On September 9, Susan Reid, Gail Minotti and I are leaving for a week-long workshop with Ramanand Patel, Pandit Mukesh Desai, and one of the renowned teachers of Vedanta (probably Sw. Tattvavidananda) of Arsha Vidya Gurukulum. Arsha Vidya is a traditional Vedantic school. Students of Vedanta come for around the world to study this illustrious philosophic system on the nature of enlightenment. We will have a week of twice-daily yoga classes with Ramanand, a daily music class with Mukesh and twice daily Vedanta classes with Swamiji.
Ten days after we return from Arsha Vidya, September 28, Gail and I will leave for India. On October 1 we will meet Karen Cairns (YE class of 2003) in New Delhi to participate in a pilgrimage to various sacred places in North India. In parts of this pilgrimage we will be with our Ashtanga teachers Shri R. Sharath, Shri Saraswathi and Shri Sharmila Jois. This trip is organized by the publishers of
Namarupa Magazine. You can read more about the trip
here. There is a map of our route and some photos of some of the places we will be visiting. As described in the pilgrimage brochure, "These places where the sacred stories unfolded are sometimes called
tirthas. A
tirtha is a place of crossing over and most literally refers to the fords of rivers. It also refers to a spiritual crossing place, where the divine is more easily intuited, recognized, or experienced.... It is a source of spiritual renewal."
Some of the places we will visit are New Delhi where the journey begins, and nearby Varanasi, the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world through which the Ganges river flows; and Agra and the Taj Mahal. Back to Delhi, then we travel to Haridwar, the gateway city to the Himalayas. From Haridwar we go to Rishikesh, the home of ashrams of famous teachers and gurus such as Sri H.H. Pujya Swami Dayananda (founder of Arsha Vidya Gurukulum), Shri H.H. Swami Sivananda (founder of Sivananda Yoga); then to Uttarkashi where Sharath will hold a five-day Ashtanga Yoga Sadhana (Practice) Retreat with us.
From Uttarkashi we venture progressively deeper into the snowy Himalayas taking a 15 km trek on foot or by pony to Kedarnath, one of the most sacred temples to Lord Shiva. This impressive, ancient stone temple is believed to have been originally built by the Pandava brothers at the end of the Mahabharata War (6000 -500 BCE). The present temple structure is thought to be about 1000 years old. In June of 2013 the temple withstood a catastrophic flood that destroyed most of the town of Kedarnath and obliterated other towns and villages downriver. This was the worst disaster to strike India since the 2004 tsunami, and more than 5,000 lives were lost, many of them religious pilgrims. Modern buildings, bridges and roads were swept away. The temple lost its massive doors but otherwise survived intact and with only minor damage, a testament to ancient methods of construction. More information about the flood can be found
here.
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| "Kedarnath Temple1" by Naresh Balakrishnan - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kedarnath_Temple1.jpg#/media/File:Kedarnath_Temple1.jpg |
After we descend from Kedarnath we travel on to Badrinath, a temple to Lord Vishnu, and from there back to Delhi.
Gail will return to Louisville to help Erin Cronin teach the Mysore classes. Karen and I will go on to Mysore to spend a month continuing our Ashtanga study with Sharath. I also use my time in Mysore to take flute lessons with
Ravi Shankar Mishra, and Karen and I will both probably take Sanskrit lessons with Lakshmish Bhatt, the KPJAYI Sanskrit teacher, as we have done for so many years.
At the end of November I will travel to a spiritual retreat center in Maharashtra state in Western India near Mumbai. This will be my third visit to this center, but I have not been here in eleven years, so this is a special treat for me. Here I will spend twenty days immersed in seva (service), yoga, meditation and study. During this time I will not have access to the internet or my cell phone. In fact, we are not allowed to use our cell phone even to tell the time; it has to be put away. The last five days of the retreat are spent in total silence.
I know people wonder why we undertake this travel every year. What can I say? I grew up in a small town in Tennessee. When I was about five years old my mother told me about a man in our church who practiced yoga and could stand on his head. When I heard the word "yoga" it profoundly affected me. I didn't know what yoga was, but I wanted to do it, and I began to practice headstand in my room. When I was about eight or nine, my mother showed me Lotus Pose and explained how to meditate: "Imagine that your mind is like a chalkboard, and when thoughts come like words written on the chalkboard, erase them." When I was fifteen my mother gave me a magazine article about yoga postures that had helped a woman afflicted by polio, and said, "I think you would like this." Back then no yoga classes, no yoga teachers, no yoga books were available, at least not in rural Tennessee.
When I was nineteen someone gave me the book,
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda. When I read the part where young Yogananda meets his Guru, I could sense that I, too, had a guru, but I didn't know who it was. I couldn't imagine the circumstances of my life changing to the extent that I would ever be able to meet a guru. However, in 1986 I traveled to India (
you can read that story here), but I didn't meet any gurus. I moved to Louisville, Kentucky in 1989 to practice law, thinking, "I will not meet my guru in this lifetime." Life is unexpected. I met Maja Trigg, founder of Yoga East, and two years later she made it possible for me to meet my guru. Not only did I meet my guru, I have met other illustrious masters and gurus:
Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, Sharath, Saraswathi and Sharmila,
Ramanand Patel,
Swami Dayananda,
Francois Raoult,
John Friend,
David Swenson,
Doug Keller and more.
"That practice becomes firmly established when practiced for a long time, without interruption, with devotion." (The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 1.14)
These were Sharath's last words to us when he left Louisville after two weeks of teaching here in 2003. This is why I continue to study with my teachers as often as possible, year after year. Next year, 2016, will be forty-nine years of yoga practice, twenty-five years of study with my guru, twenty-two years of Ashtanga Yoga, eighteen years with David Swenson, seventeen years of returning to study in Mysore with Pattabhi Jois and the Jois family, fifteen years of study with Ramanand and John Friend, and twelve years with Doug Keller.
The first year I studied with Ramanand, he said in one of the classes, "There are sixteen ways to balance the hip joints. Today I will give you two." That was fifteen years ago, and I'm sure Ramanand has come up with more than sixteen ways now, but he has not taught all sixteen. My guru said that one has to accept that sometimes one's present understanding is inadequate to comprehend what the teacher is teaching. In this past weekend's workshop, I could see that very new yoga practitioners were not yet able to apply everything that Doug was instructing. I told some of those students, "This is why you have to come back to Doug's workshop next year. Next year your level of understanding will be deeper." One time we were in a class with Swami Dayananda, and someone asked a very simple, very elementary question, and many people in the audience groaned with impatience. Swami Dayananda held up his hand and said with great patience and understanding, "I will answer this question. One can only ask a question at one's present level of understanding."
One of my teachers once said, "If you are looking for water, you can dig a lot of shallow holes, or you can dig one really deep well." This is why I go back year after year to India, why I study in Mysore every chance I can, and why I study with all of my teachers as often as possible. I want to dig one really deep well.
