Following the Path: A Kriya Yoga Teacher's Story of Trust

In 1979, a thirty-year-old woman with a finished education, a job, a marriage, and young children walked into a lecture given in somebody's home in Felton, California, carrying a magazine she had already decided to be suspicious of. The magazine was called Truth Journal. Her question, as she recalled it on the Spirit Led podcast, was simple and a little combative: whose truth? That skepticism, the refusal to swallow a teaching whole, is the thread running through the conversation that host Joan Hope Craig recorded with Yogacharya Ellen Grace O'Brian during a week-long retreat at the Center for Spiritual Awareness in Lakemont, Georgia. O'Brian has been a disciple of Kriya Yoga since that evening, following her guru, Roy Eugene Davis, for decades as a teacher, writer, and leader. What she describes is less a conversion than a decision to follow an opening she could not fully explain, and to keep following it through distance, loss, and the ordinary demands of a family and a working life.

What was missing when the path first opened?

The most useful thing about O'Brian's account is how unglamorous her starting point was. She was not in crisis. By her own description she had arrived at the place where she was "supposed to" be: schooling complete, work underway, family in place. And yet, as she put it in the interview, she did not have the happiness she thought she should have. Her search had already taken her toward Buddhism and to the writings of Alan Watts. She had not read Autobiography of a Yogi and had not gone down that road at all.

Many listeners will recognize that gap between the life that looks complete and the life that feels complete. O'Brian's point is not that the outer life was wrong. It is that the search was real, and that a sincere searcher can sit inside an ordinary, successful life and still feel the pull of something unnamed. The Felton lecture did not answer a question she had articulated. It arrived where the question already was.

Why did a skeptic trust a teacher she had just met?

O'Brian is careful to describe herself as a critical thinker, "not necessarily in the best way." She was always hunting for the flaw: what is not true about this? She had watched many paths, and many religions, ask her to accept the part she liked and ignore the part she didn't. What she found in Roy's lecture was different. "I didn't have any argument with him," she said. The teaching on the nature of reality, the nature of mind, and how to meditate agreed with what she already sensed about how things are.

Then came the experience she still returns to. Questions began to form in her awareness, and before she could put them into words, Davis was answering them. She did not report lights or dramatic phenomena. She described something quieter and more exact: "a powerful influx of the light of consciousness and truth that came from him." For a person who had been testing every claim, that quality of direct address mattered. She felt he was speaking to her.

"The path opened up for me, and I followed it." (Ellen Grace O'Brian, Spirit Led podcast interview, featured in the episode description)

What makes this more than a pleasant anecdote is the Truth Journal detail. O'Brian's first reaction to the magazine's title was cynical: who gets to say what the truth is? That reaction turned out to be the first lesson. She had no sense, at that time, that there were different levels of truth. She knew the everyday meaning of truth, the question of whether a statement is true or false. She did not yet grasp what she called absolute truth or absolute reality, the level the magazine was pointing toward, even in the choice of its name. Her skepticism did not get dismissed. It got re-aimed.

She summed up her response with a line that reads like a plain statement of method: "Even though I didn't know what it was, I knew enough to follow it. So, that's what I did." Host Joan Hope Craig picked up on the shift in her earlier posture. Before Davis, O'Brian had been looking here and there, and holding something back. After him, the feeling was "this is something I can trust."

What does trust in a guru actually rest on?

O'Brian's answer is short and specific. Her whole experience with Davis, she said, was that "he always told me the truth." She added that this is a very rare experience to have with anyone. For a student, trust of that kind is not built by charisma or by the teacher's pronouncements. It is built by a long pattern of being told the truth, including when the truth is inconvenient, and by finding that the teaching holds up against one's own careful reasoning.

That kind of trust also explains why O'Brian stayed. The pull of the path did not depend on being in the same room as her teacher. She lived in California with family while Davis was based in Georgia. In the interview she noted that she "didn't know anything else." Today, she observed, people who come regularly to her center in San Jose sometimes panic at the thought of moving away, worried they will lose access to everything. Her own experience was different. "I used to see my teacher maybe twice a year if I was fortunate," she said. "But it's how it was."

The lesson here is not that proximity doesn't matter. It is that the relationship she describes was carried by inner recognition and by the discipline of practice in the intervals between visits. A student who lives far from a teacher is not automatically lost. The question is what they have actually learned to trust, and how they keep returning to it when the teacher is absent from daily view.

How do you live the teachings in your own body, mind, and life?

The episode's description lists several threads beyond the origin story: finding the back door to surrender, living the teachings authentically in one's own unique body and mind, and the spiritual life from the perspective of women and mothers. O'Brian comes back to these themes repeatedly, and she ties them to a line that appears in the episode's promotional material: "We are here to live in accord with divine purpose to bring our light into the world."

Her framing is practical. Spiritual teaching, in her telling, is never lived in the abstract. It is expressed "in this body-mind, in this situation," which is to say, in the specific nervous system, history, and circumstances each person actually has. A teaching that cannot survive contact with a particular life has not yet been understood. O'Brian's own biography gives weight to this. Host Craig introduced her as a mother, a wife, a grandmother, and a working minister who has had to sustain a steady practice inside a full regular life, and who sets an example in doing so.

There is also a note of relief in how she describes the work. In the exchange with Craig, she reflects on how living within a community of practice lightens the load, and on how the promise of the path remains available even when a person is juggling many roles. The spiritual life, in this view, does not require stepping out of ordinary responsibilities. It asks that those responsibilities be lived from the same center that the teacher pointed to.

What happens when your devotion is tested?

The conversation moves through hard territory as well. Craig asked O'Brian to share stories she has told many times, and the interview touches on the question of surrender, on the stance of a student who says "I'm not ready," and on experiences that followed from being in a teacher's presence. The episode's description promises a story about what to do when someone sets your temple on fire, which the host introduces as a true story. The full account belongs to the episode, and it is worth hearing in O'Brian's own voice rather than paraphrased here.

What runs under all these stories is the same discipline she began with at the Felton lecture. Her test was never whether the teaching felt comfortable. It was whether the teaching was true, whether it agreed with what she could verify in herself, and whether the person giving it could be trusted to say the difficult thing. A student who holds on to that standard is less likely to be shaken by every rough moment, because the question has shifted from "do I like this?" to "is this telling me the truth?"

Where to go from here

If O'Brian's story resonated, the most direct next step is the full Spirit Led episode, where the stories about the temple fire, the back door to surrender, and the perspective for women and mothers are told in her own words. The Center for Spiritual Awareness, the teaching community founded around Roy Eugene Davis, is at csa-davis.org, and O'Brian's own teaching materials are gathered at ellengraceobrian.com. Readers who want the lineage behind the story should look at Autobiography of a Yogi, the book O'Brian had not yet read when the path opened for her.

Her account leaves one question worth carrying into your own practice. Think of the magazine title that made her roll her eyes, and ask what you are currently taking on faith, and what you have actually tested. Then, as she did, follow what you can verify, and keep looking for the level of truth beneath the words.