GURU OF THE CHAKRA - THE SPINNING WHEEL OF ENERGY
By Joyce J. Persico, Sunday Times


The conservatively dressed man who opened the door to the second floor therapy room of the Satyam Shivam Sundaram Center in Princeton looked as if he had been incongruously transported from another time, another place, another culture to the Indian-decorated room in which he stood.

His understated wool slacks and sweater said Firestone Library, his graying hair and glasses said mid-50s to mid-60s and his voice hinted of a life in the American South. And yet there he stood, in a room of brightly printed pillows and Indian artifacts, drinking in the sights, sounds and smells of the house - the soft-voices of the students and their teacher's cadences on the first floor, the aroma of garlic from the kitchen mingling with incense, the suggestion that the house was being readied for a ceremony by supplicants.

He has been coming to this room, or one like it, over the past nine years for the same reason that a 21-year-old ex-rock musician enters one like it in New York at least once a week and for the same reason that a group of psychiatrists and psychologists hold Sunday morning sessions at a home in Kendall Park - to meet with an Indian therapist and lecturer named Shyam Bhatnagar.
"Shyam is Mr. Milltown," says the man, his oldest student. "He can detect from the tone of voices as much as a psychiatrist can from a Rorschach test."

"If you're going to do a story on Shyam," urges Mary Weisstein, New York psychotherapist, "say that you talked to a woman who just lost her husband a month ago and the only thing that keeps her going is this man."

Michael, the Princeton businessman, says sound therapy has cured him of insomnia.
John Myers went to Shyam with a back ailment and stayed to become his assistant.
Ann Medlock came to the center from a broken marriage and says the therapy made her better able to cope with the pressures that followed.

And Doctors Patricia Carrington and Harmon Ephron bring Shyam questions about their patients which they haven't been able to answer by conventional psychiatric and psychological means.
Shyam (pronounced Shamm) is a tall, handsome man with tinted glasses, a nest crop of black hair laced with gray, a sense of humor and a soothing voice that is an oral advertisement for his philosophy of the effect of sound on consciousness.

One of six children born in northwest India, (now Pakistan) to an eye surgeon and his wife he came to the United States in 1960, staying on the East Coast for seven months before traveling to California in the beginning of 1961. To acquaint himself with the culture he studied "here and there" and worked as an importer of Indian objects.

"I was quite a successful businessman," he recalls. "But I developed a stomach condition. The doctor told me, 'You're doing something against your temperament." So I went back home to India. When I came back, I began associating with the psychology of the drug revolution.
It was the beginning of his work on the effect of sound on consciousness, a work that incorporates Hinduism, meditation, vegetarianism and the playing of a large, lute-like droning instrument called a tambura.

California was receptive to his teachings.

"He was lecturing at places like Esalen (one of the first centers for the consciousness movement) at the time," says Uma, his American Wife of three-and-a-half years. "But he thought it was forming into a personality cult or that he was becoming a father figure for a lot of people. He'd rather have a few students doing quality work than thousands wearing his pin or his picture."

Bhatnagar left the West Coast in mid-1965 to establish a base for his instruction in the New York area. At first, he taught in the apartment of a music therapist who is now herself a psychotherapist. By 1968, he was invited to Princeton by Dr. Bernard Aaronson, a psychologist at the Neuro-Psychiatric institute of Princeton. to experiment with the effects of sound on consciousness.

Since that time, the Satyam Shivam Sundaram/Self Research Institute, founded in 1966 by Bhatnagar's associate, Harish Johari, has grown into a center at 425 Alexander Street in Princeton and another at 45 East 51st Street in New York, both directed by Bhatnagar. Similar centers exist in Amsterdam and Munich, he says.

"Of the kind of people who come to me, there are three types," he explains. "First, there are the physically, chronically ill who are not able to find cures by conventional or unconventional methods. Second, there are the emotionally disturbed or the psychologically disturbed. And third, there are those interested in their spiritual development.

"So, you see, I have patients, students and disciples.

"Chakra is a spinning wheel of energy. It's like saying you don't live only on food. I added the word 'therapy' to it. Chakra therapy. There are seven Chakras or openings and certain ones can be blocked. The seventh is the top of the head. The sixth is in the middle of the forehead. The fifth is behind the throat. The fourth is in the heart and lungs. The third is the solar plexus. The second is the genitals and the first is the base of the spine."

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