Transitions are difficult.

The dynamics of our monastery in the first year of my being there were not very healthy, and thus they did not last long term. By the end of 2005, however, things were coming to a head, and 2006 ended up feeling like a fresh start. And as things were coming together a bit more for our monastery, the one in Christchurch completely fell apart, and monks stared migrating our way.

The older school Hare Krishna monk mentality prevailed at our monastery in 2005. The attitude was that to be a good monk you had to be good at selling books, if you struggled with that one task it was a sign that monastic life wasn't for you. Our UK import tried to mellow this hardline stance, but it still came through from our monastery leader. And I heard about it regularly, though increasingly indirect, as a result of my increasing illnesses.

I was being presented with an ideal standard, that I would be able to sell books and lots of them, and told that that would ensure my life as a monk. Of course, I liked monastic life, the simplicity of it, and the focus involved, and the chance to steadily work on improving myself. I liked those things. So I wanted to achieve this ideal goal, but my failure to do so resulted in a feeling of failure, combined with the feeling that, if I failed, I would have to give up what I liked about my life then. It was a scary feeling. And even though I was being told by other senior members of our monastery that this wasn't actually the case, nonetheless it felt like it, it was what was being dictated by the monastery leader.

Around half way through the year we had two senior and well seasoned monks join our monastery, after escaping the collapse of the Christchurch centre. At the time, their presence in the monastery improved the situation to some degree. They were much more soft hearted in their approach to others, and were encouraging to me of my efforts as a monk. They were monks of the 'new school', where monasticism was not based on book sales, but character, study and discipline. As they recovered from their experience in Christchurch, which I must say were infinitely worse than what I have described so far, they eventually took up roles of leadership in our monastery.

As the year came closer to an end our monastery manager made the decision to give up monastic life, and pursue life as a married Hare Krishna. This left an opening in the monastery for someone with computer, management, organisational and communication skills to take his place. Because of my failing health, my computer skills which far excelled anyone else's in the monastery, and my previous experience running an animal rights group, I was the obvious choice for the job.

Each year, as I've mentioned before, the Hare Krishnas run a book distribution marathon, focusing all their attention on selling books for the month of December. Because book distribution was such a strong focus for the monastic as it is, the marathon was the chance for the monks to really show their prowess, show off their strengths to each other. Sometimes even cheating. As the time for the marathon approached, perhaps a week before, I came down with another massive illness. I developed a huge fever, which literally made me completely delirious for two days. As that illness progressed it moved into my lungs and I developed pneumonia. Others also got the flu/fever, but I was the only one to develop pneumonia. I was out of action for three weeks, coughing all night.

For most of my time that year, everyone was encouraging me that even though I was sick and not distributing many books, there was no reason for me to think about changing my service focus and doing something else instead. But when I got this illness the mood changed. As I lay awake one night, coughing my lungs out (not literally) the manager came into my room and said "I've had enough of watching you hack away at yourself like this. If you keep this up you will end up completely destroying your body. We need to change this." His suggestion was actually that I consider going to university to study something, but remain a monk. I found out recently that he got in a whole lot of trouble for suggesting this to me without discussing the concept with my Guru first. Our UK import talked to me the next day, and agreed that my time as a fulltime book distributer was over, and that I would have to do something else as my focused service. The problem was, nothing was certain about what I was going to do next. Nothing had been confirmed or discussed with my Guru at all, and thus I spent most of December in a state of insecurity. What if I did have to leave because I was changing services? Was I failure because of this? What was I actually going to do next year? And how would it affect my relationships within the monastery?

These were big concerns for me during that time. It bothered me a lot. I spent most of my recovery time then listening to lectures on my mp3 player, reading 7 hours a day and discussing philosophy with our manager as he trained me to take over his job as manager. He trained me as the manager even though, at the time, I had not received any direct word from my Guru whether or not that was actually what he wanted me to be doing with my time. That month I also started writing a blog, which was mostly philosophical musings combined with personal thoughts about things. It was a little unconventional for a monk, but that month was the start of the creation of my unconventional monastic approach.

The month of December in 2005 was a stressful month, but at the same time it was a month of hope. I spent my worrying time split between thinking I was a failure, feeling rejected by the monastery for not living up to the expected standard of a book distributing monk, and the other half of the time worrying about what I would be doing instead, whether it would mean leaving the monastery, or being looked down upon for doing some 'inferior' activity, whether I actually had what it took to do the other activity or not. It was a stressful month for me.

There really are few feelings in life that I can think of that are worse than feeling rejected, a failure, not good enough and uncertain about what will happen to you next. The feeling of plans falling through, and hopes being pulled away can sometimes be heart crushing. That December felt like that. And this February has felt like that.

Over Xmas and New Years that year, I did manage to visit my family for the holidays. The festival that was being held at that time was not open to the monks, instead we joined a second end of year festival which took place in mid January. I had relatives visiting from Canada, and I explained to my Guru that this may be the last chance to see my Oma. As it turned out, she didn't come to NZ anyway, though she is still alive in Canada.

When I returned from my parents place to the monastery, I was greeted with news about my new services. I would be taking over as the manager of the monastery AND I would be more involved in the outreach work at the Loft, giving classes there more regularly, including during the week, teaching philosophy, making friends, drawing people to take up the Krishna conscious lifestyle. I was pretty happy to hear the news, it brought a feeling of stability.

But it also brought some personal changes that I didn't expect. And some of those changes were things that grew in later years into things that I despised.

My Family

I just came across this photo as I was looking for relevant photos for my blog. This photo is from 2005, pretty much right around the time described in my last post. This was the FIRST time my entire family came to visit me at the monastery. We had spent the day at the zoo together, posed for a few family photos there, which ended up used as Xmas cards for the extended family. And this is us together at the yoga centre in town, attending a Krishna Fest on the Sunday evening.

EDIT: Decided to include the family photo from the zoo as well.

The rise of the turks.

A few days ago I had dinner with a friend of mine, he was the manager of the monastery when I first arrived there. At the time of our dinner he hadn't seen this blog yet, but he asked me to tell him what he was like during that time. This morning, while I was contemplating the issues of this update, I remembered an event which was relevant to this entry and which also provides some insight he may find useful as well.

Our monastery now had our UK import who was trying his hardest to rectify the problems of our monastery, which were many. Aside from the bullying, the other part of the monastery's issues which I found created a constant feeling of instability was the constant power struggles that went on during this time. This was a difficult issue for our UK friend to solve. The manager wanted to exert his control over the monastery, and the leader had his approach. And they were worlds apart in vision, values and character.

But this power struggle often overflowed from the management committee which was set-up over to the small guys, the turks as we were once called. Once, somehow or other, my room which I shared with two other monks, the turks, started to have a problem with fleas. I'm not sure how it happened, but myself and my roommates started to get covered in these insanely itchy little flea bites. These were a million times worse than any mosquito bite I had ever suffered from, and the lesions would actually last for over a week. They drove us insane!

And one day, while we were contemplating how to get rid of these awful fleas, there was a knock on the door. I answered and it was a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman, who wanted to make an appointment to come back and give us a free demonstration of his vacuum cleaner, by cleaning one room of our house for free. He informed me that this vacuum could even eliminate fleas. What a perfect arrangement, I thought.

For some reason, however, when the manager was approached about this idea, he was adamantly opposed to it. He offered up his arguments, and I offered counter arguments. Others got involved in the issue, which created a fair bit of tension for the monastery. Ironically, years later when I was the manager I made a similar judgement call to his, with a similar result. What happened in this case was that power relationships were emphasized and even publicly declared. We were informed that we were to respect all the decisions of the manager as the manager, and we were to respect the role of the leader as the head inspiration of the monastery. The result of this, however, was an increase of distrust. For starters, we had no faith in the leader of the monastery at the time. And then there started to be greater doubts about the manager of the monastery, rumours of frivolous spending (which to be honest probably stemmed from the awesome lunches we bought when selling books together, the manager and I), and doubts about decision making.

I think anyone who knows me will know that I always have a problem being under someones authority, and I will always speak out when I disagree with something. But during this period of time I had that tendency squashed, with the result of increased health problems and stress for myself.

As all of these internal power struggles occurred amongst the management committee of the monastery, us younger monks created our own mechanism of coping with things, and creating our own stability. In particular, for that period of time, the relationships between myself and the younger monks who I shared a room with, tightened dramatically. Because we couldn't rely on the leaders and seniors for support and encouragement, we started being there for each other, creating our own little scene within a scene.

This had both positive and negative results. I think perhaps everything does if you think about it enough. The positive result was that we became more enlivening in our lives. The negative result was that we had only served to isolate ourselves further and further. Hare Krishnas restrict their associations and friendships to only Hare Krishnas. Monks tend to reduce their socializing and friendships to other monks. And now we had reduced our genuine social interactions to our own small room. For me, being such a social person by nature, this was not a healthy long term option.

I started to feel more and more withdrawn. At the time I was still selling books fulltime on the street, but my outgoing nature started to whither, making each day more difficult. I started to suffer more and more from fatigue, asthma, and I started to contract regular illnesses and lung infections. At one point I had a case of extreme food poisoning which lasted an entire week, where I could not eat anything at all.

Our UK import was also a sickly fellow, and he took pity on my ill health during this time, though he seemed convinced that it wasn't due to mental anguish. The leader of the monastery, however, let me know regularly that I thought my illnesses were do to my weaknesses and psychological lackings, which of course only served to make things worse.

Somehow, I stayed positive through it all. I used my sick days to focus on my studying, reading, and spiritual practices, which kept my spirits high. At that time I loved to read the books, and memorize them, and ponder philosophy deeply, and the time of solitude and reflective thinking kept me strong and working on myself. I was in anxiety because of my situation, but I also felt like a person of growing strengths. I knew that I had the potential to grow through this time and come out better off.

Excitement, growth and fist-a-cuffs.

After my last few posts a lot of people have been asking my why I stayed within the Krishna community for as long as I did. I think the answer is complicated, but the next segment of the story should provide some clues.

In the early months of 2005 the saviour of our monastery appeared on the horizon, coming all the way from England. He was a monk who had served for many years in London, taking on many different roles, including leadership roles, and was in a lot of respects an expert counselor by nature. Because of his seniority and respect he was naturally given the role of leader for our struggling monastery. He quickly assessed the problems, and did what he could to solve them. Or at least to deal with the messes as they continued to arise. And arise they did.

But he started to point out shortcomings in some of the leaders of the monastery, and he helped us younger ones learn how to deal with these kinds of issues in more positive ways, and how to view them as they arose so that we did not become negative towards those who we felt pained by. He was very scholarly, and always knew which verse from the Gita to apply to which situation, not in an impersonal way, but in a natural and fluid way. When I was struggling with my personal relationships with people I considered to be bullies, he reminded me of the strength of character required to see enemies and friends on an equal level, which is an amazing aspiration I think.

One day, during one of the biggest festivals of the Krishna calender, after spending the morning taking part in the events at the temple, myself and several other devotees went to distribute books in Henderson. It was a Saturday, I remember because Henderson was always full of various Pentacostal Christian groups, each given an hour slot, singing, preaching, praying, speaking in tongues, and often attacking Hare Krishnas. Most of the time on these days, the Hare Krishnas would find different places in Henderson to distribute books, either running and hiding through the mall, hanging out in carparks, or other areas. I always liked being in the middle of the Christian zone. I knew my Bible inside and out, and I had made friendships with some of the Christians, and complete rivals out of others. Saturdays selling books in Henderson was always my favourite event. And this Saturday in particular, while engaging in battles of wits with Christian preachers, I actually managed to sell an amazing amount of books. It didn't even make sense to me, but it was such a fun and exciting day. I felt so happy to be doing what I was doing.

But then something really weird occurred. It didn't ruin the awesomeness of my day. But it did have carry on effects, both negative and positive. I was standing near the doorway of the mall entrance, in the square in Henderson. I was almost jumping with happiness to be there, having such an awesome day. I approached one person to see about selling them a book, they took it! They even gave me an extra big donation of $40, which was awesome! As I turned around towards the door again, I saw our monastery's previous leader, the person I was struggling with in terms of our relationship, because I felt bullied by him. I saw him there, standing almost in surprise, short of breath, face white. I smiled at him, cause my day was going awesome, and he smiled back, then walked back into the mall.

What I had missed was that he was actually chasing another member of our monastery out the door of the mall. Not in a kicking him out sort of way, but in a chasing to catch sort of way. I hadn't noticed the other monk slip past me while I glowed about my $40 donation I had received for a book.

Then, it was time for us to pack up. We were fasting all day, until midnight, and I was definitely feeling tired by this point. I went back to the van with our book selling leader. But this time it was just me and him. The other monk who had come with us was not there. I asked about his whereabouts, and received a vague answer. I sensed something was wrong, but I knew not to push the issue, lest I receive some harsh treatment as a result. We drove around the block, and then back to the temple. When we got to the temple our other monk friend was already there. If you know the geography of the area, this is an amazing feat. The temple is not an easy place to get to from Henderson. This monk and I had developed an interesting and open friendship over the months. He was the first one I confided in when I felt the stings of bullying in our monastery. So I asked him what had happened. He filled me in on the story.

Our leader/former (I should think up code names or something) had tried to have a conversation with him about some personal issue. However, the conversation was over shadowed by a bullying mood. My friend did not feel comfortable in that situation, voiced his discomfort, and decided to exit from the vehicle to get some space to cool off. When he tried to leave the van, the leader became a bit more agitated, and tried to grab his arm. My friend said that the discomfort increased, and so he left quickly, only to be followed by the leader, through the carpark, into the mall, and out to the exit where I was standing. According to him, the situation was only a few steps away from escalating into a physical fight.

This was a turning point I think for a few of us at the time. And it lead to a watershed for me. We now had a new sane head to our monastery, our UK import. He was made immediately aware of this situation, and set to work rectifying it, working on fixing broken relationships. And he did an amazing job. I think both parties in that dispute came out much better off in the end.

As for myself, I had issues with it. It did nothing to strengthen my failing relationship with this person in a leadership position in my life. One day, I was having a counseling session of sorts with our UK saviour. Somehow I brought up the fact that I was aware of the near-fist-a-cuffs that took place on that festival day. He immediately expressed concern. Not just concern, but a very intense opinion of the issue. His concern was primarily for my own mental health, and he gave me a good solid kick in the ass. He pointed out that, although this was a serious issue, and he acknowledged that I was being a victim of bullying, at the same time, I had developed rather negative ways to dealing with the problem. My way of dealing with it was not to deal with the problem, but to dwell on it constantly, to find others who would back up my opinions, and just sit and backstab the person I was having troubles with. He pointed out that this was not at all beneficial for anyone. We were monks, destined to live together for likely a long period of time in a small and tight community. If I didn't directly tackle this issue it would only destroy me from the inside, which it had already started doing. His words were so truthful that my eyes filled up with tears.

I left his room that morning, and caught a train to sell books in Glenn Innes. I cried as soon as I got there, because I had to acknowledge that he was right. My response to my situation was not only doing myself more damage, but it was hurting others in my community as well.

That day marked a change for me, and my attitude in the monastery. I was more determined from that point on to do MY part at least to fix the relationship problems I was having. And by doing so it gave me a huge sense of persona growth. THIS, I think, is the kind of thing that kept me in the Krishna consciousness movement for so long. Being in such a close and tight knit community is going to be really tough, in any situation. In a monastery that pressure is multiplied by a million. And it was always going to be difficult. But, by standing up to the difficult situations, and working with the aim of improving myself and my relationships gave me a solid sense of achievement. There were always problems, sometimes things got worse before they got better, sometimes they never got better at all. But that struggle to keep moving forward was a real strength builder. And that kept me moving forward despite all the tears shed, the illness from stress, or the hierarchical social structure which beat at my soul.

So, hopefully this story sheds some light on why I stayed within this community for so long. It was fun, I had awesome days. And I also felt like I was achieving something awesome, something that added to me as a person. I think that without these experiences I probably wouldn't have the strength to write this blog.

This is NOT an anti-Krishna blog

I really have to thank everyone for reading this, and for all the amazing e-mails, text messages, facebook messages, phone calls and conversations. The response has completely blown me away, and has been beyond all expectations I had for how this little project would turn out. It's been amazing reading everyone's responses, and seeing how different people pick out different aspects of this story, and use it to reflect on their own personal lives in such unique ways. I think the openness of this blog has inspired people to be open about their own lives and situations, and honestly acknowledge that things aren't perfect, and they need rectification. To me, that is an amazing response.

I can't even describe how important and positive all the support and encouragement has been for me. This has been exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. The fact that it took a lot of guts to even start writing this blog made me feel like it was a big risk. What if everyone saw that I am actually a weak person? What if people attacked me for being honest and open about the negative aspects of a community? What if this attempt to be open, honest and heartfelt resulted in me being insulted, brought down and hurt more? But so far, the response has been so uplifting, this has easily been my most inspiring last few days since I made this change in my life.

But I did just want to clarify a few things. For starters, this blog is NOT an attempt to criticize the Krishna community, philosophy or lifestyle. That is not it's purpose, and I am a little concerned by the fact some people, both Krishna devotees AND people in general are taking it as such. I still have a lot of friends who are Hare Krishnas, and I have full respect for their community. This blog is about ME. It's selfish. I am talking about MY experiences, MY life within their community. I am willing to be totally and brutally honest about it all, and about my personal shortcomings. As my blog carries on, and as the story progresses, I think that there will be a few twists and turns along the way that will surprise people, because they will reveal a lot about the basic human condition. I am totally willing to admit my own mistakes, and I am willing to acknowledge that sometimes, the ways that I acted within this community were as bad if not worse than the things I have so far described. And that is MY fault, not the communities.

There are problems in every tight knit community. I received one message from someone I feel to be a close friend who mentioned that if they were to write a similar blog to mine about their experiences within the radical activist community it would probably come across just as negative and anti, even though they are still fully active in that community, and consider it their home.

I think it is important for the growth of a community to acknowledge it's shortcomings. If it can't, problems will just continue. I hope that if this blog challenges anyone they will take on board that challenge, acknowledge what needs to be changed in their own lives, and make the tough and scary decision to improve their lives or their community. I can see that is happening already for some. And that is so inspiring.

One final thing: Yeah, I know there are grammar and spelling errors, which probably make things difficult to read or understand sometimes. And while I AM sorry about that, I'm not going to go back and edit these entries. One reason is I don't have the time. Another reason is I don't want to risk second guessing some of my openness and changing things. As this blog progresses, and maybe even comes to some what of a conclusion, I may actually consider committing this all to print. At which time I will probably edit it, or more likely, I will ask someone else to edit it for me. :)

So anyway, THANKS HEAPS!

Porn Again.

Every year, for the month of December, the Hare Krishna community holds a book distribution 'marathon', where the selling of books on the street, and door to door, takes priority over all other activities. I was initiated at the end of year festival which took place after the first book distribution marathon that I participated in. As I mentioned before, when I moved into the monastery I experienced some less than encouraging treatment by the hands of the leader of the monastery. During this book distribution marathon that mistreatment reached it's boiling point for me, and I know that it was noticed by the others in the monastery at the time.

As a result, one day while taking a lunch break with a fellow monastery members, I discussed the issue with him. It was definitely a relief to talk about it with someone, and to hear that I wasn't imagining that I was being treated in such a harsh way, as others were also becoming concerned about it. He suggested I talk to the monastery manager about these issues as well, as he was also concerned about it.

That happened sometime before the end of year festival, where I was initiated and received my new name. Then we traveled together down to Christchurch for the festival. On our return to Auckland, I had arranged to travel to my to my parents place, for a late Christmas celebration. Before I left for my parents the monastery manager informed me that he had a plan on how to deal with the leadership issues that were taking place in the monastery. He was writing a letter to higher authorities about it, with the hopes of having the leader removed from his position, possibly even from the situation altogether. This is the stage of the monastery I often refer to as the mutiny stage. I went to my parents with hopes that it would be successful, but also with a definite feeling on instability, knowing that the leadership and management of the place I lived was such a shambles.

I had a nice visit with my family at that time. There were also a few other family friends visiting during that time, and it was nice to catch up with them. I chanted my rounds either alone in the early hours of the day in the garage, or sometimes I would talk to an old bus stop down the road, and chant in the bus shelter. I cooked big meals for the family, because Hare Krishnas refuse to eat any food cooked by someone who is not a devotee, as their lower consciousness would affect the eater in a negative way.

Then I returned to the monastery. What happened on my return made the whole situation I was living in seem even more of a shambles. I arrived by at the monastery, and attempted to turn on our communal computer. For some reason, it was not working at all. I don't even know how it happened that is was so completely SNAFU, but NOTHING worked on it. I know enough about computers to fix them in most situations, and but this time, although the fan turned on, and the lights were going, the computer completely refused to boot up at all. There was nothing I could do with it.

I approached the monastery leader about the problem, and I said "There is something wrong with the computer, what happened?" His response was a complete surprise to me, he said "Don't worry about it, we're looking into how those pictures got on there, and when we find out who has been looking at these websites we will tell their Guru." I was taken a back, as this both felt like an accusation AND an admission of guilt simultaneously. I replied by saying, "No, I don't even know what you're talking about. The problem with the computer that I'm talking about is that the computer is broken, it isn't turning on at all. Do you know anything about it?"

To be honest, I suspect that the computer had been destroyed in some crude way to protect the porn spying culprit. I mentioned this issue to the monastery manager, who then acknowledged the issue, that some porn had been found on the computer. He also pointed out that there was also porn found on the laptop computer. The laptop was a computer which was seldom allowed to be used by anyone other than the manager and the leader of the monastery. He recruited my computer nerd skills to find evidence of who had in fact been looking at porn. Before the communal desktop had stopped working, he managed to get the files off the computer which would help incriminate the offender. As we looked at it closely, it was clear that the person responsible was in fact the monastery leader.

This made things increasingly more difficult for me. For starters, I was already being mistreated by this person who exercised their superiority over me at any given opportunity. Then, I had started talking about this person behind their back as an attempt to get some relief from the mistreatment. There was the attempted, but failed, mutiny and coup. And now I was one of only two people who was aware that our exalted leader, who was a long-term and well respected monk, had been looking at porn online. I felt simultaneously sorry for him, yet at the same time, I hoped that this would mean a down-fall for him, that either his position would be taken from him, or his behaviour would radically change. As we sat chanting together in the same room, I could see that he was feeling the pressure of someone about to be caught out in a lie. It was stressful, every interaction was pressurized for me during that time. This is when I started to suffer from increasing health problems.

Then, one day, the manager had decided he had enough evidence to confront the leader about the porn issue. At first, the leader denied it. Then he said he was just testing the computer monitoring system, to ensure that if someone had looked at porn in the monastery it would be detected. Then he acknowledged the reality, that he had been distracted and purposefully downloaded the porn.

The monastery manager then decided it was time to bring this issue up with higher authorities again. He still hoped to have the leader removed from his position, and he hoped that the porn issue might be sufficient to do the job. In one sense, it was. Though not directly as a result of these issues, a more senior monk came to stay with us a week or too after the higher authorities were made aware of the porn issue. He took on the role of leader for the time being, for the 9 months of his stay in NZ. And under his care the monastery turned into a sane place for once.

As a result the leader was made to apologize to me about his looking at porn, and the issues that had caused in our relationship. Our relationship did change from that point on. I think partly because of a sense of embarrassment on the part of the monastery leader. He was a very emotionally lead person. Although he still had his mean and nasty streak to him, which he seems to carry to this day, from that point on he seemed to approach me with a mood of low self-esteem. It was hit and miss though. And it was still a constant source of stress and anxiety for me.

Not long after this, the stress had taken it's tool on me, and I started to get sick regularly. I didn't want to tell anyone at the time when they asked, but I do think that the primary reason I suffered from sickness was the stress of having to deal with a bully 24 hours a day. I started dreaming of leaving the monastery in Auckland, ideally for another monastery elsewhere, just to escape this situation. And I often had to hold back tears while the mistreatment continued. And so I started my period of ill health in the monastery.

My Initation

I think these are the oldest picture I have of myself as a Hare Krishna. These photos are from the date of my initiation ceremony, sometime in the last few days of December 2004, when I officially took the vows of a Hare Krishna, which were that I vowed to abstain from illicit sex, intoxication, meat eating and gambling, and I promised to chant the Hare Krishna mantra on my beads 16 times around each day, a task that generally took me personally two hours to complete. Initiation also means that one is taking a vow to obey and follow the guidance of a Guru. During initiation one is also given a Sanskrit, or sometimes Bengali, name, which is chosen by the Guru. At this ceremony my name became Vidyapati dasa. Vidyapati was a poet, so I was named as his served, Dasa meaning slave or servant of.

On a practical level, receiving a new name is a confusing thing. For starters, it actually took me at least a day to remember my own name, and then longer to remember to respond when people used it! And it took others a while to get used to referring to me as Vidyapati instead of Mikey.

This occasion was a very serious event, as you may be able to tell from the photograph. The acceptance of a Guru, and the taking of vows is something that I have always considered to be on the level of a marriage situation. You take vows essentially to promise to be loyal to one person for the rest of your life. It is a point that is often stressed in the Krishna community that one should not approach these vows whimsically, and then change one's mind at a later date, saying "I was different then, I've changed now."

I think that is fair enough, and I think I entered into my initiation with the intention of sticking with it. At the same time, obviously I did not continue to be faithful to my vows, and I am no longer following the guidance of my Guru. Obviously, my goals and desires did change over time, and that lead me to a point where I felt I could not longer continue my relationship as a disciple in any way.

I will be honest to say that this was the hardest part of my decision to leave this community. At first, there was a definite sense of failure, even though I had already completely lost faith in the process and philosophy of this movement. There was definitely a fear of letting down the Guru, to whom I had made my vows to begin with.

I will say that there is a certain issue of prestige within the Krishna community, which I think is difficult to avoid for a lot of people, and which draws them to make big decisions perhaps partly out of social pressure more than through their own well thought out opinions. Having a Sanskrit name does give a feeling of belonging to the community, and it provides a recognition that a certain standing has been achieved, almost like receiving the next colour belt in a martial arts style. This is not the purest of motives by any means, but it is definitely a motive that happens. There is a feeling of disappointment in the hearts of an aspiring disciple if they have to watch others getting initiated before you, as if it is a sign of your inferiority. And within this community, status actually does mean a lot. Seniority is respected, and a Sanskrit name gives the receiver a certain sense of seniority. They are above those without a Sanskrit name. At least, I can say with honesty, this is how I felt about the situation, and I acknowledge that perhaps it was not the best motive for taking vows that are, strictly speaking, rather serious.

My initiation took place at the temple in Christchurch, while all of the young devotees from around the country spent a week or so together having a festival, between Christmas and sometime after New Years. This festival happened pretty much every year that I was involved with this community, though in subsequent years it was held at different locations. Having a festival at this time meant something very tuff for those of us who came from strong family backgrounds. It meant not being able to go home to see our families during the holiday periods, especially Xmas. I remember having to tell my mother before this festival that I was not going to be able to come home for Christmas. She started crying on the phone. My reaction at the time was one of anger, that my family was not respecting the lifestyle choice and goals I had set for myself. To be honest, I was also still feeling a bit bitter about the fact that the previous Xmas my family had all taken a trip to Canada without me.

But not being present to take part in Xmas with my family for so many years is something that I am very sorry about now. In truth, I missed watching my little brothers grow up because of the fact that family attachments are frowned upon within the Krishna community as being illusory distractions. You are not your body, you are the soul, so your family are only bodily relations, of limited importance in comparison to your spiritual progress. So I missed watching my brother grow up, and I missed seeing their bands perform, I missed hearing about how life was for them. I don't really know how they ended up the way they are now, and I definitely feel sorry that I wasn't able to be there for them as an older brother during any rough patches they may have had. I don't even know if they HAD rough patches. And to me, now, that is heart breaking to think about.

I think I am going to cry regularly while updating this blog.

EDIT:

Just found another picture of this day.