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- view from dorm to main temple
Two nights sleeping on the 13th floor in Amma’s ashram got me closer to the sky and the highest that I’ve been since my departure from Seattle, but didn’t get me any closer to the famous “hugging saint” who has embraced more than 30 million people. Of course, if she had been physically closer, ie actually at her ashram, I may have experienced something more than the hug. I left with fond memories of cheap but excellent cappuccinos, tasty khichari (lentils cooked with rice), sunset meditations, and interesting conversations with fellow travelers and Chaitanya, a former Seattle resident who has called Amma’s ashram home for 10 years.
Amma’s full name is Mata Amritanandamayi but Amma means “mother” in Malayalam, India’s state of Kerala’s local language. She has certainly become a type of mother as she and her various organizations have given birth to hospitals, universities, charity programs, mass housing projects, and disaster relief assistance programs throughout Asia. After the tsunami in 2004 which hit the Keralan coast and flooded her ashram on a sliver of land off the shore, her organizations poured more than US$46 million into Kerala to assist with disaster relief including wide scale housing development.
The 30 minute introductory video at the 5 pm orientation for new residents provided an excellent overview of all of her work – complete with a clip from a Peter Jenning’s evening news program. The video also showed the mass adoration and the long lines of people who wait to receive a hug and some whispered words from Amma either at her ashram or see her during one of her world tours which take her out of her ashram for seven to eight months a year. Some of my Madurai classmates have seen her in Germany, America, and in India although they haven’t joined the 400 strong Amma groupies who travel where ever she goes. For the groupies and Amma devotees, they can always console themselves with the many fawning books written by various Amma disciples since she first started to gain prominence in the 1980s. They can buy lots of memorabilia too including key chains, pendants, pens, bags, organic products including chocolate to keep Amma with them always. If they don’t live in the ashram, many come visit at least once a year. The ashram’s all pink two tall towers and many adjacent dorms can house more than 4,000 people. About 2,000 of the residents though are university students attending Amma’s computer science or medical related schools. When Amma is there, I’m told that the ashram swarms with people and the services and the accompanying ringing music can last far into the night or all day.
So, yes, it did feel a bit cultish there at the ashram but the long term devotees were refreshingly down to earth and earnestly kind and helpful. When Amma isn’t there, the place becomes a quiet, relatively unstructured and very cheap (US$3 for accommodations and two Indian meals) Western respite from the Indian travel circuit. There is a lot of time to talk to other travelers there and, for the first time in this Indian trip, I actually heard a fair number of American accents.
My traveling companion and fellow Madurai TTC student, Anne Mette from Denmark, and I didn’t wake up for the 4:50 to 6:00 am chanting of the 1,000 names of Durga or the Divine Mother. Since we didn’t go to the morning service and/or we didn’t have our own cups, we missed out on the 6 am and the 4 pm teas served out of big steel cannisters. We always got to the 9 am breakfast at the western cafe though! Since our community service, which is called “seva” at Amma’s, wasn’t until 2:30, we were free to wander around, do internet, hang out outside of the juice stall, and wonder where everybody went until lunch was served at 1 pm. Our seva was dumping the western cafe’s trash and sweeping and mopping the floors. We accomplished the tasks in an increasingly sweaty but efficient manner. Then, the unguided hour meditation, 5:30 to 6:30, at the ashram’s nearby beach to watch the sun set over the Arabian Sea – which was a very spiritual experience actually. We went to the women-only 6:30 to 8:00 pm bhajan (devotional songs) at the temple the first day as we didn’t know the women could join the men at the Darshan hall. The bhajan experience was rather painful as we didn’t receive any chant books nor any cushions and the three switched on fans in the temple did a poor job of cooling the slowly more crowded temple. On the second day, we just prolonged our stay at the beach to watch a stunning but calm inducing sunset. After experiencing those vividly colorful sunsets, how can an individual really believe that they are not supremely lucky to be alive while at the same time being gently reminded that our one life is just a microscopic sand grain on eternity’s beach.
As the sun rose the next day, we descended from our airy eerie in the wheezy small elevator, dropped off our sheets and pillows in the laundry carts, and walked over the beautiful and now flood proof bridge back into the real world of India. Hugless but rested.
To learn more about Amma, you can visit her website at: http://www.amritapuri.org/
Logistics: Some trains stop near the Ashram and it is about 150 rupees to get to the ashram. Or, you can take the backwater cruise run by Kerala tourism that leaves from Quillon’s boat jetty every am at 10:30 and arrives around 2 pm at Amma’s ashram – about 150 rupees. Heard very conflicting reports about whether or not this tourism boat is good or not. Can take it all the way to Allepy too and it arrives at 6:30.
