In my life I count among my greatest blessings my early ill health,
poverty, lack of education, and the harshness of my guru. Without
these deprivations, I might never have held on so faithfully to yoga.
When everything else is stripped away, the essential is revealed.
Of course, when you are young, it is particularly difficult to know
what to hold on to and to have the determination and perseverance to
do so. As a struggling youth in Pune, I clung to my yoga practice. As I
have said, society as a whole thought anyone who wanted to make a
career as a yoga teacher was mad as well as a good for nothing. The
climate of opinion was that it was acceptable to become a priest or a
renunciate, but yoga as a profession was beyond the pale. An even
greater source of pain was my family's disapproval and ostracism. For
example, coming from an ultra-orthodox background, I naturally had
a shendi, the long tuft or lock of hair from the crown of the shaven
head. In modern, westernized Pune, this was utterly scorned. My class
of college students, all so strong and fit and bright, teased and ridiculed
me mercilessly. Eventually I shaved my shendi off and adopted a
modern haircut. This brought the wrath of my family down on me.
They would not eat with me or allow me in their kitchens.
Hindus are also traditionally forbidden to cross the sea. After my
first teaching trip to England in 1954, I stopped in Bangalore to pay
my respects to my maternal uncle. He refused to even let me in the
house. Is it any wonder I developed a defensive shield of haughtiness
as a young man? Time has mellowed me, but in my youth haughtiness
was the only way I knew to preserve myself in what seemed a hostile
world. Yet this hostility also motivated me to become enduringly
faithful to yoga.
Everyone sometimes finds themselves in the awful dilemma when
every course of action or behavior seems to be wrong. Arjuna, in
chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita is on the horns of such a dilemma. 'Ic1
do nothing is an action too, with inevitable consequences, and so that
is not a way to escape pain and suffe ring either. With Krishna's lwlp,
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