Touched by God
I had an interesting conversation with Chandru yesterday. Chandru is Guruji’s photographer. He also manages the bookstore, where he sells dvds of Iyengar classes and intensives, cds of classes, and photographs of the family, in addition to books written by the Iyengars. Chandru is about 60. He has traveled quite a bit, as he goes to the conventions with Guruji and Geeta, and has a son in Australia. He has worked at the Institute for 33 years and says that he and Patricia Walden “grew up together.” He is nice looking man who wears western clothes, like a dark polo shirt, Dockers, and reading glasses, carries a western style brief case, and an i-phone. He can also be seen in blue bloomers and a sleeveless undershirt in Geeta’s class.
I was thanking Chandru for being so kind to us. “It’s just part of my job,” he said. I explained to him that other people do their job around the institute also, but not with the kindness he offered. “You soften the hard edges of this place,” I told him. “You make the harshness bearable.”
“That is because I put brackets on my time here,” he explained, making the hand gesture of parentheses. “From 9-12, Monday through Saturday, I am here. My wife does not bother me with domestic things.” After that I am home and I don’t even pick up the phone when they call me from here,” he said, waving his finger around to point to the Institute. “Other people, they don’t bracket, and they have more stress.”
He began to talk about how the Iyengars are special people, different from you and me. He compared them to a few famous Indian singers, dancers, musicians. He patted the top of his head and said, “we say that they are ‘touched by God.’” I nodded in agreement. There is no denying that Guruji, Geeta, and Prashant, have unusual knowledge that you cannot find anywhere else in the world.
All of a sudden Chandru got animated. “Think of this. . . Say you or I lose our job, lose our husband or wife, or lose everything. We think about survival. Okay, I can clean something, I can wash something, I can lift with my arms, I can load trucks, I can do something so I can survive.” “Of course,” I nodded, in agreement, thinking about how so many people just beg on the streets, but he or I would find work.
“Guruji wouldn’t do that,” he said. “All these times in the early days when he went to the West, he ate only bread and water, to keep his vegetarian diet. And when he had only 2, 3 students, he did not think of anything else but yoga. He kept on practicing yoga every day. You and I, we think like this: if the electricity goes down and the fans don’t work, then we don’t practice,” he said, waving his hand in dismissal. “We just say, oh, it’s too hot, I’ll do it later. This is not Guruji. Nothing gets in the way of his practice. You know so many times in the practice hall, I am disturbed when the windows are open and the horns are beeping in the streets. It hurts my brain,” he said, furrowing his brow. “But you see Guruji practicing right by the street side. He has been practicing there since the beginning (1975, when the Institute opened), and never does he move over to the other side of the hall. He doesn’t hear any of it. He is so inside, he doesn’t even hear it.”
The main classroom and practice hall at the Institute is on the second floor. One side faces the street. Indian drivers always beep their horns. They beep when they pass a car, a motorcycle, a bicycle, a pedestrian. It’s loud, it’s obnoxious, and often seems unnecessary. The sidewalks are crumbling, the curbs are high, and so people tend to walk on the street instead. Without clear lane lines, and with vehicles of all widths, from the bicyle to the rickshaw to the SUV, drivers do a complicated dance that requires constant communication; hence the beeping. The windows at the Institute are always open in the summer, while 9 ceiling fans whip around up above. The place is airy and wonderful. Our muscles open and spread to the outdoor temperature and humidity.
I continued with Chandru, “What I don’t get is how Geeta can possibly know and teach such fine and accurate details, how she can feel this in her body, given her practice today.” Geeta today is about 65 years old. She has problems in her hips that make walking difficult. She hobbles from one hip to the other. When she practices, it is mainly restorative, often supine postures, or supported seated postures, with the aid of wooden props, bolsters, and blankets. Yet she knows exactly how to teach us to do headstands, shoulderstands with variations, backbends, you name it. The memory is in her cells from years and years of previous practice. “When Geetaji was very young, a teenager,” Chandru explained, “she used to assist Guruji in the Intensives. He would see a student doing something wrong, and he would point to Geetaji and say, ‘Show them how they do.’ Geetaji would do the pose wrong, just like they did, so they could see.” Immediately I understood: she had taken the students’ pains into her body for their benefit. Now she suffered the consequences. No wonder she could speak so assuredly about what did and did not invite pain and problems. She knew from her own experiences.
Senior teachers from all over the world look to Geetaji for guidance and teaching, because she is so brilliant, sensitive, and penetrating. She will often refer to and credit her father; for example, at the Las Vegas convention, when she lectured on the Pancha Koshas (five layers of human existence) she said, “Guruji has mastered this in his practice. He is the only one out there who has mastered this. You go to any other yoga teacher, you will not find they have experienced and understood this. Guruji is the only one in the world who knows this.” She added, humbly, “I will try to explain this subject, but Guruji is really the only one who knows.”
At other times, she will say, “Don’t think that because Guruji is a man he doesn’t understand the woman’s body. He knows. All these things we know about menstruation and woman come from him.” She doesn’t fawn unnecessarily to her father. But when she needs to show something in a posture, she does not hesitate to point to one of the hundreds of 8×10 photos of her father in asana on the walls.
And yet, Geeta is a legend in her own right. Her knowledge is unequalled as is her ability to covey it. And this is why it is so maddening when in the U.S., you refer a student to Geeta’s work or writings, and the student says something about her being so fat or disabled. They’ve never met her; but they have seen her pictured on the cover of Gem for Women, seated for pranayama. They have heard that she does mainly restorative practices. “If I do Iyengar yoga, will I get fat like her?” “Why should I follow her? I can do more than she can,” they think. Those who have had the privilege to be in her classes are amazed by her brilliance and keen powers of observation. She sees you wherever you are, even if you are one of 130 students. She feels what is happening in your body, and corrects you from across the room. She reads (and responds to) what you are thinking in your mind during pranayama.
The years of “unbracketed” commitment to the subject of yoga, her father, and the Institute, have taken a toll. She is tired. Her body pains. At the beginning of every month, a new group of brazen westerners like me come, not knowing the rules, maybe not comprehending the accent, wanting attention. She teaches five classes a week and supervises the medical classes. She is the director of the Institute. She is a doctor of Ayurvedic medicine. She gets stressed. Her body pains. She shouts. Sometimes it’s too much for her. She dreams of retirement.
We don’t know what will become of the Institute once Geeta retires. The senior teachers from all over the world are making their way here, not just once a year for a month now, but twice a year, or a 2 or 3 months at a time. We are all trying to get what we can from the Iyengars while they are alive and well. As Chandru says, they are not like us. They are “touched by God.”
