Lotus feet

photo by Agathe Padovani

It’s easy for the day-to-day to slip from ritual to routine. You lose sight of the bigger picture, forget to zoom in and out, gross to subtle. At the core, yoga, and service work, are a practice of love. It takes hard work to surrender to the vulnerability of this truth. Practice, teaching, devotion to hospitality – they all work the energy body. The Gita says, śraddhā – faith – “is where one places one’s heart.”

I had started to write this as I was planning to return to India this February, for the first time in about five years. Going back to charge up at the source. (India is an origin country for coffee too.) I’ve had to fight for it, cracking open space, plowing through fear and resistance, deep grooves of attachment and aversion. Sometimes you have to climb a thousand dusty steps and elbow your way through the crowds to receive the blessings.

As anyone who does hospitality work thoughtfully knows, this work is mind-control, holding space a continual refinement of infinitely subtle awareness, an unraveling of layers and patterns of conditioning. If it is to be sustainable, it needs support. Tools need sharpening.

I went last week back to where it began for me, to convene with teachers, as students, bright eyes and open hearts. Guruji, our teacher – our teachers’ teacher – came from India to gather us around him. He died, suddenly, a bolt of lightning to the heart, in our midst, in the mountains, on a beautiful fall day, blue sky and crisp forest air.

The normally subtle conduits that flow between our hearts were torn wide open this past week. We held each other in a bounded, sacred space of healing and true collective self-practice that was almost too powerful for my heart to hold. Yoga only exists in relationship. Community is there. I’m so, so grateful, and I have so much love for you all.

Each of us has a story. I had been getting up at 3:30 to make chai for the Boss – his last chai. Then for the group, around 100 people, when we came together the morning after his passing. It’s never felt more like an offering, like true service, an act of devotion. Chai and coffee also only exist in relationship.

I was with him when he passed. I had been carrying his backpack up the mountain. We look for symbols everywhere, we seek meaning and metaphor in the small flickers of quotidian light. As Angela Jamison has said, what appears to be magic may just be observation subtle beyond comprehension.

The space that we held this past week was ineffable and sublime. This is how we charge up now – from each other, collectively. Maybe it always was.

To the senior teachers and leaders of our community who planted their feet and held this container of love and tears and practice: truly, deeply, thank you so much. To John, our hidden mango: where would we be today without you?

I’m inspired to keep doing this work. We are tending – tenderly – a fierce little pilot light of radical intention. From one flame, many candles are lit. Sharathji burned brilliantly, and we all carry the same flame in our hearts. I reckon there are not a lot of true masters left on this Earth. What an unfathomable blessing to have been able to sit at his lotus toe-socks for a brief sliver of time.

There was so much to learn. There still is.

Oṃ vande gurūṇāṃ caraṇāravinde