I met Michael Wilkins outside a place in Barnes, London SW13, where the man in the pub next door said that no Sahaja meetings had happened for at least eighteen months, but it was clearly printed on the leaflet I'd been handed at the Hammersmith Town Hall public program only the week before!

A year later, I'd been meditating twice a day, attending one or more public programs a week. I met Michael again. He told me of his recent trip to Cabella for Navaratri Puja in 1991. In the year of my Sahaja practice, I had never heard the words ‘puja” or “Cabella” until he mentioned them. He said the weekend had been extraordinary although he had found some aspects quite difficult. I was imagining something of the order of food, or accommodation, something like that. So when I asked you what he'd found difficult and he replied, “surrender”, I was astonished. What was the need to surrender, and what needed to be surrendered?

He said, “You do know who She is, don’t you?”

“No”.

“God!”

“Oh no" I thought, "I really don’t need this.” (Having been an atheist for the previous thirty three years, but recently wavering a bit after reading Joseph Campbell and attending a Jungian group).

I was inspired to go to Cabella for the very next puja, Diwali. My ego and superego were in overdrive. Apart from Shri Mataji and the music, I didn’t much like anything I saw. Men and women wearing Indian clothes in an Italian hill village in the middle of nowhere. Men dancing with men, women with women, etc etc. 

But recognition wasn't difficult at all, in fact, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, a logical, practical response to the feelings and experiences cascading through me, over me and around me.

I'd always found that certain times, travel had one move both through physical space as well as spiritual space. This weekend was so, magnified beyond anything in my previous experience or imagination.

After a weekend of wonderful meditations and the puja, seeing Shri Mataji in Her physical form, I was in seventh heaven.

At 3 a.m. on Monday morning following Sunday's Diwali puja, with me having to leave at 6 a.m. to get back to work in London, I heard the voice of my friend Ian Paradine from the street outside the pension where I was staying calling my name. He said that Shri Mataji wanted to see me. I dressed quickly and we walked hurriedly up to the castle.

In Shri Mataji’s room, there were a dozen or so people present. I was transfixed. I couldn’t think of anything to say, anything worth saying. What can you tell God? And I was with my Mother, I was a small baby again. Moreover, whereas I'd never been very close to my birth mother, and she was long dead, in the recognition of Shri Mataji came a deep love and appreciation of my mother too, which has never abated in the years since.

Eventually, having spoken to some of the others present, Shri Mataji turned to me and said something like, “You can publish a book on Sahaja Yoga? How would that work?”

I explained my grand plan, it was smart, clever and I'd seen it work before when I worked at Penguin. Shri Mataji said to go ahead and do it.

Later that day, as I walked into Soho, where I’d worked for some years, the ambience had changed utterly from the place I'd left just a few days before. It now felt as though I’d entered the gates of Hell.

My plan for the book collapsed ignominiously at each and every stage, I could see and accepted the lesson She was giving me but that's another story for another day.