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A principle in life to remember is to travel light.
You are traveling all the time.
Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.
– Yogi Bhajan
My first experiences of Solstice and Yogi Bhajan
by Swami Dev Singh Khalsa
It was the Summer in 1974 and I just came back from my first year of College at New England Conservatoire in music in Boston and I was real traumatized from my first year of College and had a bunch of weird relationships with people up there. When I left home for College, I guess I wasn’t really prepared for the world, so I came back with the intention of taking the year off from school and I just was going to stay at my parents house and practice classical guitar which was my professional pursued.
I started calling various restaurants looking for playing jobs and I called this one place in Dallas called “The Health Nut” and this guy answered the phone and said, “well we can’t pay, but if you want to come down and play for a free meal, just ask for Chuck. So I came down to the Health Nut and I asked for Chuck. And this little guy with a turban on comes out looking at me in the eyes and I looked him in the eyes. And this was one of the few people who was into eye contact as much as I was, so I played there frequently.
One time I went down there after not having been there but for a couple of months and Chuck was in the kitchen doing some carrots or something. “Hey stranger, what have you been doing”- he said, and I said, “well, bla, bla , bla, …..(I did not have mush to say) What about you?” He said, ”Well, I have been in NM for Tantric.” That was end of the summer in 1974, so I asked, “what is that?” And he got this slight little grin on his face and he said, “well, you sit with a straight spine and you do this and you do that and other things.” He finally worked his way around and invited me to Yoga class.
A few weeks later, when I was burned out from this practicing the guitar, I said, “well, I think I will do something different today. I think I’ll go to Yoga Class.” I drove over to the Ashram. When I got out I was Chuck and a couple of ladies were sitting on the front steps and I said, “Hi Chuck.” And he saw me and said, “Oh, Sat Nam. It is great you came.” I did not know what Sat Nam meant at the time.
Chuck taught the class and at the end of that one hour class I knew I was totally hooked. I knew I was hooked for life. I just felt real high and this wasn’t something I was going to replace with my musical pursues.
I didn’t necessarily know that this was going to be the basis for my entire life, which of course it is now, but I knew I found something that I was definitely going to stay in.
We had a great feast after class, with all the yoga students and everything and I noticed that nobody was calling Chuck “Chuck”. Everybody was calling him Guruchander.
During the class somebody walked in and said, “Hey, Nixon just resigned.” I guess Kissinger came into the Oval Office and sai: “Swami Dev Singh just took his first Yoga class, we better resign”. It was August 8, 1974. That’s why I’m one of the few people who will know the exact date of this first KY class and things started going from there. I kept going to class and couple of years later started to go to Solstice and about a year after I started to hang around at the ashram.
One Sunday I noticed a teenage girl from Holland showed up at the Ashram. She started hanging around and within a year or so, SSS gave her the name Kirn Kaur and a couple years after that she and Guruchander got married.
The very first time I saw Yogi Bhajan actually was in October of 75. It was a Tantric Course in Austin and Guruchander talked me into going to it within the space of 20 seconds and I went.
I went to my first Solstice in the summer of 1976 and SSS said, while I was there, there was a very auspicious Solstice-day for various reasons.
At that time Tantric was every afternoon for 5 days. Solstice was 10 days. You were expected to stay on silence the entire 10 days. The diet was strict for the entire 10 days and no snacks, no snack bars, nothing. If you wanted a shower you jumped in the stream at least for the first few days. After a while they got some shower curtains.
On our way to Solstice we would stop at this convenience store. All of us, and especially all the people who had been to Solstice before, rushed in and filled their arms with all this junk food we can get. I was puzzled and asked, “Why are we doing this?” I was told “You’ll find out.” It did not take long to see what they were talking about. The Solstice diet consisted of the same things it is to this day. Hot onion and potato soup in the morning with bananas and oranges, mung beans and rise with boiled carrots, beats and fresh lattes. And no lunch. The director of Dallas Ashram at the time, Sahib Singh stayed up all night in the motel making a trail mix for us before we went up to the Solstice site. As we came close to the site everyone was instructed to get rid of all of the junk food they may have left in their bags. Anyone caught with any junk food was liable to be reprimanded on site. To my surprise some people still were able to hide some of it in their tens.
The conditions of our stay were quite unusual and harsh. Everyone had to get up for Sadhana every morning no matter what. If they did not, we were instructed to through cold water at them while they were still sleeping. One time it was my turn making sure everyone was up so I was instructed to get the water and pour it on one of the guys. Later on he told me that he really wanted to punch me in the nose.
After we got to Solstice one of the new guys, Atma Singh disappeared on the second day. Everyone was looking for him all over including the woods but he was nowhere to be found. Ashram Director from Dallas, all worried, went to a phone to call his parents and tell them he was missing. To his surprise the missing person answered the phone. It turned out. He got tired of Solstice and ran home.
The first time I saw Yogi Bhajan on Friday night after Tantric. We were doing warm-ups, in fact we were in camel pose which was one of the most difficult exercises for me in those days, and the Dallas Ashram Director Sahib Singh, was on the stage having everybody doing camel pose and he said, “Inhale,” so we all inhaled and suddenly this voice from the back of the room said, “Exhale”. And then he said, “relax.” We relaxed and of course it was the Yogi Bhajan. He walked into the room right past and his robe brushed on me. He got up on stage. The sunlight was coming in through the window and my first sight of Yogi Bhajan was his profile against the sun coming in. It was very dramatic and very inspiring introduction.
That year I got my name. I went up to him, and I handed his secretary a piece of paper with my information and she passed it to him. He looked at me and he wrote down “Swami Dev”. Took another piece of paper and wrote “Swift”. I said, “Thanks Yogi Ji” and walked away. I just could not believe that anybody could have given me the name “Swift”. So I laughed and I came back a few minutes later. I asked his Secretary “that does it mean?” She said, “it says it means Swift” and SSS was in the middle of giving somebody else his name and he stopped for a second and gave me this humorous look and then went back to what he was doing.
One day during Tantric the SSS had this guy by the name of Livtar getting up on stage and play his new song. The song of Khalsa and that is the song we now sing in every Gurdwara.
I could probably go on, now that you got me started, for hours but is that enough for now?
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