It’s 21 days now since the afternoon in the Shenandoahs, when my teacher died. This morning I sat in the new moon dark in Michigan, where the fresh snow on the forest makes everything soundless.
The memory washes over me first as touch. His sacred body. Enough said.
The leaves under foot and the cool earth under that.
And the people who held me – the stability of their backs under my hands and the sadness and shock in their chests. “The literature” teaches that first things we say in a crisis, a potential trauma, set the pathway for the grief process. Yes. But I think the first five people who held me have helped determine my process so far. It is beautiful. Full of renewal. How strange and good that every single one of them would be a powerful practitioner, with a hard-earned ability to bear witness when the worst possible thing happens. The worst possible thing. People who practice a granular daily encounter with the edge of will and surrender, which showed up then as an instinct to stay together in our bodies… while abjectly accepting – without negotiation or resistance – that he had left his.
The memory comes in as the things we said. Action words. God words.
And finally, for me, as images. The light was golden. Slanting across the valley before us and through old trees, starlight extinguishing into the leaves on the ground where we knelt. Finer than a bed of funerial marigolds, that carpet of leaves in the forest.
Individual faces cracking from action into recognition, with these bolts of pure sadness. And his face, finally, so beautiful. Beautiful. Still and a little ashen. So totally free. A moment that will anchor my mind, the rest of my life.
Words don’t exist for the purity of this moment. The beauty, goodness and truth of it are a radiant orb of pure safety for my spirit. I know I’m not the only one inside of it. This light dome is full of crazy amount of vitality, and a togetherness that goes beyond kinship to uncanny karma.
Everyone is different. But for me, none of this is intrusive. There are no cracks in my everyday mind, where this floods back in. It’s like a museum diorama of an ancient scene, which today I chose to visit. To be nourished by the rawness of reality and the truth of life and death. The total radiant mystery of life and death.
I have been through a different experience lately, something legitimately traumatic, in which another’s past cruelty does lash back intrusively. My psyche holds this, and returns it to me unwanted, I think specifically because I’m alone in the experience. It is only real to me. There will never be acknowledgement, so the healing is my own to do. Isolated by the truth of it. Whatever trauma is for me personally, it is this alienated thing, that comes back demonically, and walls me in to its aloneness. Bromides about “letting go” only suppress it. It’s in the circuitry and very slow to resolve. Still workable. Just slow.
The recent literature on trauma is pretty interesting. I started with Peter Levine, which is great if a bit passe now. But like many in the yoga world have gotten the most from Polyvagal Theory. This is a whole body of work and practice around the social nervous system, how we are connected or disconnected by voice, body hexis, nervous system resonance, even the electric conductivity of the skin. How it is through the social nervous system that states of activation or trauma are resolved. This was all baked in to Mysore style, well before the philosophy came around. The philosophy itself is a product of a highly alienated capitalist society – it can never uncover the absolute root of modern trauma, because that alienation is all it knows.
But Mysore style, and the death of its greatest master ever, is a different field of intelligence. The isolation that trauma theory gives us tools to resolve isn’t our starting point. Relationship is the whole universe of ashtanga. We start by joining something that already existed, a hundred-year lineage of shared breath. The con/spir/acy before conspiracy theory. The relationship is within ourselves, within time, within a shared breath space – be it present or remembered.
The ways that SharathJi would perceive mind in bodily movement, the wild receptive intelligence of his hands, the impersonal nature of it all: these were his whole life, and they condition our experience of his death.
Back in the diorama of that day, the scene is the most normal thing I have ever experienced. It’s easy to say this event was crazy. Unthinkable. I felt that way at times the first week. Now I feel I’ve moved in to a new normal that is continuous with that moment. The tragedy and peace of it are continuous with life. It’s not going to be this windowless room in my psyche that I tend to alone. It’s full of souls, and life, and the spinning wheel of infinite time.