My teacher’s between worlds, until around the solstice.
He’s a weather system expanding and contracting, moving over the surface of the waters and the forests and the cities. Another beginning, formless and void. A heavy cloud system laden with electricity. How will he return to earth? A saint, a goof-ball, a tiger enthusiast, a guru? How will his yoga condense – as tapas, stand up comedy (his telephoto lens in my face in durvasasana left an impression), as community, as an individualized path?
It’s the 14th day now. Shiva–saffron scooter Shiva– and I exchange namaste emojis through the planet, praying for rain. Narasimhan sends thrilling breadcrumb texts, dense as osmium, that I’ll be turning over for the rest of my life. Harini and I shoot the breeze. Dear friends waking up after the last funeral share how they feel now. The specific density of Lakshmipuram — the other end of the energetic pulse that shot out on the 11th in the Shenandoahs.
These are the people who spent 53 years in my teacher’s orbit, watching him expand and contract as a human being, later riding the seasonal waves in consciousness—and expat invasions—that his movements made for them. It helps to have a toe on the ground there with them.
Grief is a weird doorway. Now I live inside the frequency of Maha Mrityunjaya, as democracy in my country comes to an end, the world ignores Sudan’s refugees, drone quad-copters shoot hospitals in Gaza with square bullets made in Florida, Ukraine comes ever more to the brink. World news filters in from the scholars around me, while in grief I seek neither headlines nor numbing entertainment. My heart is suspended in a hidden ribbon between the two, inside this globally distributed network of love and vulnerability. The only way to exist at all now, I feel, is to accept the complexity without armoring the emotions.
Yesterday I woke to this line, shouted across a packed room. “Annngelaa. CONNNTROOLL yourself!” A line he used repeatedly one season when I was jumping out of my skin in excitement about asanas.
This frequency I’m on – of “had to be there” jokes, of a totally specific loss that includes some trauma, and a specific community – contains the energies of everything else happening now. It’s not a bypass. In response to losing him, there is room for feelings of shock, horrible loss, despair, gratitude, transformation and all the rest. It’s an open channel created by relationship, amid so much contradiction and complexity. Yoga is that.
When Sharath condenses finally, my prayer is that he will return to us in human form. Not a saint. A guy who did something enormous, who had a specific skillset, and all the normal human fallibility. Whose individuality is the watermark on our memories.
Not, on the other hand, some totem. Some object that we use as a projection screen, a universal ATM to pay out psychic needs, or the keeper of “correct method.”
There is a narrative that attachment to the guru is an obstacle that prevents you from enlightenment. Yes totally, if you’re looking for some sort of spiritual authority figure to put on a pedestal as an object representing pure wakefulness. A hollow totem. But what if, for many hundreds or thousands, ashtanga was never that? What if we were never in it to become some untouchable unflappable shadow of ourselves? What if the fallible funny awkward relationship was itself the jewel in the lotus?
If so, the learning is that individual people are temporary. Scenes are temporary. Treasure it all while we can.
Speaking from experience, there is repressed grief in the most hardcore spiritual communities, from Christianity to Buddhism. The focus on transcendence, on another world where we have perfect bodies or perfect minds, helps numb the pains of the flesh. I respect this – there is some truth in it.
But for me, it is the mundane that is most infused in my teacher’s spirit. The echoes of the dad jokes, the uncanny perception of the body, the occasionally freakish ability to read a room. Ashtanga is a practice of relationship and of the body. One of being present with our fears and false narratives until they loosen and unravel into nothing.
It is lived-in. It is not an idea. For this, I will affix the term of endearment – Ji – to his name. Notice the usage in his native language. Ji is not grandiose. It is a diminuitive honorific. It holds the complexity of this treasure.