I first met Shri Mataji in London in the late summer of 1975. I had been living in London for some years, and my search for spiritual truth had been growing increasingly desperate, when I heard one day that a ‘yogi lady’ had appeared from India. The flat where Shri Mataji was meeting seekers at the time was in a block in Judd Street near Kings Cross Station, and this was the last meeting there. It belonged to an Indian Hatha Yoga teacher whose classes I had attended some months previously. I had seen Shri Mataji’s photograph before I met Mother. One damp Sunday afternoon, it was raining, and I came with my sister Maureen.
I walked through the door into the room where Shri Mataji was and my life was never the same again. My first impression of Shri Mataji surprised me in many ways. I had been somehow expecting a kind of silent gathering with people tip-toeing about and speaking in hushed tones. Instead, the first thing I saw was Shri Mataji correcting someone in a very forceful manner. Not only did this shatter my expectations, but it created a quite unexpected reaction within me, ‘This is what it must have been like to come across Christ preaching in the market place,’ I thought, while at the same time having the strangest feeling that I had somehow wandered inside the pages of the Bible. I felt both startled and uncomfortable by this as I came from a hippy background, and was wary of anything that seemed ‘religious’.
At the same time I felt that the room was full of light, as if I had stumbled out of a jungle path on to a great, royal highway. I felt something long forgotten was rising within me, a sense of goodness, of self worth, a feeling of purity. Shri Mataji Herself was extraordinary. I just could not believe that anyone like Her could exist in this world. I felt transported to a different dimension where anything was possible.
‘This one is sick,’ were Shri Mataji’s first words to me. Then She said, ‘Don’t worry, you will be all right,’ and I felt tremendous relief. I knew instantly that She spoke with absolute authority.
Shri Mataji asked for a bottle of water. She held the bottle for a moment, then gave it to me. I treated the bottle very reverently, and sure enough, when I later drank some of it at home, it had quite an extraordinary effect on me.
Pat Anslow