Rohini Ralby spent several 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 teacher 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 emerges from 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 Home with
Baba, she provides a practical guide to real, abiding happiness.
