My Trip to Ganeshpuri, India

Meet Nityanda.

The shiniest jewel of my recent India adventure was my stealthy pilgrimage to Ganeshpuri, a small jungle village about 90-minutes north of Mumbai. I went to see the former home of Nityananda who is one of my greatest spiritual teachers; I've felt his presence around me for years, and his teachings just make sense to me. Nityananda built his last ashram there and took mahasamadhi (or mystically kicked the bucket) in 1961. This place has been on my to-do list for about 9 years!  Check that one off!

But you need some back-story before I share the sweetness from that day. I will share my own experience of Nityananda, rather than make a poor attempt at retelling people's accounts of his mysterious nature.

In April of 2006, I was en route to Cambodia for a job. I went to interview survivors of the Khmer Rouge and to write about sex trafficking and different community development projects in the tribal countryside. I went only four months after a two-year living stint in Kabul. I was operating on emotional fumes, and the physical/post traumatic burnout that comes with living in a war zone; it's because of this that I doubted my decision to go. Could I really handle another adventure?

My Radio Interview With Dr. Meg Blackburn Losey

Click here if you'd like to listen to my interview from last night on Dr. Meg Blackburn Losey's radio show Cosmic Particles. Meg is wonderful and I'm grateful that I had the chance to connect with such a spiritually aware woman. You can visit her site if you're interested in following her weekly show on things of all spiritual topics.

Back From India

(So long, and thanks for all the fish! "Fish?!?" you say! This could be fish from anywhere in the world, but I must use it to represent my trip to India. I stayed in an ocean town and ate a lot of fish while I was there. I smelled a lot of fish, often times when I didn't want to. People kept talking to me about fish. I even met some fishy people. It was a theme that I'm still deciphering) 

I'm fresh off the plane from India. Yep, I was out of the country for most of November. I wasn't a good pilgrim--I traded in my Thanksgiving Turkey for curried chicken and basmati rice. I haven't been home for too long, and most of you are like, "Whaaa???? You didn't tell me you were going to India!" Well, that's usual for this butterfly spirit. I'm always going on a surprise adventure at the last minute. I had no idea that I was going to India until one week before, back in early November of this year. My friend and filmmaking partner Peter Bussian asked me to represent the film we're working on--Scarlet Poppy--at something called the Indian Film Bazaar in Goa, India. 

A friend recently said to me, "Your life sounds so exciting, but I couldn't stand being you..."

Images of India, 2011

I spent the end of 2011 in India, representing a film that I'm producing called Scarlet Poppy. It was accepted into the Indian Film Bazaar in Goa, India. These pictures are from my trip. So much to say, too jet lagged to write.