My Dear Teacher, On Friday evening during the time of your evening program, as far away as I am, I profoundly felt the force of your transmission, as I do now whenever you conduct a program, even if I am not meditating. Sometimes I forget that you have a group session, and I will feel my awareness dissolving into formlessness, even when I am sleeping. The energy begins to intensify a couple of hours before these gatherings and continues for several hours after. In fact, just thinking of you is enough! I am constantly pervaded by your shakti.

I am writing you these observations because I thought you might be interested in knowing how your disciples are experiencing your transmissions. For example, during my attendance at the Palm Springs intensive on 1/24/09, my mind was profoundly immersed and fixed in a state of formless transparency, so strongly that even if when I tried I could not feel the energy working anywhere else (heart or vital), nor could I pull myself away from that state except by rising out of my meditation seat. The energy continued with me in highly intensified form throughout the week, and even now boosted again and again by your group transmissions remains quite full. The overall transparency of my body and mind is greatly deepened, as if one hour with you were equal to one year of my own practice.

I note however, that when the shakti is a little less intense (when I am not in your physical presence), I can work with it in a way that is more balanced. Without loosing the depth of transparency, I can reach out and touch the heart or the vital energy. These then begin to feel the pull, and begin to blossom: the upward dance of the shakti penetrating, dissolving and uniting the prana and senses into consciousness, and the heart melting into itself and opening, shining with tenderness and beauty. My point here is only that a very slight amount of disciplined application has ignited what might otherwise have been a lopsided deepening into Being.

I do not wish to bore you with the story of my journey through other practices, let me only say that I have practiced deeply in yoga and pranayam, nada and bindu concentration practices, bhakti yoga, non-dual Vedanta, but mostly in Theravada traditions of samatha and vipassana, more or less in that order. My journey began in my early teens, and I am now in my fifties. Along this journey I have had many profound experiences, including immersion in voidness, states of profound absorptive tranquility, and experiences of the indwelling Lord, but I was never able to stabilize any state, or integrate these openings. Only now with the great mercy of the shakti you share with us, is there a matrix of intensity that can conduct, stabilize and integrate these various aspects of the Reality as they unfold spontaneously.

Again and again over the years I prayed to Devi to send me a true guru, one who is right for me, and when I was at the point of despair She sent you. I can think of no one else who could understand me better or make better use of the fruitions of my various practices. Even on a more mundane level, as a gay man I have in you the most deeply validating model I could have hoped for – a small but significant detail of Divine attention that reassures me that this connection is not coincidental.
I have noticed that no one addresses you with any of the traditional honorifics of the Guru, and you seem to have no use for the eastern formalities. I will of course honor the culture that you have created around you, but if this connection is not the real deal, then nothing is! Please bless me my beautiful gurudev and think on me with kindness, that my long search might end here, with my head…

at your feet,