An Excerpt from "Sai Rapture, The Ecstatic Journey of a Modern Day Gopi".

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The Awakening Flower

ASTRAL FLIGHTS

My dance with God officially began in my early twenties. The birth of my daughter heralded my true initiation into the life of a seeker of knowledge and the journey to God. Disillusioned with the hypocrisy of conventional Christianity, I had abandoned the church and its religious practices. I was like a boat without a rudder, drifting aimlessly in a sea of intellectual agnosticism. What happened in the delivery room was so life-changing and self-altering that I must attempt to describe the circumstances in detail.

I was forced to go into the hospital a week or so before term. It seemed my water had broken and I sat amid the wailing, blood curdling screams of women in labor; my immature 22-year-old mind shuddered in fear of what was in store for me. At some point, the physician administered an IV of oxytocin to induce labor. He made me promise that I would not shout or scream. As the medicine was quick working, my contractions started with a vengeance, very close together, indescribably painful. At one point I remember telling the doctor that I had to leave. He asked me where I thought I was going, my legs were strapped down and my arms too. But I just kept insisting that I had to go. I was wheeled into the delivery room; a few doctors surrounded me asking seemingly simple questions about my telephone number and address.

They seemed to be discussing the possibility of forceps delivery. Then quite unexpectedly, as if all the drama and noise of a television program going full blast was suddenly switched off, I found myself clearly out of my body standing across the hospital room watching my body give birth. I thought to myself, “What am I doing over here?”