At a shrine called Kailash perched on the grounds of Yogaville—the Satchidananda Ashram in Buckingham County, Virginia—a group of musicians, filmmakers, and spiritual practitioners gathered in October 2015 to make something that looked like prayer and sounded like protest. The location was deliberate. From the shrine, you could see the Lotus Temple and the James River below, the same river that energy companies planned to drill beneath horizontally as part of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline's construction.
The result was Awake, a six-minute film and performance piece by Good Day RVA and Lobo Marino that would later circulate online as both artistic statement and environmental activism. It was made with intention: not as a debate, but as a call—one rooted in the spiritual tradition of the ashram itself, grounded in the landscape that surrounded them, and amplified through violin, cello, and voices.
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline represented a specific threat to Virginia's environment and communities. The proposed natural gas infrastructure would pass directly adjacent to Yogaville, the spiritual community founded decades earlier by Sri Swami Satchidananda. Worse, a compressor station—an industrial facility producing noise and emissions—was slated for construction on top of the rural community of Union Hill, where families with deep roots faced displacement and health risks.
For residents of Yogaville, the pipeline wasn't an abstract policy debate. It was an assault on the very conditions that made contemplative life possible: silence, clean air, the integrity of sacred land. And for the musicians and filmmakers who collaborated on Awake, it was an opportunity to ask a deeper question: what does spiritual practice mean if it exists in isolation from the world's suffering?
The lyrics of Awake move between prophecy and witness. "The empty climbed upon the hillside and filled their mouths with water, from the creeks of others until it dried away," the song begins. "The empire stacked their stones and iron upon the grass. The trees bent, broke from the pressure then couldn't grow at all." These aren't metaphors—they're descriptions of what extraction does, what dominion costs.
But the chorus pivots. "We're all standing in the same sunlight," the performers sing. "Where we cannot see each other as divided." This is the spiritual core: not retreat from the world, but recognition of interdependence. Not an ashram turned inward, but one awake to its responsibility. The song circles back: "Listen the grass moves, up through the cracks it grows. Listen the rain will fall, listen the creeks will swell." Resilience and awakening are not separate from environmental resistance—they are the same gesture.
Musically, the piece honors both stringed instruments and the human voice as tools of consciousness. Violin and cello create the harmonic ground—not orchestral, but intimate, the way intimate acts of resistance often are. The Super 8 footage collected for the video captures Virginia landscapes that would face devastation: the Great Dismal Swamp, the Jefferson National Forest, the river valleys and creek systems that sustain both wildlife and human communities.
There is no separation here between the aesthetic and the political. The beauty of the landscape, captured in degraded film stock and projected with care, becomes evidence. The music becomes witness. The ashram becomes not a retreat from the world but a place where the world's urgency is finally heard.
What makes Awake significant is not that it proved effective in stopping the pipeline—political outcomes are always uncertain. What matters is the statement it makes about what spiritual community is for. The video emerged from Yogaville, a place founded on the principle of integral yoga, where the separation between inner life and outer responsibility has never been absolute. By filming at the Kailash shrine, by invoking the James River and the land itself as participants, the filmmakers and musicians asserted that awakening must include awakening to what is being destroyed.
The credits acknowledge: Chris Damon, Evan Hoffman, Will Weaver, Tommy Terrell, Kate Rivara, and PJ Sykes brought the visual vision; Patrick Bates shaped the sound; Jessika Blanks and Zoe Olivia Kinney gave the piece its musical spine through violin and cello. The work was collaborative because resistance rooted in spiritual community must be. It was made in gratitude and in solidarity, acknowledging Swami Dayananda, the ashram community, and the people of Union Hill who faced the compressor station's threat.
Awake exists now as a document of a moment—October 2015, when Yogaville and its allies raised their voices against the pipeline. The video circulated, drawing over 8,500 views, small by viral standards but significant as a record of what spiritual practitioners and musicians were thinking and feeling when extraction industries came too close to home.
The song's final movement loops back to its beginning, returning to the image of listening: to grass pushing through cracks, to rain and swelling creeks. This is not naive optimism. It is the recognition, rooted in both dharma and in the witness of those Virginia landscapes, that resilience and resistance are not separate from awakening. They are awakening. The ashram is not separate from the world it overlooks. Spiritual practice that claims otherwise is asleep.
To understand Awake is to ask: how do contemplative communities respond when extraction threatens sacred land? The piece invites viewers to consider the spiritual dimensions of environmental resistance and the environmental dimensions of spiritual practice. For those drawn to dharma or activism, to music or land defense, the video serves as both artistic and political instruction: that these domains are not separate, that awakening must be awake to the world, and that musicians and spiritual practitioners have always had a role in bearing witness to what is being lost and what is still possible.
