"There are so many influences of fear, anxiety, and sorrow in the world, and people are becoming heavy as a result of that," says Rodgers. "When they come here, they realize they can disconnect from the anxiety and fear and reconnect the soul to the supreme source—and to love, kindness, mercy, and peace, which strengthens the soul so that you can be in the world." You don't have to live on top of a mountain to do it. Visitors return home with a practice they can continue in daily life, even if it's just a few minutes a day upon waking. "When we fill ourselves with spiritual energy, it makes a big difference," says Iyengar. "There is a stark contrast in doing nothing and doing life, and in doing this and doing life. It's beautiful to live that way."
A Seeker's Destination: Matagiri
Sometimes the Hudson Valley's artistic and creative side merges with its love for Indian spiritual traditions. This is the case at Matagiri Sri Aurobindo Center, a community haven in Mount Tremper dedicated to 20th-century gurus Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, the founders of Integral Yoga. The artist and actor Sam Spanier cofounded Matagiri with his life partner Eric Hughes after years of seeking and study—which led him to Pondicherry, India, and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The vision for Matagiri came from The Mother herself, who told Spanier that he would be a bridge between East and West.
"[Spanier] took that very deeply within him," says Julian Lines, who took over stewardship of Matagiri with his wife, Wendy, after Spanier died in 2008. "He came up to the Woodstock area in the late 1960s with the intention of fulfilling that destiny." Once he found and purchased the property, Matagiri developed as a kind of miniature outpost of Auroville, the experimental community in India created by The Mother to realize the ideals of peace and human unity. Matagiri became the largest distributor of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother's books in the US, and they distributed handmade paper, stationery, and incense from the ashram as a way to support the community. "About nine or more people at a time were living there collectively," says Lines. "Some flowed through on their way to live in India. Or they wanted to have relationships, so they partnered and left. It was a celibate community. It didn't match the lifestyle of young people in the 1960s. Yet it was a place of artists and seekers and visionaries, people who had a rich inner life and were expressing it one way or another."
Today, Matagiri continues to expand the concepts of human unity and evolution of consciousness out into the world. Recently, the organization unveiled the new construction of a straw-bale eco-house, and it is here that the center offers programs open to the community, including a reading and meditation session every Sunday at 3:00 and gentle hatha yoga classes taught by Wendy Lines on Sunday and Monday mornings. This summer, Matagiri will begin offering Awareness Through the Body movement classes and trainings, focused on giving children a chance to become spiritually self-aware. Matagiri also hosts Indian music concerts, including one by slide guitar player Barun Kumar Pal to be held on August 15, Sri Aurobindo's birthday and the 50-year anniversary of the Woodstock festival—a cosmic date for both the center and its environs.
Luxury Ashram: Yoga Vida Farms
Recently, a farm-focused retreat center sprung to life in Wawarsing—starting from the seed of an idea planted at an ashram in the Indian holy town of Vrindavan. The man with the idea was Michael Patton, a former Wall Street broker who cofounded Yoga Vida studios in Manhattan with Hillaria Baldwin (the yogini married to Alec Baldwin). "The ashram has a beautiful, open garden that feeds the majority of produce to the guests—and coming from a place with every convenience at your fingertips like New York City, it was shocking to see a lot of vegetables in the ground," says Patton. "We were sitting there looking at the garden after a philosophy discussion on the Bhagavad Gita, when I had the idea of doing a small friends-and-family CSA back home." The idea soon grew into a public-facing retreat center where wellness-oriented New Yorkers could go to learn more about their food and where it comes from, while ingesting a tidbit of yoga philosophy along the way.