Inner Silence Studio is the result of a journey dedicated to earnestly doing the necessary steps to evolve and learn through experience.

Teacher Chivito Cowa

Chivito Cowa, also known as Rob Anderson, is native of Washington State and possesses a profound love of the Pacific Northwest. He spent most of his cognitive years studying and experimenting with our existence and how we may consciously evolve within it. Chivito is mostly known in Tacoma by a venue he opened called Panamonica's. This was an establishment dedicated to promoting the arts, inspiring and building an art community, and to create an artistic foundation for others to build from. In 2005, Chivito thought it was time to begin his spiritual pursuits, so he closed Panamonica's and began a journey that has taken him around the world learning ancient systems of meditation and healing.

He began his journey of discovering the many understandings which comprise the overall Understanding, just as each pebble and grain of sand come together as a whole to create a shore. He wanted to find the spiritual masters he had up until then only read about.

Chivito spent the first two months of his journey at an Ashram in Hawaii where he practiced Vipassana and another series of meditations which has only been orally taught from guru to disciple.

Spending most of the time in silence and slowly surrendering to silencing the mind, he was finally able to not only be aware of but consciously create every thought, every breath and action and to create them from love and devotion.

Every action became a meditation of consciousness operating within a universal partnership underlying everything. Chivito’s time in Hawaii was a time of healing, re-awakening, and connecting with a higher source that has continued to evolve within him.

Chivito was then guided to India, where he spent the first month at an ashram just outside of Nasik, 5 hours Northeast of Mumbai. It was here that he not only learned but experienced the true essence of yoga and all its ramifications and potential. He was introduced to living a true yogic lifestyle within a sacred community devoted only to evolving.

After a month of training from early morn to the dark of night every day, he was taken to a bus station. He bought a ticket for the first bus that was leaving, not knowing where he was going but surrendering to the higher consciousness to guide him where he needed to go.

As it turned out, Chivito was guided Northward through the Great Thar Desert, into Rajasthan to a small ashram just outside Puskar. This began an intense training with a small number of beautiful, spiritual beings who radiated with love and were the embodiment of understanding and selflessness.

His time there was an intense period, as he was stripped of all his preconceived thoughts and perceptions of life. He was forced to exist without any comfort zones and pushed past every limit he thought he had until he began to fully embrace the thought, “I am limitless, I am free when I allow myself to be, I Am that I Am”.

Chivito was in meditation for 12hours a day – 6 hours in the morning and 6 hours in the evening. The time in between was a walking meditation of applying all that he was transferring, and walking outside any format without rules or laws to delineate the existence of what he had known as life: to let go of everything Chivito thought he knew, to see things as they truly are, and to become being comfortable being uncomfortable… to let go of the hand railing and begin to finally take his first steps.

After being trained within sacred temples beneath the desert mountains and teaching local pilgrims sacred truths and practices, Chivito was again guided to the North into the Himalayas to a small town near the source of the Ganges River called Uttarkasi. Here he stayed at another small ashram with a beautiful holy man and his spiritual guides. This began the next stage.

Chivito loved this little ashram nestled along the banks of the sacred Ganges. It was here the lessons were taught by this sacred river. He and his guides would sit for hours upon a rock over its sacred flow and listen to all its subtle nuances.

The spiritual guides would say listen to it, feel it, and allow yourself to become a part of it; surrender to its constant flow and know it is the mirror reflection of love and everything life is.

It is here that he learned how to apply the subtle perceptions gained from the long hours of intense meditations integrated with this embodiment of love to healing.

Chivito met and learned from healers who came from different parts of India and all across the world on how to perceive the flow of the subtle channels within everything – trees, rocks, people, water, the air, and so on.

Chivito and his guides would walk amongst the foothills of the Himalayas, practice evoking love within every breath and step. As they did so, butterflies by the thousands would gather around and flutter through the trees on the hills. They manifested anything needed through the expression of love.

One day, Chivito’s guides told him to come home. They told him: “You do not sit at the foot of a master and become a master. You must live the life of a master within everyday life”.

They told him he had learned much and knew all he needed to know. Now he must apply this within his everyday life. To return to where he will be confronted by an environment that will re-stimulate old habits and patterns and where pain and emotions still linger within him, as they do within us all... to love his parents.

The spiritual guides then told Chivito to learn how to communicate everything he had learned in western terminology and help others. They told him that this next phase would be his most challenging..

He reluctantly and excitedly returned home to do as the guides had told him and to pick up the pieces he had left behind – to reconnect with the one he loved, with his friends and family and with the beautiful community who had so graciously helped send Chivito on his journey.

He took a thirty day yoga training in Seattle that focused on the physical aspects of Asanas and teaching. Afterward, he began a program at the Ayurvedic Academy affiliated with Bastyr University in order to learn in-depth the ancient healing system and philosophy of India that he had already begun.

He also began coursework at the Ashmead College of Massage to learn the Western viewpoint of anatomy and physiology, kinesiology and Western massage while gaining experience working with different body types. He also had the opportunity to perceive the subtle channels where blockages occur and practice integrating massage with the healing work learned in India to reconnect these channels and allow healing to naturally occur.

He has now been guiding others with yoga and meditation for over a year while studying and practicing these healing arts. He has created Inner Silence Studio to offer these amazing healing arts until January 2008. In January he will return to India to begin an internship at an Ayurvedic Clinic in Kerela.

Following the internship he will venture North to the ashram where he began his first journey to India in order to do a month long training in Yoga Therapy.

He will then return to the South to volunteer at the Ayurvedic Clinic within Amma’s Ashram.

In May, he will travel to Thailand to learn traditional Thai Massage, Acupressure, and Thai Herbology.

After almost one year of this additional training, Chivito will return home to Tacoma, WA to offer these healing arts and help guide others on the path of health, tranquility, and wellness.

“I am honored and humbled to be on such an amazing path where I am able to dedicate my services through the higher power to helping others heal and discover their limitless potential. I humbly bow to you. Namaste.”

- Chivito Cowa