Why did you leave the ashram?

.

In Dallas in 1970 I ran the kitchen at a Yoga ashram. My title was House Mother. With the windows open I cooked up vegetarian meals for the 20-25 people who lived there, beginning around five in the AM packing lunches for the yogis who went off each day to their jobs.  The entire household got up at four AM to meditate each day and we taught asana and meditation classes, even held chanting sessions in what would have been the living room / dining area if the house on Lemon Avenue were still used as a family home. 

Why did you leave the ashram, people often ask.

“Well the group got kind of extreme,” I say.  “They gave up everything sensual, even sex.”

“You took vows of chastity?”

“Even more than that. They called it Bramacharya.  They give up all sensual pleasure.”

They would repeat, "You took a vow of chastity?"  And those of you who have read other posts here know why they were so incredulous. 

Around six months after I moved there, everyone at the ashram began wearing orange robes and practicing a newer more extreme kind of yoga, where you channel the energy that you would get from pleasures such as sex and use it to expand your consciousness, rev up your kundalini with sexual combustion, give your meditation an extra surge of bizazz created by your very own horniness.

“It was supposed to make your meditation more intense,” I explain.

People almost always ask me again, “Why did you leave the ashram?”

And I say, “I had to leave.  I got knocked up by the guy who delivered the brown rice.”
.