Honoring BKS Iyengar

A year ago today, the great yoga teacher BKS Iyengar died. He was such a light. Here is what I wrote in his honor in 2014.

Understanding the Prayer

Understanding takes its own sweet time, and it's an ongoing process. I had a profound moment, while wearing a hairnet and singing along to the Beatles. Here is what happened.

I fell in love with yoga from pretty much the first class I ever took, years ago. I had no intellectual knowledge of the philosophy of yoga, but it felt right. So right. I remember walking down the street after my second ever class, trying not to laugh out loud because I felt so delighted and free!

Sure enough, I became more aware of the disciplines and values of this ancient spiritual system, and some of these made good sense in my head; intellectually, I got it and thought it was a good idea, though I didn’t wholly feel it in my body.

If you’ve taken a few yoga classes, you’ve more than likely heard or chanted the prayer Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu. This is a prayer that’s often recited in Hindu practices, and it can be translated as, “May all beings be happy and free, and may I in some way be able to contribute to that happiness and freedom.” Of course we wish that for each other, right?

In reality, it has taken me years of practice to begin to really experience that prayer and understand it in myself.

At the weekend, I went to help out at a monthly soup kitchen at a church here in NYC, for the first time. It’s called Mother’s Kitchen, and it was founded my teacher, Mata Amritanandamayi as a place where homeless people can get a good meal in a welcoming environment.

When I walked in, I was happy to see quite a few people I recognized from satsangs (community gatherings) around town; I put on an apron and hairnet, started chopping up fruit, and felt very lucky to be able to help in this way while having a friendly time with all these nice people. There was even a guy plonking away on a piano in the corner while we worked. My friend Sanjoy said, “Wait til people start arriving—that’s when the magic happens.” I didn’t know quite what he meant, but took his word for it.

As I stood at the serving tables collecting seating tokens and chatting to folks who had come for the day, I looked around me—at all these people who had come together, all the good will that was going on, all the food that had been prepared with love, human beings being decent to each other. I was moved to my very core and had to stop myself from welling up. There was nowhere else I’d rather be than right there, and I had the thought-feeling: “This is what it means. This is being inside Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.”

Maybe it has not taken you six years of yoga practice, trainings, study and so on to arrive at understanding prayers like this in your heart. Maybe you don’t practice yoga at all and you got it from the get-go? Maybe you’re somewhere in-between.

I wanted to share it with you, though, because quite often on our respective journeys there are ideas which seem to make good sense to our brains, but don’t really chime with us on a deep level. It is so, so, so very okay if and when we feel that way! Understanding, on any level, happens in its own time; whether it’s related to an immediate personal relationship or something you’ve read in a poem, whatever it might be. And understanding is fluid, not static; it moves with us. There is no end-point to understanding, it just gets deeper, wider.

These practices that we have—like yoga, or giving up our seat on the train, or trying not to interrupt people, or being patient, or formal prayer—are all part of the same thing, all part of our reaching an understanding that doesn’t need to be explained. The kind of understanding that very simply brings peace to our hearts.

Lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu.

लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवन्तु

Summer and the happy habit

Beautiful, beautiful August! Such a good time to get into the habit of exercising our gratitude muscles. Here is my piece for Conscious this week.

My spiritual teacher, the humanitarian Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma), visited New York recently, and as ever, it was a time of great joy and learning for me. Amma is popularly known as “the hugging saint” because she gives her blessing in the form of a very tender embrace. This hug is known as darshan, which you can translate as “a glimpse of God”, and indeed, in the moments when you’re nestled in the arms of this awakened person, it can feel like time disappears and you’re part of something infinitely vast.

One learns about love on a visceral level, both in Amma’s embrace, and in watching her hugging people—one after another after another—for 12, maybe 13 or 14 hours non-stop. She has said before that where love flows, everything is effortless, and watching the affection coming from Amma and in the faces of those people she’s embracing can be like seeing love made visible. Everyone is lit up.

But there’s also a more instructional kind of learning on offer in the form of the talks that she gives before darshan. On this New York visit, she spoke about gratitude, specifically on how it’s so easy to focus on what we don’t have. It’s like if there’s something wrong in your mouth—say you’ve lost a tooth—your tongue can’t help but endlessly explore that area, and the gap feels enormous. We’re compelled to explore that lack, even as we forget the other perfectly good teeth in our mouths, or the general miraculousness of our bodies. When we get obsessive about what we don’t have, we lose sight of what we do have.

I notice that gratitude comes more easily to me in the summer. Yesterday I lay in the park just watching the flowers nod gently in the breeze, and I felt utterly bowled over by the gorgeousness and generosity of summer. It is a time of ripeness, abundance, fecundity, playfulness, smiles at the beach, ice-cream truck music… Even the quality of being physically alone in summer can feel different to in other seasons; there’s a certain kind of freedom and a quiet joy to it.

This being so, it is a very good time to practice being thankful. Not to simply strike things off a list, ”I am grateful for this, that and the other”, but to really feel it in our bodies: The way the evening breeze feels on your skin; your feet in the sand; a mouthful of ice-cream; the feeling of leaning your head on your friend’s shoulder, and their shoulder being warm from the sun. It’s like everything is humming with the same sweet energy. To me, it is darshan in everyday form.

Developing such awareness to your body is something anyone can support through yoga practice, if that’s an option that appeals. Simply focussing your attention on your breath and what it feels like to be inside your body in the outside world can have a transformative effect on your relationship with your own body, mind and soul, not to mention other people’s, whatever the time of year.

But right now it is summer. Why not let the sun melt your heart and your anxieties? And see if you can let yourself just hang out in those moments of sweetness and thankfulness. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. Just here.

Happiness can, I think, be like doing headstands: It takes some practice. What a beautiful time it is to get into the habit of being grateful.

A special day for teachers

Today is a special day in the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist calendar: it’s Guru Purnima, a holiday where people can celebrate their teachers. For this reason, I think it’s a beautiful holiday for everyone, regardless of faith—though certainly faith comes into our relationship with any teacher in our lives, whether it’s listening to an insight or gesture when it’s given, or finding the space to understand it afterwards.

Perhaps you have someone whom you regard as a spiritual teacher? A guru, monk or humanitarian figure whose words and way of life you follow? Or maybe it’s someone in a classroom or a driving lesson whose words go beyond simply making sense and somehow become inspiring?

There is a beautiful lineage in yoga that the yoga teacher Ruth Lauer-Manenti talks about in her book, An Offering of Leaves. She talks about how sometimes in a class, our teacher will physically touch us in a way that feels helpful, saying, that teacher, too, was touched by their teacher in just such a way, and their teacher before them. “When the teacher is talking about kindness and you feel nourished by their words, something inside of you is stirred and something that was sleeping awakens. This is because that teacher also had a teacher who spoke about kindness and woke them up.”

It makes me think of the image of buckets of water being passed down a line, and it strikes me that good teaching can work in our lives like this. Many pairs of hands have brought me to this point in my life; many good people have given me tools to dig myself out of holes or build safer ladders to the stars; many people have held me physically and emotionally. On a day like Guru Purnima, it’s nice to take a moment to think of all the people in your life whose teachings have lifted you and supported you.

For me, I’m thinking of my spiritual teacher Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma), and of my wonderful granny dressed in her white cardigan and sitting in her favorite chair; I liked sitting at her feet like that even when I was a grown up. I think of my incredibly patient driving instructor, Mo, who only lost it once, the day before my test when I was driving abysmally: “Love! What’s happening! You’re cracking up!” Family, friends, so many hands...

The word guru has its roots in the syllables “gu” meaning darkness and “ru” meaning light, conveying a sense of the darkness of ignorance being dispelled by light. Some friends and I had a discussion about the nature of a guru. One said, “the guru is in your heart,” then another said, “the guru is your heart.”

The guru is your heart. Happy Guru Purnima.