I have recently discovered an Ashram down the street from my house. I’ve known it was there for many months. I would drive by it half-noticing diminutive people dressed in white with mushrooming head wraps, progressing slowly toward the entrance. Last week was the first time that I set foot inside the building. I was in hot, single-minded pursuit of some relief of my deep, constant, reverent humanity. Bearing witness to what life plays out and understanding that the judgment I place on anyone is a mirror into my own sickness is disturbing and exhausting. Especially lately. However provocative and lucid the understanding, it sets off a cacophony of voices in my mind, each with an extreme and conflicting opinion, some positive, some negative, none neutral.
So into the Ashram I went to take a yoga class. The narrow hallway within the entrance was littered with shoes. To my left, a lounge area with couches was filled with bare-footed people, most of them with covered heads. I removed my shoes and joined them, approaching the desk in front of the next door that opened to the carpeted, vaulted studio where many people were already finding their space on the floor. I signed up for the class and proceeded to the studio, which was crowded and dim and palpably alive with energy in its purest form. Bodies were bending and folding, warming up. I might have been the only one in the room without something covering my head, which made me feel naked and conspicuous. There was a temptation to leave, but I stayed, sensing the importance of what was about to happen.
The teacher was a tall, older man with god-like eyes staring out from between a very long, gray beard and a perfectly constructed, authoritative headdress. He spoke casually and with slang, contrasting the seriousness of his appearance. He told us that it is our birth-right to be happy and that the way to elevate to enlightenment is to lighten up. Right away, I felt lighter. Just his voice and the substance of what he said was enough to lift some of the heaviness from me. The yoga is Kundalini and unlike any I have ever practiced. It’s more about meditation and breathing than it is about moving and posing the body.
The whole thing was conducted with my eyes closed. There was chanting and breathing and holding the breath. Whether sitting, standing, or lying down — with or without the use of my limbs — I gained nearly effortless access to a meditation deeper than I have ever experienced. I gained access to a neutral mind, a neutral space inside, unburdened and always unflinchingly happy. The host. I was communing with the host. It lasted an hour and a half.
When it was over and I left the Ashram, the whole world had changed. The concrete was a playful shade of gray, not so serious and shadowed as it had been before. The sky was bigger, the air more abundant, the space around me wider, or I was smaller, taking up less of it and moving through it slower like the people in white. By smallness I don’t mean diminished, but much, much greater. As though the solid dimensions of my body were smaller while the space inside me had grown infinite.
I had been a swollen cloud of thoughts and feelings — an inflated pain body squeezing and ballooning around me as I went through my day. The Ashram poked a hole in it and it disappeared without fanfare. My gift to take with me back into my life was a new ability and alacrity to concentrate from a neutral mind. To arrive at each moment with the unbuffered smallness of the true self.
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