Jan 14. Hot Babes in Yoga Tights.

My path becomes more moderate every year now.  Though I have been traveling to India almost annually for 15 years now, I never had a Guru experience, lived in an ashram, or subscribed to any specific spiritual pathway.  Robert likes to tell the Swamis:  Kate’s father was a priest and her mother was a nun.  I’m Irish, what can I say?  My parents, whom I respect more than any other, did their time in an organized, group-minded spiritual community.  This resulted in their children, myself and elder brother, to be raised NOT to repeat this experience.  At age 19, when I first landed in a nunnery, a Buddhist village in France, I cried and cried.  If I meant it, meant it at all, this god-questing I had known since age 13, I would stay here and be a Buddhist nun. 

Only I didn’t want to.  I was just starting college, just finding my way through the free-wheeling land of American hippies in the 90s.  We took hand drums into the woods, rolled joints, rolled kegs of beer to bonfires, and sang bhajans.  It required a lot less discipline than ashram life.  I’ve always been attached to making my own schedule.

Soon after the nunnery, I found this yoga path.  A proscribed sequence of asanas that I could sink my teeth into.  The need for a teacher to take me further into the practice brought me back to India, and here I am.  Again and again.  I’ve never questioned that the yoga tradition is a path to god.  One that’s got plenty of texts to explain different ways of getting there, and plenty of practices to change the state of my present experience.  Though I didn’t really know why I was it doing for so many years, I knew I was deeply interested.  It has become downright meaningful, I’ll tell you that.  Anything repeated daily with intention for so many years will take on meaning.  Yet somehow, this yoga path gives me a firm container to work in, while allowing me to make all my own choices and support the discipline in my own way. 

Problem: the yoga scene is getting more and more booby traps all the time.  Mysore presently affords us all of the usual sex, drugs, alcohol, pricey hair products and bad foods one could ask for.  The world of sense-gratification still requires effort and one must keep the mind focused on the goal.  I’m not sure a lot of us here know what the goal is.  Looking back, I sure didn’t in the beginning.  It would seem this is what Sharath keeps reminding us by harping on the Yamas and Niyamas at conference, on duty and the importance of family life.  I feel like he really just wants us to behave ourselves and be gentle people.  The most rudimentary, and yet the most challenging.  If we all just accepted this humble goal, things would be a lot less confusing.  Not only in the Mysore scene, but all over.  Let’s behave ourselves and be good people.  Doesn’t that sound glamorous?  Wouldn’t we rather be hot babes in yoga tights doing advanced shit?

The more years go by, and I find myself coming here again- every time same but different- and seeking the company of ones like my parents and Robert Moses, I am humbled.  It’s the simple stuff that requires the most mental effort.  Somehow I ended up a hot babe in yoga tights by default.  That happens to all the ashtangis.