Doing the Work
Instilling Courage
—by Alik Elzafon Carmel, CA
How did Rudi and his work affect my life?
It gave me life.
In 1971 I was a young man just out of film school, totally devastated by life’s mystery, whose sole purpose was to go through a day and stay alive.
An elderly man, the head of mind control in NYC, refused to let me study with him. ‘You don’t belong here’ he said ‘you belong with Rudi’. ‘Who is Rudi?’ I asked. He is a fat Jew who will knock you down with his energy’, he replied. It took me two weeks of constant inner struggle to finally traverse the short distance between my apartment and Rudi’s store.
I walked in singing and chanting to keep my mind still. Rudi looked up at me and smiled. ‘I love you very much‘ he said, and sent me to learn the exercise.
I didn’t sleep all that night. I woke up at 3:30 AM and called the Ashram. A sleepy voice of one of his students answered. ‘I would like to talk to Rudi’ I said.
Bruce Denny (I had learned his name later) said that Rudi does not hold classes on Sunday morning. ‘Please go and ask him, ’ I repeated, ‘or I will keep on calling’. Bruce went and came back after a very short moment. ‘Rudi said that if you come tomorrow morning he will hold a class’.
I had felt like a whale dying on the shore when all of the sudden a body of water appears to him.
Weeks later, when it suddenly dawned upon me that I had actually woke Rudi up in the middle of the night. I came to him soaking in remorse wishing to apologize. ‘Great students don’t stop at bad manners’, he said and never mentioned the incident again.
In all honesty, in the first six month of being around Rudi, I did not internalize that one has to change. That the point of the exercise was to give us enough energy so we risk jumping into the unknown and… change. I was just preoccupied with the buzz around Rudi. As time went on I realized the depth of despair I was climbing from, and made hesitant attempts at changing myself. My appetite grew stronger as I witnessed Rudi changing. His changes were alarming and at times, discouraging. I came to him with despair realizing the distance between us. ‘If I could do it’, he used to say to me, ‘Anybody can do it.’ The courage he had instilled in me aided me all through my life in the most impossible situations.
Change is no longer a word to me. It is a way of life… a reality. Rudi had turned on a valve in my heart that cannot be turned off. The affect it had on my life is a minute-by-minute one.
