Soil To Soul: Why Madhu Tandan Left City At 26 To Live In A Himalayan Ashram

In her mid-twenties, Madhu Tandan took the plunge of leaving the capital city of Delhi to move to a remote ashram in the Himalayas. She wasn't alone, her businessman husband, Rajeev, joined her too. Therein began a soil-to-soul journey of inner reflection, real challenges, and greater purpose. Under the teaching of Ashishda, the former English aircraft engineer turned Vaishnav guru, the couple lived a life not many could have imagined in their twenties. Uprooting a life came with its challenges - to live in a place where monotony had to not just be accepted but also mastered was often met with personal dilemmas and to tackle it all together as a couple whilst understanding their individualities was both challenging and rewarding.

Madhu and her husband now live amidst the hills of Sattal living a simple, peaceful life that stems from experiences. As someone who holds expert knowledge of how dreams function, she also conducts workshops around them. In fact, it was her life in the ashram which stemmed from her dreams, that inspired her first book, Faith & Fire: A Way Within (1997). 

In this conversation with SheThePeople, Madhu Tandon reflects on how she navigated her seven years of Ashram life with her husband by her side, why their journey is a testament to an inward quest, what it means to live by a soil-to-soul philosophy, and why dreams often have the power to nudge us to change the course of our life. 

Excerpts from the interview

In your mid-twenties, you and your husband left the capital to live in an ashram in the Himalayas. At an age where people are constantly seeking fulfilment from the busyness of life in a metro, you chose the ‘soil to soul’ way of living. What instance made you leave a life you were developing behind? 

It developed over time. Does one know the starting point of any event? When I look back many small indicators fed into our decision. We had a well-settled life. Rajeev was running a business and established through his factory and I was working. We had a comfortable home, friends, parties, holidays, the usual as any young couple does. But we asked ourselves if life was only about making a comfortable niche for ourselves or if was there something more.

Admittedly, we had seen our guru Ashishda’s life in his hermitage and were drawn to it, where work and contemplation of the inner and the outer joined hands to express and unite the truth of both worlds. It seemed a seamless life. Charmed by it, Rajeev had asked him if we could stay there and Ashishda had refused saying, “It was not a life you run away to but a place where you come to face things.” After this, we accepted our life in the city with weeklong visits, twice a year to the ashram. Strangely, it was a dream that alerted me that I still wanted to live in the ashram. So, at one level, we were slowly moving towards making the choice and yet the decision to relocate was made instantly after a dream.

Living as a community in the Ashram must have had its challenges. Can you recall what it meant for you in the initial days and were there moments when you regretted your decision? Following this, tell us about the life-altering moments that made your firm in your journey that continued for almost a decade in the ashram.

Any time you make a drastic decision the opposite usually kicks in. If you decide to immigrate to a foreign country, very quickly you will start remembering life back home. For us, it was the same. We were not used to the farming life in the ashram. Like any middle-class couple, we were not used to doing manual work, not even washing our dishes. In the ashram, to eat bread, I had to bake it. If I wanted butter on it, I had to churn it. If I wanted jam, I had to make it. We also started working on the farm. I started milking cows, carrying headloads of compost to fertilize the fields, and sweeping the hillside for dry leaves for cattle bedding. I was not used to it. It stretched my capacities and I often questioned why manual work? On top of this, there was deprivation in food. Life in the ashram was simple. Food was wholesome but repetitively the same. There was no chance to break the monotony of the days like we did in the city.

I often questioned my decision to stay. Yet I continued to stay there, because something often imperceptible was happening which anchored me there. This was an important lesson that fatigue has nothing to do with manual work but has to do with the mind and the value we give to the work we are doing. While working when I was tired, a dream told me, “There is a glow behind physical work – find it.”

How did writing happen? Did it culminate from your urge to document your experiences in the ashram? 

I had not kept any notes, or diary of my stay in the ashram, only a record of my dreams. I started to write because the experience in the ashram was complex. It was challenging and rewarding in equal measure. I needed to understand it. 

The other reason was that at one point in our years at the ashram, I reached such an abyss of despair that I abandoned all hope. All roads seemed dead ends. Then quite unexpectedly, I was touched by something so profoundly beautiful that I dare not give it a name. It filled my being with an all-embracing experience of love that I found difficult to duplicate. I wrote the book in gratitude for that.

Could you elaborate on the dream workshops that you hold and what are your major takeaways from these unique workshops?

I have written two books on dreams. In the workshops, I began with some basic principles of how to interpret a dream. Many people shared a dream, and I asked the group to associate with the various elements of the dream. These workshops introduce people to the startling resources dreams offer as an unusual ‘take’ on many of their personal situations, attitudes, and regrets and provide suggestions on how to untangle them. Each dream uncannily addresses insightfully the dreamer’s life situation.

Can spirituality alter life’s perspective for the better?

I don’t know whether one can say “better”, but it can change perceptions. For me, for example, it made me question the role of suffering. Usually when confronted with suffering one asks the same question – Why me? Did I deserve this? Normally, one will circle back to the same point with no way out. But I found that if I ask a different question, then the seemingly locked doors of suffering might be seen as an opportunity to view one’s fears and expectations afresh. Suffering made me search for answers within and drove me to take refuge on a deeper level. I saw that everyone suffers and our attitude to it determines in which direction our next step will be.

Suffering confronts us with choices – we can either run from it, or walk with it, and finally, if we are lucky, listen to it. It often points to an inability to let go of something within us that we no longer need to hold onto in the old terms. In general, spirituality made me see that the outer is not at war with the inner. The outer is a reflection of the inner.

Were there life-altering moments in the relationship? In a sense, you two were not just there together but also exploring your inward journeys separately. 

Here is a paradox – we were not only exploring our journeys but were joined together by them. The journey was the substratum of our relationship. It had brought us together, we were attracted to each other because of the common aim. It was the compass that made us practice what we had been taught in the experiential ground of the relationship. Ashishda had said, “Love means leaving both hands free to hold each other with, not one hand holding the partner while with the other you hold onto your ego.”

So, fundamentally, our search got intertwined. The other became the mirror of one’s understanding. In our stumbling, struggling efforts we had accidentally chanced on something far more profound than either of us, and it linked us inextricably together. 

At a time when people are constantly fighting two battles, one on the outside proving their worth and one on the inside - how does looking inward first change an outlook towards what matters most in life? 

When you learn to go inwards you are alone with yourself and it is only then that you can see that only you are capable of supporting yourself and not anything outside you. You begin to see your strengths and your weaknesses, without running away from them. Realising that helps one work on one’s fears and slowly this will strengthen you, giving you a sense of real confidence. It is based on a more authentic and deeper part of yourself that is not entangled with keeping images and what other people think of you.

Which fundamental factors have stayed true to your being on this journey? 

Dream analysis, meditation, self-reflection, introspection. Finding out who I am, apart from my conditioning, my knee-jerk reactions, my patterns of behaviour, my proving my identity. 

I’m quoting you from an interview where you stated, “You have to give up something else in favour of a commitment, and that thing you sacrifice never leaves you. But it can transform you if you let it and do it in awareness.” Could you elaborate on this?

Every commitment requires a choice. Choosing one over another. If you are an apprentice you have to devote yourself to learning the skill, which means you have to give up some pleasure or play time. Though the desire for play or pleasure is not eradicated from you, it is simply held in abeyance. If you are trying to give up smoking and you do it because it is good for your health, you may succumb to the temptation. But if you say, “I accept I want to smoke. I love smoking. It eases my tension but I will not do it because I am trying to build something of essence within me. It will develop something within me which is not an egotistical ability but builds strength beyond it." This will help in many other areas of life. It brings focus, attention, and the ability to persevere.

You’ve made ‘love’ and ‘companionship’ a process in your book which is an ever-evolving concept. Have you drawn this from your personal experience?

Yes, I have drawn from my personal experience where the relationship evolves if both people are trying to work on themselves, looking at their attitudes, their fears, and their reactive points toward the other. Slowly, you begin to realise that much of this is the ego’s language – two personalities who want their way and so are pulling in different directions. But more than this, the relationship evolves when you both are trying to serve an aim bigger than the ego – something that you both hold onto when the ego is doing most of the talking in the relationship. That helps you shift your gaze from the other to the love which has slowly become the substratum of the relationship. It becomes like a third entity in the relationship to which you naturally refer when you are hurt, angry, and finding the other person impossible. 

From my varied experiences and interactions with people - I’ve had two realisations - one, peace cannot come from a change of place or situation but from within; two, sometimes, getting away from a situation and looking at it from the outside helps to reflect better. What is your advice to those seeking a reflection or change?

No, a change of place does not necessarily bring about peace, because wherever you go you take yourself with you with all its unrest. Yet on the other hand, a diametrical change in lifestyle like we did helped us change certain attitudes which were preventing us from finding the peace we were seeking. A lifestyle change sometimes brings you more in alignment with your authentic self and that should be the only yardstick to judge the necessity of making a change.

How can aspiring authors stay true to their purpose in this day and age? 

Observe little things, nature, people, and situations and make mental notes on how you would describe them. Become attuned to an unusual thought or sentence in a conversation. Try and listen to things. Everything has a story. The little nasturtium hanging from someone’s windowsill, the conical stone, the break in someone’s voice, the old man sitting on the bench. Then take that little thing you have noticed during the day – write it down. A thought, a feeling, an unease, a broken cobweb, a bird, or anything that jumps out at you. But write every day. It is the best way to listen to oneself. And when you listen to yourself, you hear the unspoken in others, which is where the true story lies.