The guru of Governors Bay
SHE Chocolate’s tantric master
Not many New Zealand villages have their own guru. And even if they did, they probably wouldn’t have a guru who operates a top chocolate business on the side and lectures around the world.
The presence of such a spiritual master is the good fortune of Governors Bay, a settlement at the top of the Lyttelton Harbour on the shady side of the Port Hills.
To call Governors Bay a settlement is a little misleading. Although only a 20-minute drive from the centre of Christchurch, it feels a world away from the metropolis.
For that reason it has attracted an mix of artists, professionals, writers, actors, academics and business people who like the view over the harbour and the alternative feel of the place.
One of the best views is from the SHE Universe Cafe, which is partowned by guru Bernard Charles George Prior. The top level of the building houses a cafe/restaurant and in the basement workers manufacture award-winning and expensive SHE chocolate.
Prior lives with his fellow travellers about a kilometre away on a large, rural property where he holds retreats and seminars. His publicity material shows people gathered around a fire pit and people sitting at his feet.
He arrived in Governors Bay in early 2004 with a small group of devotees, some of whom still live in the community, but his connection to New Zealand goes back many years. He first started giving talks and retreats in New Zealand in the late 90s, travelling around in a caravan with his then wife Debra and their son.
Nicole (not her real name), an energy healing therapist in the North Island, went to one of his talks in Tauranga around then and was impressed with the experience.
She became a follower and helped organise his retreats and talks and remembers mail-outs, licking stamps and ‘‘printing out stuff’’. Through the sect, Nicole, who describes herself as practical and sensible, met many wonderful single women who were similarly drawn to Prior and his teachings.
‘‘I look back on my seven years in that organisation and I had a great time. It was really crazy, fun stuff. We really had a good time.’’
The Ohinetahi property was the first live-in Prior community in New Zealand and Nicole, who helped fund the purchase, lasted about 11 months.
‘‘I had run my course there and it wasn’t right for me and I had no trouble getting my money out.
‘‘Initially he was amazing, really amazing. I experience life very energetically so the connection I had with that group was amazing. A bit weird. I didn’t even know what he was teaching. He called himself a guru and didn’t even know what a guru was,’’ she says.
Prior having sex with his female followers took ‘‘quite a bit’’ to come to terms with, she says.
‘‘I didn’t think people did that. How crazy is that? It was weird. I was from a normal Kiwi family ... but it was big, deep process ... It’s done nothing but enhance my experience of this life.There was such a genuine heart there but he doesn’t act in a manner average society would think was acceptable.’’
After a year in Governors Bay, the group bought the local cafe and renamed it SHE (Spiritual Human Evolution) and then SHE Universe. Then came the chocolate making under SHE Chocolate.
It would be inaccurate to call Prior a local identity. For one thing he spends most of his time overseasgiving retreats and lectures in places like England, Italy, Greece and Thailand.
But there is a lot of talk about Prior. As one local says ‘‘we all know him but we know nothing about him’’.
The chief subject of the talk about Prior is the women who live with him. Some call them his harem, others say they are just devotees who help him spread the word and run his businesses.
Although Prior can appear a mysterious figure as befitting his guru and tantric master status, it’s not hard to find out a lot about him. I was told an interview with him was out of the question.
Prior is a slick marketer and his website includes a store as well as all a budding devotee might want to know, such as how to enrol in the next retreat.
You can also spend countless hours listening to Prior on You Tube. Here are three quotes from his website which give a flavour of his teachings.
* The door to the Deep is your life in this moment. That’s where it is. Whatever is going on in your life is a million doors to the Divine, to Awakening and the manifestation of awakened Consciousness.
* If you were to drop into the Infinite, you would drop beyond your name, your form, your self, your person. Where you would land, You as Consciousness, is in the Consciousness of where You Are already One, knowing the Fullness You already Are.
* Enlightenment is Awareness no longer getting confused with the sense of self as a me. No one actually gets enlightened, but there is a return of Awareness moving into Knowing, which is Light – the Real Self.
Prior has also developed a mystical dance that he calls ‘‘The Form Reality Practice’’ that he claims is a vehicle ‘‘to know and embody all that B points to’’.
Prior refers to himself as ‘‘B’’ because, as he told someone in an interview, his teachings are all about to ‘‘be prior to all things’’.
A MOST UNUSUAL CHILD
Prior was born in 1954 in Reading, England and claims to have been an unusual child.
In an interview with Iain McNay, on UK internet television channel Conscious TV, he said even as a 5-year-old he was in ‘‘a constant state of joy’’.
‘‘I’ve only heard this from one or two other people who are now regarded as spiritual teachers or masters … I would experience incredible stillness where there would be nothing.’’
He also had visitations from various beings and when he was 9, during a storm he felt something ‘‘happening inside’’.
‘‘Then I experienced who I know to be Jesus stepping through the window ... The image was Jesus, but it was the pure being of Jesus communicating with the pure being of this one. There was union that my being to his being recognised. It was so beautiful, so calming and utterly real.’’
(In another interview he talks about a past life as a brother of Jesus. He told the interviewer he tended to let go of these past lives because he was more interested in the ‘‘now’’.)
At 19 he had another experience of the divine when he was shopping in Woolworths.
‘‘I was knowing oneness with everything: with the buses, with the people, with the whole movement of life. It was actually in me. It was an incredible place,’’ he told McNay.
His life-changing meeting with the Absolute was about 12 years later by which time he was a successful window dresser working mainly in the West End of London. He was also married with two children and owned two shops and a house.
Over the years he had meditated with a small group of people but was not under a teacher or guru.
He described meeting the Absolute as a space opening within and the inner word was ‘‘breathe’’.
‘‘I – not Bernie Prior – became consciously aware of what was taking place, as consciousness. I was propelled through this vibration that turned into ‘OM’; I literally became ‘OM’ – and then fell into absolute nothingness.’’
PATH TO A SPIRITUAL GUIDE
With nothing seeming real any more, he found himself one morning packing his bags. He left almost immediately for India after somebody offered him a free ticket.
‘‘I was taken to a Master and a Divine Mother.’’
McNay did not press him on who they were. He felt no concern about ditching his wife and two children, he told McNay.
‘‘At that time, as now, I’m coming from an entirely different place. Most human beings are not aware of this on any level . ... There was no concern in me because I was totally in another place; and yet that place was totally embracing all that was taking place. I left everything to my family, literally.’’
What happened then is not explained anywhere but it appears he commenced a career as a spiritual guide, developing his own philosophy along the way.
By 2004 he was in Governors Bay buying first a property in the Ohinetahi Valley and then, with others, the cafe.
SHE CHOCOLATE
Despite his ethereal expositions, Prior keeps the business side of things firmly on terra firma.
He is a director and shareholder of three New Zealand companies and owns 25 per cent of the shares in SHE Chocolate and SHE Cafe and Restaurant. Although some devotees work in the business, only about 20 per cent of the cafe’s team have any connection with Prior.
SHE Chocolate is probably the most successful of Prior’s business interests. It has won awards and supplies outlets throughout the country. It was started by Oonagh Browne with the help of her then partner Declan Scott, both originally from Ireland. They were refugees from the corporate world and while Browne concentrated on chocolate, Scott, a chartered accountant with a degree from Trinity College in Dublin, became Prior’s right-hand man. He left the community about two years ago but is still friendly with many in it.
Browne, an IT specialist, says her life was transformed by attending one of Prior’s retreats and learning the Form.
‘‘Magic truly happened. Practising the Form daily I discovered how to listen to a deep inner voice ... the chocolate started to flow.’’
And so did some good works. During the earthquakes in 2011 SHE chocolate went around welfare centres distributing chocolate and hot chocolates.
During another local emergency, the Port Hills fire last year, SHE cafe provided breakfasts and lunches to the fire brigade.
The other parts of Prior’s empire come under the companies Ohinetahi Retreat, which owns the $1.1m property housing the community/ashram, and Bernie Prior Foundation, of which Prior is the only shareholder and director.
Prior’s retreats and seminars provide a steady income. At the end of June he is having a five-day retreat in Tuscany. The retreat costs about $770 per person and accommodation adds another $600.
According to Prior’s website he intends to expand the Ohinetahi retreat by setting up The College of Integrated Spiritual Human Evolution (I-SHE College).
His organisation also sells a number of Prior belief system products. For about $350 a year you can become a member of the B
Prior Heart Group which among other discounts gives you 25 per cent off a Skype session with him.
His book is for sale as are video packages of his retreats and lectures. Love Without Duality
MEETING THE GURU
The B Prior Foundation Retreat Centre is more commonly known as 30 Teddington Rd, Governors Bay. When The Press visits on a Monday afternoon, the chill of the late autumn afternoon has set in.
The retreat consists of a big house with some separate living quarters and a number of huts dotted along a long driveway. It has many big mature trees and handsome stone walls but doesn’t have the air of people coining it.
Later inquiries later show the property houses a substantial community including about 10 women, two or three men and a number of teenagers. One of the women is Prior’s former wife Debra. Another is Lorraine Taylor, his current partner and an international yoga teacher.
The others come from Columbia, Lithuania and England.
Unfortunately not a soul is to be seen at the house. Members of the community work in the cafe and the chocolate factory.
Eventually a woman who introduces herself as Minal emerges and tells me she is a teacher of the Form dance. As Prior is in Italy she says a community member called Christiane (Arjuna Hollmer), a devotee from Sweden, will contact me.
Minal Dhulashia is director of education at the B Prior Foundation. According to her internet profiles, she has an MA in Engineering Sciences from Oxford University and has worked as a top executive for Deutsche Bank.
The next morning community member Karen van Willigen, who is from Australia, calls.
Asked about criticisms of Prior circulating on the internet, she says there is ‘‘a lot of misinformation out there’’.
‘‘A lot of teachers face similar allegations and it is not the truth. I’ve been here for 12 years and there is no way there is any exploitation going on. We can all say what we feel and everyone goes, ‘they’re brainwashed or they are this or that’.
‘‘It’s like talking to a wall sometimes, unless people understand and they are never going to understand as everyone has their own ideas clouded by their own understanding of life.’’
She says she knows of no disaffected former devotees.
She suggested some unhappiness was part of the process. ‘‘People undergo a transformation and meet levels of themselves that must be addressed.’’
Our pasts created binds that needed undoing, she says.
‘‘We have patterns and it’s all because of our past. Bernie, because of who he was, allows people a clearer field, that people have to meet their past. And people do experience going through eyes of needles. It’s not brought on by Bernie. They are here to face themselves and that’s what it is all about. It’s a life of transformation to meet ourselves and it’s a life of freedom. We can never be free while we still have baggage and we have to meet that baggage.
‘‘A lot of that stuff on the net is people blaming their baggage on somebody else. You can blame anybody for the shit you can feel in your own life but it’s actually nothing to do with anybody else.’’
Bernie taught people to discover their heart and undo their binds, she says. People feeling rotten were just meeting themselves.
A MODERN DAY ASHRAM
I mention an interview Prior gave to ‘‘spiritually awakened’’ former Transcendental Meditation coach American Rick Archer in 2015 for a website called ‘‘Buddha at the Gas Pump’’.
Rick referred Prior to an email he had received from someone in New Zealand saying B slept with his students.
‘‘You probably heard this accusation before so you might as well address it openly and let people make their own judgement,’’ Archer said in the interview.
Prior responded that he ‘‘actually lives right now with six women’’ and said he had, as a tantric master, awakened to the ‘‘energies of the realisation’’.
‘‘There’s a lot around about this realisation, a lot of people have not liked that I have taken on women. Of course they are women that have come to me as students but I have made them literally my partners in life. That is what you are hearing.
‘‘They are in deeper realisations in their own right, deeper realisations as to who they are and what the function of man and women in their calling together is really about... meeting their own depths of pure consciousness and realising the deeper they go the finer they are as women.’’
Prior’s response went on to talk about the women integrating deeper levels of the feminine principle aligned to their origin in the Deep.
‘‘That is possible then in their loving and lovemaking that there is a transmission of what women is realising into the man and what the man is realising into the woman of more than what is a man and a woman.’’
Sexuality was about a calling to a greater depth of what ‘‘it is to be who you are as a man and woman’’.
Willigen scotched any suggestion of orgies at the ashram. It not about any of that, she says. ‘‘He is in a relationship with everybody that lives in this community. Whether man, woman, couples, he has an intimate relationship, and I’m not talking sexual, where he takes people into their heart. That’s his whole aim in life is to show people back to their heart. He is in a relationship with a number of women. But it’s not about sex.’’
She says the community or ashram concept was difficult for ordinary people to understand.
‘‘We are talking to people so brainwashed by the world. People locked into their boxes, 9 to 5 and this is how relationships should be. This is how my family life should be and that is all bullshit. People are breaking out of that now.
‘‘So we bring something a bit different and people just can’t get it. It’s not just about how we might live but also the philosophy he brings. He is inviting something so much deeper. This is like a modern day ashram and people live in ashrams for a higher purpose and it’s a very personal journey for everyone here. It’s not just Bernie living here with so many women.’’
Van Willigen says there is no chance of an interview with Prior before deadline.
‘‘Because he doesn’t move unless he is called to move and if he knows what the angle is and what it’s all about. Sorry, we just don’t meet newspaper deadlines.’’
However after the article about Prior went online on Friday, he was obviously called to move quite quickly. In a brief email he said: ‘‘I want to clarify that I am now living with one woman, Lorraine Taylor, as my sole partner and have been for the past 2.5 years. Also please let it be clear that my connection with She Universe is purely as a director and shareholder and I do not receive any funds from this business.’’