March 22- 3000 Years of Snot, Stool, Sex, and Death

My doctor Ramdas at Vaidygrama said a few very profound things this time.  One of these:

“So,” he sits back in his chair, peering over the glasses, “what is the plan?”  Ooh. He’s been working with westerners.  I blink, taken aback.  This is not the usual line of questioning and I suddenly just want to cry.  Fuck the plan.  Plans make me crazy and I obsess over them.  I want to kill them all. 

“You know Charaka?” he asks.  I nod.  Charaka is the name of the body of textual knowledge of Ayurveda.  It has been around maybe 3000 years, 7 fat volumes covering all manner of disease and treatment.  I think of it as 3000 years of human trial and error, recorded.  3000 years of snot, stool, sex, and death.

“Those people were all travelers,” he says, closing his eyes as he speaks.  I feel he knows he’s about to school me and he is a little bit shy in it.  “All that knowledge was gained by traveling.  Charaka were a nomadic people.  Charaka went everywhere and saw so many things.  This is a life of learning.  You don’t have to be attached to this house place.  You can be free in your self.”

Not surprisingly, earlier that day I was lying on the day bed outside my room. Contemplating, no, more like berating myself for not reading more texts on this trip.  And bam, he says it.  Just what I came to see on the day bed (as if I haven’t seen it so many times already- but wouldn’t our culture pat me on the back if I just went to MIT instead?) my truth is that I learn by being, or about being.   I’m being, ok?  That’s what I’m up to.

There I sit, exposed beside the dear old Dr Ramdas in all his sweetness.  He pierces me quickly by seeing me through to the quick, and saying it like it is.  Now, that’s Ayurveda. 

I came all that way for this man to tell me I’m ok.  Travel on.

Being “free in myself” is the state of mind the yoga is encouraging.  Believing that this life down here on the ground is the end-all: not free.  Deluded.  And I’ll tell you this is why I have, historically, kept moving.  Fear of indentifying with a life situation.  It was fear, all this time it was fear. 

In the past few years, exhausted and confused, I began to release the fear.  I began to contemplate house-holding and life situations of a more “permanent” kind.  And I feel safe in it, now, because the yoga will keep on kicking my ass if I go astray.  I don’t see my self going in one way or the other at this time, and I don’t think it matters.  Neither lifestyle is more or less “free.”  Becoming skillful with the practice, I can take smaller bites.  Move along at a modest pace.  Understand the mind’s hang-ups and let them dissolve in their own time.  Understand some of them may haunt me from the causal regions until the next go-around, and this doesn’t make me a bad person.  Push the wheel, gently, persistently.  Observe.  Learn.  Like Charaka.