Letting Go of My Passport in an Ashram in India

India is a surprisingly bureaucratic country. You realise it for the first time when you apply for a visa. Then, when you try to book trains and buses, it gets worse. With every train ticket and long-distance bus ticket, you have to enter your passport number, expiration date, date of birth, and so on.

And it continues when you check into hotels. They all need to see your passport and visa. So naturally, when you stay in ashrams (religious or spiritual retreats), the same thing happens.

I stayed in three ashrams in total, and all of them had lengthy check-in processes, including taking photos or requiring us to bring passport-sized photos.

In one of them—Amritapuri in Kerala, the hugging guru Amma’s ashram—we actually had to leave our passports at the reception desk during our stay.

When you visit temples in India, in some places you’re not allowed to take phones inside. So you have to leave your mobile at a deposit counter. And I really detested this. When you’re travelling, everything—plane tickets, hotel vouchers, train bookings, contacts and communication—is on your phone. Especially when you’re travelling alone, you have no backup. So I really didn’t want to part with my phone, but there was no choice. (And actually, the security is tight, so in the end I came to trust their phone deposit system.)

But for me, parting with my passport is a completely different story.

I’ve been living in the UK for nearly 40 years, but I don’t have a British passport. I have permanent UK residency in my Japanese passport. That means without my passport, it would be very difficult to prove my UK residency—especially when I’m abroad. So I fear that if I lose my passport abroad, I may not be allowed back into the UK.

Nobody wants to lose a passport while on holiday, but I particularly fear it—and I never part with mine.

So imagine how I felt when I was told I had to leave my passport at a busy, chaotic ashram check-in counter run by volunteers in Kerala.

There were only two choices: do what they said, or leave. This ashram is almost at the far southern end of India, and we had come a long, long way. I briefly considered leaving. But the person at the desk saw me hesitating and reassured me it would be safe and that I could collect it the next day.

So I left my passport in the office for a day.

And do you know what I felt?

I felt light.

To start with, physically, I was freed from carrying a passport pouch around my neck all the time.

But more than that, I felt the burden I had been holding so tightly to my chest—literally—had been taken away. As if Sai Baba (or Amma, or some other divine presence) had taken it from me for safekeeping.

The next day, I picked up my passport (of course, it was safe) and went back to carrying it around my neck as before. On the surface, nothing had changed. But something small had shifted in me—from letting go of something that had felt unthinkable, even just for a day.

After writing this, I came across the following in Sathya Sai Baba’s newsletter today. It captures the essence of what I’ve been trying to say:

“When you go to a new place, you seek out a friend and hand over to him all the money you have for safekeeping. But if you start suspecting him later, you will have no peace. Have faith in him; you are free; you have no worry. So too, give all your desire-driven activities to God; have faith in Him and be unconcerned forever.”

It made me wonder what else I’m holding onto so tightly—and whether I can trust enough to loosen my grip, even just a little.