For a high priestess of the new age, Shakti Gawain seems pretty down to earth. But she looks the part, as she strides confidently into a West Hollywood restaurant, where she has come to talk about her new book, ”Return to the Garden” (New World Library, $18.95).
She is a tall woman, about 6 feet in heels, who still has the dancer`s body she had when she was graduated as a dance-performance major from the University of California, Irvine.
She wears a lightweight pants outfit and practically no makeup. Physically, she is a presence, the sort of person you would notice anywhere.
”Return to the Garden” has been touted as Shakti Gawain`s answer to the environmental crisis.
The woman who purportedly showed millions how to solve their problems and achieve their goals through her first book, ”Creative Visualization,” and in her second, ”Living in the Light,” purportedly taught them how to develop their intuition, now urges them to look beyond themselves and make contact with our wounded planet.
She insists, however, that this concern is nothing new for her.
”It`s always been there,” she said. ”It`s a natural evolution and extension from my earlier teaching. Politics and the environment have always been major interests of mine.
”But we can only live in a healthy, balanced world to the extent that we lead healthy, balanced lives,” she added. ”That`s how the internal and external tie together. Our individual relationships are only so good as you are conscious. Your relationship with yourself ties to your relationship with others, and that ties to your relationship with the community, and that in turn to your relationship with the planet.
”That`s how I`ve tried to live my own life. I`ve spent quite a while dealing with my own healing and that of others. I`ve made an effort to contribute to the world in my writing and teaching. My parents were this way. It was ingrained by them that I have a major responsibility to the world. So I`m not saying anything different. I`m just saying it more broadly. I`m saying, `Hey, we live on this planet, and it`s in danger,` ” she said.
As if to prove her contention that her new message to the world is not really so new for her, ”Return to the Garden” is, in its longest part, an autobiography.
It is a remarkable for the author`s modesty. Gawain presents herself as not much more than a child of the `60s, though more environmentally aware than most.
Her parents were well-educated and active-her father a professor of aerodynamics, her mother a city planner-but they divorced when she was quite young.
Although she kept in contact with her father, she grew up, in fairly comfortable circumstances, with her mother in Mexico, in California and, for a short time, in Washington, D.C.
She was in college during the Vietnam War and joined in the widespread protest movement.
Once out of college, she traveled around the world, taking well over a year to do it, settling for a while in India, living on the beach in the former Portuguese colony of Goa.
Gawain herself has no objection to the ”child of the `60s” label: ”To tell the truth, my generation is probably very fortunate in that we haven`t had to deal with major survival issues like how to stay alive, how to keep food on the table. When you`re concerned with survival issues, you don`t have time to deal with spiritual issues. My parents` generation had two world wars and a depression to contend with. It was a pretty big leap to our generation. ”In the same way, to be in the Western world at this time, we have that same sort of advantage over most of humanity. We have the time to deal with questions of how life can be richer. We have more opportunity to do this. And, while I think that humanity as a whole is evolving, still there are many on the planet dealing with basic survival issues. That`s part of the greater, planetary problem,” she continued.
It was in India that Gawain`s lifelong interest in the spiritual became better focused. She says she felt some special kinship to the Hindu god Shiva. Later, when she had returned to California, she was given the name Shakti by a friend.
What was her first name before she took Shakti? ”I`d rather not say. I use it to travel with, to preserve my privacy. Gawain is the name I was born with, though,” she said.
But why Shakti? It is, after all, the female aspect of the god Shiva, and, in the Hindu cosmology, Shiva is the god of destruction. Does Shakti Gawain see herself as a destroyer?
”Well, as you evidently know,” she said, ”Brahma is the creator, Vishnu is the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. To our Western minds, this makes him seem terribly negative. But Easterners have a more sophisticated concept of nature. They know that everything is in the process of destruction. Vishnu stands for that part of us that wants to sustain values, and Shiva for that part that wants change.
”If you want a new job, you have to let go of the old one. We always have to let the old die to let the new be reborn. To me, Shiva represents change, rebirth, movement. I`ve always been drawn to movement. In movement, we find life. I`m a traveler, a dancer, a mover. Shiva, of course, is a dancer, too. It`s his dance that keeps the universe in motion,” she said.
Gawain herself has been in constant motion since she left India nearly 20 years ago.
Settling in Mill Valley, Calif., that woodsy, offbeat suburb of San Francisco, she began a guru search that ended in self-discovery.
She put many of her insights into her first self-published book,
”Creative Visualization,” and began giving workshops on the subject.
Creative visualization, she said, ”is a process of imagining what we want to have happen. There are many specific techniques, but the overall essence is to have an internal experience of what you want to create. It is a stepping stone to what you want.
”We all use it in the negative sense. Most of us visualize our worst fears, and this tends to bring them into reality. You see, essentially what we do is to create our own lives on the deepest level. A person who feels unworthy tends to create situations that continue to support those feelings.
”What I tried to do in the book and later in the workshops was to get people to use affirmation and visualization to picture themselves as worthy. This opens us to the possibility of attracting things and people we want, rather than what we don`t want. You can use creative visualization to create a new job, get a new house, a new car, all kinds of material, tangible things. Or, on a deeper level, you can use these techniques for healing psychological wounds, for creativity, for relationships-real, practical things.”
Bantam Books took over ”Creative Visualization” and had such success with it that the publisher brought out a mass-market edition of ”Living in the Light” as well. The two reportedly have sold about 3 million copies and been translated into 12 languages.
”I don`t do workshops on creative visualization now,” Gawain said,
”but others do. We use it as a tool. My workshops today focus on the content of the second book-how to contact and follow your intuition.”
They did have that focus. Gawain is taking 1990 off-a whole year all to herself.
”I`ve worked real hard for years,” she said. ”I`m a workaholic. I tend to be too much of a giver. I give out too much of my own energy, especially working with large numbers of people. I must replenish it. A year ago, I was a total burnout, and that was when I decided to stay in Hawaii writing this book, `Return to the Garden.` It was still work, but it was a kind of completion to me.”
Gawain learned a lot, she said, while writing the long autobiographical section in the new book: ”I saw patterns repeated. It gave me a lot of insights into my own behavior. I remembered things I hadn`t thought of for years. And-how can I say this?-I appreciated my life. I decided I`d had an interesting life during my first 40 years, learning, growing, teaching, trying to contribute to the world as much as I could. I have a feeling of integrity, having given something to the world. Still, there`s a lot I haven`t done. I haven`t been married, haven`t had children. I want to do both.”
Is there a candidate? She laughed at the question and came as close to blushing as a new age priestess possibly could. At last she said, ”I have a good candidate for that.”
There is nothing pompous, elevated or otherworldly about her. She`s direct and personal as she reiterates her theme:
”We all-well, most of us-have scars from childhood, so we have a responsibility to ourselves to discover and change, and we have a
responsibility to the people we love and to humanity and the planet, too. The process of coming to know yourself in this way seems naturally to make us more aware of the environment and other peoples and their needs, and the planet and its needs.
”It`s becoming clear that one of the most important ways of connecting with truth and your own soul is through your physical body. The feeling of being in your physical body should be a very good feeling. So part of the process of self-discovery is waking up to your physical body through eating, exercise, sensuality, sexuality. Physical addictions only become addictions when our true needs become distorted. Our bodies are a real natural guide to help us find God!”
