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The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine was surrounded by flames. Then a household got here to its rescue

LifestyleThe Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine was surrounded by flames. Then a household got here to its rescue

Tales of the miraculous have all the time encircled the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine.

The story of its 1950 founding goes that the non secular guru Paramahansa Yogananda bought the 10-acre Pacific Palisades property from an oil firm president, after the oilman had a vivid dream by which his land turned a “church of all religions.” Yogananda then established the grounds as a spot of peace, solace and sanctuary for individuals of all faiths.

Swans on the lake on the Self-Realization Fellowship web site.

(Self-Realization Fellowship)

The spring-fed lake within the middle of the compound is its defining characteristic. Swans glide throughout its floor, new moms push strollers round its perimeter, and other people of many religions and backgrounds meditate quietly alongside its shores.

The lake additionally performed a key position within the shrine’s unlikely escape from the Palisades hearth, as a household of three devotees used its waters to extinguish threatening flames.

Self-Realization Fellowship president and non secular chief Brother Chidananda, in a livestream handle to the group’s worldwide membership, recounted the efforts of Billy Asad and his two grownup youngsters, Gabriella and Nicky, who got here to the property’s rescue.

The Asads, he stated, had been “the divine instruments of God and guru who literally saved the Lake Shrine.”

It was the soot-covered swans, so darkish they nearly appeared black, that first struck Gabriella Asad when she arrived on the Lake Shrine on the second day of the fireplace. Then, the shortage of different animal life. No koi fish rose to the floor to greet her. The turtles that normally solar themselves on the scattered rocks had been gone.

The Self Realization Fellowship lush Pacific Palisades grounds.

The Self-Realization Fellowship’s lush Pacific Palisades grounds embody a historic houseboat, the place guru Paramahansa Yogananda lived and wrote whereas directing the work across the Lake Shrine.

(Self-Realization Fellowship )

Trying across the smoldering grounds the place she was baptized as a child and now volunteers within the gardening division, Gabriella, 20, resisted the urge to fall to her knees in despair. As a substitute, she grabbed 4 hearth extinguishers and, by way of her tears, set to work alongside her father, Billy, 54, and brother Nicky, 19.

As embers the scale of golf balls pelted the property, she put out spot fires and hosed down the wood-shingled roofs of the Lake Shrine’s historic buildings.

“Just the way the sky was, all the smoke, the way the swans were covered,” she stated with emotion in her voice. “It took everything in me to do the best I could.”

Her father, a former yoga instructor who lives on a houseboat in Marina Del Rey, had been monitoring the explosive Palisades hearth since quickly after it broke out the morning of Jan. 7, when a monk noticed flames within the close by mountains. As a longtime member of the Self-Realization Fellowship, Billy knew what was at stake: the plush meditation gardens open to all, the historic houseboat the place his guru lived and wrote whereas directing the work across the Lake Shrine, the thousand-year-old Chinese language sarcophagus containing a few of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes.

“It’s not just this beautiful garden with a lake,” Billy stated. “It’s a vortex of light and love and peace and harmony and healing.”

Billy isn’t an authorized firefighter, however because the founder and proprietor of WDA Hearth Safety, he helps get companies and houses fire-ready. He’s additionally an authorized Regulation 4 tester beneath the Los Angeles Hearth Division, which permits him to examine and assess hearth doorways in L.A., and he’s licensed beneath the Workplace of the State Hearth Marshal to service and check transportable hearth extinguishers. His father was a firefighter for 30 years and taught him about hearth habits. Over time, Billy handed his data on to his youngsters.

He started visiting the Lake Shrine’s paradisiacal grounds 25 years in the past after a buddy gave him a duplicate of Yogananda’s seminal ebook, “Autobiography of a Yogi.” He nonetheless remembers strolling onto the property for the primary time.

Billy Asad, daughter Gabriella and son Nicky in yellow coats beside a lake

Billy Asad, left, with daughter Gabriella and son Nicky.

(Billy Asad)

“It was that ah-ha moment,” he stated. “I knew it was my path.”

His youngsters had been baptized within the Windmill Chapel, which abuts the lake and appears as if it had been magically transported from the Netherlands.

Gabriella and Nicky attended Sunday college on the temple and went on teen retreats with different Self-Realization Fellowship members. As they obtained older, they turned regulars on the hourlong companies held on the property every week. Nicky used to work as a chef on the Lake Shrine, cooking for the monks and lay individuals on the retreat middle. Gabriella volunteers with the gardening division.

A man hose down a smoldering hillside

Billy Asad hoses down the hillside on the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, the place morning companies are held each Sunday.

(Billy Asad)

“Ever since I can remember we’ve been going to Lake Shrine,” Nicky stated. “It’s our home. It’s everything to us.”

By 10 a.m. on Jan. 8, Billy had tracked the fires lengthy sufficient to know the Lake Shrine was at risk. Together with Gabriella and Nicky, he loaded his Toyota Tacoma TRD Professional with helmets, gloves, hearth coats, eye safety, steel-toed boots, respirators, radios, axes, shovels and about 30 hearth extinguishers. Then they headed north to the property.

Flames raged round them as they climbed into Pacific Palisades. Phone poles crashed to the bottom close to the truck. There have been checkpoints alongside the way in which, however Billy confirmed his hearth credentials and was allowed to move by way of.

Once they arrived, the Lake Shrine had been deserted, the 14 monks who dwell on the grounds safely evacuated. There was a firetruck within the parking zone, however the two firefighters there have been targeted on a three-story condominium constructing adjoining to the Lake Shrine that was consumed by flames.

Transferring rapidly and coordinating by way of their radios, the Asads rushed to extinguish spot fires crackling on the base of bushes, in a patch of bamboo and on the numerous railroad ties that function stairs all through the property.

“That’s exactly how everything starts,” Billy stated. “A tree falls and catches another structure on fire.”

To stop future ignitions, in addition they set to work wetting the roofs of all of the buildings. Due to her volunteer job, Gabriella knew the place the backyard hoses had been positioned, though a couple of had already melted. She took care of the customer middle. Nicky was charged with soaking the place of his baptism, the Windmill Chapel.

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In the meantime, Billy noticed an surprising software: a gas-powered water pump on the lake’s small upkeep barge. It was new to him, however that didn’t matter.

“I know fire pumps,” he stated. “I know hoses. I know attachments. So within five minutes after seeing it, I had the engine started and we were spraying bamboo on fire from 100 feet away.”

Because it occurs, a couple of months earlier, a resident monk of the property, Brother Bodhananda, had bought the pump in case of future fires. Earlier than being evacuated, he introduced the pump out of storage and moved it onto the barge.

“It’s a credit to him and the maintenance manager, Bill Lackner, who works there that they had the temporary fire pump set up,” Billy stated. “We jumped on the barge and immediately started using it. I have boating experience and my son does too. It was all part of this amazing divine plan.”

The Asad household labored for seven hours earlier than pausing, together with taking a second to softly rinse a number of the soot clinging to the swans’ feathers.

That night, Nicky and Billy got here again and stayed till 4 a.m. the following day, hosing down the property and persevering with to extinguish spot fires that had been igniting throughout, typically repeatedly in the identical place. It was blindingly exhausting work, they usually imagine it was the prayers and needs of devotees throughout the globe who empowered them to do it.

The Lake Shrine towers are illuminated at night surrounded by fire

The Lake Shrine towers had been in danger because the Palisades hearth raged on the hillside final week.

(Nicky Asad)

For the following three days they stored returning till the fireplace hazard had handed. Even now, because the preliminary hearth menace has ended, they proceed to patrol the grounds every day.

On Sunday in his livestream, Chidananda shared the outcomes of the Asads’ work. The Gandhi World Peace Memorial is unhurt even because the vegetation on the hillside behind it’s gone. The houseboat is protected, as is the Windmill Chapel, the place weddings, christenings and memorials are held.

The Court docket of Religions, the place small monuments to every of the world’s main faiths welcomes guests to the grounds, is undamaged. The towering pillars and crossbars of the Golden Lotus Temple had been hosed down by the Asads and are as soon as once more gleaming white.

There have been, nonetheless, some structural losses. The guests’ restroom close to the property’s entrance, for one. At the same time as, simply 20 ft away, the Lake Shrine museum and bookshop with artifacts from Yogananda’s life nonetheless stands.

The residing quarters of the 14 monks who reside on the property additionally took successful. An ashram the place half of them lived sustained slight injury to at least one window. The Outdated Santa Ynez Inn, which housed the opposite seven monks, burned down, taking with it the workplace and condominium of the Lake Shrine’s non secular director, Satyananda.

“I’m an unhoused evacuee, but I’m doing quite well,” Satyananda stated. “We adapt and move forward.”

The damaged visitors' bathroom.

One of many few constructions misplaced on the property was the guests’ rest room.

(Self-Realization Fellowship)

Witnessing what happened on the Lake Shrine was a non secular expertise, Chidananda advised fellowship members in his handle, however he added that he doesn’t plan to speak about it way more.

“You know why,” he stated, smiling gently. “Because it’s too easy to become proud or smug, or feel that we are better than others who didn’t fare as well. Our guru would have abhorred any sense of superiority complex based on the fact that we were spared while others suffered. That’s completely opposite to the spirit of his life.”

As a substitute, he stated, the non secular neighborhood’s consciousness ought to revolve round one query: What can we do to assist?

He’s already requested fellowship communities in Southern California to arrange meals and clothes drives, whereas monks and nuns on the group’s middle in Mount Washington are providing non secular counseling over the cellphone.

Because of the Asads, the Lake Shrine neighborhood may even proceed to supply an open, inclusive and delightful area for anybody in search of a quiet sanctuary for non secular reflection, renewal or meditation — simply as quickly because it’s in a position.

“To me, the survival of this beloved shrine means so much because of what it represents,” Chidananda stated. “It represents our faith that spiritual life, a higher consciousness of love and unity and harmony, will be able to endure in this world, despite all contrary forces of maya [illusion], delusion and destruction.”

The property stays closed to the general public for now, however Billy stated he’s already welcomed a couple of firefighters and cops to take their breaks on the Lake Shrine grounds.

“They walk around the lake and take a break from the chaos,” he stated. “And you’d just see it in their eyes: ‘What is this place?’ ‘We had no clue this was here.’ ‘We’re coming back.’”

The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine property remains closed to the public for now.

The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine property stays closed to the general public for now.

(Self-Realization Fellowship )

In the meantime, Gabriella is relieved to see that the swans are again to their snow white shade. The turtles have began sunning themselves once more.

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