The Siddha Yoga for Meditation

The movement’s real-life guru, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, leader of a global network of dozens of meditation centers, is no publicity hound either. Even though many Internet bloggers and fans of the book connect it with the guru, the Indian spiritual leader’s followers in the United States continue to resist publicity.

That includes devotees in Watertown Square, who congregate quietly at the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center of Greater Boston in a meditation space decorated with candles, rows of chairs, and photos of Gurumayi and her predecessor, group founder Swami Muktananda, who died in 1982. US representatives for Gurumayi said - with exquisite politeness - thanks, but no thanks, to requests to discuss the surge of interest in their practices and traditions.

The friendly, volunteer-run Watertown center, in a small, brick office building on North Beacon Street, maintains a monthly calendar of meditation, prayer,yoga mats, and discussion classes. It welcomes newcomers to its monthly “Not Just For Beginners” mediation sessions, hosts weekend chanting ceremonies, and encourages “seva,” or volunteer service, as a central tenet of membership.

Members - mostly 40 and older, and from a variety of spiritual and cultural backgrounds - say Siddha Yoga is often a later-in-life discovery for adults who have lost interest in traditional religious practices, though some who follow its tenets also attend church or synagogue services. Local devotees may not see Gurumayi in person for years at a time, but they regularly listen to recordings of her guided meditations and can pick up her publications in the center’s small bookstore.

The goal of Siddha Yoga is to create a “deep meditative experience” for people, said the group’s California-based spokeswoman, Karen Williams who want to buy yoga mats .

She readily acknowledged that Gilbert’s book and widely watched appearance last year on Oprah Winfrey’s television talk show made a huge splash, but she declined to comment on whether “Eat, Pray, Love” had attracted more seekers to the group’s centers. “But we don’t talk about people who practice or do not practice Siddha Yoga. We don’t seek publicity,” said Williams, apologetically. “On a personal level, I do think it’s awesome that she has created interest in mediation and yoga.”

Although it draws on centuries-old Hindu traditions, Siddha Yoga became popular in the early 1970s, when Muktananda began visiting his followers in the United States and later established a large ashram in the Catskills in New York, in addition to its main center in India, near Mumbai.

Gilbert’s book, subtitled “One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia,” chronicles her yearlong global journey of self-discovery in the wake of a bitter divorce and severe depression. An instant hit, especially among female readers, the book was praised in a Boston Globe review by Barbara Fisher, who described Gilbert as “the epic poet of ecstasy.”

The book has been largely a mainstream-media phenomenon, making barely a ripple in Indian and Indian-American circles, said Ramesh Rao, a communications professor at Longwood University in Virginia and a former executive council member of the Hindu American Foundation. He said it isn’t uncommon for Eastern spirituality to temporarily capture the fancy of Americans.

Movements like transcendental meditation and the work of wellness guru and bestselling author Dr. Deepak Chopra “occupy a similar space in the popular consciousness and life of Americans,” he said.

The middle, or “Pray,” section of Gilbert ’s book - describing several months spent in Gurumayi’s Indian ashram - chronicles the author’s struggle to practice meditation and spiritual devotion. She described first becoming aware of her guru through an ex-lover, who had a photo of “a radiantly beautiful Indian woman” on his dresser.

“I asked, ‘Who’s that?’ wrote Gilbert. “He said, ‘That is my spiritual teacher.’

“My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: ‘I want a spiritual teacher,’ ” Gilbert wrote. She began attending weekly meditation sessions in New York City and meditating each morning on the group’s mantra, “Om Namah Shivaya,” which in Sanskrit means “I honor the divinity that resides within me.”

“And when I heard she had an ashram in India,” Gilbert wrote of her spiritual awakening, “I knew I must take myself there as quickly as possible.”

In the book’s preface, Gilbert acknowledged that she changed or omitted the names of only a few characters in the book, including the guru and most of the pilgrims she met while visiting the ashram, to protect their privacy. “I will not be using my Guru’s name throughout this book - because I cannot speak for her. Her teachings speak best for themselves. Nor will I reveal the name or location of her Ashram,” she wrote, hoping to spare yoga mats ”publicity which it may have neither the interest nor the resources” to manage.

Gilbert said she intends to maintain her silence despite the massive popularity of the book and buzz about the coming movie.

“It’s just a promise I made to myself four years ago to say nothing more about any of it than what’s in the book,” she wrote in an e-mailed response to a Globe inquiry.

Rao, the Longwood professor, said he sees the book’s popularity as “the classic, modern ‘15 minutes of fame’ phenomenon.” Its prominence will last “until we discover another new author or another way of meditating, eating, loving, or dying.”

He also noted, however, that its success is probably evidence of how seemingly disparate cultural and religious quests are fundamentally very similar.