya continues, "We have had every possible vehicle to our higher self. Only we think we have to run for it and take time out. We run to our therapy, run to our yoga. Two very, very counterproductive ideas: run and take time out. What we need is to take time in and reclaim our self in our everyday life. People say, I don't have time to do everything to get healthy. Meanwhile, they're missing the obvious. We reach for the solution so far away when it's right within the self, only we bury it so deep we think we have to go to the extremes of the earth to get it.

"By finding spiritual accord in our daily routines, we can find it elsewhere and everywhere in our ancestry and in clearing our spaces. It's in a delicious naturally grown fruit, one that hasn't been tampered with, of course; in a deep, connected breath to a clear thought; in music that speaks to your heart; in kind words of appreciation. And so," Bri Maya's mouth turns up in an ebullient smile as she cradles her drum, "Thank you!"

Bonnie Hartley is a health writer and healing workshop leader from Brooklyn, New York.

Bonnie Hartley worked for more than a year to get an interview with Bri Maya Tiwari, a Vedic monk who runs the Wise Earth School in the Smoky Mountains. Bri Maya is an internationally renowned emissary of peace who has singlehandedly revived an ancient Ayurvedic tradition. Her story is the focus of our Mind-Body Health column this month.

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