For Asha
Asha Greer is my teacher, initiator and friend. She died in January of 2022. A few years ago, I was inspired to pitch an interview with Asha to a magazine I admire. I asked her if she’d be up for it, explaining that my scheme was to lure them into publishing it through her relationship to the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, while the real purpose was to introduce its readers to the practice of hanging out in the spaces in between. This is the pitch:
Asha Greer, 86, a nobody
Asha is an 86 year old artist, tea master and mountain. She founded Lama Foundation, a counter-culture experiment in consciousness and communal living in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, in 1967. While most of the communes of that era have long since dissolved, Lama Foundation is alive and evolving over fifty years later. A friend of Ram Dass, Asha illustrated portions of Be Here Now, which was published by the Foundation (originally in pizza boxes).
A contemporary of gurus and spiritual masters and a Murshid (senior teacher) in a Universal Sufi lineage, Asha is not interested in titles. Decades of meditating an hour a day (often surrounded by her students), creating art and surrendering to life have polished her atmosphere. She hangs out in the gap between thoughts. If you’re nearby, you’ll feel your breath slowing and your grip on your mind softening. A devoted mother of four who now lives simply in rural Virginia, Asha is a human who through practice has become so still—so empty—that mystical experiences flow freely. She remains as humorous as ever.
Asha in the early days of Lama Foundation.
An older work of Asha’s that came with the following message: “Did I mention that the best way to tame your demons is to befriend your dragon and ask him or her to help you to subdue them. This one appeared on a sheet of paper while I was on a retreat to aid me in opening my heart. I was grateful as my heart did open and I learned vulnerability is the first lesson. Then I felt the exquisite pain and beauty of really caring about and for others. It’s among Our greatest works: to love and trust enough to express it and to receive it.“
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