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5 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z B A C H E R BACHER CONSNTANCE CALLANAN FAMI LY 4 Five children CONTACT swardarshana@gmail.com A T 1 6 I had the unpleasant realiza- tion that I as a body would one day cease to exist.And that really didn’t make any sense.Why would we be born only to die? And what was the purpose and meaning of life? For some reason I was sure these couldn’t be found in the options so- ciety offered: education, work, mar- riage and family. There had to be something else, but I had no clue what that was, nor where to look for it. So I went off to Antioch, and though I enjoyed my years there, and was interested in making the world a better place, when I left I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life. My immediate need seemed to be for independence and freedom, so I headed for NYC, got an apartment on Madison Ave., a job at Popular Mechanics Magazine, and enrolled in General Studies at Columbia. For six years I worked for vari- ous magazines, editing, research and writing. I married a legal editor and with his three children we moved out of New York to a farmhouse in Vermont. We had two more chil- dren, two beautiful daughters, and lived off the land in a modified way. I continued to do editorial work for a prestigious letterpress printer. In pursuit of decent education for my children, I helped start a Montessori school in nearby New Hampshire, which is still operating. In the late ’70s we moved to N.H., where I worked in a residential therapeutic community based on R.D. Laing’s philosophy of assisting people to go through psychosis without medi- cation. Here I became interested in the field of consciousness and al- ternative ways of seeing and expe- riencing the world, and pursued an independent study program in this area at Goddard College. Personally, I wanted to change the way I expe- rienced the world, the way I per- ceived it. But, short of taking drugs, which I didn’t want to do, I didn’t know how to go about it. By the mid-1980s I found my- self to be incredibly active. I was on two advisory boards and chairman of another,working part-time at two jobs, volunteering on a drug abuse hotline, performing in a woodwind quintet and an early music con- sort (flute and recorder), teaching a course in “creating,” and ferrying my children around—among other things. I had no time for myself and I was not happy. Busy as I was, my life felt quite unsatisfying.With each new endeavor I seemed to be look- ing for something and not finding it—so I’d dive into another activity. My approach to life did not seem to be working.At this point I asked my- self this question: Am I going to go on like this for the rest of my life? Is this all there is? Continuous activ- ity until you die? Something seemed to be seriously missing. So one day I just stopped doing all of it—includ- ing cooking and the family’s laundry. Luckily, I had a great family, and they pitched in. Suddenly, I found myself with time in which I didn’t have to do anything. For the first time in years I could lie on the couch in a silent living room, just enjoying the light coming through the window, and being aware of my breath. About this time, in 1986, I met someone who introduced me to meditation using a particular man- tra. I had an amazing experience the first time I closed my eyes and re- peated this mantra: it was as if the whole space was pulsating, in a sort of neon, with the sense of “Home.” Something in me said,“This is it, this is what you’ve been looking for.” I asked the gentleman who taught meditation to help me start a yoga practice. Overnight, I gave up smok- ing, became vegetarian, began doing yoga and pranayam, and meditating daily. After two months,my instructor went to visit his guru in India. I had no interest in gurus. But while he