"I used to teach intermediate Hatha yoga, do you believe it?" I said to my new in-home physical therapist and grimaced in pain getting up from my chair. I continued, "The guru from India who opened Woodstock, do you know who I mean?"
She stopped in sudden interest "Yeah I do know who you mean," she said. "I've seen the video."
In that moment I realized, I've experienced so much stuff that people now only vaguely know about, as hardly anyone has written first hand about the counterculture of the 60s and 70s. So here I go with my contribution.
***
Summer 1969 I recovered from taking more than 100 LSD trips over three months in Laguna Beach by returning to my parents' home in Temple City.
Once I was able to hold a metal fork close to my teeth without vibrating, my dad said I had to get a job, so soon, like him, I was riding the commuter bus transit to downtown LA and back everyday.
if you needed a job back then, you just opened the newspaper to the want ads in the back, if you could type there were pages of clerical jobs. I think in my lifetime I got 20 different jobs by just opening the paper and calling the place, showing up, showing them I could type and speak in sentences, and next day I'd be sitting in their front office answering phones and typing for the bosses. No one ever asked for a background check back then; they just assumed you weren't a criminal because you were functioning in the world, but that's getting off on a side trip.
It used to be really easy to find a job even if you were just coming off spending a few months outside the Leary ranch with a bunch of freaks like you who thought he was some kind of hero holy man, dropping tabs of Orange Sunshine.
***
Lunch break downtown LA wandering through a bookstore, there was Mark who had been the director of a play I was in a year earlier before I ran away from Hollywood.
"You should go to the yoga ashram," he said when he learned I was living in my high school bedroom, and described a place in the Hollywood Hills where you could rent a dorm style room and be a student, that they had group meals and it sounded great. Within a few days I had moved in to Swami Satchidananda's Integral Yoga ashram in the Hollywood Hills just above Cahuenga, a mansion to live in and learn an ancient Hindi monastic lifestyle.
I would walk down to the Barham Boulevard and 101 bus stop and ride downtown and back everyday, and come home to a house full of people chanting, saying Hari om Hari om Hari Om as you walked in. I can find the house on Google Maps I bet.
101 freeway and Barham Boulevard Los Angeles map search:
There it is the big house on Knoll Drive, that squat structure next to it wasn't there before. It still has the really long backyard with another structure on it, and there it is that brown structure that same structure.
You can see how I walked all the way around up to Lake Hollywood Boulevard to Barham and then down to the freeway at Cahuenga to catch the bus back and forth from the yoga ashram to my clerical job downtown.
***
Remember I am a pedophile priest victim from age 6, and in my early twenties, I wanted to be in some religion; so I embraced this paradigm that Swami Sachidananda had created, adapting ancient yoga tenets to the needs of 1960s American post adolescents.
He went from opening Woodstock and kick starting a spiritual movement that attached itself to the rock and roll movement of the time, to opening a string of ashrams across the country- good for him and enterprising
Remember, I'm a pedophile Catholic priest victim who had stuffed the memory and was living in a state of endless frenzy, in 1996 my diagnosis was PTSD since age 5, but in 1960 to 1969- 73, this period, I did not make the connection between Father Horne's fingers ding-diddling me at age 5 and this Relentless sexual drive I had that would not stop.
***
My sexual confusion since Age 5 led me to have a very strange experience with one of the guys from New York who ran the LA ashram- I'm not going to publish his name. He kind of chased me through those backyard trees to that little hut structure at the end of the property overlooking Cahuenga, and we had an encounter that lasted maybe 15 seconds and ended with his abrupt ejaculation and a week or so later my abrupt evacuation from the ashram.
I don't think anyone told me to leave, the vibe was just so bad from every other person there.
You weren't supposed to have sex at a yoga ashram but suddenly here I was doing it in their sacred backyard; and no one seemed to notice it wasn't me that initiated it, or if I did I didn't know it, it was just what I did instinctually and what happened to me everywhere I went.
Somehow I always survived.
***
About a week after my hot encounter with the wild-haired orange-robed New York Guru kid in the LA ashram backyard, I packed my stuff into a duffel bag and headed for Alaska. Out of the blue I announced to everyone I'm going to Alaska and no one stopped me.
I really liked living there. It was celebrity yoga. Since so many upcoming performers lived in the nearby hills, they'd often come for our Feast dinners where we laid out a huge amount of vegetarian Indian looking food. The actresses always walked around with almost empty plates.
One day a girl who looked a lot like me showed up with a stack of hand written sheet music, sat down at the piano, and played songs from her upcoming album which was called Tapestry; so I got to hear Carole King play those that music before almost anyone else heard it, in the short time I lived there.
***
Instead of Alaska I ended up in San Francisco where I stayed at the Swami's ashram and heard about a festival coming up in Boulder called the holy man jam. I packed up everything I was carrying, including a portable typewriter, back into my Army Surplus duffel bag, and Hitch hiked to Colorado.
***********
RELATED: Wednesday, June 17, 2020
I used to be called Sunshine.
At the holy man Jam I connected with the yogis who were starting the Swami's ashram in Dallas and they said come on with us and so I did; and that's how I ended up living in Texas for the next 15 years.
Ah those days back when, oh that period of time when everything could be spontaneous and it was so easy to run away from your scandals and start over in a new place, although I actually brought the scandals with me always. I won't even write what I did in the car on the way from Boulder to Dallas, no one needs to hear that.
Texas in late summer meant getting out of that steaming car and walking over 110° hot parking lot to enter a grocery store, the doors open, and that Rush of air conditioning just phew completely cools you off.
*
Okay I'll write what happened in the backseat of that car and post it anyway as who gives a Flying F what anybody thinks.
In the front seat were 3 guys 2 who ran the yoga ashram in Dallas and in the back seat was me squeezed in with three other people. As we rode across America, the guy next to me slipped his hand into my underwear and finger banged me and I didn't stop him, I just tried not to move around too much so no one would notice, but of course everyone noticed.
But no one said a word.
Those same two guys from the front seat were running the yoga ashram that I went to live in on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas.
Let me see if I can find the Dallas ashram house on Google Maps too Search Lemmon Avenue in Dallas Texas
Wow, you cannot recognize it at all. Lemmon Avenue at Inwood used to be a quiet two lane Street lined with trees and big five- and six-bedroom houses like the one the Swami was using for his yoga ashram, in the late 1960s. But I went to Google maps to find it and it's now a four-lane highway covered with rapid traffic, where the ashram used to be is now a car wash or a mall who can tell; there are no houses anywhere nearby, but a couple of apartment buildings.
Man, humans have really destroyed this planet with their freaking cars and when you get right down to it, our dependence on the car led to the whole lifestyle that made humans so dependent on oil for everything.
Suburbs, streets where a human can't walk, the loss of personal interaction. Now your neighbor is just someone who gives you road rage.
It's kind of ironic and kind of a balancing of universal karma that today the USA is falling mainly because of that dependence on oil.
Americans are still holding on to their steering wheels as the waves of fire and flood rush over us. I'm glad to be leaving this planet soon]
***
On a side note, I don't include the sex stuff in this Memoir because I'm bragging or I think it was so cool and everyone else should do it too.
I would have never behaved this way if a Catholic priest hadn't been finger banging me and arousing me from age 5 to 6, and these promiscuous experiences were not glorious and wonderful; they were humiliating and embarrassing and the reason I had to keep packing up and moving from places, because I was often a perpetrator, I did something that made them all come at me that way. I don't know what I was doing but it was not forced, it wasn't rape, it was just me turned loose on the world aroused at age 5 and then in my early twenties not being able to stop.
***
One time my sister Patricia who was also a victim of Fr Horne and I were talking, in our adult lives we only had about three short periods of time where we even spoke to each other, and in one of our conversations she said to me,
"Whenever I see a love scene or any Intimacy in a movie, I have to fast forward past it as I can't stand to watch it."
I knew exactly what she meant.
Because of the way we lived, our lives driven by finger banging by pedophile priest Father Thomas Barry Horne-y, no one wanted to be intimate with us for any amount of time.
I don't think I even said it to her then, but I also have to fast forward through love scenes because they remind me so much of what I never got to experience.
It still happens today. but now I have curiosity as I see how one rape one time affects one normal human being in a film, and just shake my head at what was done to me and how it caused me to end up arriving at age 78 with a bad case of floppy vagina
***
Then everyone living there but me voted to take vows of brahmacharya, which means renouncing all sensual pleasures, so I ran away with the guy who delivered the 50 lb sacks of brown rice, had his baby, and landed in Austin Texas with my guitar trying to make a living and raise my kid by myself, chasing his father who after a short period of time with me also didn't want me around.
***
It's hard to believe that after all this time and these experiences and realizing what they did to me, I still wish I could go to Catholic church now and then, as I miss it.
I miss the imaginary experience that I got at both Catholic Mass and that I got during group meditations at the ashram on Lemmon Avenue. To this day I wonder if my spiritual experiences are real or just me still reeling from what happened to me by the fingers of that perverted Catholic priest between my legs when I was 5 years old.
And since there's absolutely no support organization left to support the pedo priest survivors, it's inevitable that Catholic priests molesting children is still going on and will continue on; because people of Earth are not inherently decent, they fall to evil urges way too easily. I can't wait to get off this planet
Decades after the ashrams, I still love to cook, but I'm only now learning how to cook meat, and I love it
***
Meanwhile, I am not sick and dying, I'm just feeling empathy for the planet so this memoir has the working title: Empathy for the Earth
The Swami had a stump speech so to speak. I went along sometimes when he made public appearances, and he almost always spoke about the day he opened the Woodstock festival and led a mass group meditation in front of that huge crowd of people.
He repeated the story often, saying that you could never do that in India. Because in India people wouldn't sit still that long especially in a huge crowd and the Swami would marvel about how that huge crowd at the Woodstock Festival meditated in silence for several minutes.
Oh how our nation has changed since then. Today we are so kardashianated it would be hard to find people who could sit in meditation for any period of time at an outdoor music festival.
When I say I lived an unusual life I mean I was right in the middle of so much stuff. It had a lot to do with being finger banged by a Catholic priest at age 5. That caused me to be a sort of Sexual Forest Gump. I had this compulsion, especially for men with some connection to the sky either through religion or flying high performance jets in the Navy.
I ended up going to college at Austin because I had that baby to support and then ended up in Houston working at NASA, mostly because of that same compulsion. So I have more chapters to write of this little saga, stay tuned
***
I look back at my life and I was always running away after some scandalous episode, always always always, and that's how I ended up living on $1,300 a month in subsidized housing today. writing my life story hoping someone will recognize its value and buy it to produce as a limited series.
*That beautiful neighborhood there's no sign of anymore, Lemmon Avenue in Dallas where the ashram used to be, the street was lined with houses like ours.
Large two-story Old South Style homes with high ceilings, huge windows, and lots of shade trees, so soothingly comfortable, even on the hottest Dallas days; no air conditioning just architecturally orchestrated breezes through your home.
Back then you could walk from Lemmon Ave through sort of open country to Turtle Creek and listen to it babble.
********
This fits in here somewhere https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2026/09/dialogue-for-movie-made-of-my-life.html
screenshots are from https://www.woodstock.com/remembering-swami-satchidananda/ and this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8MpRSPneHs&t=94s
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
I used to be called Sunshine.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Background for How I got the name Sunshine, Part 2 of My Life Story coming shortly
Background (Finally finished the story in May 2020 here https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/06/i-used-to-be-called-sunshine.html )
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
Searching for Other Sunshines
I used to be called "Sunshine." From 1970-1976 that was my name. There were a handful of Sunshines floating around love-ins and communes at that time. I am now Searching for others who got that name in that era to compare stories, maybe write a book. Any Sunshines out there?
more memories to come as the Nudges urge me
eternal journalist saga https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2026/09/eternal-journalist-saga.html
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