Having the blissful opportunity to attend an all day Yoga immersion is a true luxury these days. This Saturday, I was able to do just that, getting to experience an "Indian Ashram" only 45 minutes from where I live. This is thanks to the amazing Laurel and Dan Heffner, who have truly been lights in my life. They have reconnected me so deeply to my experience of India and the lessons she is still teaching me.
It was five ethereal hours of chanting, meditation, pranayama, asana, theatre (reenactments that I found surprisingly effective) and spiritual study, focused on Swami Sivananda. I would have gone no matter who we were studying, but the fact that it was Sivananda really made the whole day that much more special. In fact, the whole day felt like constant explosions of serendipity regarding my Yoga lineage and education, seeming to appear in cosmic neon flashes above my head.
I first started doing Yoga when I was 16 years old, when a piano teacher of mine handed me a copy of Lilias Folan's Alive with Yoga on VHS. I ended up practicing with that old tape hundreds of times, watching sweet Lilias in her red striped leotard and thinking to myself that this felt like nothing I had ever experienced.
Soon after, I purchased my first book on Yoga - The Sivananda Companion to Yoga and it became my go to for everything Yogic. I read and reread the text, highlighting, making notes and dog-earing the pages. Many years later, I would go through teacher training at Sri Swami Satchidananda's Ashram in Yogaville, Virginia. I didn't know much about him at the time, but was drawn to the Integral Yoga philosophy and holistic approach to traditional Yoga. It was much later that I found out that Satchidananda had been a disciple of Sivananda's. One of the first serendipitous links of the retreat day was finding out that Lilias Folan also was a disciple of the Sivananda lineage, being taught by Swami Chitananda (Sivananda's direct disciple).
I am used to doing retreats that involve all the elements we were experiencing, but this was my first time really experiencing the reenactment/theatre aspect of traditional Yoga. At first I wasn't sure what to think, but I soon became caught up in the message and in the power of someone channeling an experience instead of just telling about it. The teacher in me connected with this immediately and it reminded me, that as a student, this is a very effective way to teach. Dan made a fantastic Sivananda, both in his spiritedness and his physical appearance, donning the orange robes and shiny head, his dancing and clapping got us all up to join him and joy filled the room.
There were several reenactments, but the one that affected me most was Satchidananda. My teacher. I have had such a journey with him and his role in my spiritual life and it was so strange and almost overwhelming to see him embodied in someone else. While some may say it was just an actor in a wig, I have to admit I felt something stronger when he walked towards the stage in his orange robes. He looked like him, moved like him. Since I have heard the real Swami talk a lot, there was a bit of a difference in the way the actor talked, but it didn't take away from the retelling of the speech he gave at Woodstock. I have heard of this event, even taught students about the speech probably a few hundred times. But I never got it like I did this day, seeing this Satchidananda in front of me, hearing the speech retold in this cadence, imagining the hippies that he got off drugs and onto Yoga, pranayama, meditation. And then the led minute of silence. I imagined how powerfully that silence must have swept across the chaotic youth in the crowds.
Afterwards, I couldn't stop thinking about how people say that if you're drawn to something strongly, it's usually because it's familiar and you were already doing this in another life. I look back to how I started with Yoga at such an early age and have never stopped, how my practice has just continuously grown deeper and wider and fuller and how I have complete faith that this will keep happening for the rest of my life. I just can't get enough of it - it is a true practice with so much to always learn anew. I think of how I have never had any desire to do any drugs or to drink alcohol and have been sober my entire life, yet have been surrounded by many close friends and loved ones who have/do. I think of my obsession with the sixties all through my childhood and teenage years and how I was the weirdo who listened to The Doors and Creedence ("our Dads' music") while my other friends listened to Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston. Is there something to this? Normally it would sound kind of kooky, but in this meditative space, in this deeper awareness, it all started to make sense to me.
Beautiful gifts kept coming throughout the day, probably the most profound to me was the gift of Radha's diary. The excerpts of Sivanananda's western disciple were my favorite part of the retreat by far. I could relate to her so closely, being a western woman who traveled to India and wrote about it too. A woman who doubted herself and tries her best to live this practice. I loved her authentic voice and realness so much that I can't wait to order this diary for myself and to read all of it!
Why should we only read the Gita, the words of Jesus or the Sutras? Why not read one woman's diary of an authentic pilgrimage, both inner and outer? To me, a story like this is just as inspiring.
I am so grateful to have the opportunity to "plug in" to Yoga retreats a few times throughout the year, but this one really took the cake for me. It was everything I had hoped for and more and resonated with me on a thousand layers. I went in that morning feeling like a tired, worn out little bud and left feeling like an opened lotus, clear and connected. To be able to practice with others who feel the same way about Yoga as I do and to learn from teachers like Laurel is such a powerful gift.
"Do real sadhana, my children. Do real sadhana." - Sivananda
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