People

Something Something Kaur

by ELISE MILLER

The other day, I entered the home of a husband and wife who follow the teachings of Harbhajan Singh Yogi, the spiritual teacher known for introducing Kundalini Yoga to Westerners in 1969 and starting 3HO (Happy-Healthy-Holy Organization).

Until that Thursday morning, all the yoga classes I'd been to were held in large studios with wooden floors, like Om in Manhattan, Park Slope Yoga and Area in Brooklyn, vying for sticky-mat space among my thirty or forty fellow yogis, most of whom were supple hotties intimidating me with every curve of their sinewy bods.

This Kundalini class was in someone's home, a grand pre-war barrel-front brownstone painted white. I later learned that it was my first visit to an actual ashram, "a home where yoga is lived and taught".

Outside the French doors that led to the living room/studio in the front of the house was a narrow hallway of sanded parquet and two austere bedrooms. I peeked. Everything in the house, at least on the first floor, was done up in white and natural materials  -  wood, shells, gauzy curtains. Cotton matelasse coverlets lined the studio floor. Patchwork duvets topped the beds in the rooms I peered into when I went to go pee.

In the bathroom, a narrow medicine cabinet with a bleached wooden door concealed row upon row of homeopathic remedies in tiny dropper bottles. Even the hand towels looked organic. I felt restful immediately, as if I'd entered a day spa, or an alternate reality, which made my heart sing, since that was exactly what I thought I was looking for: a break from my usual reality  -  the one that leaves me feeling angry, drained and inferior on a daily basis. Maybe I wasn't looking for Truth after all, but Fantasy.

My instructor was not a tank-top wearing young lithe dancer girl with bleached-blond baby bangs and Celtic tattoos, like the instructors I had grown accustomed to here in NYC. This one was my mother's age. Okay, a little younger. She had a spiritual name. We can call her "Something Something Kaur". Something Something Kaur was rounded and Caucasian, in a white turban with a pale blue brooch attached, and long flowing robes of white. She also sported sleek designer eyeglasses that may or may not have said Prada along the gold mirrored arms.

Wandering around the house was my instructor's husband, Something Something Singh Khalsa. He was also decked out in white, with a long gray beard.

They had a dog too, a huge majestic collie named Sashimi or something spiritual-sounding. I could imagine the stares these people got when they took the dog for a walk. The ashram was like a fairytale land, and as weird and foreign as it looked to me, I appreciated its lovely rebelliousness against the mainstream way most of us dress ourselves and our homes. I could almost hear my mind creaking open.

Aside from the flowing robes of white, I was down with it. Had I been a few months (or weeks) younger, I would have walked out the door laughing after class at how silly it all seemed, or I would have run out screaming, ranting about how, well, how silly it all seemed. I mean, white turbans? It's easy to make fun of that. But I felt like I had reached a point in my life where I was desperate.

Desperate because this couldn't be it. I didn't want to constantly be circling my life, this precious gift of life, from victimhood to rage to shame to self-loathing to escapism to devastation and around again. I mean, I have my good days. I have my good stretches of a few months. But invariably I find myself working up a good cry in the bathroom (like some favorite memoirists of mine.)

And in my wake-up call of desperation, white turbaned yogis could no longer deter me. I decided to let this teacher into my heart, because quite frankly, I felt like I'd run out of alternatives. I mean, I haven't tried Prozac, but I don't want to either. Not that it doesn't work for some people, and maybe I'll venture on that road one day, but until then ...

The strangest of our exercises was when Something Something Kaur had us stand with our knees bent, as if we were sitting in a chair, with our hands held up in gyan mudra (the OK sign). She told us then to dance. And we did, all three of us attending class. We danced in our pose back and forth and in circles, with our butts sticking out like improv students trying to get a laugh from the audience. I felt like a clown, but I couldn't refuse to participate. That wouldn't be very open-minded. So I danced and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the mantle, beaming, possibly like an enlightened being, or maybe like an idiot.

In our final relaxation, lying on the floor in corpse pose, I had a vision. Like those teacher-guided visualizations you do in some acting classes, where the teacher has you imagine yourself under the sea finding a treasure chest as your body is bathed in gold liquid light, I somehow guided myself on my own adventure.

The CD lulling us was "Anand Bliss", by Snatam Kaur, one of the hottest acts in the 3HO.

Soaring and heartfelt, her ethereal voice became my higher self, the guru inside me. I liked this idea. Still, I momentarily flashed on a painful memory that reminded me of my rage, but my guru was there with me and, as the music heightened in its quest to crescend, before my mind's eye unfolded a mountain scene, very cinematic, one of those panoramic craggy and green ranges like you'd see in a Mel Gibson movie about Scottish wars.

On my mountain range, my guru, an enlightened version of me dressed in, you guessed it, flowing white robes, climbed the mountain escorting my rage, personified as a giant hunching ogre dressed in dirty rags the color of dirt. At the top of the mountain, Rage broke down and sobbed like a child and I saw that Rage was nothing more than a scared child. Rage then morphed into a little boy from the 30s, my father, and morphed again into three-year-old me, my bangs crookedly cut by my own hand, in a woolen mini dress, one half red, the other navy blue, bisected with a black line and an anchor at my heart.

38-year-old guru Elise scooped 3-year-old me into her arms, where magically her dress faded into white, the bangs grew out and the two cuddled and danced. Eventually, probably because I was hungry, the two Elises found themselves at a table spread with good things to eat. A tear rolled into my ear.

Soon we were roused to sit up and chant. And afterwards, as if my visualization had come to life, our teacher offered us yogi tea, a mixture of cardamom, cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, fresh ginger and milk.

Now, I'd never been offered tea at yoga class before. Spicy and delicious, I felt like I'd fallen in love. At home, stifling my urges to dance around the apartment, proclaiming my newfound light and loving feelings to Bryan, I tried to prepare yogi tea, but each batch tasted like shittier than the last. But I was determined to get it right.

[Courtesy: Elise Abrams Miller]

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