It is challenging to make sense of a place that I love because if its disgusting attributes. Though sometimes it stretches my patience to its very limits, the outcome of every escapade is a deep learning and gratitude for the growing pains inflicted. India has been good to me, it has softened my hard parts and hardened my soft areas—thus granting me a sort of balance that cannot be found in seeking; a balance that can only be achieved by acquiescing to life. India encourages one to give up, to give self to the higher powers and to believe that all is for the best.
From this land of pain, powerlessness, filth, love, bliss and beauty comes a system of well being and beliefs that is based on a person performing daily the practices necessary to one’s individual nature, spending quiet still time each day allowing thoughts of past and future to lift, allowing life to go on around with no personal interference and using the tools available to attend the divine nature in every aspect of being. India’s pervasive doctrine allows a person who does not perform correctly, to try again and again until they get it right, until they do everything they need to do—even if it takes endless lifetimes, they will eventually go to the next different place and have a whole new set of concerns. Though people will have something to say about the way that others live because the culture is nosey, theoretically every person’s idea of what they need to do is correct, every belief system is welcome, each human plight is acceptable because it is part of one’s individual path. One cannot do anything other than that which they are doing. Nothing is bad or good, everything just is.
Like taking a bath in a dirty pond, I have escaped the heat of hell and cleansed myself of attachment to that which no longer serves me in the cool, polluted water. I emerge fresh, cleaner than I was—or at least differently dirty and perhaps smelling funny to those who think they can afford to ignore the putrid bath. I am free of affectation by so many things that once disturbed me, like waiting, fear of getting hit by cars, human faeces, being told no, my own inability to focus, my perceived shortcomings, physical discomfort, and lack of amenities. The most beautiful women I’ve ever seen dripping with jewellery and beautiful saris emerge from dilapidated shacks or jump off of the back of a truck to dance through puddles of sewage collecting cow chips and sorting through garbage. It is impossible to find intolerable that which a hundred people around me will happily endure.
Most of the people here are in survival mode. They are happy to have food on the table, electricity, their loved ones around them, occasional treats. I came here with a huge list of necessary comforts that I’ve since abandoned. After living in mud huts that are luxurious compared to the tin shacks down the street, I am comfortable sleeping anywhere. After months of cold showers using a bucket, I no longer crave long hot showers or baths. I used to feel squeamish at the notion of spreading the usage of toilet implements (brushes, buckets, etc) to wider fields or touching certain things or walking near human excrement—though there was no physical contact with faeces, human discharge in general, eating food that had been left out or cooked in a dirty kitchen, etc. After having no choice but to suffice with the community hole in the ground and make-shift plastic cup in a bucket of water for cleaning that had never been washed, hugging lepers and eating food that they made for me, stepping over a beach full of morning poops to join my friends in an ocean swim, walking in the dark through fields infested with black cobras, drinking the most amazing fresh squeezed juice on the planet out of a glass recently used by any number of strangers and barely washed in a bucket-full of questionable water, I understand that I am not physically affected by many things that bother my intellect.
Tantrics are thought of as witches here in India. If some villagers’ children get ill and husband loses his job, it will be assumed that they have been cursed by a Tantric. Movies portray them as vicious malevolent, skull-wearing, psychotic priests with yellow finger nails and googling eyes, who will curse you and steal your babies. The Indian stigma against Tantrics comes from the Agora Tantrics who take this idea of basking in everything to an extreme. These are the guys that are running around naked, covered in ash of corpses, holding up a left arm for twelve years, pulling a jeep around with a penis, abstaining from eating or they eat anything that comes their way. They take their understanding of enlightenment from preoccupation with a source of divinity that strings everything together and perhaps people are afraid of them because they are wild, powerful—as this ability to see God in everything is a great source of power.
As we age we accumulate and pass on to our progeny a set of pre-existing conditions, requirements, opinions, apprehensions, pre-conceived notions and judgements that cloud reality. Many people find that their life becomes consumed and composed by a series of fear-based aversion or cravings based on their own past experiences or the things they’ve heard from others. This prevents one from receiving life as it is, for each moment is new and there is no way to guess how something might act or feel. This also adds stress, fatigue and disease as energy is lost in an effort to avoid or control many aspects of the flow; it is kindred to swimming upstream. After a bit of research one will understand that Tantra is the practice of accepting life as it is, avoiding dichotomy between good and bad, abandoning judgement as much as possible to reveal the world as a child might see it…Everything is confronted as if for the first time. This is actually the closest view of reality and the highest form of optimism—to allow curiosity to supersede fear.
I am a huge advocate for finding a teacher and studio where one feels at home and devoting oneself to an informed practice of yoga, for this gives a person a knowledge of different asanas, pranayama, meditations, mantras and understanding of proper alignment—a set of tools necessary to safely explore and to heal themselves. A good instructor is often able to tune into the needs of the classroom and wonderful heights can be reached collectively. At some point one has to use what they have learned. I developed a dependence on classes with an instructor to guide and others around to compare myself to. I learned everything that I know about asana from these circumstances and was weary of letting them go, for when practicing alone I felt like a deer in headlights at the prospect of being able to do any type of movement that I want to. Even when I became an instructor, I would channel the universal everything for my class and experience great juju with everyone, but was somehow afraid to really do this just for myself.
In India it is difficult to deny an exploration of my own practice. While I have had the opportunity to study with some wonderful teachers, my most profound learning experiences about yoga in India have happened while practicing on my own. The understanding that I am here, where the Rishis originally developed the yoga system, has given me license to listen deeply to my own inklings; to take time every day to follow the whispers of my inner voice while omitting the ego as much as possible. At this point in my study of yoga I understand that an asana practice is simply time put aside to move as the body wants to move, to open and cleanse the energy channels that want to be opened in preparation for meditation and to make it possible to find bliss in a variety of postures.
My practice in solitude feels more like a true asana practice. It begins and ends when I want it to and it amplifies to a degree that is comfortable for me on that day. It is good for a beginner to be encouraged to move beyond their fear and to explore their true physical limits, but many people in this situation get competitive or hard on themselves and push in wrong directions for want of acknowledgement from peers. This is absolutely not asana practice; this is aerobics, gymnastics, and ego-stretching. A true asana practice is based on compassion and curiosity about the state of the body; sometimes the body will feel energetic, strong and want to be pushed, stretched; other times it feels tired, weak and it wants to be nurtured, breathed into, energized, and loved.
There is a string of energy that pulsates into every part of our being—every part of our presence on this earth that we can imagine. The point of asana is to bring that energy into the parts that aren’t getting enough and meditation is simply to see every part of the universe inside as it is now. When we go too far into a posture, the first thing that happens is the good feelings stop pouring into the appendages involved, then our breath stops or gets shallow, we feel apprehensive, we feel danger. If one eases up at the point before this happens (and this point changes every day) and sends love, nurturing to those parts through those open channels, they will find a stronger presence from members involved and an ability to go deeper later; they will find that during meditation, they are able to explore that area of the body with greater clarity—which is the purpose of asana in the first place. If one pushes beyond that stopping point, they will find that injury occurs and that place closes off energetically in an effort to heal itself without interference from ego—a force turned malevolent by its over-reaching breadth of influence.
One of my teachers told me that to prevent depression, I must do sun salutations every day to appease the sun. So my personal practice started with a vow to do at least six sun salutations on the beach at sunset and to meditate every day even just a little bit. This seemed an easy vow to fulfil, but I find any such vow to be quite challenging. Sometimes I put off these sun salutations and am forced to do them quickly, sluggishly, with a full stomach—but I do them with compassion and always feel better, reconnected because of them. Other times a hankering for other poses pops up within the sun salutations and my practice lasts for hours and my body does amazing things—drawing energy in from outlandish places and like an alchemist, passing it through my being in different ways, turning it to gold and spreading it out to the ends of the earth. I meditate sometimes before asana practice, where I get visions of the poses that my body wants and sometimes after asanas where I could explore the changes that have been made, the wild open energy channels and vibrations—functioning much like a prolonged savasana.
The longer I keep this daily practice of listening to the universe, the more intricate my practice becomes; I began to develop new poses, to understand how to fit various aspects of the practice together, to realize why pranayama, mantra, meditation, etc. are necessary. I’ve read many books and heard many theories, but nothing compares to the learning received from my own practice. This practice is a play time, like a healing time—where I can do anything I want with no requirements and my body becomes something mysterious and interesting, something new every day to explore. With this great compassion, I have been able to touch my foot to extremities that I hadn’t imagined before, but also the smallest movements become infinitely beautiful, deeply challenging and opening. This pervades other factions of life until everything becomes the first of its kind that I have encountered, a source of great entertainment, something to be regarded with understanding. This ability to look with compassion and healing at the intricacies of my inner world extends itself to the people and things that I touch with senses or perception, encouraging an ever-deepening understanding of my environment and a stronger ability to treat it as it wants to be treated. An effort to confront life with curiosity, innocence and no judgement, I believe, is what originally gave way to the concept of Tantra.
It has been established that matter is ultimately composed of various combinations of the same sorts of particles. If we wish to be pure in thought and free from the misery of confusion, we cannot then react to some things with aversion and other things with desire, for it is all essentially the same. So this leaves us with a choice, we must either avoid pleasure and enjoyment of our senses—the doctrine of the ascetic, or we must embrace everything that comes at us equally-the basis of Tantric practice. Both methods provide us with the ability to face anything with equanimity, leaving us unaffected by this system of love and hate, pain and comfort, bliss and agony, thus attaining a heaven on this disgusting beautiful planet, living in a world that just is.
The simple practice of setting aside time to be open will lead one to many understandings, bring new practices and deepen one’s ability to feel. For some people this may mean getting rid of everything owned and retreating to the mountains or running naked screaming through the city streets eating poop and sleeping with dead bodies, for others it may entail devoting oneself entirely to their family, or their cat, or their job scrubbing floors— God lives in everything. It is said that there are as many paths to enlightenment as there are people, or beings. People don’t usually come from elsewhere to India and find enlightenment, they come to India to learn how to look, how to appreciate what they have and then they find enlightenment in their day to day life. A guru can inspire and help a person begin to explore their inner universe, but it is the guru that lives inside of each one of us and acceptance of that which composes life which will show the way to liberation from bondage.
