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Nayka News: Paradise to Chimp Eden  Namaste from your favorite Tantra dakini,
mentor and friend, NAYKA… "You should never give yourself a chance to
fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead." -----------A Guru in India "
Love the heart that hurts you, but never hurt the heart that loves you." -- Vipin Sharma
"True love does not come by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an
imperfect person perfectly." -- Jason Jordan
I apologize for the lateness in sending you a very special VALENTINES newsletter but I've
just recuperated from the worst flu bug I've had since childhood. I was quite disappointed in myself for getting sick in the first place seeing that I was having regular dates with
the "other man in my life" (Aka: Fit Tv's Italian Stallion GILAD), timing my vitamin and Chinese herb vitamins hourly, mastered the ultimate natural granola crunch mixture, could
recite the entire Yogi tea brands in alphabetical order, and took meditative walks in nature with the dogs daily. I found myself waking up one morning in a daze as if I was thrown down
Alice in Wonderland's fantasy hole, awakening in a daze during the "Week in Love." Although one might imagine all of those little things you would do from you! r home if you were suddenly
sick in bed for over a week, I consider this form of stillness and rest a type of torture worse
than the illness itself. This all happening during my favorite holiday of the year was punishment all the more, as in my family, Valentines Day was always held dear thanks to my father who
relished in spoiling his wife and four daughters with an entire house decorated outside and in
with Valentines decorations, balloons, gifts and poetry. Since his passing, I have been left with
the disease of passion to the point that I find myself wondering what the world is doing these days to demonstrate such gestures of love.  I will begin by stating that it should be almost punishable by fine that not a single TV channel played a romantic movie
this year on the night of Valentines Day. Is it that our society really prefers the choices of CNN's political commentaries, Bruno and Carla's dance off, The Biggest
Loser, or the top style mistakes from the Grammy's Red Carpet? Even animals were not in the mood for romance on the Animal Planet Channel as the show they aired was called
Paradise from Chimp Eden. The most entertaining show I could muster on Valentines was coming from the comic George Carlin who shared a dichotomy of relationship
differences ! between men and women today.
His take on "The Modern Man" may very well showcase why masculine energy is out of balance with feminine energy
these days. Take a 3 minute peek at his description here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCljFYn3zTY. What you
realize he is getting at is how complicated, over-processed, over-planned out our lives have become. Who has time for
spontaneous lovemaking anymore? My mother summed it up best when I asked her what her ideal fantasy date looked like: "Someone who makes me feel his undivided attention over a
glass of wine." Is it really that hard to accomplish just this nowadays? Has dating and the process of falling in love, or even staying in love, resorted to something of a "To Do" mention
on our Palm Pilots TASK list?  The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised
his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a
life of single-pointed focus, he taught.) There is indeed a need to simplify one's life objectives based on what one wishes most in life. There are simply only so
many hours a day to which one can "achieve" anything, and so if you choose work, family, hobbies, the gym, your hobbies, and leave LOVE at the bottom of your daily activities, can you
really blame yourself or your partner if you simply are too exhausted to put any energy into it? Perhaps this is the real reason why TV programming sticks to vegetable-state-like programming
to which no single person or couple even have to entertain the subject of love, romance or sex.
 Sometimes while switching the TV channels, I like to imagine what the various TV hosts' love lives might look like. I can't even fathom Anderson Cooper having time
for a love life. Dr. Sanjay Gupta couldn't possibly be a good lover seeing he spends his time between rescuing sea lions in Antarctica, commenting nightly on Larry
King, seeing patients and instructing American parents what foods they shouldn't feed their children at the school cafeteria. Is it any wonder no one ever even sees
Oprah's boyfriend Stedman when she has a schedule that clocks out running a TV show, a magazine, various charities, 8 homes worldwide, and a doz! en dogs? What
kind of "quality time" would she really be able to offer her partner?
There's a line in the Kama Sutra that states, "Sex is easy. It's making Love work that's an art." It is true
that one can program their bodies to go on auto-pilot when it comes to the physical, biological need of sexual release. But the Eastern Arts challenges us to recognize
that true enlightenment (happiness, bliss, ecstasy) can only be reached through the soul's imprint through our body. Through various Eastern practices like tantra,
yoga, and meditation, we reset our physical blueprint to include more conscious energy that refuels our inner most love for OURSELVES. However, one must make it a
daily practice to include more TIME for this passion to grow. Remember what Rumi stated and ask yourself which three things you really want in your life and
compare how your time measures up in giving you those things.! If you free your schedule up just a little bit, you can finally compete with our early ancestors and land a better version of
Paradise to Chimp Eden. My schedule of availability for the rest of February is only in Schenectady, NY. As some of you
know, I am aiming to get to CONGO, AFRICA this spring but am on hold due to recent earthquakes and government turmoil that makes CONGO a bit dangerous this month. I aim to
head to Edison, NJ, Boston, and Washington, DC these next 6 weeks. Please check my online calendar by MARCH 1st for those exact dates.  To schedule, please begin by filling out my site's AVAILABILITY form specifying dates and times you'd like an
appointment. I am available by my office phone most mornings by 9am-noon. Generally I am session by the afternoons. Please be sure to check out my bio and extensive write up in
this week's METROLAND.
I run a FREE TANTRA*SACRED LOVE*KAMA group in the Capital Region. To attend our free events (over 80 people and counting now) please email me to
request the group's link. A great way to meet other Eastern minded folks! Our GODDESS GIRLS women's group is growing as well.
OUR next trip to INDIA is aimed for MAY 2008. Please check out
www.AffordableIndia.COm for
tour details, rates and call directly to learn more about our next co-ed trip. Singles or couples are welcome! A tour itinerary can be read through here:
http://www.affordableindia.com/trip_itinerary.html
Don't forget our BOOK OF THE MONTH, SHANTARAM,that allows you a $100 discount if you can
answer a series of questions when calling. (See details below on book from previous newsletter and first chapter entry!)
 NEW SERVICE OFFERED FOR COUPLES!!!!!!!!!!!
Looking to spice up your Date nights with your partner? Don't know how to though? Let NAYKA plan a romantic TANTRIC DATE night for you complete with a detailed night of EXPRESSIVE
places to try, hour by hour, and a guided plan of KAMA SUTRA and SPICE prepared for just you and your partner! I will interview each partner for their desires, wishes and interests and
prepare a total EVENING TANTRA date night that will give you step by step instructions that night on what to do, where to go, and your "next
task" will await you at every location! Please call to discuss this exciting new addition to the NAYKA service menu. SINGLES: NAYKA offers dating and online dating tips in person on how to meet your ideal
partner, and even knows QUITE a number of SINGLE people on both sides of the sexes if you are open to a little MATCHMAKING. Please call to discuss!
I look forward to seeing you very soon. Stay warm this month and be in touch. Happy Valentines Day,
NAYKA
www.Nayka.Com
www.HeartacheHelper.Com
www.AffordableIndia.COm
(301) 789-2503 office  Now on to my guilty pleasure………..NAYKA is recommending that for the first time, we start a BOOK OF THE MONTH club. As an incentive, to those folks who
read her selected Book, and can answer a series of questions from the book, they will enjoy a $100 discount off a 2 hour session or longer!
I am sharing with all of you my ALL-TIME FAVORITE book as this month's first selection. Coincidentally, it will share with you all of my OTHER favorite themes in this
novel: India, Love, Helping Others, The Mob, Friendships, India……………….:) The book is called SHANTARAM by Gregory David Roberts. You can easily
find this book online at Amazon.Com. It is a large book, but it is such an amazing read that you are THANKFUL it doesn't end too quickly. To get you "hooked" I am
sharing from the NY Times web site, an excerpt from the first chapter here. Hopefully, you'll enjoy the book as much as I have. (three times over now)
FIRST CHAPTER
'Shantaram'
By GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS
Published: December 26, 2004  It took me a long time and most of the world
to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I
realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to
forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you
make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals
in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front
wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India,
where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the
enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the
wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there. Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen.
And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else-with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.
The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air. I
could smell it before I saw or heard anything of India, even as I walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport. I was excited and delighted by it, in that First
Bombay minute, escaped from prison and new to the wide world, but I didn't and couldn't recognize it. I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of
hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of
gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It's the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It
smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans
and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, a! nd of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples,
shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. Karla once called it the worst good smell in the world,
and she was right, of course, in that way she had of being right about things. But whenever I return to Bombay, now, it's my first sense of the city-that smell, above all things-that welcomes
me and tells me I've come home. The next thing I noticed was the heat. I stood in airport queues, not five minutes from the
conditioned air of the plane, and my clothes clung to sudden sweat. My heart thumped under the command of the new climate. Each breath was an angry little victory. I came to know that
it never stops, the jungle sweat, because the heat that makes it, night and day, is a wet heat. The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn
to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave. Then there were the people. Assamese, Jats, and Punjabis; people from Rajasthan, Bengal,
and Tamil Nadu; from Pushkar, Cochin, and Konarak; warrior caste, Brahmin, and untouchable; Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Parsee, Jain, Animist; fair skin and dark, green eyes and
golden brown and black; every different face and form of that extravagant variety, that incomparable beauty, India.
All the Bombay millions, and then one more. The two best friends of the smuggler are the mule and the camel. Mules carry contraband across a border control for a smuggler. Camels are
unsuspecting tourists who help the smuggler to get across the border. To camouflage themselves, when using false passports and identification papers, smugglers insinuate
themselves into the company of fellow travelers-camels, who'll carry them safely and unobtrusively through airport or border controls without realizing it.
I didn't know all that then. I learned the smuggling arts much later, years later. On that first trip to India I was just working on instinct, and the only commodity I was smuggling was my
self, my fragile and hunted freedom. I was using a false New Zealand passport, with my photograph substituted in it for the original. I'd done the work myself, and it wasn't a perfect
job. I was sure it would pass a routine examination, but I knew that if suspicions were aroused, and someone checked with the New Zealand High Commission, it would be exposed as a forgery
fairly quickly. On the journey to India from Auckland, I'd roamed the plane in search of the right group of New Zealanders. I found a small party of students who were making their second trip
to the sub-continent. Urging them to share their experience and travelers' tips with me, I fostered a slender acquaintance with them that brought us to the airport controls together. The
various Indian officials assumed that I was trave! ling with that relaxed and guileless group, and gave me no more than a cursory check.
I pushed through alone to the slap and sting of sunlight outside the airport, intoxicated with the exhilaration of escape: another wall scaled, another border crossed, another day and night
to run and hide. I'd escaped from prison almost two years before, but the fact of the fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night. And while not completely
free, never completely free, there was hope and fearful excitement in the new: a new passport, a new country, and new lines of excited dread on my young face, under the grey eyes. I stood
there on the trample street, beneath the baked blue bowl of Bombay sky, and my heart was as clean and hungry for promises as a monsoon morning in the gardens of Malabar. 'Sir! Sir!' a
voice called from behind me.
 A hand grabbed at my arm. I stopped. I tensed every
fighting muscle, and bit down on the fear. Don't run. Don't panic. I turned.
A small man stood before me, dressed in a grimy brown uniform, and carrying my guitar. More than
small, he was a tiny man, a dwarf, with a large head, and the startled innocence of Down syndrome in his features. He thrust the guitar at me.
'Your music, sir. You are losing your music, isn't it?'
It was my guitar. I realized at once that I must've forgotten it near the baggage carousel. I couldn't
guess how the little man had known that it belonged to me. When I smiled my relief and surprise, the man grinned back at me with that perfect sincerity we fear
and call simple-minded. He passed the guitar to me, and I noticed that his hands were webbed like the feet of a wading bird. I pulled a few notes from my pocket
and offered them to him, but he backed away awkwardly on his thick legs.
'Not money. We are here to help it, sir. Welcome in India,' he said, and trotted away into the forest of
bodies on the path.
I bought a ticket to the city with the Veterans' Bus Service, manned by ex-servicemen from the Indian army. I watched as my backpack and travel bag were
lifted to the top of a bus, and dumped onto a pile of luggage with precise and nonchalant violence, and decided to keep the guitar in my hands. I
took a place on the bench seat at the back of the bus, and was joined there by two long-haired travellers. The bus filled quickly with a mix of Indians and foreigners, most of them young, and
travelling as inexpensively as possible.
When the bus was close to full, the driver turned in his seat, scowled at us menacingly, spat a
jet of vivid red betel juice through the open doorway, and announced our imminent departure.
`Thik hain, challo!'
The engine roared, gears meshed with a growl and thunk, and we sped off at alarming speed through crowds of porters and pedestrians who limped, sprang, or side-stepped out of the way
with only millimetres to spare. Our conductor, riding on the bottom step of the bus, cursed them with artful animosity.
The journey from the airport to the city began on a wide, modern motorway, lined with shrubs and trees. It was much like the neat, pragmatic landscape that surrounded the international
airport in my home city, Melbourne. The familiarity lulled me into a complacency that was so profoundly shattered, at the first narrowing of the road, that the contrast and its effect
seemed calculated. For the first sight of the slums, as the many lanes of the motorway became one, and the trees disappeared, clutched at my heart with talons of shame.
Like brown and black dunes, the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside, and met the horizon with dirty heat-haze mirages. The miserable shelters were patched together from rags,
scraps of plastic and paper, reed mats, and bamboo sticks. They slumped together, attached one to another, and with narrow lanes winding between them. Nothing in the enormous sprawl
of it rose much above the height of a man.
It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travelers, was
only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling
survivors. I learned, months later, that they were survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine,
and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year.
As the kilometres wound past, as the hundreds of people in those slums became thousands, and tens of thousands, my spirit writhed. I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my
pockets. If you feel it at all, it's a lacerating guilt, that first confrontation with the wretched of
the earth. I'd robbed banks, and dealt drugs, and I'd been beaten by prison warders until my bones broke. I'd been stabbed, and I'd stabbed men in return. I'd escaped from a hard prison
full of hard men, the hard way-over the front wall. Still, that first encounter with the ragged misery of the slum, heartbreak all the way to the horizon, cut into my eyes. For a time, I ran
onto the knives.
Then the smolders of shame and guilt flamed into anger, became fist-tightening rage at the
unfairness of it: What kind of a government, I thought, what kind of a system allows suffering like this?
But the slums went on, kilometre after kilometre, relieved only by the awful contrast of the thriving businesses and crumbling, moss-covered apartment buildings of the comparatively
affluent. The slums went on, and their sheer ubiquity wore down my foreigner's pieties. A kind of wonder possessed me. I began to look beyond the immensity of the slum societies, and to
see the people who lived within them. A woman stooped to brush forward the black satin psalm of her hair. Another bathed her children with water from a copper dish. A man led three goats
with red ribbons tied to the collars at their throats. Another man shaved himself at a cracked mirror. Children played everywhere. Men carried water in buckets. Men made repairs to one of
the huts. And everywhere that I looked, people smiled and laughed. The bus stopped in a stutter of traffic, and a man emerged from one of the huts near my
window. He was a foreigner, as pale-skinned as any of the new arrivals on the bus, and dressed only in a wrap-around sheet of hibiscus-patterned cotton. He stretched, yawned, and scratched
unself-consciously at his naked belly. There was a definitive, bovine placidity in his face and posture. I found myself envying that contentment, and the smiles of greeting he drew from a
group of people who walked past him to the road. The bus jerked into motion once more, and I lost sight of the man. But that image of him
changed everything in my attitude to the slums. Seeing him there, a man as alien to the place as I was, let me picture myself in that world. What had seemed unimaginably strange and
remote from my experience suddenly became possible, and comprehensible, and, finally, fascinating.
I looked at the people, then, and I saw how busy they were-how much industry and energy described their lives. Occasional sudden glimpses inside the huts revealed the astonishing
cleanliness of that poverty: the spotless floors, and glistening metal pots in neat, tapering towers. And then, last, what should've been first, I saw how beautiful they were: the women
wrapped in crimson, blue, and gold; the women walking barefoot through the tangled shabbiness of the slum with patient, ethereal grace; the white-toothed, almond-eyed
handsomeness of the men; and the affectionate camaraderie of the fine-limbed children, older ones playing with younger ones, many of them supporting baby brothers and sisters on their
slender hips. And half an hour after the bus ride began, I smiled for the first time.
'It ain't pretty,' the young man beside me said, looking at the scene beyond the window. He was
Canadian, the maple leaf patch on his jacket declared: tall and heavy-set, with pale eyes, and shoulder-length brown hair. His companion looked like a shorter, more compact version of
himself; they even wore identical stonewashed jeans, sandals, and soft, calico jackets. 'Come again?'
'This your first time?' he asked in reply. I nodded. 'I thought so. Don't worry. From here on, it
gets a little better. Not so many slums and all. But it ain't good anywheres in Bombay. This here is the crummiest city in India, y'can take my word.'
'You got that right,' the shorter man agreed. 'But from here on in, you got a couple nice temples and some big British buildings that are
okay-stone lions and brass street lights and like that. But this ain't India. The real India is up
near the Himalayas, at Manali, or at the holy city of Varanasi, or down the coast, at Kerala. You gotta get outta the city to fred the real India.' 'Where are you guys headed?'
'We're going to stay at an ashram,' his friend announced. 'It's run by the Rajneeshis, at Poona. It's the best ashram in the country.' |
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