A few months before she died, Asha Greer wanted everyone to wake up. We were sitting on the porch of her little house in Miran Forest, near Batesville, on a cool October day. She was reflecting on art and tea, life and death, and I asked the beloved artist, spiritual teacher, and longtime Charlottesville resident what she wished for. “Man, I wish for people to wake up to how beautiful life is, in spite of the fact that you die, that you get sick, that you suffer, all of that,” said Greer, who’d been suffering from brain cancer for most of the last year.
Greer lived a quiet, extraordinary life. Her impact can perhaps be felt most deeply in intimate spaces—a meditation student’s stillness, a tea ceremony student’s gentle fingers, a family member’s memory of her grounding presence at their loved one’s death years ago. For many, she modeled a devotion to spiritual practice, to art, and to love.
Recalling her childhood in Los Angeles, Greer described a comfortable upper-middle-class life that nonetheless felt lacking. “Way inside of me, there was this place that was making faces a lot of the time,” she said, “Yes, it’s nice to win tennis games—not that I won that many—it was nice to have this very nice life, but it didn’t satisfy anything in my being.”
Greer (formerly Barbara Durkee) was attracted to art, and eventually found her way into the 1960s New York art scene, where she and her then-husband Stephen Durkee founded a ground-breaking media artists’ collective called USCO (Us Company). The Durkees later moved to northern New Mexico, and in 1967 co-founded the Lama Foundation spiritual community with Jonathan Altman. Lama was conceived and continues as a community that embraces all spiritual traditions. Richard Alpert, known later as Ram Dass, assisted with the founding of Lama, and the community published his now-famous book, Be Here Now.
After 12 years at Lama, Greer moved to Charlottesville with her four daughters. She took up residence in Miran Forest with several other families, raising their children together. She worked as an oncology nurse and co-founded Hospice of the Piedmont. When I asked her about working with dying people, Greer said, “It was me. It was you. It was all of us. There was no difference between the people who were dying and the people who were living…I don’t think dying is necessarily suffering unless people make a story about it being suffering, because it’s inevitable. We don’t know anybody who isn’t going to die, so why in the world suffer because of it?”
Once her children were grown, Greer focused on art and spiritual practice, teaching, taking journeys, and going on retreat, always with meditation as her ground. Though embracing a range of spiritual paths in the tradition of Lama Foundation, she eventually became a murshida in Sufi Ruhaniat International. Greer shared her gratitude for meditation as “a place for all of us to rest, to find peace with creation, to find peace with even those people who cannot make peace with creation.”
She also practiced and taught Japanese tea ceremony through her Heartwood Tea School. About the tea ceremony, she said, “It’s an act of life. It’s a conscious act of life, which—well, I’ll tell you what it is, really. It doesn’t divide the physical world and the spiritual world. It wipes out the difference.”
Talking with her during what she and her family knew to be the last stage of her life illuminated the depth of Greer’s spiritual understanding. Her presence felt peaceful, suffused with gratitude for the beauty of her life and family, and, despite moments of mild confusion, her conversation revealed a balance of wisdom and humility. She spoke about her brain tumor almost as a visitor that had joined her, as a kind of teacher. “I feel fine about dying,” she said. “And now my practice is not so much ‘practices.’ It’s really surrendering to how things actually are, without some sense that I have to make everything work.”
After surgery on her brain tumor last summer, Greer described a revelation in her spiritual life. “It was huge. I moved, I did. I moved from here,” she said, pointing to her head, “to here,” pointing to her heart. “I opened my heart pretty thoroughly at that point. And in opening my heart, I cleaned out all that stuff that comes in with your personality, that has to get along with [other people], with society.”
Greer grew tired as our conversation continued, but I came away with a clear sense of her connection to the ineffable, and an appreciation for the generosity that drew so many people to her as friends, students, and companions in a life of spiritual and artistic exploration. She embodied what she wanted for everyone else—to open their eyes “to how amazing life is. And try to stop being afraid of it and start appreciating the glory and the beauty and the unusualness and the incomprehensibleness of it. Wow! The big wow!”
Greer died on January 7, and was buried in Miran Forest on January 11. More information about her life and teachings can be found at asha-greer.com.