Awakin Call

[Please note this call is at 11AM Pacific, 3 hours later than our usual slot.]

"This is an invitation to shift your allegiance from the activities of your mind to the eternal presence of your being." — Gangaji

Born Merle Antoinette Roberson in Texas in 1942, and raised amid the pines and hymns of Mississippi, Gangaji grew up believing fulfillment lay in doing things right—marrying young, raising a daughter, teaching school. Yet beneath those roles ran what she called "a deep and persistent longing." After her divorce, she moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, taking Bodhisattva vows, practicing Zen and Vipassana meditation, helping to run a Tibetan Buddhist center, and building a career as an acupuncturist. No practice could quiet the longing.

Then in 1990, following what she later called "a final prayer for true help," she traveled to India. Her husband Eli, who had already met a teacher there, wrote home urging her to come. In Haridwar, she met H. W. L. Poonja (Papaji)—a student of Ramana Maharshi, one of the most renowned sages of the 20th century. At the door of a small rented house, Papaji greeted her with flashing eyes and a robust "Welcome, come in!" She fell in love instantly. When he asked what she had come for, she answered, "Freedom."

He said, "Good. You are in the right place. Now do nothing; be still."

She was startled. Surely there was some esoteric practice, some mantra, some way of getting rid of her ego? But he meant exactly what he said: Stop. Stop all searching. Over the next few days, when she didn't "go" with fear, it dissipated. In its place was a gentle spaciousness. One day Papaji asked, "Who are you?" and for an instant she knew that she was the spaciousness that thoughts and emotions come from—the same spaciousness that remained when they disappeared. That meeting ended the restless seeking—not through attainment, but through recognition. The river she had searched for outside was her own being.

Later, Papaji gave her the name Gangaji, after the sacred Ganges River, and asked her to teach. "The Ganga now will flow in the West," he told her. Though she felt unprepared—she hadn't even read Ramana's books—she began holding meetings.

In the years that followed, she wrote heartfelt letters to Papaji, simple, tender notes full of repetition and rediscovery. "I write the same things over and over," she admitted, "but each time I write them, I'm astonished again." They reveal a woman learning to live what she had glimpsed—that awakening is not an event but a willingness to be still within the ordinary.

That same stillness began moving outward in unexpected ways. In 1994, she accepted an unexpected invitation to visit a federal prison in Colorado. What began as a single visit grew into the Gangaji Foundation Prison Program—now over 30 years old and reaching more than 4,000 incarcerated men and women through Freedom Inside: A Course in Self-Inquiry. As of April 2024, more than 3,300 inmates access her teachings on tablets through the Edovo platform, while 700+ more receive workbooks by mail. A volunteer correspondence program pairs prisoners with letter-writers in what one volunteer described as "a most intimate and deepening act of love toward myself, as well as a way of appreciating our shared human beingness." One woman wrote from her cell on Mother's Day: "I can barely see the paper for the tears I'm shedding. As long as I travel inwardly, I am as free as I will ever be."

Her teaching brings the direct path of self-inquiry into contemporary life, with a distinctive emphasis on direct experience—meeting fear, anger, or grief without trying to change it, experiencing emotion as energy rather than personal story. "When you open your heart to fear, rather than trying to fight it or deny it or even overcome it," she says, "then you find it is just energy." From satsangs in Ashland, Oregon to correspondence in prisons, her work carries the same quiet insistence: stop the chase, rest where you are, and listen. She writes, "Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don't trust what you have been taught... deeper than that, trust the silence of your being." Her books—The Diamond in Your Pocket, You Are THAT, Freedom and Resolve, Hidden Treasure—and her podcast Being Yourself continue to ripple this invitation into ordinary lives.

Her path, like any human life, has included everything: activism, marriage, motherhood, divorce, spiritual seeking, and in 2005, she learned of her husband Eli's three-year affair with a student—news that would become public the following year. They separated briefly, then reconciled. Through it all she has faced what arises—never claiming to be different from anyone else, admitting freely to her own experiences of anger, fear and pain, yet sharing her awareness that even in the midst of the most intense of storms, is the liberated true self.

Across every role—daughter of the South, activist, acupuncturist, student, teacher, correspondent, wife—runs the same thread: a longing that led her not to a new identity, but to the freedom of being fully human. At 83, she continues teaching globally—a gentle mirror of freedom who shows that even in our smallest rooms—whether a prison cell or a restless mind—peace is never absent, only waiting to be recognized.