Tag: India travel

ch…ch…ch…changes

by L. Valdez Karl
lotus feet
“Lotus Feet of the Lord” and a rose given to me by Swami Avdheshanand Giri, head of the Juna Akhara naga babas, at 2010 Kumbh Mela, Haridwar

Happy belated New Year!  May you all be well and happy and peaceful in 2013!

This is my first post of 2013 which is amazing to me since I started writing this blog in 2005 before my first trip to India.  But it is also my last post for a while because I will step onto Indian soil for the 7th time on January 29.  I’m blessed and oh so grateful to be able to have traveled to Ma India all these years.  That realization is never lost on me because India is truly my soul’s home.  As someone told me, my trips are not just to study yoga, they are pilgrimages.  Jai Ma.

This trip will be very different as a group of 7 intrepid travelers and yoga practitioners will be meeting me in Chennai for my first attempt at a group trip.  Kali help me.  I could never be a full-time travel agent because the details of organizing this trip have given me more than a few migraines.  And I am quite accustomed to being alone in India which is how I like to be.  Now I will be with 7 other people for a full 16 days.   It surely will be a test but I expect nothing less from Ma.

I start the trip with taking Module 4 of Ganesh Mohan’s yoga therapy training and then I am off to Calcutta and Varanasi and Sarnath, where Buddha did his first dharma teaching after his Enlightenment.   In Sarnath I will attend a dharma gathering led by Christopher Titmuss. After that, off to Varkala, Kerala for a week to see the preparations for my first ever retreat then back to Chennai to wait for the arrivals of 7 first-time travelers to India.

One thing that is VERY COOL is that I finally get to meet my long-time blog reader and cyber-friend Svasti!  How exciting is that?  Since we are both sisters of Kali we thought meeting up in Kali’s city of Calcutta would be auspicious.

Back to Chennai for a few days after the retreat then off to Goa and Mumbai, both for the first time.  I was invited to Mumbai by Sharell who writes Diary of a White Indian Housewife and I said “why not?” because life is too short and I have a lot more years behind me than I have ahead of me.  I found out about this yoga place  in Mumbai and contacted them about whether they would be interested in hosting me for a workshop before I leave India.  They said yes, so maybe I will bring Yin Yoga to Mumbai….we shall see!

After all that, I will start plans to an October 2014 yoga retreat to this place in the Himalayas….interested?  Two of my students already are thinking about going.

As for me and my yoga, 2012 was a year of santosha once I returned home from India.  It’s hard to explain but I’ll try.

Although I cut two weeks off my trip last year, I surely did not want to come home because I was content where I was and how I was.  I realized in India what a freak I am in my local yoga scene of hot yoga and acro-yoga and yoga with weights and yoga with such names that I can’t even figure out what it is.  People feel bad when I call myself a yoga freak but I don’t hold any bad connotations on that word just like my hippie friends and I were proud to call ourselves freaks back in the day.  So yeah, I consider myself a yoga freak and I let my freak flag fly.  You either dig it or not.

My yoga practice is more meditation than asana now and an epiphany came up and bit me in the ass as it usually does: santosha.   I used to get bent out of shape about not having a load of students.  Frantic as a matter of fact and I almost quit teaching.  Since I no longer teach in studios (other than workshops), the only regular students  I have come to my house.  A friend told me that we are true sangha because it is yoga the old school way.   My students are 150% supportive of me even though I will be gone 10 weeks — they know I need to get back to India to re-nourish myself and they know I bring back more yoga for them.  My students are empowered enough to do their own practice at home when I’m gone.

I almost canceled my group trip because of the Kausthub mess, but only one person backed out; the rest trusted my judgment about continuing the trip and studying at KYM and the majority of those coming have never met me.   That speaks volumes.

I get a ton of hits on my website but my phone does not ring off the hook — in fact,  it does not ring at all — for yoga inquiries.  I get no calls for private yoga, trauma sensitive or otherwise.  I’ve been told that with my training and experience I could make $100,000 a year in New York City teaching private classes.  I worked with one woman all last summer who was a survivor of sexual assault and she got to the point where she reunited with her husband and was able to move out of town, a story of transformation.  But other than that, nada.

Do I care?  I can honestly say no.  I’m detached from the fruit of my actions.  Sometimes it’s scary how detached I am.   My gut is telling me that the detachment will open me up for something much greater than I can imagine.  Those who want my style of yoga will find me, those that don’t, won’t.  And I am finally content with that.  And that’s liberating.  My own practice has gone so inward that I’ve turned myself inside out.  Last year I had planned to go to Varanasi but while meditating I heard a voice tell me “everything you are seeking you already are.”  That’s why it’s called insight meditation.

Yes, I still do workshops and I’m creating a Yoga for Inner Healing training that will utilize yin yoga and trauma sensitive yoga.  I’ve been asked to teach twice monthly next year and a place where I taught once a month.  I will work on “Freedom Style” Yoga workshops in the style of Erich Schiffmann.  I should say, in MY Freedom Style as Erich suggested.   Because that’s what yoga is to me:  freedom.  Once you silent mind, once you shut up, that’s when the knowledge flows in.  That’s freedom.

I realized not too long ago that I’ve developed siddhis.   Of course I am not talking about levitating or turning water into wine or developing the ability to drink poison unscathed.  I am talking about the ability to watch a negativity come up and then burst like a balloon or disappear like a rising bubble in champagne.  POP.  GONE.  Over and over again.  That’s real magic.  My reactions to things in the not too distant past that would have been loud and immediate just aren’t there anymore.  POP.  GONE.   Those are the siddhis of transformation and I don’t quite have the words for it.  But that’s OK because I don’t think about it, it just is.  It’s this low-grade almost imperceptible constant buzz of santosha.  Silent mind it and shut up and do your practice.  Thinking less, feeling more.

I’ve done few yoga trainings this year but felt called to learn more energy work which I did in the form of Emotional Freedom Technique and Quantum Touch Healing. This is work I rarely talk about because when I talk about it someone invariably wants to label it and put it in a box, and that’s not what my energy work is about.  People here are dazzled by “master” this or that and how many letters you have after your name on your business card.  My friend in India just tells me “bring your healing.”  No one asks me what it is, what it does, etc. etc. etc. because it’s understood as being a part of life.  Something tells me to combine it with yoga but not here, there.  I just can’t bring myself to name it Blah Blah Blah Quantum Reconnective Reiki Blah Blah Blah Yoga Blah Blah — as I saw a class similarily named today.  It’s just yoga.  It’s just healing.  Life is yoga and life is transformation.  That’s it.

There is always a morphing, a changing, a moving on inside me.   I’ve always known my real home is the world and not where I live.  I knew that when I was living by myself eating government cheese and using food stamps when I was in college.   Maybe my niche is yoga travel to India and beyond.  Maybe my teaching niche is to small, select groups who can see beyond mainstream.

Adios, kids.

the writing on the wall

by L. Valdez Karl

Enjoy the silence.

A week from today I leave for my 6th trip to Ma India, my longest trip yet, 10 weeks.   My internal alarm clock goes off and my body and mind start buzzing a week before any India trip.  If you’ve been keeping up you already know with whom I’m studying and where I’m going.  I think what is making the buzz even louder is that my bones are screaming at me that this trip will not be like any other I’ve taken.  It is going to be very different.

2012-2013 will be transformative.  Maybe transitional is a better word because I feel like I am a turning point in my life.  For whatever reason a whole lot of stuff is ripening, maybe that’s the buzz I’ve been feeling for the last 6 months.  As a long-time gardener I am very in tune with a garden’s growth so a sense of fecundity is certainly not lost on me.   I recently had an amazing Tarot reading and one of the cards the reader pulled was that of a pregnant woman with a huge belly lying in a pumpkin patch entangled in thick vines…waiting to give birth but feeling like it will never happen.

For most of 2011 I felt stuck, trapped in the tired paradigm of what constitutes yoga in the modern scene, but also trapped in tired paradigms of relationships of all kinds.   How to digest traumatic experiences without having them fill our hearts with hate and despair?  I experienced despair last year that I have not experienced for a very long time.  Buddhi (intelligence) is the function of the mind that digests our experiences by wisdom so that they serve their purpose of growth and renewal.

Fecundity, growth, renewal…see a pattern?

Toward the end of 2011 I came to grips with my place in the Universe.   It’s about walking my path alone, shaking people up, turning things inside out and upside down.   You best believe I have plans for that when I return.  But that’s not an easy path and not always welcome, even in the yoga world.

The Tarot reader said that India mirrors back to me my true self, who I really am, and what I am capable of.  She said  there are many reasons I am drawn there but a major one is affirmation, people that bear witness to my work in this world.  I’ve always said that people “get” me more there than here.  Going back to India yearly re-charges, re-nourishes, and nurtures me in a way that nothing else does here.  This is the first time since 2008 that I will be traveling alone in India and I am going to relish it — no one’s agenda but my own.   Freya Stark said, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

In her book Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff Rosemary Mahoney describes how I feel when I go to India, a solo woman traveler of a certain age:

I was alone, finally, with no one to protect me. I wanted to sing for happiness — a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical situation, to my surroundings, to independence, and to solitude. The happiness I felt that morning had nothing to do with the future or the past, with abstractions or with my relationships to other people. It was the happiness of entering into something new, of taking the moments simply for what they were, of motion, of freedom, and of free will. I loved not knowing what would happen next, loved that no one here knew me. I felt coordinated and strong, and the world seemed huge and vibrant. It was a relief to be alone…

My happiness was a feeling of physical lightness, of weightlessness, like drifting on air…

To prepare for her trip up the Nile, Mahoney read the Egypt travel journals of Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale.  She writes that she recognized in Flaubert’s notes of 1850 the same kind of happiness she felt.  She quotes Flaubert as he witnesses the Nile:

I felt a surge of solemn happiness that reached out towards what I was seeing and I thanked God in my heart for having made me capable of such joy; I felt fortunate at the thought, and yet it seemed to me that I was thinking about nothing: it was a sensuous pleasure that pervaded my entire being.

Mahoney quotes Florence Nightingale’s reaction to a Nile sunrise:

It looks. . .so transparent and pure, that one really believes one’s self looking into a heaven beyond, and feels a little shy of penetrating into the mysteries of God’s throne…

This is the sunset taken from the top of a temple in Rameswaram and just beyond the horizon is Sri Lanka.   During that evening in 2006 as I stood at the top of that temple and stared into the limitless expanse of ocean, I began to cry as I imagined the monkey god Hanuman leaping from rock to rock to rescue Sita.   Like Flaubert, I also thanked the Universe that I was “capable of such joy.”  Such profound joy and pleasure that it indeed pervaded my entire being.

Finally Mahoney describes Flaubert and Nightingale as neither having “any desire to fit the tediously cliched expectations that society had slated for them”; that they both “prized solitude”; and both traveled Egypt during periods of “considerable personal uncertainty and self-doubt”, agonizing “over how they would use their talents and answer their natural impulses.”

I am a woman of a certain age who travels alone, relishing my solitude.  After traveling around the sun over 50 times, India was the first country overseas that I visited and if I can never return, I always carry India with me as a talisman.

I also do not suffer tediously cliched expectations gladly.

The wounds and arrows of my misfortunes sneak in sometimes when I’m not looking and I can only tend to them in the arms of the Mother.  One way of tending to them is by reading the writing on the wall and acting upon it.  The writing on the wall tells me “to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.   I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.”   I will not die an unlived life.

The last card the Tarot reader pulled was called the Speaker of Trees and it contained a picture of a snake rising up through the center of the tree.  The reader said that the card means power, confidence, brilliance, communication of new ideas and plans, everything coming together.

I’m going home to shed my skin.

first uploaded at http://tudodeom.blogspot.com/

Happy New Year…to me

by L. Valdez Karl

The title is tongue-in-cheek.  I wish all my blog readers — and haters, especially the haters — a joyFULL and metta filled New Year and indeed, the same for all of 2012.

Looking back over 2011 I learned a lot this year — learned a lot in a somewhat quiet way, not so much in the hit-ya-over-the-head type of way.  And what I learned was yeah, it IS all about me.  Really.

The year started off with a bang as I had decided to stop writing after writing this blog for 6 years.   Then this Yoga B.I.T.C.H. returned, renewed and refreshed.   I did my thing all year, teaching my students and going for a few trainings, and then I hit the wall.  I almost quit teaching this year and then I got re-inspired.  I collaborated on a new and (we think) powerful Therapeutic Yoga Training that has garnered a lot of interest so far — but not where I live.  But I’m OK with that finally.  Esalen has asked us to send our yoga resumes.  Yeah, you bet your asana I want to teach at Esalen.  I’ve finally decided to conduct a teacher training and  I’m planning a Yoga & Spirituality Retreat in March of 2013 where the Therapeutic Yoga Training will be an option.

I also decided not to allow myself be ruled by the current yoga business paradigm because I am so much more than that.   Two yoga teachers who trust my vision are on board and if it’s meant to be, it will be.   I honestly don’t care what the local  yoga studio does because frankly, that business model is tired and stale and the people I want to teach to aren’t those people anyway.  To that end, I decided to start a non-profit corporation in spite people telling me not to do it.   Henry Ford once said that if he had asked people what they wanted they would have said “faster horses.”  Think about it.  I stopped allowing people without vision into my life.  But a praying mantis taught me my biggest lesson.

My biggest lesson was listen to my heart.

Of course I know that I’ve been doing that for years, listening to my heart and to my second brain, my gut.  But somehow I had lost my way a bit this year, I can’t explain exactly how.  Maybe it was by trusting people too much, by expecting to be treated as I treat people when I should have no expectations at all.  Yes, trust is a positive thing, but not at the cost of denying yourself.   My life lesson at this stage of my 57 years on this Earth is that I am not responsible for anyone’s happiness and no one is responsible for mine.  The key is to let go of everyone, and I mean everyone, who do not have your  best interests at heart, the ones who do not support you, the ones who can not make the least bit of effort to sustain a relationship.  Get rid of the “iffy” people as I call them.   Life is too short for peoples’ “bar talk.”  That’s over and done with, and like anywhere else, the yoga world has lots of bar talk.  My Kali Sister Svasti has some good advice about what she has learned in her 40 years on the planet.

While that lesson has been rolling around in my consciousness for quite some time, it took events of this year to solidify it.  Intuitively and energetically I know that my yoga trainings early next year in India — one with A.G. Mohan, and my 6th time at Desikachar’s school — are the culmination of my beginning.  A cycle has come to an end.  The long beginning was my 10 years of a yoga teaching.   I learned that you can’t seriously refer to yourself as a teacher unless you’ve taught for at least 10 years.  Sorry if that offends anyone.  On second thought, no, I’m not sorry.  I’m being real.

I also know intuitively and energetically that I am going to give birth to something potent and profound.  Don’t mistake my confidence for arrogance.  I know this as sure as I knew for two years that I had to be at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar last year.  Spiritual adepts have been telling me this for years — that the years 2012-2014 are going to be a rebirth.  But you have to die to be reborn.  Dying never bothered me, it’s living that’s hard.

We’ll see what Varanasi has in store.  I’ll be there at the end of my trip at the end of March.  Varanasi is also referred to as Benares or Kashi, the city of cremations, a city of death and rebirth, a city that like Haridwar last year, I know in my bones I must be there at that time of my life.  North of Varanasi is Sarnath where Buddha did the First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma on the Four Noble Truths.  One city of endings, one of beginnings.  Between trainings I’m spending my time in Varkala in the south, where there is a 2,000-year old Janardana Swami Temple, a temple to Vishnu that is referred to as “Benares of the South.”   In Varanasi I’m staying near Assi Ghat, the same ghat where Krishnamacharya stayed when he studied in Varanasi in the early 20th century.  My India trips are always filled with such serendipity.

I’m ready for a new beginning.  I believe you either lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.   Those are your three choices in life and I don’t have time for vanilla or beige anymore.  As Danielle LaPorte writes:

show up.

shine.

let it go.

Happy New Year.

To me.

The Call

by L. Valdez Karl
upon first seeing Gangakondacholapuram, 2008 

My first OM was in 1973 with Beat Poet and Buddhist, Allen Ginsberg, and I drifted in and out of yoga during the ‘70s. It was only when I returned to a serious yoga practice in the mid-‘90s that everything clicked.

I began yoga teacher training in 2002 at a traditional yoga studio in Chicago. I was a sponge soaking everything in, I could not get enough yoga knowledge. A yoga master named Srivatsa Ramaswami came to the studio to teach a weekend workshop. I had no idea who he was but learning classical yoga from an Indian teacher intrigued me. He set me on my path to India during the first night of his workshop.

That night he chanted and taught us mantras. His chanting cracked something open and I drove home crying all the way, not from sadness but from an inexplicable joy. There was something about the slow, careful yoga he taught that felt perfect. After that weekend something took hold and I knew I had to travel to the heart of yoga.

I researched yoga schools in India but nothing felt right until I read about the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, the school of T.K.V. Desikachar. It was no coincidence that the yoga of Ramaswami that had resonated with me so much was the basis of this school. I told my husband to his dismay that when it was time for me to go to India I would go and nothing would stop me.

Something more than yoga drew me to India. More than one emotion percolated at the same time — fear, nervousness, excitement, love, passion. All those emotions rolled up together like kittens in a basket, inseparable; sleeping, yet ready to explode at any moment.

It was like when you meet someone again whom you loved and never forgot. The initial emotions of seeing that person – fear, nervousness, love – suddenly come pouring out of your heart, and you are drawn for an inexplicable reason, never to be the same again. You feel that it is a culmination of something, but you don’t know what, and you don’t want to know, because it doesn’t matter. But it is also a beginning and you hold your nose, close your eyes, and jump. I had never been overseas but at the age of 51 I knew in my bones that going to India was something I must do. I went alone.

I had been told by an adept that I would melt into that world. I stood at the doorway of the airport sniffing the early morning air like an animal finally set free. The feeling was primal as soon as my foot touched Indian soil. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I stepped into Ma India’s arms. I was home.

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and it begins again

by L. Valdez Karl

Have to get a new visa and back in Ma India’s arms at the end of December. Two weeks at KYM then 5 weeks until I land in Mumbai (where I have never been) for a month-long yoga therapy training in Nasik. My longest trip yet.

My gut is telling me this is the icing on the cake before I move on to getting a masters in transpersonal psychology. Somehow I know that in the future my teaching and this will be used together….all things reveal themselves when ready. Conditioned existence.

After all these years it’s all coming together, but first I have to go home.

ferry to Dakshineswar, Kolkata

three generations, Bhubaneswar, Orissa

Kolkata street food

kumkum, Haridwar

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my Eat Pray Love Tour of India

by L. Valdez Karl

“Eat. Pray. Fall in Love with [our] Inspirational India Tour.
Starts at $19,795 per person, based on double occupancy.”

I have an idea. I’ve done four trips to India so who better to lead you to the land of yoga, spirituality, and chillums incense?

extra rupees for medicinal plants

Have you always dreamed of traveling to exotic India?

a lot of incense needed here

“I Loved indian movies from age 5. Finally at the age of 35 i funally went to india (had a dream from early childhood)…To say I was deeply disappointed is to say NOTHIN I was in SHOCK!….”

shock

“……It is such a pity that indian movies have NOTHING to do at all with real life… I wish India was a little close to the image you see in movies.”

Well, I have your enlightenment right here. Pay me $20,000 and I will take you to lands like you’ve never dreamed of….THE REAL INDIA!

Extra charge for animal costumes.

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river of love

by L. Valdez Karl

Photo by omtapas, 2010, Krishna River, the Lord of Love. from Piduguralla to Malkangiri (Orissa)

in om’s words: “I start at 6:30am and after maybe one hour I reach the Krishna River. There is no bridge so I have to wait for the little ferry to reach my side and then the other side. My energy level on those first two days is incredible, I feel as if I am in complete love and that I will see my beloved one at Malkangiri.”

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shanti

by L. Valdez Karl

Photo by omtapas, 2010. Taken at Malkangiri Lake in Orissa, India.

The photo says peace and serenity. In om’s words: “the picture is a nice reflection of Peace to meditate on.”

A picture of shanti for Sunday.

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the surrealistic version of Eat Pray Love

by L. Valdez Karl

I’ve always received messages in my meditations. Some might call them visions although that is too strong a word for me because I certainly don’t consider myself any type of psychic. I do get flashes of peoples’ lives when I do energy healing — I usually don’t tell them what I see but when I do it is always confirmed. But for the longest time a picture came into my head of an older me, with long gray curly hair, wearing orange robes and sitting with my eyes closed on a ghat somewhere in India. I don’t know if it is a picture of the future or from the past. When I first started to receive these images I did not know what a ghat was and India was not even a thought in my mind.

After five years of going to India this was my first trip to north India, to the Ganges. When I walked onto our hotel terrace overlooking the river in Haridwar it took my breath away. I stood there amazed because I instantly knew I had been there before. I have written before about how for the past two years I knew in my bones I had to be at THIS Kumbh Mela at THIS time in my life. Nothing was going to stop me.

I stood there for a long time taking everything in and it was such a deep, visceral knowing that I could only compare it to when my feet first hit the ground in Chennai five years ago, the feeling that I had come home. Everything that was in my view I had already seen and known. There was no mistake about it, I had already been here, in this spot. It was the week of Mahashivaratri and the orange robes of the sadhus across the river looked so familiar to me on a level that was very different from seeing them in photographs.

Before the Mela we had been in Kolkata where we went to Kalighat. When I walked into that temple I received such a blast of shakti that I had to sit down before I fell down. When we were in the inner chamber itself my friend told me that my eyes were so dilated that I looked like I had dropped a hit of acid. The cockroaches crawling all over the metal grill surrounding the murthi of Kali Ma sparkled so brightly that they looked like crawling jewels. I mentioned them to my friend but she could not see what I saw.

After we made our offering and the priests thumped our foreheads we walked around and came to the area where the goats are sacrificed. The idea of an animal or a human dying for the Divine is abhorrent to me but I take many things in stride in India. If the thought of legless and deformed beggars or slum children pulling on your sleeve for a rupee is too much, then India is not the place for you.

I watched a woman butchering the meat as stray dogs gathered waiting for a morsel of goat to drop. Goat heads with blank staring eyes lined the edge of the sacrificial platform and I looked at the dogs. In my shakti induced high their panting mouths seemed to be smiling. Kalighat is next door to where Mother Theresa tended to the dying whether they were Christian, Hindu, or Muslim, and instead of feelings of revulsion about the decapitated goats, I took in the entire scene and all I felt was pure love. In the Bengali tradition, the goal of the Kali devotee is to become reconciled with death and to learn acceptance of the way that things are. The love that I felt was raw and primal and my heart space filled with the fire of bhakti. I felt as if I were on fire. I felt extraordinarily alive.

All the people who had died next door, all the goats who had given their lives for the Mother, all those dogs who were going to eat. It was my own surrealistic version of Eat Pray Love.

I was filled with joy.

On Mahashivatri we watched the procession of the naga babas to the Ganges and I knew that I had never been to such a joyful event in my life.


devotees of a swami

Our hotel in Haridwar had its own ghat and after the naga babas took their bath on Mahashivaratri I walked down the steps into the Ganges and dunked myself three times. We had already been in Haridwar for five days but I wanted to wait until the day that Shiva married Parvati to really feel the river. I had immediately felt the energy of the river just standing on the terrace on the first day so I knew it would be even more energized after the holy men bathed.

I was right. During my third dunk I stayed underwater a bit longer and I felt electric. I came out and sat on the steps with my feet in the water. Bathing in the river is thought to wash away one’s sins, a death, so to speak (“you will die in India….”) The waters of the Ganges are called amrita, the “nectar of immortality”. Hindus believe that there is nothing as cleansing as the living waters of Ganga Ma. I wanted to sit there all day with the water on my skin. Something was coursing through me and once again all I felt was joy. Our true nature.

As it turned out it was an auspicious day for me because that night I met a swami of the highest order, a man who is the Acharya Mahamandaleshwar of the Juna Akhara.

That morning he had thrown a rose to me from the procession — he stopped his chariot, looked right at me, threw the flower and smiled, and then moved on. At that time I did not know that in the afternoon I would be invited to a special puja that night at his ashram, the oldest one in Haridwar. A mantra teacher friend from Mumbai sent me a text telling me he was staying at an ashram and would I like to come for a special Mahashivaratri puja. He said he would be chanting during the ceremony and maybe I would be interested. I had no idea that he was staying in the ashram of the rose throwing swami, I did not even know the swami’s name. Before I left my friend said, “what if it’s the swami from this morning?” I told her that would be too much of a coincidence — but there are no coincidences, all things happen for a reason.

When the rickshaw arrived at the ashram that night and I saw the picture of the swami who threw the rose, I froze in my seat. I couldn’t believe it. Once again that shakti blast pieced the coconut and all I could do was stare at the billboard with his picture. I sat there for so long that some of the devotees asked me if I was alright. I walked into the ashram grounds and eventually was taken back into the swami’s compound before the start of the puja. Nothing was planned, everything just happened, merely the flow of the experience, the essence of allowing things to unfold. I was told that night that it was my good karma to be there, that I was meant to be there from the moment I caught that rose. I returned every day to the ashram before we left Haridwar.

For whatever reason, maybe it was my jump into the Ganges, but my personal practice and my yoga teaching have changed. I really can’t describe it, but the energetics have changed, even my students say so. I’ve read that when shifts of consciousness occur it changes your DNA.

The new message I received during my recent meditations was that the day I stop teaching here will be the beginning of my Indian life. But not yet. I still have some cooking to do, it will take a few more years. I’m coming to end of my marinating and it’s nice to begin to see what the feast is going to look like. Or not. That’s OK, too. Kali is said to not give what is expected. It is said that perhaps it is her refusal to do so that enables her devotees to reflect on dimensions of themselves and of reality that go beyond the material world.

Everything with a grain of salt. All things happen when they are ready to happen. They always have.


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from sadhus to zebras, part 1

by L. Valdez Karl

Shiva was certainly testing me as I made my way to India this time, and as I later found out, also as I made my way to Africa. It literally took 80 hours for my feet to hit the ground in Chennai.

Due to plane problems, instead of flying American to Brussels, then Jet Airways (an Indian airline that partners with American) to Chennai, I was put on the direct flight from Chicago to Delhi. Seventeen hours later I landed in cold, smoggy, polluted Delhi and spent the next 14 hours in the airport because of more airline problems — nothing was flying out of Delhi because of the fog/smog.

I left Wednesday night and I was still sitting in Delhi on Friday morning. They finally put us on the plane to Chennai and then we sat. And sat. And sat. For about four hours. I finally made it to Chennai around 3 p.m. Friday afternoon instead of 12:05 a.m. Friday morning as originally scheduled. But at least I made it, bags and all. It could have been worse.

I spent 6 weeks in India, flying from south India to Kolkata in the northeast, taking a train to the state of Orissa (get out your map), flying back to Delhi for a few days before taking the train to Haridwar in the foothills of the Himalayas for the Kumbh Mela (where I would be living in an ashram right now if I did not have to teach in Africa), training it back to Delhi, then flying to Qatar. Or so I thought.

I crossed the Persian Gulf twice in one day. I was in two Middle Eastern countries on two Middle Eastern airlines in one day. Not by choice I assure you. Shiva was testing me yet again.

I was supposed to leave Delhi for Nairobi at 4 am. Ah, yes….that lovely Delhi airport again where I now know the international AND the domestic terminals intimately. For some reason the Qatar flight did not leave on time and by the time we got to Doha, the Nairobi flight had closed its doors.

Thank goodness I had decided to upgrade to business class (solely for the extra baggage allowance — you really think I was not going to buy anything in India?!?) because if I had been in economy and insisted that they get me to Nairobi by any means necessary THAT DAY, Qatar Air would not have treated me as well as they did.

OK, forget that. I completely lost it when they said the Nairobi flight had closed its doors. Had I not had the airline hassles I experienced getting to Delhi six weeks previously, I probably would not have lost it like I did. As my meltdown was being recorded (I found out later there was a camera behind the desk), Qatar personnel got me on an Emirates flight to Dubai and Dubai to Nairobi. Same day. Allah be praised.

Instead of arriving at the Nairobi hotel at around 2 p.m. as I had originally planned, I arrived at the hotel around 9 p.m., just in time to take a hot bath, sleep, and leave less than 12 hours later for a flight to Zanzibar. The room cost me $190 for less than 12 hours. I should have slept at the Nairobi airport, at least they have free wi-fi.

But I had my bags. They weren’t flying over the Persian Gulf somewhere. It could have been worse.

I spent 5 nights off the grid in Zanzibar….

…where I showed some children some asanas one day and they were damn good.

I watched these kids play with pull toy “cars” made out of plastic bottles, using the caps as wheels. They were happy and laughing. I thought about what children their ages back home play with and what they throw away. The garbage of an American child is the toy of a child in Africa or India.

There is nothing on this beach except for a small hotels. No phones. No TVs. No internet. No restaurants to speak of, at least not the type that westerners are used to. Nothing.

Right before I arrived, Zanzibar had just gotten electrical service again after three months. In fact, in the middle of the late afternoon and late at night, the hotel shut off the electricity.

Every day I watched these kids play with plastic bottles or driftwood or using any type of ball as a soccer ball. They were supposed to be in school but they weren’t. The local school was supposed to have electricity, but it didn’t.

The filmmaker Rick Ray was staying at my hotel and we had dinner one night. He had been in Rwanda filming some survivors of the Rwandan genocide, bearing witness to their stories. He told me the story of a young woman who had been a girl the day her people were put inside a church and massacred. He told me that blood is still on the walls and skulls are still on the floor as a memorial. He told me that it is almost impossible to wrap the mind around stories that are so horrific.

She survived for three days by hiding underneath the bodies of her parents. She escaped, hiding from the murderers who were still killing and raping her village, and she made her way to a swamp where she found her sister. They lived in the swamp for three months surviving on algae and anything else that was edible, finally making their way to a refugee camp.

Ray told me that she told him she forgave the people who changed her life forever. She will never forget, but she forgave. She is happy because what other choice is there? I thought about a question that I heard the Dalai Lama once ask: in a country that has everything compared to many, if not most, parts of the world, why are so many Americans unhappy? He did not understand this. Neither do I. Not when I’ve seen children in India and Africa play with garbage — and laugh while they are playing with it.

When I was in Arusha I saw them bringing the Rwandans back to jail after their day in court at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The tribunal has jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The United Nations car sped through traffic and my friend told me that the trials have been going on for almost 15 years.

Rick Ray told me that the Rwandans who took part in the genocide are put in front of their village and the people can choose to forgive them for their atrocities.

Sometimes the people who have nothing, have everything.


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