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Walking Home with Baba: The Heart of Spiritual Practice
Rohini Ralby spent eight years as head of security, appointments secretary, and personal assistant to Swami Muktananda, and in their many hours alone together, this world-renowned guru taught her, one on one, the essence of spiritual practice.In Walking Home with Baba, an expert guide to spiritual practice, Rohini draws on that experience and her subsequent study and work as a spiritual director to convey, in clear and concise terms, what spiritual practice truly is.Spiritual practice is walking home. It is retracing our way back to God—to Absolute Truth, Absolute Consciousness, and Absolute Bliss. Until we take this path, we will suffer, trapped within a false identity—our lower self, which is nothing more than a set of ideas. The way out of suffering and back to God passes through the Heart. The Heart is not the physical organ or the seat of emotions, but the place within, where the manifest emergesfrom the unmanifest. It is the ground of our being.Walking Home with Baba recounts Rohini’s experiences on the path and explains exactly how to get to and rest in the Heart. Its odd-numbered chapters are explicitly instructional, offering tools and techniques for spiritual practice. Its even-numbered chapters recount significant vignettes from Rohini’s own spiritual journey, especially her years with Muktananda. While the instructional chapters provide detailed guidance in spiritual disciplines, the narrative chapters convey the lived experience of traveling the path and being the close disciple of a great Guru.Walking Home with Baba is also a practical, even quintessential companion to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Rather than offer an exhaustive commentary on every sutra, Rohini distills the key principles of classical yoga by focusing on selected sutras and explaining how they relate to daily spiritual practice.After a chapter recounting her final experiences with Baba, including his death,Rohini closes the book with a list of suggested readings, and a compilation of her own aphorisms—pithy, often witty one-liners designed to shake us out of our ignorance. For clarity, she provides a glossary of spiritual terms.Walking Home with Baba is the expression of decades spent practicing and sharing the practice with others. Its purpose is to teach us how to free ourselves from misery and recognize who we truly are. Though Rohini introduces tools she has developed over the years, she returns again and again to the essential principles of practice. In Walking Homewith Baba, she provides a practical guide to real, abiding happiness.Rohini Ralby is a nondenominational spiritual director, a vocation that, as of 2012, she has pursued for more than two decades. She lives in Owings Mills, MD, a Baltimore suburb, with her husband, David Soud, and has two grown children, Ian and Aaron. She can be reached through her website www.practiceforus.com and via email at rohini@practiceforus.com.
140 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2012
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126 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 14, 2012
Great book! As a student of Rohini Ralby’s for 15 years I have experienced first hand that she is an excellent spiritual teacher and guide. Now she has written an invaluable book explaining what spiritual practice is for all people on a spiritual journey. Outlined in the book are her teachings along with stories from her own life. These stories reinforce the teachings and help the reader look at their own everyday experiences and see how in every moment we can choose to live more consciously and take steps to walk closer home to God. This book will touch all aspects of your life. I highly recommend it.
May 26, 2013
Let me begin with a full disclosure: I studied with Rohini Ralby for nearly eight years from about 1993 until 2001. During that time I learned my first tai ch'i form and worked through some very difficult issues with her as my counselor and spiritual advisor. Together with my wife (also her student) Rohini provided me with the tools to turn my life around during a very difficult period for which I am forever grateful. I will also admit that I have perhaps allowed some of those tools to rust a bit… So for me reading this book was both a way to rekindle some of that earlier experience, to remind myself of what I had learned before and to recognize that some of things I thought I'd learned, I'd only partially understood. And, that I'd fallen out of practice. But that was my experience of this book and therefore my bias.
If I may borrow a musical term, Walking Home with Baba is a kind of rondo form, with Ralby's stories of her guru Baba, (Swami Muktananda (1908-1982)) forming a refrain between a series of practical spiritual lessons. The stories, many of which take place at the Ganeshpuri ashram in India, are all from Ralby's personal experience between 1976 and Baba's death in 1982. The lessons would make a book by themselves. They include such topics as an introduction to spiritual practice, the Foursquare personality game: a technique of exploring and recognizing how to own the opposites and contradictions in your life, and the practice of meditation. They are all explained in quite simple straightforward language. There are, to be sure, a collection of Sanskrit words sprinkled throughout the text, but all are explained, and repeated enough, that they become a kind of new vocabulary to the patient reader (there is also a handy Glossary in the back). The one chapter I had difficulty reading, because I was not familiar enough with the source, is the commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, which as Ralby herself notes, requires you to "raise your game a bit to follow the subtleties." But, then again, while this book is written in a clear and very understandable style, it isn't intended to be "easy." It is an introduction to a practice. It's short enough that you can read it in a day, but difficult enough, that it bears much rereading.
Nothing is sugar-coated, including the stories of Baba. They are sometimes humorous. My favorite in this vein is the story of Baba cooking kir with Swiss chocolate, for a Brahmin (p. 73). They are also full of the petty venialities brought by many of the guests to the Ganeshpuri ashram. Baba is sometimes angry, sometimes gentle, but always giving what is needed, often with a touch of impish humor. The stories create a gloss on the lessons, but also a way into the lessons in the form of real life experiences, with Baba as guide.
The title, Walking Home to Baba, is a metaphor for the journey to finding God within. As Ralby notes in her conclusion, its not an easy path "Reading this book may have given you lots of ideas, but if you walk away satisfied with only ideas, you will got get far along the path." (p. 155). So this is most definitely NOT Chicken Soup for the Soul, it's more like an invitation to a discipline, one that is both demanding and highly rewarding, but not easy. Note to self: The reason the path is difficult: because it takes practice!
If I may borrow a musical term, Walking Home with Baba is a kind of rondo form, with Ralby's stories of her guru Baba, (Swami Muktananda (1908-1982)) forming a refrain between a series of practical spiritual lessons. The stories, many of which take place at the Ganeshpuri ashram in India, are all from Ralby's personal experience between 1976 and Baba's death in 1982. The lessons would make a book by themselves. They include such topics as an introduction to spiritual practice, the Foursquare personality game: a technique of exploring and recognizing how to own the opposites and contradictions in your life, and the practice of meditation. They are all explained in quite simple straightforward language. There are, to be sure, a collection of Sanskrit words sprinkled throughout the text, but all are explained, and repeated enough, that they become a kind of new vocabulary to the patient reader (there is also a handy Glossary in the back). The one chapter I had difficulty reading, because I was not familiar enough with the source, is the commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, which as Ralby herself notes, requires you to "raise your game a bit to follow the subtleties." But, then again, while this book is written in a clear and very understandable style, it isn't intended to be "easy." It is an introduction to a practice. It's short enough that you can read it in a day, but difficult enough, that it bears much rereading.
Nothing is sugar-coated, including the stories of Baba. They are sometimes humorous. My favorite in this vein is the story of Baba cooking kir with Swiss chocolate, for a Brahmin (p. 73). They are also full of the petty venialities brought by many of the guests to the Ganeshpuri ashram. Baba is sometimes angry, sometimes gentle, but always giving what is needed, often with a touch of impish humor. The stories create a gloss on the lessons, but also a way into the lessons in the form of real life experiences, with Baba as guide.
The title, Walking Home to Baba, is a metaphor for the journey to finding God within. As Ralby notes in her conclusion, its not an easy path "Reading this book may have given you lots of ideas, but if you walk away satisfied with only ideas, you will got get far along the path." (p. 155). So this is most definitely NOT Chicken Soup for the Soul, it's more like an invitation to a discipline, one that is both demanding and highly rewarding, but not easy. Note to self: The reason the path is difficult: because it takes practice!
January 26, 2013
As someone who practices yoga I am always interested in reading books about Eastern philosophy. I haven't yet found one book that gives me everything I need in this area, but I like to read different perspectives and I seem to get something new out of each book that I read. In this regard, Walking Home with Baba is as good as any book I've read. Her explanation of the yoga sutras as clear and concise, and I really liked the chapter on foursquare personality games, because I thought it was a terrific way to present the way we box ourselves in with labels and how we can get out of this trap. Ralby goes into more detail than most people probably are willing to follow, and that's where I had problems with this book.
Ralby is very dismissive of hatha yoga, which is the type of yoga that I practice. She says "hatha yoga has developed into a complicated series of poses...which have mistakenly become ends in themselves." She is also very critical of so-called yoga teachers, who, in her opinion, lead people down a limited path. She implies that anyone who participates in yoga classes has the wool pulled over their eyes and most yoga teachers are peddling snake oil. In contrast we are told in my class that whoever and wherever we are at that moment is perfect for our practice. Because I have received a tremendous amount of benefit from practicing yoga in the mind-body-spirit realm, Ralby's words automatically put me on the defensive. No one likes to be told that something that they enjoy and embrace is not good enough.
And as far as the half of the book which details her experiences with Baba, I just didn't get his teaching style at all. He seems to teach using anger and belittlement, which surprised me considering that it seems completely contrary to other teachers like Thich Nat Hanh whose work I admire deeply. Many of the lessons are presented kind of like parables in which Ralby gets a somewhat obscure lesson from Baba - I say obscure because frequently I didn't get them although Ralby seemed to draw strength from them. I'm not sure whether or not Ralby misrepresented his teachings, but what I got was that you have to be broken down in order to be built back up. True, perhaps, but Baba achieves his goals by yelling at her and putting her in situations that she can't handle in order to teach her what her limitations are. It doesn't seem kind, and it doesn't seem to come from a place of compassion. At times Baba even comes off as slightly abusive: he yells at her one moment then is tender the next. I just couldn't figure it out.
Ralby is very dismissive of hatha yoga, which is the type of yoga that I practice. She says "hatha yoga has developed into a complicated series of poses...which have mistakenly become ends in themselves." She is also very critical of so-called yoga teachers, who, in her opinion, lead people down a limited path. She implies that anyone who participates in yoga classes has the wool pulled over their eyes and most yoga teachers are peddling snake oil. In contrast we are told in my class that whoever and wherever we are at that moment is perfect for our practice. Because I have received a tremendous amount of benefit from practicing yoga in the mind-body-spirit realm, Ralby's words automatically put me on the defensive. No one likes to be told that something that they enjoy and embrace is not good enough.
And as far as the half of the book which details her experiences with Baba, I just didn't get his teaching style at all. He seems to teach using anger and belittlement, which surprised me considering that it seems completely contrary to other teachers like Thich Nat Hanh whose work I admire deeply. Many of the lessons are presented kind of like parables in which Ralby gets a somewhat obscure lesson from Baba - I say obscure because frequently I didn't get them although Ralby seemed to draw strength from them. I'm not sure whether or not Ralby misrepresented his teachings, but what I got was that you have to be broken down in order to be built back up. True, perhaps, but Baba achieves his goals by yelling at her and putting her in situations that she can't handle in order to teach her what her limitations are. It doesn't seem kind, and it doesn't seem to come from a place of compassion. At times Baba even comes off as slightly abusive: he yells at her one moment then is tender the next. I just couldn't figure it out.
June 18, 2022
I love this book. Aaron Ralby has now done an amazing job reading this book aloud. Check it out on audible.com
October 18, 2014
A wonderful guide book on spiritual practice. I really liked the stories of how Baba helped Rohini Ralby overcome attachments. This is one of the books you'll have to reread multiple times and actually think about the stories and practices, and use them to think about your own life and how you can improve.
*I received this book through goodreads first reads*
*I received this book through goodreads first reads*
July 27, 2016
Fascinating book about how Rohini lives her life in servitude to Swami Muktananda. He destroys ego, breaks it all done, even being harsh at times - but always with love, driving at getting his disciples to truly experience spirituality and get to the heart of their best, truest, deepest selves.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews