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Currently Prartho is working at The College of Marin, near San Francisco, Ca. (where she also offers classes on mystics). She teaches poetry to children as a visiting poet in schools, and recently (2003) won the Marin Arts Council Individual Artist's Grant in poetry.
She talks here about her experience at Cornell....
"For five years - from 1991 to 1996 - I was invited to teach meditation because many students at Cornell University were having trouble handling the stress of life in a highly competitive environment. Yoga had been offered over the past fifteen years or so, but the head of the department felt something was still missing. One day it came to him that it was meditation."
"Classes were offered through the Physical Education Department and would earn participants some credit towards graduation. The course itself was not mandatory but, having signed up, students needed to attend all but three of the twenty-two sessions (each lasting one hour, fifteen minutes), which were offered twice a week.
"The students were pretty much half women and half men and were a mixture of nationalities. Apart from Americans, there were Indians, Koreans, and Eastern Europeans."
In 1991 Prartho offered one class of twenty-two sessions called "Explorations in Meditation." By the second semester, there was a demand for two sessions, the classes always attracting the maximum of twenty-five. Participants were generally freshmen, so eighteen to nineteen-year-olds, but even graduate students and professors took part in the course, for their own personal growth.
The courses proved so popular that participants often signed up to repeat them.
"I decided that there were so many misconceptions about what meditation is - namely that it is sitting down and making your mind stop - that I started on the very first day of each course with the Osho Kundalini method.
"I wanted to shake things up - and not just physically! I think Kundalini is a natural. It works for almost everyone - first try! That's been my experience. It's not that difficult to do and, if you put yourself into it, by the third stage you are quiet; something changes in your mind, a quietness enters. That was what I could see, and that's what the feedback was.
"I always tried not to make meditation serious. There was laughing together when I explained the shaking and dancing of Kundalini. The yoga teacher, who became my good friend, took the class, and said, 'The things you get people to do are just amazing - I don't know how you do it!'
"But to me the active meditations are natural; they're what children do everywhere - for example, gibberish or whirling or humming, or even shaking, the moving from one emotion to another very rapidly, and so on.
" Some students did struggle. They had an idea of what meditation should be, and they felt it wasn't happening. There was one: he was an exchange student from Korea or Japan - he was familiar with Buddhism - and he complained often that he wasn't "getting it." And then one day we did the No-Mind meditation. It was the first time I had ever introduced gibberish to a sophisticated group of intellectuals, so I was a little nervous!
"I use the tape where Osho directs one inward after the gibberish, at the end. When I rang the bell to denote it was over, he was still sitting there. Everyone else left - he was still sitting. Finally, another class was coming in, so I went over to him and touched his leg gently. He opened his eyes, and there was so much peace in them.
"I said, 'It was good, huh?' He just nodded...and never complained again!
"Towards the end of the series, I would bring in Dynamic. I felt the participants needed to trust me, each other, and the process before I would bring in Dynamic. I think there is a lot of fear around insanity. I think that is the main issue for people thinking about doing Osho Dynamic - that you might touch on your own insanity, and, having touched on it, be lost in it, with the fear of 'What if I can't get back again?'
"But because the trust was there...and because in a way they had already tasted craziness in the gibberish they weren't as afraid.
"In fact, the issue for some people was more the physical effort required. I had to present it in the afternoon, and I have to say I don't think that is the optimal time of day to do Dynamic. It's created for the early morning, but unfortunately we couldn't do it then.
"I think there was also the fear of being total that perhaps inhibited them. What's the fear? Perhaps that if you give everything you will be empty... and we have been taught to be afraid of emptiness.
"By the end of the course everybody had found one or two techniques they loved, and some loved Dynamic."
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