Greg Dyal

Greg Dyal describes the music of Ananda as "the heart." The music gets your heart involved. Without getting your heart involved, you’ve just got your mind. The mind is really subordinate to the heart and intuition. When you touch the heart, the mind follows.

Swami Kriyananda’s music brought Greg to Ananda. He first heard it during a 1978 Joy Tour that came through Chicago. Greg had never heard life being expressed that way before. It spoke to him more deeply than any other music he had ever heard. He read Swami’s book, The Path, and the following summer he went to Ananda for the apprenticeship program.

During those summer months, he was totally immersed in the teachings, in yoga, in sadhana. Every day he met people who felt so familiar to him, as if their names were on the tip of his tongue before he met them. He realized that this was where he belonged. This was his spiritual home.

He returned to Illinois to work and save as much money as he could during the winter months, and the following summer he returned to Ananda to take the yoga teacher training course. And then he just stayed.

Greg was in love with the spiritual life. He met an analogous person at Ananda to match each person he had left behind in Illinois, only the Ananda person was leading a spiritual life. He felt very blessed, because a lot of the habits he could have kept with him just fell away. His two years at Ananda Village gave him strong sadhana. He became a good meditator, solidifying the habit of regular meditation and Kriya practice. At that point he wasn’t thinking about sharing anything about the spiritual path. All he was focused on was how to live it.

Greg moved to the Ananda center which was then located in a house in Atherton, and wound up working at the Stanford University Bookstore. After a year and a half of that, he realized that he was on the wrong side of the counter. He took classes at Foothill College, then transferred to UC Davis where he received his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering. These years away from Ananda involved a lot of emotional flushing, overcoming chronic depression, getting past things that were holding him back spiritually. He went through some heart-wrenching, but heart-opening inner experiences.

He graduated in 1989, at the same time that Ananda Community was starting, so he moved to Mountain View to rejoin his spiritual family. He was slowly getting back into the life of Ananda, by chanting at kirtans and attending Sunday Services. At some point, he told David Praver that he wanted to get more involved. David invited him to be on the Community Counsel. He did that for about a year, then was the head of the counsel for another year. It was a good way to get involved and balance a naturally introverted nature.

Now Greg feels a strength coming through him that he can share with others. He feels his next step in his spiritual growth is being more open with the spiritual life, more comfortable with it, and being able to convey to others what he’s experienced over the years.

Greg shares his wisdom and energy with all through the 14-Steps series and other classes at the Ananda Sangha, and he shares Ananda’s heart by playing guitar at Sunday Service and kirtans.