Chanti holroyd

Ananda: Palo Alto

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Freestyle Academy for supplying me with resources and helpful information to complete this project. I would also like to thank the community members of Ananda for being so welcoming, easy to talk to, and open about their life stories. Finally, I’d like to give a shout out to Niles and Willem for helping me film and record my interviews, as well as take photographs.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements...

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Preface...

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Introduction...

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Meditation’s Endless Benefits...

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More than a Community...

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A Balanced Life...

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Conclusion...

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Works Cited...

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Preface

I decided to focus my documentary on Ananda because it seemed to fit my life perfectly at the time. I had just began meditating and was fascinated by the unique community and the people that make it up. Although I received much needed help with filming, I decided to work solo on the project itself, because I was so passionate about it.

The hardest part about this project to time management in every aspect of it. Scheduling interviews was a huge struggle for me because I’m constantly busy and so were the people at Ananda. When I finally got together with people to interview them, I was so nervous that I would forget one tiny thing that would ruin my audio recordings or film. In addition, the deadlines for this project were more aggressive than any other project I’ve worked on and caused me tons of stress.

Throughout this project I’ve realized my biggest stress is putting out work that I’m proud of. I’m extremely self motivated especially when I’m working on something I’m so passionate about. In this case, I’m putting out work that represents a place that so many people love deeply, including myself, making me want to push myself extremely hard in order to represent Ananda in the best way I can.

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Introduction

The Bay Area is known for being a fast-paced, technologically-advanced area where hard working, highly productive individuals with impressive degrees live. This is where I grew up. I’ve lived here all my life, experiencing and watching people work hard to graduate from overly competitive schools so that they can get into that prestigious college and land an overly stressful job. A friend of mine, who has traveled to many parts of the world, described the Bay Area as the most fast paced area in the world. Having the opportunities to travel a fair amount in my lifetime as well, I have noticed that living here, time flies by and the days feel much shorter than those elsewhere. We’re so distracted by our thoughts, picking apart our past and worrying about the future that we’re rarely present in the our lives.

I began asking myself, how can I get the most out of living in an area like this? How can I make sure that my life doesn’t just pass me by? That I’m getting the most out of my life? For me, the answer laid in the study and practice of mindfulness in order to explore a deeper meaning in life.

Mindfulness is form of meditation in which one focuses on their current state of being (ex: breath and bodily sensations) and filters out thoughts that are irrelevant to the current time being. Not only have studies shown the endless physical and mental benefits of practicing mindfulness (ex: improved sleep, lowered anxiety), but I have found that it is a key element for me in order to get the most out of my everyday life, whether I’m at school or with my friends and family.

As I began to, in all honesty, rediscover a new way to live, I remembered a place in the back of my mind that I thought would help me on my path. Ananda is an open-armed community that my parents used to take my roughly once a week, a place that allows people to take time out of their busy days and practice mindfulness through means of meditation or even yoga. I cannot overstate how inviting and warm people are. I have never felt so comfortable to talk to anyone and have casual heartwarming conversations, a huge difference from my everyday life in high school. Here I was, surrounded by people I barely knew who shared similar goals to me, a community of understanding and supportive human beings. As I began learning more about Ananda, I found that I wasn’t the only one; People are drawn to Ananda from all over the World.

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Meditation’s Endless Benefits Ananda teaches the practice of meditation through yoga and/or meditation classes.

People fall into the practice of meditation for various reasons, but those who stick with it are often looking for more out of their lives. There are many steps to meditation. The first is completely relaxing your body and your mind and positioning yourself so that you’re comfortable but won’t fall asleep. After this begins a stage called Hang-Sau, a simple form of meditation that teaches one to clear the mind by focusing on the breath or on the “spiritual eye” (located on the forehead) if you’re more

experienced. This attention on the breath allows the mind to relax completely.

Contrary to the beliefs of many, meditation takes a lot of focus and energy. “It takes a lot of energy to meditate. If you don’t have energy while you’re meditating you go to sleep. When you go to sleep, then you go into your subconscious, but in meditation… you’re trying to go into superconscious,” said Rammurti Reed, one of Ananda’s meditation teachers, and a meditator himself for decades.

In a Ted Talk from 2012, I watched Andy Puddicome, the founder of Headspace (an

award-winning digital health platform that provides users with guided meditation), a former Buddhist monk, and “the international poster boy for the modern mindfulness movement,” according to The Times say, “Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it’s much different than that. It’s more about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly — witnessing it coming and going — without judgment, but with a relaxed, focus mind.”

Nawashami Asha, a light-

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bearer at Ananda , told me “(Meditation) is so gratifying even if you meditate badly, even just to try to bring yourself to center and to recognize you actually have a center and that if you live life from your center you just feel so much more secure. Everything that you really want begins from your center.�

Meditation is also beginning to have measurable benefits and is scientifically proven to reduce stress, anxiety, likelihood of depression and has endless other benefits. Several studies show that meditation is providing measurable benefits, including the reduction of stress: In 2012, 201 volunteers with coronary heart disease were asked to either take classes on exercise and diet or take classes on meditation. Researchers followed up with participants up to 5 years

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later found that volunteers that chose to take meditation classes, had a 48% reduction in their overall risk of heart attack, stroke, and death compared to those from the health education group (Blue).

In an additional study, researchers at UCLA took MRI scans of 100 people, half of which were nonmeditators and the other half long term meditators. The long term meditators showed higher levels of gyrification, which can be associated with faster information processing ( journal.frontiersin. org).

Meanwhile, at the University of Washington, 45 human resource managers were randomly split up into 3 groups. For eight weeks, one group practiced mindfulness meditation, one practiced body relaxation, and one had

no training at all. The groups were given stressful multitasking tests before and after the eight weeks. The study showed that the mindful meditation group reported less stress during the test than the two other groups (http://faculty.washington. edu).

More and more benefits are being undercovered as meditation is constantly being studied.

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More than a Community

Ananda is housed in a white, basic church-like building.

The surrounding grounds are decorated with colorful flowers and the walls are painted vibrantly. People there smile at you, welcoming you without judgement; there are children playing and people everywhere, celebrating and enjoying life.

Filled with unique human beings from all over the US and even some parts of the world, Ananda has a what some may call a “magnetic pull” for people looking to find more out of life.

Rammurti Reed, a lightbearer and long time meditator, lived with his wife for five years in a valley on an island in Setonaikai, the Japan inland sea. They leased several buildings on the

island where students would arrive on ferries from Japan’s biggest towns to learn English. They lived in a beautiful house surrounded by mandarin orange and plum trees when his home was wiped out by a typhoon. Where there had been a gentle stream running past their home, there was now a raging river that left only the bathhouse standing. After looking through a spiritual community guide book, they decided on ten of their favorite communities, spread out around the world. Although they had planned to spend a year at all of them before settling down at their favorite one, they couldn’t seem to leave Ananda.

“When it came time to move on to the second community and visit it, it was the people, the

nature of the people and their high quality of character and not education, but intelligence and knowledge that we just couldn’t imagine leaving them,” said Rammurti. He and his wife have since been a part of Ananda for over 35 years.

Asha Praver was in her early 20s living in San Francisco when she began looking for more meaning and truth in life. In 1969, she met Swami Kriyananda at Stanford University. He was just beginning to form the first Ananda community in the hills of the Sierra Nevada. “I very much wanted a life that had meaning and I wanted a life that would give me real satisfaction, make me really happy. I also wanted to help people in ways that would really count and I just saw all of it in the life of Ananda,”

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she said. On June 1st 1971, Asha left everything behind to move into the Ananda community and has been living there ever since then, meditating, and working to build new Ananda temples and communities to spread their teachings.

Whether people are going through a hard time or simply looking for more in life, they seem to be drawn to Ananda.

Vinny Jones was living in North Carolina in 2011 working as a Director of Operations at Facebook’s corporate fitness center.

Although he was on a career path he was passionate about, he found that himself and the people around him weren’t very happy. As he began researching, he realized he was drawn to Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism.

After a couple years on this path of research, he discovered Ananda. “I think all of us at some point sort of have this moment, or this series of moments, where we start to question the path that we’re on and our career, our schooling and, sort of looking for the deeper meaning of why we’re here instead of just going through the motions,” he said.

Vinny moved to the Ananda Palo Alto community about a year later

to pursue these teachings.

East West Bookstore, owned by Ananda, also helps inform people of the lifestyle and teachings at Ananda, pulling in new followers frequently.

Steven Manus was going through a divorce, a time in his life where it became clear that he wanted more out of his life.

Although he had worked for a number of years in the Stanford Chemistry department, he felt his life was lacking fulfillment and happiness, so he turned in the direction of exploring his spirituality. “You could see people who were extremely accomplished... and yet these people were almost universally unhappy,” he told me, referring to his experience working at Stanford. Steven began taking meditation classes at East West Bookstore in Seattle. Immediately drawn to the practice, he soon moved into the Seattle Ananda Community.

These people are only a few of the hundreds that make up the Ananda community in Palo Alto, all of whom have come together to reach the common goal of finding meaning and happiness in their lives. Many of these people live

in the Ananda community, which acts as a catalyst to their journey, as they are surrounded by supportive people who they can talk to and will understand the obstacles they may encounter along the way.

They found, as I had found, that they were not alone in their desire for happiness and fulfillment.

Ananda is not only a church, but also includes the Living Wisdom Elementary School. This school is unconventional in its focus of teaching children how to treat others and how to harness their energy appropriately rather than seating children in desks all day and teaching them how to get an A on their tests. The children are offered optional yoga classes while also given more freedom to just be a kid. Vinny Jones, who works part-time at the school said, “Our Living Wisdom School is different than mainstream schools in that they don’t try to fit these kids into a certain curriculum, but here they fit the curriculum into the needs of the kids in an official working setting.”

All these things are what makes Ananda’s community beautiful, unique, and welcoming.

A Balanced Life

Ananda’s balanced lifestyle, including the practice of meditation and the understanding, supportive people that make up the community, provides the perfect environment to explore life on a deeper level. Many people I’ve spoken to have revealed they are seeking self-actualization because of Ananda, the highest level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid that predicts the level of human happiness. If a person is able to reach this level of the pyramid, they have found a meaning to life that is important to them and feel fulfilled because they are doing all they are capable of. From bottom to top, the pyramid lists human needs as physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization. The needs closer to the bottom are more necessary for happiness and must be fulfilled before progressing on to higher level needs.

Although Ananda isn’t for everyone, it’s lifestyle has the ability to satisfy every level of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Its living space and cafeteria satisfies the physiological and safety needs, the community satisfies the social need, and the sermons and meditations

or yoga classes help satisfy the esteem and self-actualization levels. Those who work at Ananda are assigned jobs that best enhance their spiritual growth at the time, whether it’s working with kids, or doing more hands-on physical work. Vinny Jones, who works fulltime at Ananda Palo Alto on top of his job at The Living Wisdom School told me, “Here at Ananda any project or communication that is

done is beneficial for this person. ‘Let’s give something to someone, or create something that would be beneficial for this person to their own highest potential’.”

Being surrounded by such a supportive community is the foundation of having a balanced life and finding happiness.

Rammurti Reed, one of Ananda’s lightbearers said, “The fact that you attend those classes with some of the other people that you live with or people that you might be having over to dinner in the evening... that’s very supportive because you’re all kind of on the same track. And you’re informing each other and answering each other’s questions and sharing.”

Ananda’s entire environment is built to encourage a balanced and fulfilling life. to dinner in the evening... that’s very supportive because you’re all kind of on the same track.

And you’re informing each other and answering each other’s questions and sharing.”

Ananda’s entire environment is built to encourage a balanced and fulfilling life.

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Conclusion

Ananda is a beneficial place for anyone looking to find self-actualization or even just be a part of a loving, supportive community. Ananda has been providing both of these for decades and with the help of people like Asha Praver, and many others, Ananda’s influence is spreading quickly as new communities are built across the nation.

Children from The Living Wisdom School have graduated to become parents themselves. As they continue to be involved with Ananda, they enroll their own children in the same school they went to as a kid, reflecting the positive experiences they had growing up at Ananda.

As Ananda’s influence begins to cycle through generations, it is also reaching out to new members every day, spreading its teachings. Swami Kriyananda’s work in creating Ananda has burned the pathway for hundreds to find self-actualization, and the happy, fulfilling life that comes with it. His work has created a place for all those people to come together on their journey, smiling as they walk the path that was burned for them decades ago.

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Works Cited “4 Scientific Studies on How Meditation Can Affect Your Heart, Brain and Creativity.” TED Blog 4 Scientific Studies on How Meditation Can Affect Your Heart Brain Andcreativity Comments. N.p., 11 Jan. 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

“Ananda: A Center for Meditation, Yoga, and Spiritual Community.” Ananda: A Center for Meditation Classes, Yoga, Spiritual Community, & Teachings of Yogananda — Palo Alto & San Francisco Area. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

“A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Meditation for Work Stress, Anxiety and Depressed Mood in Full-Time Workers.” A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Meditation for Work Stress, Anxiety and Depressed Mood in Full-Time Workers. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

Blue, Laura. “Strongest Study Yet Shows Meditation Can Lower Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke | TIME.com.” Time. Time, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

David M. Levy, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Alfred W. Kaszniak, Marilyn Ostergren.The Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training on Multitasking in a High-stress Information Environment (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Jones, Vinny. “Sangha Staff.” Interview by Chanti Holroyd. n.d.: n. pag. Print.

Manocha, Ramesh, Dr. “Sahaja Yoga Meditation Proven Highly Effective for Treatment of Stress and Depressive Mood.” Researching Meditation. N.p., n.d. Web. Manus, Steven. “Teacher.” Personal interview by Chanti Holroyd.

Praver, Asha, Nawashami. “Light Bearer.” Personal Interview by Chanti Holroyd.

Reed, Rammurti. “Light Bearer.” Personal interview by Chanti Holroyd.

“Stress Reduction in the Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease.”Stress Reduction in the Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

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“The Unique Brain Anatomy of Meditation Practitioners: Alterations in Cortical Gyrification.” Frontiers. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

Chanti Holroyd is a Junior attending Freestyle Academy.

She is an only child and lives with her parents in Mountain View, California. She’s passionate about traveling, meditation, cooking, and beach volleyball. She is committed to UCLA for beach volleyball and spends most of her time at the beach, hanging out and competing with friends.

She is potentially interested in studying psychology and brain development in college.

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