What I will be hosting, to be exact, is a series of retreats to be held at the Ashram this spring. During each retreat, about a hundred devotees will come here from all over the world for a period of a week to ten days, to deepen their meditation practices. My role is to take care of these people during their stay here. For most of the retreat, the participants will be in silence. For some of them, it will be the first time they've experienced silence as a devotional practice, and it can be intense. However, I will be the one person in the Ashram they are allowed to talk to if something is going wrong.
That's right--my job officially requires me to be the speech-magnet.
I will listen to the problems of the retreat participants and then try to find solutions for them. Maybe they'll need to change roommates because of a snoring situation, or maybe they'll need to speak to the doctor because of India-related digestive trouble--I'll try to solve it. I'll need to know everybody's name, and where they are from. I'll be walking around with a clipboard, taking notes and following up. I'm Julie McCoy, your Yogic cruise director.
And, yes, the position does come with a beeper.
As the retreats begin, it is so quickly evident how much I am made for this job. I'm sitting there at the Welcome Table with my Hello, My Name Is badge, and these people are arriving from thirty different countries, and some of them are old-timers but many of them have never been to India. It's over 100 degrees already at 10:00 AM, and most of these people have been flying all night in coach. Some of them walk into this Ashram looking like they just woke up in the trunk of a car--like they have no idea at all what they're doing here. Whatever desire for transcendence drove them to apply for this spiritual retreat in the first place, they've long ago forgotten it, probably somewhere around the time their luggage got lost in Kuala Lumpur. They're thirsty, but don't know yet if they can drink the water. They're hungry, but don't know what time lunch is, or where the cafeteria can be found. They're dressed all wrong, wearing synthetics and heavy boots in the tropical heat. They don't know if there's anyone here who speaks Russian.
I can speak a teensy bit of Russian . . .
I can help them. I am so equipped to help. All the antennas I've ever sprouted throughout my lifetime that have taught me how to read what people are feeling, all the intuition I developed growing up as the supersensitive younger child, all the listening skills I learned as a sympathetic bartender and an inquisitive journalist, all the proficiency of care I mastered after years of being somebody's wife or girlfriend--it was all accumulated so that I could help ease these good people into the difficult task they've taken on. I see them coming in from Mexico, from the Philippines, from Africa, from Denmark, from Detroit and it feels like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Rich............
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