The Complete Yoga Community

Yogic Lessons come in all guises

Just over a decade of living in Belgium has proven a challenging adjustment.  As a South African, detachment from my South African identity, my home, language, culture, family and entire sense of self has been a pain staking evolution. Time and copious amounts of yoga have finally led me to the place of living in the present moment, not one foot in Johannesburg, and the other precariously balanced in a lop-sided samastihi in Antwerp. The fact of this detachment revealed itself recently in a dream. In it I witnessed with intense clarity a plane crash, (of a plane I was due to be on) with a dramatic nosedive of the flight into an African veld. After a few minutes, salt and vinegar chips began to fall from the sky. It should be mentioned that for me salt and vinegar chips represent my connection to home with every flight back from South Africa containing a good stock of them. Belgian’s can make some seriously good chocolate but chips remains the domain of Simba and I gauged through this symbolism that the crash represented the severing of my attachment, with the chips symbolizing past ties to my identity. Or so I thought.

I was recently given an opportunity (amidst a plethora of abundant opportunities) to follow a yoga workshop with a master teacher. The dates did not suit me as it coincided with my birthday, the location required a plane trip, and the choice to leave my husband and two children on this auspicious celebratory day seemed justified in the face of what I had hoped would be exceptional learning. So off I went, punctual, excited and ready for another delicious yoga immersion.

The course was simply put, catastrophic. It was, as I never believed possible a “bad” yoga experience. The workshop was like a yoga boot camp, except without the yoga. It was gruesomely physical, excruciatingly painful, and not once ounce of my body would accept the barrage of abuse I was seemingly imposing on it. And that was just the practice. The philosophy felt vacuous, words without content, intent sans authenticity. All of me screamed out, Namastgo and I left the (12 hour) workshop enraged and in pain.

I had a choice to make. Stay one more day and face the resistance: what resists, persists had been the credo for the workshop, or go home, celebrate the remains of my birthday with the family and indulge in a beautiful celebration, that involved unconditional love and with some luck, gifts. My hearts gave me a clear directive, which I followed and there I found myself, aboard an airplane, on my 37^th birthday on my way home to my husband, two children and Guru, our beloved Shitzu.

When the turbulence started, my instinctive response was fear. Here I found myself mid (turbulent) air, alone, having made a clear choice of yoga over family. That it was my birthday made my impending death all the more poetic. Suddenly I looked down at my feet, where I noticed the numerous packets of salt and vinegar chips I had bought in London. My dream rushed back to me as a clear portend. The plane was facing south in what felt like a rather steep sirsasana, nose down, tail up with yelps from fellow passengers intensifying the already palpable anxiety. I looked ahead of me at the exit sign facing down, reading it as some implicit message of my own imminent exit and then it happened: the shift from being the chaos to witnessing it. There was nowhere to turn but to Source. I tried to call out God’s name in the numerous ways my lifetime’s conditioning had taught me: Ram, OM Namah Shivaya, OM Namo Narayanaya, Adonai and so on and finally settled on God. Not as in God help me but as in I am God. And I evoked this Divine, very personal mantra amidst the turmoil.

I suddenly saw with epiphanic clarity that if I am to die, it would be in complete perfection. That my husband would lose his life partner and my children left without a mother, seemingly unthinkable, was too in perfection and a part of their life’s lesson. I felt deeply that the Universe and Divine Mother would care for, protect and love them unconditionally. I knew with certainty that I was doing all that I needed to in order to realize my dharma and that even with ambitions as yet unfulfilled, all that I was at that moment was all that I needed to be. I understood that no death is untimely and to leave the cloak of this physical form now was not tragic, it just was. That the name of God that I called to evoke peace was really a personal acknowledgement of the Self which encompassed All as One.

Of course, I lived to tell the tale. And it was this extraordinarily beautiful celebration of love and life and utter absorption in the joys of maya (illusion), being in the form, being a wife, a mother, a teacher, a yogini and none of the above: identity within the illusion offering a mirrored reflection of non-identification of Self, all projected against the backdrop of hridayakasha (the spiritual heart centre.) And so I was grateful not for lessons I had ventured out to learn, but for the contrast that experience enabled as a backdrop against which Light would be made apparent. I was really grateful too to be able to hold the people, and dog I love for a little while longer.

By Nicki Forman Levitan