An incredible journey

Overland to India

On my way to Afghanistan – it was 1974 – the bus stopped in Mashhad, the last port of call in Iran. A very Persian town, probably the most important rug centre in Iran. At the Afghan border, just past the Iranian checkpoints, we got our passports stamped. On the bus there’d been boys who’d sold us hashish. Of course, Afghanistan being the centre of the hashish trade in that part of the world, we bought some big pieces of it – and were very happy, as we’d been waiting a long time for this!

Now at the Afghan customs office we walk into this shed. There’s me, Dave and Rob – we are pretty bedraggled, not having had a shower for ages – and there’s this official-looking guy. Plus… all the boys who’d sold us the hash are standing there too!

The boys point at me and at the other guys, and the official says, “Right, empty your pockets, open your bags. Give us the hash.”

So we gave him the hash, and he went, “Right, $100, please. $100 or prison.”

We gave him $100 – and that was the end of that.

Afghanistan was like going back to medieval times, like being in the 15th century. On the way to Herat we stopped off at little places with samovars for tea, very primitive shacks. There were very few Westerners.

We all got off the bus at a place called Hotel Minibus Station and got ourselves a room. I remember there were huge cypress trees in the courtyard, and that I wanted to take a shower. It had been two or three days since I’d had one. When you were on the road in those years, showering was a luxury. The attendant said, “Shower, yes, no problem. I will light the fire. You can take shower in 15 minutes.”

Up I went to the shower room, where I saw a convoluted piping system. At the bottom there was a circular metal chamber under which he had lit a wood fire. The idea was that when the water got hot enough it would rise up and then, through this system of tubes, come down through the ceiling into the showerhead. And you would have a beautiful hot shower.

The only problem was, you either got boiled and burnt to death, or you got frozen because, for whatever reason, the cold and hot water wouldn’t mix. It wasn’t a system made by Hotpoint! It was a system built by some bloke who’d come along with a welding gun and some soldering iron. You had a choice: boiling hot water, which you couldn’t go near, or freezing cold water. I ended up spilling tiny bits of hot water on me, and then a fair amount of the cold water from the other tap. I never really got my longed-for hot shower. Anyway, this was my first experience of Afghanistan. A great place, still quite a few years before the Soviet Army invaded the country. Friendly and proud people.

In 1974 Afghanistan was, as I said, medieval. Totally uncorrupted by the West (except for the importing of guns). In the whole of Kabul there was one supermarket. We’d see the odd car around. In Herat – the first big city after the border, where I stayed – there were rickshaws, bicycles and horse-drawn carriages. And a few motorbikes and scooters. Anything Western was very difficult to find – a good doctor, a good dentist, a good telephone. Technology just wasn’t there. Of course, you could find somebody who would do anything for you, which then often worked really well. They had ways of making things work, simple things.

I spent a few days in Herat, then travelled to Kabul, a pretty good place, too…

Did you know that Afghanistan is famous for apricot pie?

They had the best apricots in the world. There was a man who used to make pastries which were out of this world. There were certain things that tasted unbelievably good and that you wouldn’t be able to find in the West. One of them was apricot pies!

The other was the flatbread, which they made in wood ovens. There were no electric or gas ovens, just wood ovens. They lit a fire and cooked the bread early in the morning. Those flatbreads were just absolutely smoky and delicious. Better than any bread I’d ever tasted.

There was a quality of simplicity – and I think the word would be ‘continuance’ – from way back. Now this is probably gone, with all the new technology and the way the internet and social media have changed the world. You can probably even get Amazon in Afghanistan now. Who knows?

On my overland journey to India, Afghanistan was a big part of the trip. It was the beginning of ‘the East’. First you travel through Turkey and Iran… Iran was modern; it was under the Shah, although there was eastern Iran, which was pretty backward, with people still living in mud huts. But when you get to Afghanistan you finally realise you are in the East. Then you cross Pakistan into India.

Back and Forth: Goa – England

India didn’t mean meditation to me then. I was not into meditation whatsoever. I was 22 and wanted to discover things. My experiences of altered states of consciousness were LSD trips and mushrooms. That was all. But meditation, no. I knew of meditation. I knew of Osho. I knew of Goa. I knew of gurus. I knew of the allure of the East, which absolutely called me big time, but I wasn’t into meditation or gurus.

I spent the winter of 1974–1975 in Goa, actually in North Goa. I had a nice little place near where my friends George and Avril had been going for years. They were buying jewellery, coral, turquoise – Nepali and Tibetan stuff – and bringing it back to Europe to sell.

I was very much into the whole early Goa scene… There were all these characters… There was Goa Gil. He was a DJ and party organiser. There was Sadhu Tom, Sadhu George, Australian Peter, Mescaline Bobby… and many more. They were the originators of the whole early scene. Goa Gil, especially with Goa trance, which he’d invented. Of course there was an abundance of LSD and hash. The heavy-duty stuff hadn’t come in then – heroin and cocaine. It was still quite innocent. The bad stuff started to come in around 1975–1976. (I observed that because I went back again…)

At the end of the season I travelled back to England – overland, through southern Pakistan – to save up money to come back to Goa again. I drove an ice cream van. It was one of the hottest summers in England ever. I drove all around Cranham, not far from Southend, working for Wall’s Ice Cream with my friend Tony. I had a great time, selling ice cream. I think I saved up £500, which was enough for me to go to India for six months – easy. I went straight to Goa, straight onto the beach, hanging out with my friends, straight into getting very fucked up on acid.

When I came back to England in 1976 I got into big trouble with the police. I was fucked up, my brain was fried. I was trying to lie low. I wasn’t in a very good emotional space. I didn’t even know anything about my emotions except for fear – a lot of fear – and the desire to return to this immaculate immortality that I’d experienced on previous LSD trips, which never came again.

I was selling ice cream again for a while, and did a bit of work here and there. Then I was on the dole. I was living in my grandfather’s flat, in a totally negative space. My family thought I had gone barmy, loopy, so we didn’t have a great connection there. I then decided to leave England and go to Israel.

Israel, Greece, Germany

I visited Israel for a few months. I actually went twice – the second time to see a friend who lived near Jerusalem, on a farm. I hung out in Jerusalem and learned to play the guitar. After a few months, my brain slowly calmed down, since I wasn’t taking any more acid and was only smoking hash. I was just trying to chill out and come back to a neutral space. England, for me, held only negative experiences – with my family and the drugs. It was a place I had to get the hell out of.

When it was time to move on from Israel, with my friend Udi I took a boat to Piraeus in Greece. And then from Piraeus we sailed to the island of Ios, where we stayed in a cave for three or four days. When Udi returned to Israel, I went up to Thessaloniki, took a bus through Yugoslavia, all the way up through East Germany into Berlin. I arrived in Berlin sometime in the summer of 1977.

My friends Tony, Alan and Rob were living in Berlin. They were making money selling jewellery on the streets. They bought costume jewellery in the UK and brought it back to Berlin. At that time Germany was experiencing the ‘economic miracle’. You know, from losing the war suddenly they were fully employed! They were building and building and building, and had an incredibly strong economy.

While there I worked for the British Army for a few months. Together with another guy, I delivered food to the officer class. West Berlin was run by the Americans, the British and the French. (The Russians ran East Berlin, which was the capital of East Germany.) The British had their military base in Spandau, not far from the city centre.

So there we were delivering food for the British Army. It was quite a good job, driving a truck to the officers’ flats. All of the food was imported from Britain: the bread, the eggs, the cheese, the jam – all British stuff. They could not have the British eating German food! It was to remind the troops of dear old Blighty…

When it stopped being much fun, I thought, Well, I can get the dole. I can get money from the government, because I’ve worked for six months. If I go to a doctor and say that I’m sick, I can get a sick note. I thought up the idea that I had a pain in my back, that I couldn’t lift anything into the truck any more. I went to see a doctor, and he said, “Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” and gave me an injection in my back. It fucked me up; I could hardly walk afterwards. I don’t know what it was. But at least I managed to get three months of sick pay from the German government without going to work. I was involved in all these little scams, to get some money together…

While in Berlin I became friendly with a guy called Swami Bodhen. He used to sell Bhagwan books in a market in the middle of town. I was also invited to these sannyas parties, but… I didn’t want a guru. I felt I didn’t need a guru. I had a lot of judgments about gurus, also about the people who went to gurus. It wasn’t until I got pretty fucked up that I had to surrender to the fact that I needed a guru, and understood that I needed help, that I couldn’t do it on my own. Still, I started to connect with the sannyasins a little bit. I remained in Berlin until 1978.

Back to India

It wasn’t until 1979 that I started to meet a lot of sannyasins, mostly in Goa. Wherever you were in Goa, especially on Anjuna beach, you were going to bump into sannyasins. They were always very friendly and loving, and when I was really fucked up and had a head full of acid, all I could hear in my head was this voice saying, Go to Pune, go to Pune. And so that’s what happened. I’d heard this voice so many times that on the full moon in March 1980, I went off on the bus to Pune.

I immediately felt welcomed. Already at the gate. I needed a place to stay. With the Dutch woman I was travelling with – we were doing a bit of opium, a bit of coke and a bit of smoking – we ended up borrowing someone’s hut. It was in a sannyas village with rows and rows of bamboo huts. So we had a place to stay for a few days, which was convenient.

On the second night I did some opium. My friend was there too. When we woke up in the middle of the night, the whole place was on fire… flames everywhere. We rushed out. I had left the candle burning; it caught the place alight and, of course, the whole hut burnt down.

The sannyasins brought buckets of water to throw on the fire and eventually put it out. I managed to get hold of my money belt and wallet. But all my clothes were gone, which forced me to go out and buy… red clothes. That was a big wake-up call for me. I said to myself, Right, enough opium and stuff like that. Stop it! So I stopped it.

That was my initiation into the Pune tribe.

Initiation into Sannyas

A few weeks later, after I’d done the Primal Group, I took sannyas. I was hoping there wouldn’t be a conversation with Bhagwan; I was afraid he might give me some feedback. I was quite nervous because sitting in front of him brought up all my LSD fears, the fears about myself, my own personal power and who I was. I was not in a very good place.

I’d gone to Pune to sort myself out, but I hadn’t sorted myself out by the time I was sitting in front of Bhagwan. Not really. Of course his energy amplified my fears. Oh God, he’s going to say something that will make me feel like shit. Of course he did; it was a humbling experience to realise that I was just another guy – not a special guy. He just told me to go and do “many groups”.

When he gave me the new name, Anand Svabhavo, he said that bliss was my very nature, that I’d just forgotten it. Something that had always been there inside me, and that I’d been looking for in the wrong place. “Misery can exist only on the circumference and bliss only at the center.” [1] I had to make a 180-degree turn, look inside and find my inner treasure, which has always been there.

Bhagwan then asked me how long I was going to be there. I told him I could stay as long as I wanted, and he put the mala on me.

In front of him, all the feelings, the smells, the tastes and the visuals felt amplified. After, I went out for dinner with my friend Veena. I had been expecting a more normal, easy-to-pronounce sannyas name like Ramananda or Krishnananda or Shiva. Svabhavo sounds more like an Eastern European name, a Polish one. It’s also a bit difficult to say.

Receiving sannyas, getting a mala, I was blown away; it was quite an event. And becoming one of the crowd. I stayed in Pune another year and a half. It was fantastic. I loved it! I absolutely adored being there. It was such a cool place!

I never felt I was a true devotee, someone who fell in love with the Master. What a good sannyasin should be like… I was always a rebel. I know there are many types of sannyasins; clearly Osho had a vast array of potential ways a person could feel connected to him. Everything from the Sufi to the Baul… I was always a little bit on the edge, with the bad boys. They were my role models.

I was hanging out with people I liked. I liked music. Not so much Anubhava and Anita’s music, though. I used to go to music group and sing, “Bhagwan, I love your love. I love your love…” I was never really into it. I liked the discourses. They were great. I went most days. Then, of course, I had energy darshans. I got shaktipat from Bhagwan. But I didn’t go into a blissed-out state or have to be carried out in ecstasy, as what seemed to be happening to other people. On the other hand, I felt this sense of emptiness whenever I was near his chair. I remember feeling this quite a lot when he’d leave discourse after speaking.

Sometimes in Buddha Hall, straight after discourse, there was Divine Healing with this crazy guy, Asanga. There’d be a group of people around him and I would lumber over to the podium where Osho had spoken from. I could feel this emptiness or hollow space around there… and inside me. It was very beautiful. That was more my experience of Osho.

In fact, I’ve experienced Osho on a deeper level after he left the body. Sometimes here in my room, even more than in Pune. As I’ve gone through my own changes, the magic of the Master has appeared at different moments. He’s appearing, or I’m feeling that he’s around…

And, more recently, after completing the kora, the pilgrimage around Mount Kailash, things are again different. I found there was some kind of very deep integration inside myself, my whole energy somehow went deeper. It is a connection between my higher self, my heart and my throat chakra. The ability to express those higher realms is now much, much more connected in me.

There is an eternal gratefulness in my heart for the incredible journey I’ve been on for so many years. And with such incredible people – because it’s also the people who have made it beautiful, caring and loving, despite all the pain and suffering… which is an important part of the journey.

“Bhavo, you got to teach”

Around 2000 I lived at the Humaniversity in Holland. I learned so much from Veeresh and the staff there. They affirmed me and gave me a lot of juice. I learned how not to shy away from the shadow stuff – which is what Veeresh specialised in – all the belly stuff… That has stood me in good stead regarding boundaries and being a complete human being: not just a loving person, but also having personal power.

So for me, it was a natural consequence that at the end of my stay in Egmont, Veeresh said to me, “Bhavo, you got to teach.” This was almost 30 years ago, and this is what I do now. His words resonated with me as I felt that connection, and I felt that I had embodied enough life experience and self-awareness to teach. It’s important to walk our talk.

What I teach is personal power, and I mostly work with women. I have found that many women on a spiritual path have lost their ability to express themselves fully because of old ancestral fears. It’s very healing when all the shadow emotions can be seen and heard without shame or guilt, and when women are affirmed in their power and beauty by the group. This issue comes up very strongly at this particular time, when women are waking up to their own sense of power and recognising their boundaries. This is why I relish working with women. I work with men as well.

The next workshop run by Bhavo, ‘The Alchemy of Empowerment’, will take place from 10 to 13 December 2026 at The Leela Centre in Dorset, UK. More information: theleelacentre.co.uk

Watch Bhavo’s reel: instagram.com

Text based on Zoom conversations between Bhavo and Madhuri in summer and autumn 2026.

Source

1. Osho, Don’t Let Yourself Be Upset by the Sutra, rather Upset the Sutra Yourself, Ch 3 – 3 August 1979