Up at 4 on a Monday. So I guess this time has become protected. Protected by habit, and by the way this little consciousness latches on to a loop.
Relationship is protective. Ritual is protective. Radical acceptance is protective.
Ashtanga yoga, it’s only made up of relationships. They can be of any sort. And it does seem each individual tends to have just a few versions of the same relationship over and over. May as well make them good, but also open them up to creativity as much as possible.
Jayashree and Narasimhan made me understand this explictly. It was in 2009 that they gave me the first protection incantations. Invocations. Summonings.
May he protect us both. May he nourish us both, with knowledge. May our study together have brilliance and no misunderstanding. May the cows and the scholars be protected. May there be peace in the three kinds of forces acting upon us: cosmic forces out of our control, the forces of the world around us, and the forces within us. Peace.
Their mantras lightning-redesigned reality for me. Sitting on the floor of their little library, bare lightbulb flickering off in the afternoon power cut. Our motorbike-shaken bodies quivering, then going slack and dewy in the heat. A vinyasa to soften western mind. Then the protection spells, billowing around us and sealing us en caul.
A membrane than does not decay, but only if it is constructed correctly from the start.
These teachers’ transmission, like Sharath’s, is not other than magic. And we all know, I hope, that 80% of magical practice is for protection. Or maybe it is 99%.
Like Sharathji, they received the confused little sprite that I was, accepted her, and filled her with what knowledge she was able to take in. They all shook out the shabby fabric of my reality and then swaddled up my wandering soul with theirs. The spiritual generosity of this oct. And in many cases it doesn’t last.
But what does it mean when the magic actually takes, to remain in the membrane of a student-teacher relationship when reality changes again? What if your teacher is dead?
What does it mean for a student, specifically? Here is what I can see. It shows up as naming our teachers always, as citing our sources, as elder care if we had been so lucky, as reverence for their legacy. Those whose relationship is blessed like that, mutually: I see they are full of life now, and are never not grieving. This is not time to discard the past or remake the world. It is time to intuitively hold our teacher’s memory in the blessings of protection.
I look out and see those who glide along their path inside the air-chariot of unconditional love + human acceptance that the protection mantras create. And those who do not, who leave a trail of tears of broken relationships behind them—either because they chose unwisely from the start, or because they did not have the strength to accept the human parts of their teacher when they inevitably came to the fore.
That bit has been the strangest experience of my life – watching my teacher, this epic person, be transformed into either a super-human or a scapegoat in so many minds.
The adharmic relationships may be karmic, but they are NOT fate. Not at all. Not when we have transformative technologies at hand. A person can stitch real love together from shreds, re-narrate their path out of truths that really will hold, really will bless the path.
In fact, I find it is common, to get several years down your path and regret the way that it started. Something in our intention, or our protection, was not correct. Our first teacher did not have a transmission. We were without blessing. Yes! That is what real magic is for. Wholeness minus wholeness equals wholeness.
Dominic says this in fewer words, speaking of relationships. This is someone who combines his wild mind with Saturnine moral discipline. He is the one who had the generous charisma to make us all cry 3 ½ years ago at Sharathji’s 50th birthday party, recounting stories of Sharath’s childhood and the true nature of his personality and his gifts.
And this same teacher, Dominic, is one who has always held the poison of gossip or his own reactivity to ashtanga drama in his throat. He could do so for lifetimes, if that is what it takes. And from that place, when there is an interruption in love, he just says: Fix it. Go, fix it.
It is either in us, or on us to stitch together a relational path full of love, respect, blessing and realness.
Or not. Many people try to make a go of it without protection. The idea of a blessing is not the same as the action it requires.
Rocket said to me last summer, regarding a particular practice often deemed risky, wild and esoteric: it feels protective. Yes. This too is a teaching. From the place of real intelligence, and real discernment, to magnetize with the protective nature of our own methods. To then trust them, give ourselves to them, and allow them to protect us.
Sharath was about that sort of faith. He named his firstborn for it. It’s not mind-numb. It’s heart-alight. So much so, that our animal bodies know they can trust the path. They are protected.
OM
*Photography by the brilliant Kitty Schulz