Yes, it felt like a limb of me had been cut down. I’ll never forget that tree; it was a very beautiful tree. In the summer it was all covered in leaves; how could they possibly chop it down? It was the only one in the whole field.

My childhood was a mixed blessing. The relationship with my father was difficult but he was a ‘seeker’ who brought many fascinating influences into my early life. Also, we had a very unusual family heritage with strong Anglo-Indian connections over many generations.

My parents were artistic; I can remember a beautiful painting that my father had painted of Jesus holding a lamb over his shoulders. My mother also painted; I have a couple of sweet pictures she did of running horses.

Yes. I went to Salisbury College of Art and eventually worked for a time as a commercial artist in Bristol where I also obtained a place at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school.

Oh very much so. If you can express yourself in movement without speaking, whether it’s painting or writing, playing an instrument or dancing, just taking any one of those things, you come to know yourself. You touch the emotional body much more deeply; it makes you more appreciative of what is out there. It makes you become a more balanced person.

I felt that I had to dance; there was something in me that had to do it and I loved it. When I went to India, I studied Indian classical dance alongside Indian music; I felt that the two went together and that you couldn’t just study dance or study music independently, but that you had to study them both together.

I had to feel the music. I think anything that enables you to ‘feel’ is part of the journey. When you do something creative, you are expanding.

In fact, when I taught classical ballet for a number of years, I would say to my students that they should stretch their arms so that they could feel that they were embracing the whole garden, then the road, the country, the city, the seas, the world, even the stars beyond.

There’s something in us that’s like a fruit ripening; it’s going through the different stages of ripeness. Some people might be born like Ramana Maharshi and they are fully ripe, ready to drop from the tree. Others may take lifetimes.

One of the things that has changed since this awakening experience has been that before, I was very much centre-stage, receiving bouquets for my performance, so to speak. This is the ego, you see; the little personal ‘I’ that hangs on to me first and foremost.

Since the awakening experience, the trigger to be the centre of attention is no longer there.

Indian classical dance is based on the premise of spirituality; for example, Bharata Natyam is based on sacred Hindu temple dance and making offerings to the deities.

Classical ballet is secular and it is very different; if you look at anything regarding life in the East, the backdrop of Indian culture, whether it is the music, the dance, the drama, their whole life in fact, it is backed by a spiritual practice.

Yes. If you take Indian classical music, for example, it’s also all about vibration. You have 22 shrutis, or main notes. So if you take any note, and then another note, anything in between is still a valid note. Studying music, especially Indian classical music, was as if I were being taught everything that ever existed in the world because I came to know that we are all vibration.

As humans we recognize each other because we are vibrating at a similar wavelength. If we had an eye to see all this we would see that. Sometimes, we do indeed see that everything is just scintillating and sparkling. There isn’t in fact anything solid so you may even get an experience, say, of putting your hand through something.

I have always seen other people’s auras and since my awakening experience it feels as if my cellular structure has changed. Sometimes, I see energy or consciousness as colour.

The paths and journeys in our lives can be significant. I first met Swami Veda Bharati, foremost disciple of Swami Rama of the Himalayas, aged six. When I met him again in India many years later, he gave me the name Nandini and encouraged me to undertake a forty-day silence at his ashram in Rishikesh.

Swami Veda oversaw my daily routine; I’d get up at 4 am, I did some fire pujas, by going into the fire pit and doing offerings. I wanted to resolve the situation with my parents because at one point, I couldn’t talk about them without bursting into tears just like a child. I was able to get to a place where that didn’t happen any more. The forty days just released that. It was like offering all the negativity into the fire.

Sometime later I attended a dynamic meditation workshop in Glastonbury. In the first meditation, out of my etheric body what seemed like the huge shell of a cockroach with my father’s face fell onto the floor with a metallic ‘clunk’. My body suddenly felt light and released of a great burden.

In the third meditation, which was a creative visualization, I went up a path, opened a gate, and I found myself in a forest with huge high trees and the sun was shining through them. I could also hear birds singing and there ahead of me were the lion and the lamb, the eagle and the dove. It was the Christian paradise. Then I saw a young man walking towards me with his arms outstretched and I knew inside that it was my father. He came towards me and embraced me, and that was the end of the visualization.

From that moment on, for the last two years of his life, my father was wonderful. I realized that you cannot change anybody else but yourself. So I could never change my parents, no matter how much I wanted to; I could only change myself.

So my forty days of silence, the eaten-out cockroach and then the paradisal garden; these were all significant moments in my life.

In was in the early nineties that I discovered it. I walked into Courtyard Books in Glastonbury and this book just jumped at me, Be As You Are. The author, David Godman whom I later met in Tiruvannamalai, India, helped me shape my own book. Alan Jacobs, President of the Ramana Maharshi Foundation, UK, was also very helpful and encouraging.

When I read Be As You Are, I didn’t really understand it at first but I knew it was the truth. I just had an inner knowing. Interestingly, my father had been interested in Paul Brunton, the author of In Search of Secret India, the book that introduced Ramana Maharshi to the West in the 1930s. He must have mentioned Ramana Maharshi during my childhood but it was a name that I hadn’t remembered.

Another important moment for me was meeting Satyananda, who had begun holding satsang following his own awakening. We went to Malvern to see him. When he was talking, it was as if Ramana was coming through him and was talking to me. It was a very personal, inner experience.

Again, when we went to stay in a friend’s house to house-sit, I discovered to my amazement that she had nothing but Ramana Maharshi books on her bookshelves. Another time, when we were between moves, I had a night’s sleep when I was feeling ghastly and my eyes were coming out on stalks, but then Ramana’s face appeared, and a whole wave of light and bliss went through my body. I knew this was truth; truth doesn’t wear clothes, doesn’t have a name, and doesn’t have form. But there was Ramana, who came and healed me.

The ultimate defining moment occurred on the May bank holiday 2001, when I was going upstairs to sit in our little meditation room, and I was thinking, how about pure love, what’s that? I love my family, my dogs… and then the next thing was there was an experience where I felt the interconnectedness of everything; it was like there was no person anymore, it was just witnessing, that this ‘I’ was completely disintegrated, dissolved.

That’s when silence comes in. Silence is a great language to learn.

Well, yes and no. It seems like there is still a person in this body. If I hurt my thumb, I think ouch, that hurt!

But what has happened to my ego is the most extraordinary transformative thing that has ever happened. What I can say is now my ego is in the passenger seat, whereas before, it used to be very much the driver.

Before it would get angry and upset, but also exhibit love and compassion. My experience has been that the love and compassion have not gone. You have to be able to cry with someone who is crying; you have to be able to smile when someone is smiling.

There is still the compassion and the love and that is the difference between the wisdom that is coming from the heart and knowledge that is coming from the head. Jnana is wisdom knowledge.

It’s like the diving pool and the swimming pool analogy I often use. You need the diving board to become a brilliant diver, but once you’re in the pool, are you thinking of the diving board? No. So you need your ego to get rid of the attachment to the ego.

Life is beautiful. Living now, presently, sitting in a chair having a nice conversation with a lovely lady who has driven half way across the UK… and the sun is shining!

No. But I have met some individuals who were extraordinary people along the way. They were teachers to me because they opened my eyes. This process began in my childhood and continued into my adult life. For instance, I was a Bahá'í when I first went to India and I experienced visions of the Bab and of Abdu'l-Bahá.

An analogy I often use about all this is the scaffolding around a house. Every time we think a thought, there’s another piece of scaffolding, whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. You’re encased by scaffolding – the true you – and it’s only when you do something positive, it starts to drop off, like a kind act, for example. Then the shaft comes in, the glimpse.

Then the light that is within is the one that is perennially shining; it’s eternally there, it’s our true nature, and it is who I am. If I get egoistic about it, bang comes the scaffolding.

What is happening is a bit like a mandala. You know how a wheel turns, and the wheel can only turn because there is a point in the middle, which is never moving. So, that is what is happening; within here is the still point, the eternity that never moves, if you like. But it’s also always moving – where is my centre in fact? Here or here or here? So, it’s everywhere.

Life looking out, like the mandala, is what is being created. You put the dot in the middle, or even on the side, but as soon as you start to move from there, you are moving into time, space and the exterior life; you’re moving outwards. But when you return to the still point and all of that is withdrawn; it’s a bit like a spider and its web.

Mandala means a circle with circumference and centre. There are mandalas in every culture. I worked with them for about four years because I found I could fine tune myself by painting them. The mandala is our mirror. I’ve taken lots of mandala painting workshops and see it as a way of communicating the teaching.

It is Ramana’s teaching.

Because it is about asking, ‘Who am I?’ Ramana’s teaching was only, ‘Who am I?’ He didn’t have disciples, he wasn’t a guru, he never set himself up as any of those things; people just came and wrote down what he said.

It’s not Ramana’s teaching per se – he didn’t teach mandalas – but it is Self Enquiry because, ultimately, it boils down to ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What’s all this about?’ If people don’t ever ask those questions then they will never find out what life means.

I wanted to know about life, always. I wanted to know from a very young age.

Well, I don’t care what anyone else says. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The thing is, nothing anyone does will make you become enlightened, because that is already our natural state. We are chasing after a light beam when we are the light beam itself.

As there are as many grains of sand, there are as many different philosophies and people’s views. My understanding from the experience I had is that when the lotus opens, when the sun comes up, in anybody’s language, that’s what’s happening.

You could say, I did a ritual and then the sun came up – I did that. No. It’s going to happen anyway. Nothing we do is going to do it; having said that, it’s when we stop doing, in a sense, that change can take place.

It is a paradox to the dualistic mind, which thinks in a dualistic way – always comparing and contrasting.

But there is a third thing, which transcends. What is it that makes those roses yellow that you brought with you today? Everything is perfect.

People’s interpretation of how it is doesn’t change the fact that it is all perfect. Ramana’s teaching is simply to ask oneself, ‘Who am I?’ I never did Self Enquiry, not formally. I found myself doing it indirectly without knowing it, through the love of dance and art and music. Looking for self-fulfilment, self-expression, be it through making pots, dancing, writing, making music; something is calling for perfection.

We are trying to reach ourselves, like the mandala, because we are perfect within already. It’s like the prodigal son if you like, who issues forth, then rejects everything and returns to the source.

When I run workshops, when people draw or paint their mandalas, the process is all about not being able to think; all I say is it’s your journey. I am trying to cut out the pre-thinking, for example choosing a colour, and then acting directly from the heart, not the head. I am trying to encourage people get beyond their conditioning; I am trying to dismantle the scaffolding.

In the mandala you are exploring what’s within you rather than the conditioning that’s coming through you.

There is a thinking that you are not enlightened, that you have to strive for enlightenment, but it’s only a word, a concept. Here, in this poem, we are already there, there is nowhere to search because we are already what we are searching for. It’s about surrender and letting go.

Silence is everything. You can walk in the high street, you can walk in the woods; you hear other sounds and you are letting go of your mind. This is the first level.

I know some people who seem to have a continuous tape playing inside their heads. They don’t hear or empathize with you because the tape is playing so loudly, the mind is chattering so much to the point that they can’t hear anything else.

There are various layers of silence. Silence isn’t about being quiet and not speaking. You can’t switch off the mind but you can switch off the attachment that the mind has to everything because when you first go into silence, you are immediately drawn to your sense-awareness – speaking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting.

You then let go all of that; you stop actively listening and looking for distraction. You start shutting down the sense-awareness and then what happens is that you hear with an inner ear and you see with an inner eye and you smell with an inner smell. Sometimes, you can smell fragrances and you just don’t know where they have come from. You see images or hear music and have all kinds of beautiful experiences. When I walked on Arunachala, I once heard a flute playing.

Silence is not about voidness, or emptiness. It’s about fullness. But you have to get to a point where that happens. At the end of my forty days, I actually wanted to stay in that silence for the rest of my life.

Understanding silence is the difference between being bored, lonely, feeling left out, redundant, and this whole inner music, inner fullness, that is completely satisfying and fulfilling.

I would say that silence is a very good help to total immersion into that which is, because that is the language of the Self. How else can you describe eternity?

Interestingly, after the awakening experience, I went back and read Be As You Are, and I understood totally what Ramana meant. I now live in constant amazement. But it isn’t over. How extraordinary it is, ever unfolding. I am so fortunate to have this gift. What have I done to deserve it?

[Interview conducted Summer 2011]