What Yoga in Mysore Means To Me

Last year I wrote a post that I had to subsequently delete because it caused a stir in my family and even though it was "my story" I did not want to cause pain on others, so down it went and it is nowhere on the blog.

The post told the story of how my mother died, particularly how I experienced it.  She fell from a 7th floor to her death. That is what we know as a fact. There is one argument that explains it as an accident and another one that says it was a suicide.  She was alone when the falling occurred.

I was the last person to see her. She gave me an umbrella before I left for the first day of university. It was a clear and sunny day.  

When you are 18 and go through something like that you tend to blame yourself.  If only I noticed, if only I did something different, maybe if I washed the dishes every day, maybe if I got a job earlier and helped financially. It was too difficult to reconcile what had just happened. 

Then the pain all around. Everyone in shock. Who would give me an umbrella tomorrow. Or the next day, when it really rains. The wishes for it not to be true. But then the stretcher, the crowd of people. Then the coffin. Then the ground. Never again her face. 

Last night I dreamed that I saw my mother. She was my age, beautiful as ever (she won beauty contests in her youth). She had a red t-shirt on and was ordering me around to go and take care of this kid, her kid.

I told her She should tell her off, not me, it was her kid after all.   She asked me to take her to the little girl. I did. And as I showed her the way she fell from a one story and broke her knee, her eye was black, she was in pain.  It was my fault. Again!

Of course it was just a dream, but the pain I felt upon waking up is still the same I felt at 18, when the whole seven floor drama unfolded. 

Damn this hurts. I even knew the number of the emergency service in India: 6063, which is probably not the real number it just manifested like that, out of thin air in my dream.

Why does this happen? Why does the ultimate hurt, the thing that touches me the deepest into the most hidden and remote fabrics of my pain surface here, and now, as I am practicing intensely in Mysore?

I tell James. It feels slightly better to get it out of my head, roll some tears, not keep it there brewing more guilt.  I know by now that hurts need to be ventilated, aired out, shared in intimacy and safety.

Having so many people around who are going through the same practice as a community means we are all going through similar processes. It comes up in our talks, insecurities, feelings, fears, projections of what we might want the future to be or not be.  

Mysore rips you from your familiar suroundings, from your habits, from your comfort food, heck even your body as it submits to intensive practice.

This year I am socializing a whole lot less than in any prior visit.  I need the solitude, the practice to work through me.  I find myself questioning everything.  James and I talk about it, we read the Yoga Sutras, we wrestle with why is it so hard to do the number one thing that is required of us in the yoga path.

Why is so hard to be kind? From the big, obvious ways, to even the smallest. Why does being in close proximity with so many other practitioners bring up issues, and so on.

At home we hide behind our routines, our protective barriers, our "other things that we do on top of the practice", our jobs, our dealings.

Here we are in foreign land for a reason, and only one reason.  Yoga. Some of us do not like that and then fill the day with activities, but eventually we face it.  Issues do come up because we are outside the things we are used to and in a setting that more and more brings us closely into the whole practice.  

It is probably a good thing that something as deep as this has come up for me.  It is those old hurts that keep us in our place, scared to move, and we can only move forward whenever we have actually felt them and let them go.

But I tell you what I am learning from it.  Just before I came here something happened to me that triggered issues of loss, pain, death and insecurity. The details are irrelevant. Then coming here brings up this dream, the ultimate issue of pain, loss, death and insecurity.  

One thing I have been reminded of ever since my mother fell from that window is that we could all be gone in a matter of seconds after giving an umbrella to someone on a sunny day.  I realized back then, hurt as I was, that NOT hurting anyone was the only important thing worth striving for.

So I am going to attempt to forgive myself.  Just for today.  For anything I think I did that may have been wrong.  I know that I have always acted from whatever it was I believed to be the right thing at the moment and never really intended to hurt. I was just probably ignorant if I did.

Being kind is all I want to strive for.  I believe it is the most important lesson in yoga, the first one and the hardest to master. And that starts with me. I love and respect me.