Excerpts from my book

 I once thought my role was to pass along my father’s teachings, the yoga postures, the breathing practices, the Ayurvedic remedies he had mastered. But a friend gently reminded me: people don’t just want lessons, they want a story. And so this is the story I must tell, not just mine, but ours. A story of two generations, a father and a daughter, each in their own way devoted to healing, emotional, physical, and spiritual.

My father’s story began in Varanasi, India, sometime in the early 1900s. Born Anand Kumar Sharma, he would later take the name Swami Hari Har Das. His life was marked by loss from the very beginning. His parents died when he was still a boy, and after a serious illness he was taken into an ashram. There, surrounded by chanting, prayer, and study, he grew into a teacher, an Ayurvedic doctor, and a spiritual scholar. The ashram gave him discipline and knowledge, but it also left its mark, both the depth of wisdom and the austerity of someone who had grown up without a family.

My story began in 1974. I was born in Manhattan, the daughter of a white Jewish hippie mother and a Guru father. My earliest memories are not of temples or gardens, but of a cramped apartment on West 80th Street. It was long and narrow, a dark railway flat alive with sound, scent, and color. The walls were painted in psychedelic swirls, and the furniture was mostly cushions scattered across the floor. Everywhere I looked, there were reminders of my father’s world, pictures of Krishna and Vishnu taped to the walls, statues of Ganesh and Kali tucked above shelves, watching over us.

The apartment smelled constantly of herbs, pungent, earthy, and dusty. Plastic bulk bins, nailed to the walls, overflowed with powders and roots. From the small kitchen wafted the aroma of curry simmering, yogurt fermenting and strange bitter concoctions brewing. Every morning, the sharp, grating sound of the juicer would jolt me awake, followed by the tang of fresh vegetables pressed into juice. These scents and sounds are stitched into my childhood.

I adored my father, though he was far from easy to love. He was a gruff, tortured soul, short and fit with broad features and dark skin. He carried himself like a man set apart, dressed in flowing golden robes that made him look like a monk, though he never abandoned his peculiar affection for pristine argyle socks.

In the 1980s, he taught meditation and yoga at a prestigious health club uptown. I went with him everywhere,sitting quietly through his classes, tagging along as he treated patients in our apartment with herbs and oils. I saw him in both worlds: the humble healer mixing powders in our kitchen, and the spiritual teacher leading wealthy New Yorkers in postures and breathwork. After class, I would glimpse their glamorous world, smoke curling through the air, glasses of champagne clinking, trays of caviar set out in glittering rooms. To me, it was another planet, so far removed from our noisy, cluttered home. I remember once being introduced to Lou Ferrigno, the bodybuilder who played the Incredible Hulk. I stared at him in amazement and asked myself why he wasn’t green. Childhood has a way of enlarging everything, making every memory enormous, almost surreal.

I loved the parade of people who came into our lives. My father had many Sikh friends, men wrapped in vibrant turbans, their laughter filling our small living room. They often brought me treats, and I loved them for it, their presence was colorful, kind, and larger than life.

But if this is to be an honest story, I must also share the shadows. My father was not the perfect guru, nor the perfect man. He could be quick to anger, snapping at me for childish needs he could not tolerate. His discipline could feel like distance. And later in his life, after years of carrying the weight of teaching, loneliness, and perhaps his own unspoken grief, he slipped into heavy drinking. I learned early that even spiritual men are human, that light always comes with shadow.

And yet, despite all of it, I loved him. Not as a distant teacher or as a holy figure, but as my father, my flawed, fiery, golden-robed father. Swami, who taught others to find peace but wrestled with his own storms. Swami, who carried me through the city, who woke me with the juicer, who showed me the world in ways both beautiful and painful. Swami, who gave me the inheritance of a spiritual path, even if I had to walk it in my own way.

~Shanti Freedom Das