A reunion at Peter Max studio, 1991. (L-R: Peter Max, Swami Satchidananda, Ezra, Peter & Sarah Petronio.)
The Beginning
When Peter Petronio first encountered Swami Satchidananda in the summer of 1966, he was already a renowned spiritual master with students in India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Europe. It was Peter’s close friend, the artist Peter Max, who had met Swami Satchidananda in Paris while working with filmmaker Conrad Rooks on his film Chappaqua, and who had invited him to come to New York.
One morning, the phone rang. It was Peter Max: “He’s here! Come over right away.” When Peter arrived at Peter Max’s apartment, he encountered a tall, elegant man in saffron robes. “I had no idea as to the importance of his presence,” he recalls. “I just intuitively felt that I could not let this gentle and wise man leave us and go away. I asked him: ‘Please, can you stay with us.’ His reply was: ‘Let’s see.’”
At that first meeting there were four of them—Peter Max, Victor Zurbel, their friend Chuck Soloway, and Peter. But word spread quickly that someone important was in town. By that same evening there were twenty people in the room, including the poet Allen Ginsberg. Soon there were fifty, then a hundred. “Today there are thousands of teachers and students within the Integral Yoga community,” Peter reflects. “The rest is history.”
What struck Peter most deeply at that first gathering was something Swami Satchidananda said in response to a simple question: Where do we tune in? He replied: “Can you hear the radio playing? Of course not, but the waves are all around us. You need a radio to tune in. In life you need the practice of Yoga to tune in to yourself and a higher level of spiritual and human understanding.”
“I’ve kept that thought in my mind for the past sixty years,” Peter says.
A Friendship Across Three Continents
Swami Satchidananda sensed that America was on the verge of a spiritual awakening — and as he would always say, it was not anything he had done to bring that about. Providence had pushed him. The students’ own readiness to receive had called him forth. He was there to serve, and what he offered was simple: a path toward an easeful body, a peaceful mind, and a useful life. For Peter and his wife Sarah, those words were not a slogan. They were a compass.
Over the decades, Peter and Sarah, and their children Leela and Ezra, remained close to Swami Satchidananda across three continents. They visited him in New York, at the former ashram in Connecticut, and at the present Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville in Virginia. Swami Satchidananda visited them in their homes in Brooklyn, in Paris, in Chicago—sitting at the table, sharing Sarah’s home-cooked Indian meals, present in the ordinary rhythms of their lives. “Of course, our relationship was spiritual master and devotee,” Peter reflects, “but spending family time together allowed us to share everyday life together.”
The Teaching That Guided Everything
There came a moment when Peter faced a serious business conflict. He had a choice: to press on through a difficult situation or to step away and absorb a real financial loss. He called Swami Satchidananda and posed the question. After a brief conversation, he offered this:
“Close your eyes and imagine that you are holding a bowl of milk in both hands. Now open your eyes and you see that it has spoiled. Now just open your hands and let it drop to the ground and move on. It’s as simple as that.”
And then he added, quietly: “Never do anything that disturbs your peace.”
“Over the years,” Peter writes, “I have kept that very simple comment as a guiding principle for all of my actions and relationships. I’ve been able to turn it into a dynamic in which the positive vibe can overwhelm the negative vibe. In other words: ‘do good’.”
Swami Satchidananda also blessed Peter with a mantra. When asked what he wanted, Peter replied, without quite knowing why: “Focus.” And so, he received a mantra for focus, which he has returned to ever since in moments of creative challenge or uncertainty, opening, as he describes it, the top of his mind to receive what comes from above. “Perhaps he put it in my mind,” Peter writes. It is the kind of remark that Swami Satchidananda would have appreciated: playful, wondering, and almost certainly true.
Last visit in Paris, 2002. (L-R: Swami Satchidananda, Peter, Sarah & Leela Petronio).
“See You Around”
The last time Peter saw Swami Satchidananda was in Paris in 2002. He was passing through the city on his way to what would be his final visit to India. They met for lunch, and Swami Satchidananda was in high spirits showing Peter a new personal organizer, playing the film of his opening prayer at Woodstock on its tiny screen, sharing memories with the delight one had given everything and held onto nothing.
When the taxi arrived to take him to the airport, Swami Satchidananda got in, rolled down the window, looked Peter in the eyes, smiled, and said: “See you around.”
“He will always be with us,” Peter says simply.
Sixty years on, Peter and Sarah Petronio live in Paris. He still photographs, still writes, still reflects. In the daily practice of a life shaped by that first improbable evening in a New York apartment—by the radio waves nobody can hear, by the bowl of milk released, by the peace that waits whenever we stop disturbing it—the teaching continues to arrive.
About Peter & Sarah Petronio:
Peter Petronio was born in Brooklyn in 1941. Sarah was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1944. They are, by any measure, citizens of the world. He is a designer, photographer, and creative consultant whose work has spanned continents; she a celebrated jazz tap dancer and author whose art took her from New York to Paris to India and beyond. And yet, like so many lives that found their deepest anchoring in the orbit of Swami Satchidananda, the thread that runs through everything.
