A long time has passed since my last journey to Prashanti, but everything is still alive and fresh in me as if it had happened yesterday.
I went to Prashanti on June 26, 1999, the birthday of my son, Mattia, who had left his body a year earlier at the age of eight.
Sai Baba came into my life in December 1998 and He has been the Source of life and almost of survival, but above all I had the chance of finding the sense and meaning to such a painful event as the death of my son. In this way, by following Swami and His teaching I have given new meaning, a new direction to my life.
I felt a great urge to go to India, but one doubt remained: I did not speak a single word of English. I remember asking Him for help to overcome this obstacle and with exceptional timing, a few days later a friend called me, telling me that her sister had decided to go to India. She wanted to go with me and, by chance, she spoke English very well. When the Lord wants, ostacles are not there.
I remember I felt a great confusion inside of me, on one side a swing of emotions passing from frenetic joy to the deepest fear; probably it was anxiety which manifested itself in its opposite; on the other side, something strong and conscious inner made me feel a sense of calm certainty.
As soon as I arrived at the ashram I felt too tired and dazed to really understand what was happening inside and around me, but I remember a vague sense of fear that I had identified as fear for the unknown. At that time I thought “ I have arrived” and in a certain sense it was true, because that moment seemed to be like a rebirth. Instead it was also the beginning of a journey towards the deepest realms of the soul and mind and generally we know ourselves very little and we are afraid of this process that reveals the background of our life.
In fact, the work began immediately, at the first meeting with Him, in the afternoon darshan. I couldn’t look at Him, I was afraid and when I managed to look up I felt like I didn’t recognize Him, I felt a deep sense of anguish and I felt in conflict between my will and my emotions and I was confused.
During the night I woke up after a painful dream that I don’t remember and I felt a lacerating anguish rising from deep within. Then I began to pray and ask for help; the inner voice had guided me to look inside myself and I had literally leaned with awareness on the edge of a deep well. I felt a need for love so total and disarming that it left me breathless and that’s exactly what happened, I was left without air.
Let me explain better. When I realized this need I turned to God and the inner voice invited me to ask. I let that request for love rise towards the voice that was probably my own age, it was the voice of a newborn baby or even earlier. The request got stuck in my throat with a spasm of the larynx that completely took away my air, thank God it lasted a few seconds otherwise I would have suffocated. My request for love, to be accepted was a strangled cry! This is the origin of asthma and all the problems related to breathing. After a long time and after years of analysis, yoga and everything else I see clearly and recognize the emotions and feelings of the past. I would really like to dwell on the meaning of recognition! It was precisely not recognizing Sai Baba that was the first feeling I felt when I saw him. Swami has always said that he is our mirror and what we feel towards him is actually the projection of feelings towards ourselves. The first recognition that a human being needs is precisely that of being accepted as a person and having the right to exist. As far as I am concerned, the message that came to me from my mother was rejection, right from the start, even before birth.
. And this wasn’t just a non-verbal message, more or less hidden, it was explicit and accompanied by a sense of guilt when my mother told me about the moment of giving birth and clearly told me that she had almost killed herself to bring me into the world. This is how family conditioning worked inside me: what I had absorbed since birth had now become the feeling I had towards myself: I’m not worth it, I’m not worthy of being loved, so it’s useless for me to express my needs and requests, because they can’t be heard, I don’t deserve it. We could almost consider it my “original sin” the fear of not deserving and so I separated myself from parts of myself, living to please but not to love, because you can’t love anyone if you don’t love yourself first. The day after this experience was very difficult, I felt very bad, I didn’t really understand what had happened to me, I was scared and as soon as I found myself alone I cried my eyes out; to top it all I also got a migraine attack.
But I was in good hands! The physical but above all inner closeness of the Master was a balm and a miraculous medicine for my worries. In the evening I fell asleep confused and feeling just like a child who begins to walk and needs encouragement, I asked Baba for comfort. The next morning, on the thought of the day there was his answer, I was ecstatic and happy, I finally felt loved and listened to! Here are the words of the message: “When a child is learning to walk, Love will not put obstacles in his path, on the other hand it will encourage him by welcoming every step forward and controlling every fall.” I understand now that He was rebuilding trust in my heart, He was for me the loving mother that I had not had. After this “baptism of fire” I felt much better and I let myself be loved, I let his light reach me and it happened punctually in every darshan. The light is relaxing, healing, purifying and regenerating, like the meditation that Baba teaches and which is a true bath of light. After a few days I was ready to receive the gift of a special day, which began with these words, spoken to my great amazement by the inner voice upon awakening.
“Today we celebrate the birthday!” At least these are the words that have passed the censorship of the mind and that have remained in the consciousness. In the sentence there was also a reference to the past and a Sanskrit word whose meaning I did not know and that I have forgotten. At the darshan that morning I was very excited, I would have given everything to get as close as possible and we ended up in a fairly favorable position. At a certain point I closed my eyes and I felt a wonderful radiant light and a great heat that spread everywhere pass through me, I felt an indescribable joy. During lunch we met a girl, who told us about the existence of a volunteer school in the village, organized by an Italian devotee, Silvia. By her guide we went to visit it and I realized that love and faith really do work miracles. It was a serene environment, full of peace, simple and welcoming in contrast to the atmosphere of the village where there was so much poverty but also so much opportunism. We bought powdered milk at a vey cheap proce for us, but exorbitant for the local market. Afterwards, they explained to us they were scams by shopkeepers who got rich by giving a few pennies to these needy children. Silvia, on the other hand, moved by compassion for the living conditions of these creatures, responded in the most appropriate way to their needs, founding a school to educate them in dignity and love. I was deeply amazed by what I saw, even from a professional point of view and I understood that I still had a lot to learn from my job, to do it truly well. When I entered the second grade, there was the English lesson and right at that moment on the blackboard, in capital letters, MATTIAS was written. I felt shivers run through my body to my ankles, I felt a visceral, deep emotion, as if he were there, in that moment. I also felt annoyance, fear, somehow his presence, which at that moment was there, I’m sure, renewed the pain that I had frozen inside me, because it was too strong and would have overwhelmed me.
Now, after years, I can understand the emotions that were stirring inside me, but I wonder what Baba really wanted to say with his birthday phrase? His teachings always have the purpose of spiritually elevating devotees, so what? Maybe my birthday could be the day that I can truly overcome attachment, that is, not consider anything or anyone mine, to live life with gratitude as a gift. Maybe he was inviting me to see in every child I met the image of a son, a sense of universal motherhood that takes nothing for itself, but only gives unconditionally, just like that source of light that I had experienced in a dream. Maybe he wanted to tell me not to worry, that what had happened was part of God’s plan of love, even if we cannot understand why, in Him everything has a meaning. Probably yes, he wanted to say this and maybe more, teachings that escaped me, just like those words that flew away when I woke up.
Opening the travel diary I realized that I had left out a part of Baba’s message. After reassuring me that He is present to control every fall, he continued: “A firm love that does not change, does not diminish, can be the love towards the Lord of all the worlds. A changeable love is the love towards the world that changes.” Perhaps this is the meaning of Mattia’s gift: learning Life through death, learning that Love means without death, knowing that we are That, we come from that “Space” where we were never born and will never die. And we can only truly know through experience: God can only be lived.
What does it mean to live God? How can I make this intuition concrete? These are the questions I ask myself every day. Perhaps the truest answer, at least for me, comes once again from the coincidences and experiences lived during my stay with Baba.
The next morning, after the darshan, I felt a strong need to return to my room, almost as if an “all-encompassing” force (I can’t find a better adjective to make myself understood) was pushing me in that direction. My friend didn’t come so I went alone. Guided by the inner voice I lay down on the bed, a little scared by what was happening, but I was urged to keep my mind quiet and not to think. At a certain point I clearly felt the presence of Sai Baba in the room, my hair stood on end with emotion, but I was as if paralyzed, I could only wait and feel through inner perception. He came closer and I realized that he was working on me, operating on an energetic level, first on the heart, then on the top of the head, where I clearly heard the sound of a bottle being uncorked and finally on the sacral area, which remained as it was, probably blocked. The work on the root chakra will lead me to a long path of analysis, looking for the causes of the fear of living, accompanied on this journey by some guides, doctors of the soul, who know how to cross the desolate and deep lands of the unconscious. The following days I felt as if I was guided from above, as if there was a thread that connected me to a majestic Force and I ended up by chance in a school, one of the famous schools founded by Baba.
You could breathe love, you could feel a sense of peace but also discipline and silence, you could feel the respect and awareness of the honor of being there on the part of teachers and students. I breathed that energy completely and now I realize that I did my best to transfer it into my work as a teacher. Teaching has been an immense gift, truly an honor to transmit knowledge with love and awareness because every child is an incarnation of God and educating means precisely “bringing out” helping them to manifest their soul. Living it like this is like living God, an experience of Love, with love, in love for love.
During my stay in the ashram I bought a book on education in human values, which contained the story of Krisna’s flute, the tale of the small reed, cut by men and thrown on the ground, which was picked up by Krisna who, after having emptied it of fibre and cleaned it of mud, made it into his flute with which he played very sweet melodies.
Reading this story I began to cry in a liberating cry of relief, which contained joy, love, pain, fear, so many emotions mixed together, because from the depths both the real Self and all the compressed feelings were rising to consciousness.
Of course inside me there was a beautiful struggle between the inner voice, which pushed me towards this story and towards identification with the flute and the very deep-rooted prejudice that made me think: “I am not adequate, I am not capable, I am not able to do anything important etc.”
This is the challenge of my life and sometimes to overcome fear I have done and do things that perhaps others would not do, perhaps daring more precisely to overcome myself, paradoxically fear thus becomes the seed for the birth of courage! Sometimes instead fear paralyzes me and I am unable to act and make the necessary choices.
The path for me is the construction of a real self-esteem, which also includes the serene acceptance of one’s own limits and therefore of one’s past. I believe that this is achieved through forgiveness, the true feeling of liberation that comes from the awareness that every experience contains the seed of light and that the Lord gives us only experiences of growth and opportunities for evolution. We are always free to choose, we can continue to mull over resentment all our lives or open ourselves to a dimension that includes and welcomes everything.
I would now like to tell you about a little game Swami played that naturally hid a deep meaning. The first few days the inner voice tried to convince me to buy a sari and I resisted until a person confirmed to me that Baba wanted women to wear it. So I had a beautiful, simple and linear pink dress made for me, fighting with the inner voice that had led me to a dressmaker who sold magnificent silk fabrics, including a pink one with the image of Baba playing the flute. And once again the fear of not being worthy of such a gift prevailed and I chose another one.
The morning I put on the sari for the first time, I felt like a princess and the inner voice supported and encouraged this game. While we were going to the temple for darshan, a really curious thing happened: a little toad started following us, he hopped behind us and if I turned to look at him he stopped and looked at us. He accompanied us to the temple and then we didn’t see him anymore. Since I felt like a princess the toad was just right!
The meaning seems clear to me: to unite with your Prince you have to kiss the toad, your integrity requires the courage to go deep inside yourself, meeting your demons and all the unknown and unaccepted parts.
In fact the thought of the day reported precisely this advice. “I always ask for a deep analysis to strengthen the foundations of faith; the investigation will simply strengthen the spring of love……..The love of God creates in man the love for all the examples of his majesty, his magnificence, his variety…. Even the filth is loved, because God allows them to be there.”
Meanwhile, the moments in which I met His gaze were becoming more and more frequent and I believe that this was a true healing. I remember two moments in particular: in the first I felt that through the gaze He was working on me and my solar plexus was as if revitalized and I felt a tear as if it had started moving again; the second time it was as if His gaze had entered inside me to the depths of my soul, a wonderful experience, I felt completely empty and then totally full of infinite joy.
The moment of the return journey was approaching and the detachment was proving to be really difficult, I had found Life again and now I had to move away! I didn’t fully realize that distance doesn’t exist and that He lives in us and is always Present. I knew it in theory but it wasn’t yet experience. The thought of the day, like homework, went like this. “Live because you were born again. Don’t fall in love with the world so much that its false charm brings you back again and again into this disappointing amalgam of joy and pain. Unless you stay a little behind, away from attachment to the world, knowing that everything is a game whose director is God. You are in danger of being involved too closely. Use the world as a testing ground for sacrifice, service, expansion of the heart, cleansing of emotions. That’s the only value it has.” And so we left, renewed in soul and body, but also sad and sorry.
The most beautiful gift was yet to come! While we were on the plane, with all the windows covered because they were showing a movie, we suddenly raised the curtain and before our incredulous eyes two rainbows appeared that joined together to form a single one, perfectly round with the sun in the center that contained the blurred image of Sai Baba’s face. What an infinite blessing! His promise of Peace, his seal of love! Our plane landed an hour early because it had a favorable wind!
Grazia Sereno
#SSSGC ITALY
