reading, and couldn’t stop. I found meditation, consciousness practices, exercises to help me manage my mind and emotions and much more. I was aflame with curiosity and love. I had an extremely difficult time stopping my overly curious mind in order to meditate, but finally I managed, with the help of heavy exercise before dropping into meditation. Here was the new spirituality for me, devoid of dogma and providing me with practices to help me master and develop my own capacities and relationship to the Kosmos. The Buddhist and esoteric paths teach us to believe only what we know in our own experience. I had found my path —life itself brought the lessons I needed to learn. It was important to develop discernment, particularly the difference between conditioned responses and those of the Higher Self. Direct inner guidance was to be my teacher with no intermediaries, along with the learning from my own life experiences. I began to define what spirituality was to me.
Nancy Roof
Becoming a Monk in the World I learned quickly that I needed to balance solitude and action in the world. Much to the distress of my colleagues I turned the phone off for half the week and was unavailable to the outside world. Cultivating my inner life and spiritual sensitivities became my priority. I now spent three days in contact with the outer world while preserving four days for the rich inner life that speaks to me in silence and images that generate the motivation for my service in the world. I discovered that I was truly a Monk in the World, as Brother Teasdale would say. Love that had energized my passion to live in the past now was complemented by will and purpose. What was the larger Will of the Kosmos that led me so many times to know, ‘not my will but thine be done’? My husband was a mystic who had lived in Kalimpong for a year in the 50s. He was one of the first Westerners to bring Eastern teachings to the West. We founded the Mountain School for Esoteric Studies in the late 60s and held regular meditations and retreats in the mountains. This was the time when teachers from the East were coming to the West to teach, and we had many at our home teaching different practices and methods of meditation.