As part of their religious studies curriculum our oldest will be visiting the Bharatiya Temple in Troy for an upcoming field trip. This has brought on many fond memories of my time teaching yoga at the temple and the time of my life when I aspired toward Hinduism. This is a short documentation of those days that I’m putting together to share with my kids as they move through their own studies.
Yoga has always been a part of my experience. I would like to think that aspects of yoga are inherent within me, within all of us, but it is hard to look at the state of the world and talk such foolishness. Like many my age, I would watch geriatric yoga on early morning Public TV in the 70s. I would try some of the poses but what hooked my undiagnosed ADHD/OCD cocktail of a mind was the breathing. Eventually I applied what I overheard waiting for cartoons to parts of my life.
I began to use breath as a survival technique when the domestic violence in my house was too much too bear. I quickly isolated the dissociative benefits of yoga and was forced to perfect them through trauma. I learned to block the violence out by focusing on my breath. It was truly a lifesaving technique/strategy and one of the sparks that led me to respect and eventually pursue faiths and practices uncommon in my families world.
I was raised in a home whose conflicts were more that physical. My mother’s side of the family were in the throws of conversion to born again evangelical christianity that was on the rise in what would become Regan’s America. My father’s side hell bent on economic success and capitalism, the more exploitive and profitable the better. Unable to identify with either side I developed an analysis and eventually strategies of resistance that included anything labeled taboo in the dominant household systems.
There is a great deal of time and lived experience between these initial connections to the breath in my youth and my decision to kneel before another man, a round and brown skinned man, and sincerely adore his feet. It should also be noted that my experience with yoga during this time was severed from Hinduism entirely. Other than the then radical acceptance of a connection between body and mind, this western yoga was neutered.
I consider that my early onset skills with dissociation, while necessary to my survival also served to disconnect me from not only the reality of the situation, but from any analysis. While providing an out for me, it did not absolve my mind from taking it all in and needing to work it all out. Unfortunately, I did so through my own failed relationships.
Becoming a devotee
Pilgrimage to Mysore
Leaving to community