Michelle Goldberg - The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West

I NEVER WOULD have started doing yoga if there had been aerobics in the Himalayas, but I was desperate.

The few times Id taken yoga classes in college, my failed attempts to relax redoubled my anxiety. Each pose was a reminder of the lifelong inflexibility that had often mortified me. When I was a little girl, a sadistic ballet teacher barred me from a holiday party because of my terrible splits. In elementary school, I dreaded being forced to sit Indian style, because it left my hips and back screaming. Later, trying yoga, my awkward efforts to keep my legs and back straight while touching my toes and my inability to do even a half lotus only left me tense and humiliated, convinced that the practice was best for those who were already calm, willowy, and graceful.

Besides, while Id been captivated by Indias kaleidoscopic religious richness during months of traveling, I was wary of anyone purporting to peddle enlightenment to credulous Westerners. On my first trip to the country, a short backpacking sojourn in the late 1990s, Id read and loved Gita Mehtas Karma Cola, a wry Indian look at the Western spiritual tourists who flock to the subcontinent, and the enterprising Indian sages whove risen to meet the demand. As our home industry expands on every front, at last it is our turn to mass market, she writes. The hippie spiritual scene interested me as a journalistic subject, but I certainly didnt want to participate in it. I wasnt sure if I could even chant Om with a straight face.

Yet, I needed exercise. Living in McLeod Ganj, a mountain village just outside the city of Dharamsala, where the Tibetan exile movement was headquartered, I was sick of hiking. My husband and Iwed eloped the previous year, when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-eightwere about six months into what would be a year-long trip through Asia. Prior to our departure, hed worked at an Internet start-up. When he cashed out his stock options before they bottomed out in the crash of the late 1990s, we became Internet thousandaires, with a sum in the low five figures that seemed, at the time, to be a fortune. Both of us loved to travel. Putting all our stuff in storage, we flew to Ho Chi Minh City.

After three months bumming around Southeast Asia, we went from Singapore to the tip of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, then west to the relatively idyllic state of Kerala, where, while lying on a beach, we were approached by movie producers looking for extras for an Indian musical. They were shooting a scene in an ashram, and since no Indian ashram is complete without a handful of flaky Westerners, they asked for our help. Delighted, we agreed. On set, we met a thirty-two-year-old Argentine devotee of the real-life guru Sai Baba, about whom Id long been curious. His followers believe hes God, and Id seen his face, beaming beneath his surprising Afro, on stickers and trinkets for sale all over the country. A former medical student, the Argentine had given up her studies and her Buenos Aires apartment after dreaming that Sai Baba summoned her to India.

Later, as we snaked our way north, we visited her at Sai Babas enormous Prasanthi Nilayam ashram, in a barren corner of Andhra Pradesh, one of Indias poorest states. The ashram boasted a shiny planetarium, two hospitals that treated patients for free, a college, a music school, and a brand-new airport for wealthier devotees with private planes. Around the edges, luxury apartment buildings were replacing mud huts. Rather than requesting two of the ashrams ten thousand beds, we checked into a nearby hotel. Every afternoon, a loudspeaker piped in music praising the guru. When I bought a pen at a local shop to take notes, it had Sai Babas smiling face on it.

There was an ambient spiritual hysteria at Prasanthi Nilayam. At dinner one evening, a devotee wed become friendly with pointed out an Austrian woman tugging her listless seven-year-old son behind her. She was in the midst of a spiritual crisis because shed had a dream in which Sai Baba instructed her to abandon the boy and live on the streets as a beggar, and she didnt know if she had the strength to do it. As far as I could tell, no one at the ashram was stepping forward to discourage her.

I also heard rumors of sexual abuse and was shocked to meet old hands at the ashram who accepted these stories as true, though they interpreted the molestations as part of Sai Babas divine mission. One man, an American ex-motivational speaker, thought they were part of Babas plan to spread his message. Probably more people are going to know about you if there are allegations that youre a pedophile than if you say God is incarnated on earth, he told me. I ended up writing a story about all this for Salon. It didnt leave me any more eager to find a guru.

Arriving in McLeod Ganj, weeks later, my husband and I saw a flyer seeking volunteers to teach English at a school for Tibetan refugees. After months of lassitude, we were thrilled and relieved at the chance to be useful and threw ourselves into the work. Settling down for several months in the sweet, peaceful little town, blessedly cool after months on the roasting plains, I realized I needed to get in shape. Most travelers who wander around India on the cheap lose weight, but I have an iron stomach, as well as a weakness for nan and paneer tikka masala. There was a three-hour ashtanga-based yoga class that met early every morning in a gymnasium near the center of town, and I signed up for it.