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From Woodstock... to Joshua Tree: Sridhar Silberfein's Spiritual Journey


Most of us know his festivals—Bhakti Fest, in September, and Shakti Fest, in May. But not that many of us hi-desert folk know the man behind these successful festivals, and almost none of us know anything about his own personal spiritual journey in life.

Sridhar (Steven) Silberfein’s journey, not directly to enlightenment, but to a place where he occasionally may encounter a fleeting glimpse of it, began long ago. But it came into its own at one of America’s most iconic cultural events of the 20th century: Woodstock. In essence, Bhakti Fest had its beginnings there, at a dairy farm in New York, in August, 1969, a little after 7 p.m., where somewhere around half a million people gathered at what was billed as “An Aquarian Exposition.”

Say what? Bhakti Fest has its roots nearly 50 years ago at the most famous music festival in American history? I recently sat down with Sridhar to retrace the journey from Woodstock to Bhakti Fest, and to spend some time secondhand with some of the most fascinating spiritual thinkers and saints of modern times. What a fascinating trip it is...

I actually started in the sixties in New York where I studied with my first yoga teacher. That was Swami Satchidananda. I brought him to Woodstock, and he gave the opening speech at Woodstock.

I was friends with the producers of Woodstock, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, and I used to hang out with them at their house and I would watch them go through all these diagrams of building and developing this concept of Woodstock. One day they said, ‘Sridhar, what do you think is missing?’ I got my spiritual name from Swami Satchidananda during that same period of time, 1968. I’ve been using it ever since.

And they said, ‘What do you think is missing?” And I said the spiritual element. We have all these great musicians coming, or to be great musicians, because a lot of them were not even known at that point.

I said, we should bring a swami, there’s only one currently in New York, he’s my teacher, let’s bring him and have him do the invocation. They said, ‘OK, you produce that segment.’ I said OK. I didn’t know anything about producing, but I was an advanced yoga student.

I said, Swami, you’ve been invited to open Woodstock. He said, ‘OK, fine.’ Next segue in, you see this in the documentary Woodstock in the director’s cut, we flew him in by helicopter. We get out, and you’re watching all this as he’s coming out of the helicopter, and then there’s time for him to go on stage, but a little known fact is the first group that went on stage, nobody knows this, got on stage and they got so frightened from this big group of people out there, they ran off stage and they hid in the bushes.

So the producers were panicked at that point. They had to get someone else up there, so they ran and asked Richie Havens to be the opening act. So that’s how you see Richie Havens on stage. When we walk up with Swami, and I realized I didn’t have anybody to introduce Swami, so I say to Richie Havens, he’s sweating already, warming up backstage, it was boiling hot, and he’s sweated a lot when he played. I said, Richie, will you do me a favor? He looks at me like who is this kid? Could you introduce Swami? Then he looked at me and said, ‘Get the fuck outta here.’

It was hilarious. I got Chip Monck, who was the regular emcee, he announced Swami. Swami went up there and gave this beautiful gorgeous talk in front of 500,000 people and that was the Woodstock experience.

As I’m standing on stage with him, I said, wouldn’t it be great if someday we can have all these kinds of people gathering to chant the names of god? He said, ‘Oh, Sridhar, I hope you can accomplish that.’ So 40 years later, almost to the date, in September, 2009, we came out with the first Bhakti Fest in Joshua Tree, California.

We’re on our eighth year now, 21 festivals we’ve done. People ask me why is your festival different than other festivals. Because we’re building spiritual community. People come for an experience. We don’t serve alcohol, which is a very big thing. We don’t have drugs. If somebody wants to smoke pot out there, not among the people, that’s fine. We have 425 acres. Do whatever you want out there. We don’t serve alcohol. We’re all vegetarian. We have 12 of the top vegetarian food vendors in the whole country coming. The food is absolutely magnificent. It’s really great.

We house over 300 people on site. We camp thousands of people. We have a big facility. We built showers over there. Our first year when we went down there, we put in like $48,000 into the infrastructure of the Joshua Tree Retreat Center. We donated that. I didn’t have the money to do that, but they were so antiquated over there I built the stage, I built that main stage in the amphitheater, I put the pad in for the yoga hall outside, and I built all the showers down in the campground.

It’s not easy putting on festivals. It takes a lot of manpower. You’re dealing with a lot of people from all over the world. We have 36 countries represented at our festival. And dealing with the artists, just because it’s a spiritual event that doesn’t mean the artists don’t have egos. So, they say the spiritual ego is worse than the regular man’s ego because you think that you know everything. Because you’re so-called ‘spiritual,’ which means nothing.

I lived in Topanga Canyon for 30 years. I started the first natural foods store in southern California. That was called the Food Chakra, and I did that from 1970 to 1982. It was actually a very unique store. Whole Foods sent their people over in the early days to model some of their stores after mine.

I start businesses and seem to sell them and move on to something else. I started a natural cosmetic company called Desert Essence. I’m actually responsible for discovering an oil called tea tree oil. Melaleuca alternifolia and its common name is tea tree oil.

When I was hiking with the aborigines in down in Australia in the late seventies, I became friends with a group of aborigines down there through my contacts, we were hiking and they said, ‘Jump into this lake.’

I said, OK, because they were like shamans, so you listen to them, of course. So I took my clothes off and jumped in and I started to scream. I jumped out. I said, I’m burning. There was the pond full of tea tree oil because the trees, the bushes were surrounding the pond and it seeped into the water.

Then I realized everything disappeared on my body, all these scratches and bruises and cuts, and pimples, it disappeared immediately. I said, I’ve got to bring this to the country. So in 1980 I introduced tea tree oil to the health food industry. I was the first person to do that. I developed 75 products with Desert Essence, built it up and sold it. It’s a fairly big company now.

I was very demanding on my ingredients. I was the first person to use organics in everything we did. I wouldn’t sacrifice. So when the new owners came in and I worked for them for a few years, they wanted me to fudge this and fudge that, and I said I’m not going to do that. It’s compromising my integrity issues, so I said goodbye and left that.

But then I started a hemp company and I manufactured the first hemp rugs. It seems I like to be an innovative first person doing something. So we manufactured 250 hemp rugs in Katmandu, because I go to India every year since 1980. I live in India like three months a year. I live in an ashram in southern India in Kerala. I have an apartment there. I stay there a couple months doing what’s called sadhana. And I still do my yoga every single day, and standing on my head, and meditating after all these years.

You know, the basic tenet is just be a good person. Help everybody out, do the right thing. Life is very short. We’re here, and we’re gone tomorrow. I have so many friends leaving their bodies now. Cherish the moments we have together. We all have shit and old stuff in our systems we’ve done in the past. No one has lived an angelic life from the day they were born. We’ve done stuff, people have done stuff to us. But we need to forgive. The biggest thing I’ve found after all these years is forgiveness. I forgive you for anything that you’ve done to me in the past through your words, deeds, or actions. This is an actual forgiveness prayer. And please forgive me for anything I’ve done to you through my words, deeds, or actions.

I think if we do that more in our relationships with our husbands or wives or whatever, our kids, our families, our friends, our business associates, if we can constantly be able to forgive each other, that’s a very key thing to be in order to have our own satisfaction, our own grace in life, and for other people, helping them as well.

Every day is a new day. I wake up in the morning and say, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me another day to be alive, to be able to serve, to help people. We’re not getting rich at this festival. It takes so much money. At the end of the day, we’re trying to raise money for charities. We have four or five charities that we help out. Especially we have a girl’s orphanage in India in a town called Vrindavan. We try to help 1,800 girls there. I’ve adopted five girls myself. We send them monies every year. Some of them have mothers, some have fathers, and some don’t. They come to school and this is the only time when they get their one meal a day.

We feed them every single day, and we give them tea and drinks later on. At the end of the day they go home to nothing. To a drunken father that beats the mother and they have to watch all this, and the father wants to get them married off, and they just want to study and become something in their life. In India, the culture is so severe, the girls are a liability, the boys are an asset. With the boys, you get the dowry. The girl’s parents have to pay you the dowry.

In a lot of these backwards places, they get rid of the little girls. They just throw them in the river. It’s getting better, but it’s still going on.

These little girls, they just want to be educated so they can advance in life. We offer the parents, we say, we’re going to stick $600 into this bank account. You let your girl come through the school and graduate from high school and we’ll give you back that $600. They say fine, but secretly, we don’t give that money back to the parents, we actually give it to the girl when she graduates. Then we help them get into the colleges. The program is working really great. We bring water to the villages. This is what I want to do. This is my main focus, doing charitable work.

Through the vehicle of Bhakti Fest, we try to raise enough money every year to donate to them and to other causes as well. We’re very cause driven.

People come to this festival and they don’t want to leave. They have such a transformative experience. We have three yoga halls going simultaneously from 7 o’clock in the morning until 7 o’clock at night. For four days. We have three workshop halls going from 9 o’clock in the morning until 7 o’clock at night on every kind of topic, from Ayurvedic to Tantra to whatever you want, and we have a whole women’s lodge, a dome, just for women, taught by spiritual elder women, to speak about contemporary subject matters that you can’t deal with in your own relationships. Women have issues that they can’t talk to their partners about, but they can talk about it with other women, guided by spiritual elder women.

Same thing for men. We have a men’s lodge and the men go in there and they’re discussing their situations they’re dealing with, their problems, on an every day basis with a spiritual elder man.

Then we have a sound dome that goes from 9 o’clock in the morning until 2 o’clock, you just come in there and get gonged. We have a meditation dome. Plus, of course, our main stage, which is 24 hour sacred music, from Thursday at 10 o’clock in the morning, it doesn’t end until 11 o’clock on Sunday night, 24 hours non-stop. We have a second stage that’s 12 hours a day too. That’s the stage we usually give new acts, and people trying to break into kirtan sacred music.

Jai Uttal

Krishna Das

We have two or three Grammy nominated musicians. It’s very high powered - Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Dave Stringer—these guys have all been nominated for Grammys, you know. They didn’t get it because it’s all political. So we’ve got great music.

I’d really like to pass the baton to more people to get involved because I’m getting to a point in my life where I don’t want to work so hard. People say, ‘What happens to you after the show?’ I just disappear. I don’t tell anyone where I’m going, I just go away for a couple of months and pretty much just be quiet and further my own personal growth. That keeps me focused. I come back in January and start all over again.

People are coming more and more with their families to our festivals because it’s a safe environment. I’m not standing on a platform saying alcohol’s bad or this is bad or that is bad. I’m not into that. I’m into saying, OK, it does bring a different element to an event when everyone is drinking and getting stoned all day long, and alcohol does fuel anger, does fuel frustration, does fuel pushiness. I like a beer every once in a while, a glass of wine with my meal at night. I’m not on a platform. But I want to have a festival that doesn’t have any of that.

I want to see how it works out. It’s such a safe environment that people bring their teenage girls and their kids and they’re not looking over their shoulders to see if anybody’s accosting them. They’re having a good time. The girls are going to yoga. We’re really keen on developing more teenagers into more of a disciplined yoga lifestyle because that’s where the future is. It’s with these younger kids. If they’re going to just be led astray out there, I see it with my own kids, I maintained a fairly strict environment with them, and now my son is raising his daughters in similar ways by showing them what’s the best way to go about doing this. It doesn’t work for everyone.

But you come, you expose yourself to this environment, then you take it out. Monday morning you go back into the world, and you’re a better person for as long as it is, you’re helping people out. Take this love, take this compassion, take this really good feeling that you’re getting from coming to this festival and go out in the world and help people.

Bhakti Fest

We have a special rate for locals and for military. On Sunday it’s free to all military. You can come Sunday and do whatever you want. We send notices over to the Marine base inviting them, because it’s been proven that yoga and meditation is extremely important for dealing with PTSD. More and more people are finding great results with this. We invite them to come do the workshops. We’ve been getting more and more people coming from the Marine base, but we’d love more.

We totally welcome them if they want to come for one day, or if you want to come for four days, it’s $150, and if you’re having a problem with that amount, just call us up and we’ll let you in for free.

All they have to do is come out and try it. And if they need an excuse to come, there’s going to be over a thousand of the most gorgeous girls that come to the festival. Come out look at the girls and take a class.

Once you start taking yoga classes, you’ll see how the body transforms, you’ll see a lot of benefits, and then you start calming down. You try a little meditation and see this is really working. I’m really feeling change in my life. That’s what you’re looking for. You have to have change in your life. You can’t have the same wheel, the little hamster in the wheel going around and around and never gets off. That’s why there’s so much suicide and pain in the world—people can’t get off the wheel.

They have to get off the same wheel. Change the diet, exercise, get the mind settled, and a little quiet, and get out of this socio-economic situation we’re being caught in every day. It’s great out here because we don’t have to be in traffic, and we’re less of a consumer out here in the desert than if we’re in the big city. It’s really a beautiful way of life out here. That’s why we want to keep the festivals here, so people can come out. It’s surprising how many more people are coming out here from LA.

I think we’re doing really good, but everything can be better. Life is very vast, it’s a huge universe. You can always do better, help more people, do more service.

We have a lot of beginners classes. You can pick or choose your teacher. All the classes are geared up for all kinds of people. It doesn’t matter what kind of condition you’re in. Just come and expose yourself to it.

We’re open. We welcome everyone. There’s no elitism there. We’re one of the few festivals anywhere that covers all the areas in shade cloth. We have two 2,000 gallon water tanks we dispense water free through a reverse osmosis system.

I lived in Topanga. I had a seven acre ranch. That’s where we started our nonprofit foundation which is called The Center for Spiritual Studies. It’s a 501(c)3, and it’s been in existence since 1973. We’re very low key. I don’t want to be obligated to anybody. I just want to run a nice little quiet nonprofit. That’s the auspices under which Bhakti Fest runs.

So I lived there for over 30 years and when all the great saints from India came to America, they all came to our center. That was their introduction point. Yogi Bhajan, Swami Muktananda, Swami Satchidananda, Ram Dass got his start there. He is my very dear friend for about 45 years already. We met in 1970, Labor Day weekend, at an event with Swami Muktananda, who came to America, upstate New York. We were all there and Muktananda turned to Ram Dass and me, I didn’t even know him, and he said, ‘You two guys get together. I want you to run my tour around America.’

That’s how I came to California in 1970. I stayed and met my first wife there. We moved to Topanga and started that beautiful center there and the health food store. All my kids were born at the house there. Natural childbirth, never been to a hospital, no vaccines, I really have positions about all this stuff. Chlorine, fluoride in the water, I was standing on platforms before platforms even existed. I have issues with all that government control, corporate control stuff. I’m totally against all the plastic food, the Monsantos, the GMOs. Don’t get me started.

I had a great teacher that came from India in 2002. His name was Swami Kaleshwar. He said to me the vastu doesn’t work in this house. I said I don’t even know what vastu is. Then I learned that it was the Indian analog to Feng Shui. Vastu is over 10-20,000 years old. Feng Shui is adapted from vastu. And vastu is the alignment of north, south, east, and west with the five elements. It’s a very scientific thing, but it works. I started studying it.

He said, all the energy is seeping out of the south end of your house. That’s why you see so many fences around here. In Topanga he said, ‘You’ll have to build a wall on the south side of your seven acres here.’ I said that’s a big project. How about if I just get a bulldozer and put a berm up here? He said, ‘You’ll never have a happy relationship with a woman here if you stay here.’

I said, Swami, you could have saved me millions of dollars already because I’ve had three divorces up here. That could be the reason for that, but you never know. You get together with somebody, you live a beautiful life with somebody, something happens, it’s all OK, you can’t blame anyone, it’s always 50/50. You might not think that while you’re going through it, especially in a divorce, but I say to my friends now, if you’re going to get a divorce, just give her 50 percent of everything, don’t fight, you’re here to take care of the kids, with joint responsibility to take care of your beautiful children.

I said, I’m going to build this berm. He says, ‘OK, I’m going to come back next year from India.’ He comes back next year, 2003, he said, ‘Forget it. You have to leave.’

I said, I’ve been here 32 years. Every great saint, I mean everybody was there, the Kalu Rinpoche was there, everyone got their start there. Amma the hugging saint—she stayed there 17 years every time she came to LA. He said, ‘You have to leave. It’s the guru’s grace that’s saved you all these years. It’s not anything you did.’

I said, OK, put the property up for sale, I had so many different people come—Goldie Hawn, Kate Hudson, it’s a beautiful place. Then this guy walks in, he’s just wearing regular clothes, but he saw my pictures all over the wall, this swami, that swami. He said, ‘Do you know these people?’ I said I have very intimate connections with everyone you see on my wall. I’ve been with them all in close proximity to me, I’m very close to them all. I go to India to visit them.

He says, ‘Do you know that one particular guy there, Swami Muktananda?’ I said, yeah, I handled his two world tours. He said, ‘He gave me initiation.’ I was looking at him. He had regular clothes. I said, you’re a swami? He said, ‘Yeah, I am, but I’m not wearing my clothes.’

Then I took him around and I said this is the bathtub I built for Muktananda. He spent six days here. He said, ‘He lived here for six days?’ I said yeah, he lived in this house. In fact, he left me all his bathtub water and I filled up these gallon jugs and I still have them, and kidding around I said, if you buy the property, I’ll give you some. And that was it. He bought the property.

He lasted there a year and a half and he had to leave also, because of the vastu.

So I thought, I’m going to go back to Joshua Tree, because I had a house down here in 1972, a five acre house I bought on the spur of the moment. It’s in north Joshua Tree. I used to go out there on weekends and race on motorcycles with the kids. And I had a good feeling and a good vibration down here. I always felt very peaceful down here.

It’s a wonderful community, even though we don’t socialize much. I’m pretty busy and I don’t really go out. I’m a homebody now. I have a beautiful wife, and we like to stay home when we’re not traveling and we’re not working. We’re very happy here. We do socialize some, but I’m not on any list to invite to a party.

My philosophy of life is when things go great, it’s fantastic, and when things go bad, it’s still fantastic. It’s really just a feeling you have in your body and your mind. But success and failure, it’s the same thing. It’s just a stimuli, something you’re experiencing. There’s nothing wrong with failure. People are afraid to step out and do anything because they have a fear of failure, but you’re not going to do anything unless you go out and start doing. And it’s no big deal—you fail, you get back on your feet and go back to work and do something else.

This is what life is—you can’t bury your head in the sand and say I’m a failure. You’re not a failure. You’re a wonderful human being. You have to get up and go back to work.

We’re invited all over. I’ve been invited to bring Bhakti Fest to China, to Beijing, in June of 2017. Also, they want us to come to Germany next year. We also just got an invitation to come up to Ashland, Oregon, so we’re going to do a small event in June next year. I’m not looking for big events any more. It’s the same amount of energy. I just want to turn people on to a better way of life. If we can do it with a small event, 400, 500 people, instead of 3,00, 4,000 people, I’m just as happy doing that.

Sridhar and Ram Dass

I am writing my book, by the way. I do want to talk about Ram Dass for a minute, my relationship with him. I actually saved his life about 10 years back.

About 15 years back, he had his stroke. He was living up in a community in northern California, near Walnut Creek or something like that. We used to hang out a lot before he had his stroke, and when he had his stroke, he got involved with not a good group of people. He was living up there and I called him up and said what's happening up there.

I drove up there, so when I got there, these guys are putting a pipe in his mouth at 8 o'clock in the morning, and taking it out at midnight, using his credit card and stealing his money. I said, what kind of life is this Baba. You're so much more advanced, you're letting these people take advantage of you.

He said, 'Get out of here Sridhar. You have nothing to do with any of this.'

I left. I was heartbroken. I went back to Topanga. I couldn't sleep for three days. I couldn't sleep a wink. I said, after all he's done for the world, I can't just let him die in this kind of environment. So, I said I have to do some intervention, but with him, you have to be very careful how you do anything.

So I called him up and said, Baba I'm doing this retreat on Maui and I'd like you to come. He said, 'OK, Sridhar, I'll come.' I flew him over there and he arrived and he was like one step into death he was so weak and so frail.

We barely made it through the five-day retreat and I put him right into the Maui hospital and then I got him the best doctors and nurses. Then I told all his group to leave and I took over his care and he never left. His whole life changed. He's 85 years old now and he's doing fantastic. I found an Indian man in Florida who loved Ram Dass and he bought the house for him. I gave him our nonprofit foundation to help him raise money and between us and Wayne Dyer, we raise $250,000 for his health and his care and got him started on writing a couple of books.

In 2009, we got our nonprofit back from him and that's when we started Bhakti Fest under the nonprofit.

He married us December 21 on Maui, at his house. It was a beautiful ceremony. An amazing event. There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

I said let's do these annual interviews with Ram Dass, so every April since 2009 we go out there, and we have cameras set up and we sit down and I ask him every question under the world. We talk about every kind of subject matter. Last year I made me a compilation of some of these and made a book.

I like doing projects. I don't do these things to make money. It costs me money.

He's doing great, and I'm glad we were instrumental in being part of that.

We have to take care of the spiritual elders. We have to respect the spiritual elders. Take care of them. They've done some very important work. He just came out with a book last year and he's coming out with another one.

On attaining enlightenment...

What I got from all these associations with all these wonderful people is I got a very intense peace of mind, a compassionate side of me that doesn't show up 24/7. But at the end of the day, you try to be the nicest person you can.

No one's going to tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Oh, Steve, you've been such a wonderful guy in your life. I'm going to give you enlightenment.' It doesn't work that way. That's why all these people get so intense with their yoga, their meditation, their austerities, thinking that it does work that way. It doesn't. The best way to do, what I'm finding, is to become a better human being, more compassionate, more caring, more loving to everybody you meet, and try to take care of as many people as you can. And even that, you're not going to be enlightened, but who cares? We have glimpses of what enlightenment is.

Throughout your life you get more and more glimpses. You sit quietly, that's why I advocate having a little space in your home you retreat to. I have an altar, in fact I built a temple in the back of the house. I built my own temple because I like to go back and play music.

On Amma, the hugging saint...

When I brought Amma the hugging saint to southern California for the first time in 1988 and she came to my house, I invited like a hundred friends to come up - I had that many friends then. And like 27 people showed up. She came in and went into a special room, a bedroom I built for her, and she didn't come out for like six or seven hours. These 27 people dwindled down to 15, and they kept bugging me, 'Who is this person? When is she coming out?'

I said, I don't know this person. All I know is she's got the most incredible high energy of any person I've ever met and I feel she's an enlightened being. I went in to get her. I said Amma, I invited so many people and there's only a few people out there in the living room. She said, 'Sridhar, Amma doesn't care about numbers. If one person gets my message, that's fine. Besides, millions of people are going to be following me eventually.' This was when she had nobody. It was just a very small group of people. Now, sure enough, she's the biggest saint in the world, she has the most devotees in the world. And she's doing the most charitable projects. She is all over the world taking care of people, giving money to the poor, building houses for them.

There's a big suicide rate among farmers in India because Monsanto goes to these third world countries and sells them a bill of goods and the farmers believe it. Then when they don't have any crops for a couple years because it's so decimated, they commit suicide. So she goes in and she takes the wives and gives them a stipend every year and she helps them with cottage industries and everything.

In 1999, I did a movie on her life story called River of Love. I didn't know anything about producing movies, but this is how I live my life - you come up with an idea, and you just go ahead and do it. Not worrying about it. Like I said before, success or failure, it's all successful, it's all failure, who cares? It's just the ego's mind at the end of the day is chalking up accomplishments, but who really cares? Who's ever going to remember Sridhar, or Steve, or whomever? Nobody. Everyone's consumed in their own drama.

We care for a moment, and that's it. That's why I hang around with these people. They care about people all of the time. She doesn't take one second for herself. She still wears this white little sari, of course they have other saris for her, but she refused to fly business class for so many years, and finally one of her devotees said, 'Amma, we're not sticking you back there in economy any more.' She sits and hugs everybody for 20 hours a day, every single day, all over the world. Never turning anyone away. You could be a killer, a rapist, black, white, green, whatever you are, and any religion, and she doesn't care. She takes you in her arms. At that moment, all your stuff comes out, even if it's for a moment. She says a few words to you, gives you a blessing.

Life is the story.

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