No Sutras Here

I’m typing this from a guest bedroom in Bangalore. I’ve been in India for just over a week now, but it feels oddly like a month. And while I’ve seen so many things it also feels like I’ve seen nothing.

Many people I know are going on trips to India soon or are on them now – many of the yoga people. There itineraries include places like Goa and Kerala, maybe Auroville, they are having “treatments” and digging into a world of beauty and philosophy, of movement and balance.

I’ve been digging into a world of contradictions. I wonder what of this they see, if the yoga trips are a whitewashed version of a complex country that idealize a place, a history, a culture and even a philosophy with a rich tradition – and with modern problems and contradictions that can be both overwhelming and heartrending.

When I arrived in Delhi every sense I had was assaulted. The traffic, the two wheeled vehicles weaving in and out, entire families on motorcycles, the stew of humidity and garbage rising from the earth, the ambling cows on the roadsides and throughout the city serving in some way as garbage collectors feasting on never diminishing piles, the shacks and shanties stretching from the road back further than I know, “housing” humans living no better than the cows on the road and with the same level of sanitation.

A friend is on a month-long yoga trip in the south and from one of her social media posts they had a day of “karma yoga” during which they planted and worked in some sort of ecofriendly community garden, a paradise of sorts.

Is this really karma yoga or just, frankly, a nice way to spend a day? And this isn’t against her at all, the rampant, raging poverty and chaos made me think though about these yoga experiences and what karma yoga really could look like in a place like India.

My experience of India so far has been quite different than what I imagine they are experiencing – and I’d like to do their trip, after all i just finished yoga teacher training 6 or 7 months ago myself. As I sit in Bangalore this morning, feeling slightly hemmed in by my partner’s relatives here – who are wonderful people, but also whose ideas of what to see and do are vastly different from my own – I’m desperately wishing I’d somehow taken more control and booked a trip or a tour to Mysore today. For example.

On our trip, we’ve seen amazing things and in the sanitized social media version of life, you’ll see me and Gokul smiling at the Taj Mahal, climbing a cliff to a temple near Jodphur, whizzing through Old Delhi in an autorickshaw, taking in the grand Islamic structures of Hayumun’s Tomb, exploring the golden, clean functioning fort of Jaiselmer, and grinning for the camera from an ATV in the desert. Now, in Bangalore, I’m experiencing Indian family time before we head to Chennai for more family and southern sightseeing.

My last few days will be in Auroville, one of those sanitized yoga communities, an international cooperative eco-friendly city near the coast in the south, unlikely to be teeming with garbage, poverty or anything of the sort and offering tarot readings, energy healings, vinyasa yoga, cooking classes, and other such activities. I was going to say that it was not part of the contradictions, but its very existence is part of the contradictions that make up India – but if you only see those places, you could remain blissfully ignorant of the complexities of India, knowing somehow that they are out there – maybe – but letting them be an abstraction in your mind.

And to what extent does yoga require you to engage with these things in a real way.

When I came, I’d had a yoga tryout for a teaching position. I was so excited, I thought I’d done well and really felt connected to the studio owner. As I was digging into yoga, the sutras, the philosophy, all of it felt so intrinsically right to guide my path into a community and to help me discover how to co-learn with students, the asana a tool for something deeper.

I saw this opportunity as a potential to heal, my emotions constantly raw from my own teacher training experience which came with good and with bad and which always felt a little like I was an outsider – in fact the studio which had once been my home has since become a place where I feel even a little rejected, like I’m not good enough and like my role in learning is not valid or valued.

I didn’t get the new job. I was supposed to hear my first week in India and I heard nothing. The owner responded to a question I had about a beginning ashtanga series, but never got in touch with updates on the the teaching positions.

At first, I felt gut punched. Why was yoga chewing me up and spitting me out so much, exacerbating my life-long feelings of being an outsider and the sea of emotions that come with feeling disconnected and invisible or visible in ways you’d rather not be.

And as my senses were fully confronted with the contradictions of India, I started to question yoga altogether as I was experiencing it in the US. Was it all just a form of hypocrisy?

I’m back, I’ve come back around, I’ve once again landed on, it’s simply complex. Contradictory. Like India. I’ve reminded myself the practice and the message are distinct from the practitioners and the messengers and that perhaps, at times, I’m listening to the wrong messages. It’s not even the wrong messengers. I’m just hearing them through my own samskaras and not having faith that the path I’m on, whether I understand it or not, is the one I need to be on and that it is up to me to remain open to hearing messages that guide me towards my own oneness with the world and that no matter how disconnected I feel, we are all connected. Period.

But one message this trip has made very clear to me is this: I’ve been doing yoga this entire trip – not asana necessarily, and not receiving lessons in ayurveda while visiting a yoga spiritual center – but in practicing letting go, accepting what the trip has to offer and being in the moment that I am in. (most of the time).

This trip has helped me re-discover that for me, we aren’t biding time on this earth on an individual journey to burn of some karma and follow our dharma, we are a collective, we are all connected and so part of the unity of yoga is to see these people. To see the suffering. To know they are not invisible. That they are also yoga. Community.

I’m still figuring out what I do with that. But my yoga practice for India is to see what needs to be seen. Which isn’t me. I’m not the one who needs to be seen. I need to see.

I need to have faith and to accept without being myopic. Seeing only a portion of the world is really not seeing at all. And accepting things does not mean that part of karma isn’t working towards making things better, towards elevating the whole. At least this is the message I’m currently hearing as I practice having faith amidst disappointments, great beauty, constant learning and complexity.