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About a year or so after moving to Miami and helping to start an ashram there, my husband and I relocated from Coconut Grove to a large, two story house situated close to Jackson Memorial Hospital in a lovely neighborhood not far from the Miami River. Our neighbor’s properties had enormous, lush mango and avocado trees which we were welcomed to help ourselves to whenever we liked. Miami is certainly a paradise of tropical fruits and these were two of my favorites–we kept a steady supply in our kitchen.
By this time, we had several people living with us full time and visitors were oftentimes coming and going. My husband, who was the head of the ashram, had started a landscaping business with a few of the other men that lived with us and it was growing quickly.
We had settled into a regular routine with our new life in Miami and had managed to meet some kindred spirits and were attracting quite a few people to our yoga classes and intensive courses that we were offering. Two of these people, were Yogi Rama and Sita, his wife. Yogi Rama was a beautiful “old-timer” hatha yoga teacher and he and Sita lived in South Miami, not too far distance from us. We became good friends with this older couple and visited with them at their home on occasion.
Through Yogi Rama’s involvement with the community, a young woman had come to his attention who had a young daughter and needed a place to stay. So he thought of us. Back then, ashrams were very closely related to “flop houses”. We would be approached by all kinds of people trying to “find themselves” or wayward travelers thinking that they would give communal life a try for awhile. Apparently, we were an experiment in spirituality. But if we had the room and the people agreed to get up in the mornings and participate in our sadhana, most of the time we would allow them to stay with us for a nominal fee.
So we felt sorry for this single mother who apparently had nowhere to go and invited her to move in with us. But very soon it was obvious that this woman was trouble–in fact she was a lunatic! She was irrational, argumentative and confrontational and no one in the house could get along with her. Her poor little girl… We realized that we had to get her out of the house but she refused to leave. In no time, she and my (now ex) husband started butting heads and one day an ugly altercation broke out between them.
After the argument, things cooled down momentarily but we were left with a strong sense of uneasiness. What were we going to do? Soon the answer came knocking on our door, but it wasn’t the solution we had envisioned. The next afternoon, two police officers came to the door with two arrest warrants–one for my husband and one for me! What!? We were being arrested on assault and battery charges. We were taken from the house, placed in the back of a squad car, driven to police headquarters where mug shots were taken, fingers printed and then booked into jail.
We spent several long hours in jail (separately)–well into the night until bail money could be scrounged up to get us out. When we finally returned home, the woman had vanished and never showed up for the scheduled court hearing. The bogus charges were dropped against us.
I think these days you have to have some kind of proof before the cops will just come and arrest you… Right?
