Episode Transcript
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Welcome to the mushrooms, apprentice. Today's guest is Chandini Rodriguez. As the eldest daughter of Gurani Anjali, founder of yoga Anand Ashram in Long Island, Chandini was raised in Yoga. She teaches classical yoga based on the yoga sutras of Patanjali and the language of Samkhya. Chandini writes, quote, yoga is a path of deep clarity and intention by which one lives life fully aware of the movement of experieNce, end quote. Well, that is a beautiful way to start, Chandani, so welcome. I'm so happy you're here.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Well, thank you for having me. Thank you, shOna. So nice. So nice to be here.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, the irony is that I think I've done yoga once or twice in my life. And I mean, I know so many people who love it so much, and we have this western expression of yoga. And you were raised in yoga by a very interesting mother, and I want to get into your background, but before that, I want to hear from you. What is yoGa?
[00:01:41] Speaker B: That is a loaded question.
Yoga, it depends on the person and it depends on their intention.
If someone wants to do yoga in the western world, specifically here in the states, they go take a yoga class with the intention mostly to feel better and to be healthy. And that is yoga.
If one wants peace of mind and one wants to sit ANd meditate, that's yoGa.
But back, if I take you back to ancient India and the area and the desire of the people then was to find out everything about our experience, how our bodies work, how our minds work, and how to relieve ourselves of the discomfort, which is called suffering, classically dukkha, of our existence.
So that is the thrust of classical yoga. And what has happened in the west and through, you know, popularization of all the different yogis coming from India is that certain things resonated with us and the peoples of the world, especially seeing the physical nature or the postures known as asanas or asanas, most people saw that and just assumed that that was yoga. And that is an entry point that the physical realm is very apparent to everyone.
And when you do postural yoga and our common, our everyday yoga that is being practiced in the spas and the gyms is considered modern postural yoga.
And when you take a yoga class such as this, at the end of the class, you feel relaxed. It is a wonderful feeling. It is a body centered feeling. But when you leave class and you walk out into the street, into YOur CaR, into circumstance of your daily life, that experience fades and you're faced with circumstance, but you still, there's a part of you that remembers that, remembers that little, that peace. And what I'm seeing is that there is a desire that is happening slowly in the yoga community now.
They're saying a return to the roots of yoga, return to the heart of yoga.
But what is that heart that is precious, that heart.
Now my mom would say that we are all doing yoga already.
Everyone is in yoga. And the word yoga means to yoke or union.
And we as westerners think that we're going to yoke us with something external. That's the common thing. We're going to take two things and put them together. And that is not what she meant.
She said, this union is occurring in circumstance all the time in our experience and experience. The movement of experience is our life moving.
That is yoga. Yoga is occurring all the time.
So what is united in our experience?
This is the really interesting thing.
I found that when I started really studying yoga, that I was deeply entrenched in thinking I was a person. I'm Chandini, I do this, I do that. I was so convinced that if I could take my head off my shoulders and not do anything with my body, that that was really who I was. I'm a thinking person.
That is who I am.
And I was directed gently to watch my feelings, watch the body, watch the movement of experience.
When an experience manifests in front of you, we go toward it, we do whatever we're going to do. And then there's a reaction that we. That's our gift, basically, we're giving ourselves a gift there. So we have an experience. And a lot of times those experiences are repetitive and a source of discomfort. And our thinking mind just goes in a circle, goes in a circular pattern, because we do not have the tools to watch this.
So, to answer your question, yoga is many, many things to different people, depending on their intention. But classical yoga is to relieve the three types of suffering. The first suffering, or the inescapable sickness, old age and death. Every sentient being goes through that. This is not what we're talking about. We're talking about ease of understanding that, yes.
The other one is things that occur that are outside our realm of control, such as a tree falls, there's a hurricane. These are considered acts of God in the insurance industry. This is beyond our control. What is within our control or within our awareness, if we are being mindful, is the patterns of mind, the patterns of action and reaction, and the ability for us, through the discipline of yoga, to unhook that action and reaction that is cyclical through our total intention desire and practice, but you must have a very strong desire.
And your intention, your focus of your intention needs to be laser like.
Did I answer that?
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yes, that last part really. I mean, the whole thing spoke to me. But that last part almost caught me off guard because I've been studying law for a number of years, and I was just having a conversation with a friend yesterday about how to get out of the kind of quote unquote matrix, which is really the whole system we are in. And there's a line in the Bible that says, come out of her, my people, meaning come out of Babylon. We call it the matrix now.
But to do that, it's pretty much exactly like what you were saying. I mean, you have to prepared to do things very, very differently and also think very differently in order to have that very different, and I would say illuminating and freeing experience. Because what I gather from yoga is that it frees you in many ways. Would you agree?
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
The desire is to have a release from this repetitive wheel that we're on. And this wheel is called the wheel of samsara. It just continues eternally. There is no end.
But we can watch it, and we can, when we are established in yoga, okay. When we are established, we have a full awareness of it through our mind. Seeing that nature of experience clearly, being able to see the movement of our life while being in our life and simultaneously being a little bit detached, being able to see what's going on, having a perspective detached is a little hard.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Would you say it's the same as sort of be. Be in the world but not of it?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Absolutely. That was one of my mother's favorite sayings.
She would quote that, and she would say, be 100% attached. Be 100% detached.
But she meant that every single second, every single breath, your mindfulness is remembering the word mindful. To be mindful is smirkdi. And that's the sanskrit word. And what the root of that word means is remembrance.
So every second, you're remembering your intention, you're remembering to watch. You are your own counsel every second of your life.
And, you know, it's when you really want something badly, when you find yourself in a circumstance over and over and over again and you become aware that you're winding up, you're having the same argument, you're having the same reaction. Your body is going into, like your stomach is grinding, you're having a sweat, you're having that argument with a loved one that you've had for 20 years, and you're still having it. And then everyone's mad.
If you have the desire, you start saying, hmm, maybe there is something I can do.
And you can watch for clues to see things move. When we watch the changes of our experience so closely, we can start seeing. We can see a wave coming.
We can see it building. You know, when you feel, or one feels like they're headed into an argument, the body changes the body. Your stomach might start going, you might feel pressure on your head, you might start sweating, your tongue might become dry, your jaw clenched. When you start seeing how this movement of life changes second to second, it's a wonderful thing to do for yourself. It's really taking care of yourself.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: Well, my late teacher, Doctor Brewjoy, used to say, we have many parts within us. A number of them are very young. And so, say, you'll have two adults in a room and they get into an argument.
He said, it's like the conscious mind. And each of those people just left that personality left and in came. It's like you go unconscious, and then up comes the wounded one or the angry one, whatever is unresolved. And then you have two unresolved little ones duking it out in adult bodies. And so it's like what you're saying is if you can.
If you can manage to stay conscious, especially in that habitual moment when you're so used to falling into that kind of same old routine, whatever it is, response, then you have an opportunity at becoming free in a sense of that which binds you, whether it be, uh, a civilization, you know, a legal system, or, you know, a mental pattern of pain or whatever it is. Right?
[00:14:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You have that ability. Um, when you talked about the wounded, you know, the wounded people, these are called samskaras. They're memories, and they are actually part of our mind.
It is part of our mind. So those come up and they will come up, my mother would say, on the road to liberation, because that's exactly what we want to do. We want to liberate. We want to wake up every day like light free happy.
I have to explain this. I wake up on the right side of the bed every day. I am happy when I wake up. And then when I was working for that long period of time, I would get up in a good mood and then I would watch moment after moment after moment. Something would upset me.
You know, it was like classic, you know, you pour your coffee, you're going out the door and the coffee spills, and now you're in a bad mood, somebody cuts you off, bad mood. Go into work, somebody says something bad mood and repetitively, it became so traumatic that I had to, like, say, like, what is. What is that? Where do these. Where are these responses hidden?
You know, that is our past coming up in the present. And within the present, where we are always, that past is our samskaras staying in our mind, a part of our mind and our future. Our desires are there, too.
So we always have these three moments, always right there.
Right there. And what we do in the present moment can change that repetitive pattern. Because the desire is to get off the wheel of samsara, the repetitiveness, because actions as they come up and reactions that are ingrained in our behavior will go on.
Will just go on. It's a wheel that doesn't have anything stopping it.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Is that like the. Is it. What is it called? The hall of the 40 demons. When one dies. Brew used to talk about this, that you cross over and you've got to walk through the hall of the 40 demons, and they're all standing at a doorway, and they represent whatever is unresolved in you. And, oh, boy, if they say that one thing, that you just react. You get sucked in. Ouch, you're back on the wheel. The idea, you know, move to the end of that hallway without that happening, and best of luck.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that sounds, you know, I'm not familiar with his work, but that's a very nice picture.
So you can imagine this happening and become aware of those things that are particular to your life, you know, I mean, it's very interesting. So the goal of yoga is to end suffering. And suffering comes through our experience. We'll constantly be there until we are able to unhook ourselves from. Doesn't mean that it's not going to keep circling forever. These circumstances are going to come up. But the way we experience them can either be one that's freeing. We can just watch them and say, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're having that argument again. Oh, yeah.
I told this to my husband. Do we really want to have this argument again? And they would, like, look at each other. I will skip it.
That was wonderful. That was wonderful. Because at that moment of mindfulness, it just released us from a pattern.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: It's like breaking a spell.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Because a spell is something that you are not aware of.
Right. You're not aware of that. You know, and we have to. And the biggest spells, you know, this is also a very interesting practice because our world, you know, when we think of our world, we like to think, you know, yeah, we got the sun and the moon and the solar system, and we're on planet Earth, and, you know, that one did this and that one did that.
And when we experience our life, where are we? Where are all those things? Where do they reside?
Yogis are really responsible because they're seeing that they're suffering, you know, is very personal.
Not in a negative, personal way, but it is very immediate. It is a very intimate experience.
And when we see these, you know, thinking that, oh, you know, I've had this thought, oh, yeah, we're going up into the space, into space, and we're littering up there, you know, this, I thought I. That occurs to me, and I'm like, you know, we shouldn't do that there if we know we did it here. That is my conventional mind.
That is my mind that we have been trained to think that we are an individual, and there's a world out there, and we have to live in that world, but we are separate from it.
But where does this world reside?
That is an experience, an illumination, when we realize that all of these things that we think construe our world are really part of us.
They're part of our body, they are part of our mind. They are part of the imagery and the stories and the narrative that comes through sound. And everything that we think about is a sound. And we're resounding that sound right within.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Us, like a vibratory. It's all vibratory.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: In other words, it is vibratory. You know, right now, my mother used to have beautiful festivals when she started the ashram. And what was beautiful about it was that it was gentle. It was very gentle. It was very.
Or this is my experience. See, we must. This is my experience. It was very like a natural movement of her life.
She almost said, okay, we're all going to have festivals, and let's have the spring festival.
Let's have the autumn festival, the winter festival. Let's do a candle lighting ceremony during the winter solstice time. Let's do these beautiful patterns that we can see externally in our circumstance, in nature, around us. Let us honor these. But what she was doing was she was seeding in all of the students and all of the people that visited during these times that the changes of life must be watched.
So we first would practice, oh, yeah, let's look at the trees. Let's look at the sun. Let's look at this and that. And let's see that first. And then let us watch the changes within us that our experience moves.
See, we like to think we're a part, like you know, we're an individual. Like, you know. Okay, we're. Oh, yeah, we're one year older, so this watching is wonderful.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
All right. You mentioned your mother. Talk to me a bit about what was it like growing up with. First of all, with a mother like that. And basically in. You grew up in yoga. What did that look like?
[00:23:25] Speaker B: It was. It was so.
It was very, very.
Oh, gosh. Well, she was my mom, so, like, number one, your mom is like, you know, great. You know, my mom cooked great. She gave me hugs, you know, she always took care of me. She had a cute little, like, that little mischievous laugh or smile. Or if she knew I didn't want to do something, she would try to like, or if I didn't want to go to school for something, I want to stay home, you know? She wrote notes to the. To the school for all of us on a snow day and said, I kept my children home today because it's a snow day, and I wanted them to experience the snow.
That's the kind of mom she was. But what was interesting when we lived in the city, so we moved out to Long island in the sixties, I would say early sixties. And she only had one other friend, so we lived in Brooklyn. She had one other friend from South Asia, and she was from Sri Lanka.
And I remember the day we met her.
Everyone in New York City was caucasian.
My mother's from India wearing indian clothes. Asari walking with my dad, who is european American. Okay. And so. And my sister was in the stroller, and I was next. Next to her, we're crossing the street, and from the opposite direction comes a tall irishman and a shorter woman from Sri Lanka pushing her kid for their kid. And this was my mother's friend, and not even from India, you know, from. That's a different country, you know.
So I grew up in it, in a community where I didn't grow up in an indian community.
So we moved to Massapequa, which was South Shore, Long island. And it's basically jewish, italian, irish neighborhood.
And my mom only wore sari, and she cooked indian food, but she cooked american food, too for my dad. And she was very traditional, you know, she took care of the kids, took care of the house, ate together, did the homework, you know, did whatever, you know, adults do, you know, and that was it. She just. That was the dharma. That was her duty, to take care of the family, and which is a high duty when you think that all these beings come through you and you are setting them on a path to life, it's immense. So what was wonderful was my dad, you know, he knew, you know, he adopted so many things. He came in the house, took off the shoes, put on little sandals called chuples. He put them on, you know, he cut the legs of the table off. So the table was on the floor and he got black cushions and we ate around the table. He ate curry and rice with his fingers. He could eat hotter than my mother could eat.
So it was really nice. And, you know, so she was watching tv with him one night and, you know, we were around kids and she saw Richard Hittleman doing yoga and meditation or whatever his show was. And she told my dad, I can teach that because, yeah, she could teach that in India when she was growing up. And I didn't know this at the time.
My grandfather was like a visionary because, you know, India at that time was very classical. She grew up under the British Raj, so India was very different. And she. She wanted, you know, she's a normal girl. Girls like to do girl things. But he made her go take yoga classes every day after school with the boys.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: You know, down the block you go, she's the only one that was made to go. And she had, you know, a bunch of siblings, only one. And then my mother or my grandmother sent her to indian dance classes, bharatanaptiyam classes, because my mother wanted to dance like all the girls.
So that was very atypical. So when she was watching tv with my dad, she said, oh, I can teach that. So she started teaching in adult ed, you know, just kind of sharing, you know, if everybody's into, I'll show, you know, sure, I can do this. And it was. It was really nice, you know, it was really, really nice how my dad and her would go and they'd bring a record player and some chants and a little bit of incense and, you know, it was nice.
Then.
Then somebody came to our door. I think I was around ten, my mother's cooking and there's a screen door, big horse, chestnut tree over the. Over the front porch there. And he asked, excuse, you know, hello. And us three kids, ten, I think my sister was eight and my brother was around four, all huddling behind her, holding onto her. Sorry. Like, kids, do you teach yoga? Are you from India? Do you teach yoga?
And my mom was like, you know, yeah, sure. She didn't have, you know, we have right now a very, very. We're on high alert, you know, stranger comes to your door, they stay out. You might not even answer it, you know, you might not even my mom says, oh, yeah, I don't know if she invited him in at that time. But soon after that, we had people, you know, in the middle of the day, sitting under the horse chestnut tree, bringing their guitars, playing music, you know, Joan Baez, you know, Jude Collins, Bob Dylan songs on the guitar, eating, drinking tea, and talking to my mom.
Yeah, it was very.
It was just, you know, oh, you know, this. Oh, I'd like to know. It was almost like, oh, you make an apple pie. Oh, come over. I'll teach you how it was. You know. She didn't come with the intention, I am a guru. I'm going to teach yoga. I'm going to open. No.
She just shared what she knew. And what was interesting was most of the people that came were in their late teens and early twenties, because it was the late sixties, that whole movement in society was what was bringing all these people, you know, come, you know, got to get back to the garden. You know, the Beatles went to India. This whole fabric was occurring in society. But my mom was just cooking curry in the house. You know, she wasn't listening to the Beatles. She wasn't, oh, she, you know, she knew about Martin Luther King, and she knew what was going on in those things, all that kind of politics. But she herself wasn't trying to become self realized and have an altered state of consciousness or be experiment with anything. She was traditional, very traditional. Oh, you want to study yoga? Okay.
So my dad made the top floor of the house into a loft, a yoga studio. Beautiful, beautiful. We had visiting swamis. Was wonderful, wonderful. My mother connected, you know, so then, you know, we started having, like, tons of people coming to the house, and the neighbors were not too happy with that. So, you know, 25 cars parked in front of your suburban houses, you know, so they decided, you know, students said, let's get a place.
And that's how the ashram was born.
One of her students put down the first month's rent every. I remember that day going in, seeing it was an artist's loft, so there was paintings all over the place, painted on the wall. Beautiful space was transformed, and it was just an outpouring of what she knew. And seeing people coming and really being a mother, it wasn't anything different. It's just that my mother knew came with this way of living that is in stark contrast to westerners who are indoctrinated in all of the abrahamic religions.
The study of yoga is a study of liberation, of moksha. It is a moksha dharma.
It is not a salvation we're not looking for salvation. We are looking to be liberated from this never ending cycle.
And these cycles of samsara are considered birth and death, birth and death, over and over. And of course, we have a birth and death of our physical form, but we don't want to continue in this misery. We really want to know ourselves. Like, that was my driving force. What is going on? Like, what is going on here?
You know? So growing up, I was like a teenager. I was living with my mother. My mother was teaching yoga. And I'd go, you know, I would go to Sunday morning meditation. We would make these wonderful sweets called prasad, and we would chant and sing songs. And she wrote a lot of songs and poetry and did art. It was wonderful, wonderful.
But I didn't really study the yoga system until I was older, until I was realized. I had to get the suffering. I had to be tormented.
I had to have that desire.
That's pretty much how it flowered flower. She was just sharing, honestly sharing.
[00:34:30] Speaker A: That's wonderful. And also that she wasn't looking to make it happen. It's like, it shows her. It shows her and.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
To correct you, if I may. Yes.
It's not even that it chose her, because that shows a separation using her.
Sorry.
This movement was the movement of life that she was embodying.
It just flowed.
There was no trying. She didn't have to try.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: You know, if she gave a lecture, she would meditate and sit and think about it, you know, because you kind of rehearse in your mind, but you already have it, you know, you already have the words within you. It's just opening your mouth.
[00:35:28] Speaker A: Well, now you have a teacher in common with our mutual friends, Stephen Chris.
Could you talk about him as well? And when did he enter this wonderful reality?
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Well, my mother had many students, and then there were people that dedicated their life to supporting the ashram yoga itself and their own practice.
And as people studied their varying abilities, you know, understanding, awareness.
But there were two people that became yogis.
That became accomplished yogis, if one wants to put it with the word accomplished. But they embodied that, those teachings and the way and the sensitivity.
So the man you're talking about was known as Yogi Ananda Viraj. That was his name my mother gave him.
And, you know, I. After my mother passed, my mother passed in 2001, which is so. Still seems so close, because her life just informs mine, you know, it's right there. There's like, no separation there.
So when she passed, I was about, I would say, 40. About 40 years old? Yeah, 40, 41, something like that. And I was newly married then. I would have a baby then. I'm raising my daughter and I'm working, and I just was having a really rough time of life every day. Instead of waking up and being on that nice trajectory for the rest of the day, that was just so wonderful to be on. It was misery.
I was craving to go to sleep at night to get away from it. It was so bad. So I remember one day, I just was at work, and I'm like. I was remembering a lesson.
I said, you know what? There was this word, and it's called ahamkara.
And that is one of the aspects of mind. So the mind has three aspects, okay? And this comes through samkhya yoga, but it's used in so many of the moksha dharmas. The Samkhya terminology predates many, many, many those dharmas.
So Manas is the working mind. I consider it the mechanical mind and the mind of the sense. You know, the senses talk to the Manas, and then all your samskaras are part of Manas. It's just the mind.
Then. Ahamkara means aham. Aham means I am, and kara comes from the word to act or to make.
So when you put that together, the ahamkara is the eye maker aspect of the mind.
It is the part of the mind that says, oh, yeah, I'm Chandini, I'm a mother, I'm gonna. You know, I. Yes, I do this, I do that. I'm a yoga teacher. I'm a wife.
You know, you do mushrooms. You know, there's all kinds. This is Shoda. She does mushrooms. You know, this is the eye maker.
And we.
We are not simply mind.
We are not simply mind.
We are so attached to believing that we're our mind because of our education, our western education, that when you come and you study classical yoga and you find out that there is like this mechanical mind with memories and the senses and all this kind of stuff that is necessary, and then you have a part of mind that inserts a selfhood everywhere, inserts you as something almost solid, you know, almost solid. It becomes so solid to us that this ahamkara, which we need, we have to use this, because without this sense, we couldn't buy anything in the store. We couldn't clothe ourselves, we couldn't talk to another person. Everybody needs this.
Yoga does not have this bad and good thing on things. Things just are.
When you see something, and it just is, you know, it just is. It is our mind that goes, ah, I like it or I don't like it. That's. That's a quality. That's one of the ways that we have suffering. It's called the tutus, the devandavas.
So going back to Ankara, we need that. It's just a fine thing to do. So to go back to Yogi and then the virage.
I was at work, my mother's long gone, and I'm like, I'm going to call him up.
So after work, you know, after work, off the clock sat there in my desk and I just picked up the phone and I said, hello, do you have a minute? Can you explain what this meant?
And he passed about two, two years ago, the end of May.
Such a loss.
But he was a teacher that was so. Was brilliant.
A trained philosopher, exacting in his language, would correct me if I made little, you know, used words like here and there, like, no, no.
And I would get hurt. But then I also realized, I am asking him to teach me because he knows what my mother knew, he knew. And I needed someone that I could trust to teach me because I wasn't looking for salvation, I wasn't looking for a drug. I wasn't looking to. To go for thousands of years in therapy. I was looking to find out how life works, specifically how my life works.
What is. I was like, what is going on here?
So he was fabulous. Fabulous. He was one of the two premier teachers and he wrote. He did a lot of writing and lecturing and he had, you know, a few students. But he. His only desire was to teach, to help all sentient beings become free. To become free whether, you know, in any manner. In any manner.
[00:42:48] Speaker A: So how did he help you get through that particular time?
[00:42:53] Speaker B: He gave me lessons one on one, on Zoom, once a week. Wow. And part of yoga practice is you're given Sadhana, you are giving homework, you have to practice. And it depends on your teacher. It could be Sadhana can be physical postures. You're going to be silent a little. You're going to do physical postures, you're going to do some deep breathing, you're going to journal. That could be sad or it could be reading sacred text, you know, fasting. It all depends on your teacher. So every week he went through. He went through most of the yoga sutras with me. He taught me Samkhya. And what he did was help me watch my life, which is unique.
Everyone, when you are on a path, a spiritual path, your sadhana is unique to you and your circumstance.
So, you know, it was very, very deep. And what was Key was that he gave me the language to understand my life.
You see, if we have a story, we have a narrative of human life. You know, I heard, you know, growing up, you know, we're going to have. We're going to be self actualized. We have these levels of hierarchy. We have a shadow self. We, you know, all these things, you know, we have the ego and the id. And then, you know, you. All these complexes, we've learned, you know, so then you have. Then when you're sitting with all of them, that's your narrative. That's your story for your life.
But that story that I had because I grew up here, you know, not to be an A student, to be a good girl, to do my best, to be a good mother, you know, all these stories wasn't working.
That language was not working.
So he laid out the language of yoga. He laid it out. He explained what Manas is and what Ahamkara is and how Samsara works.
So he explained. And then he also instructed me on how to see these things and explained to me exactly what mindfulness is. That mindfulness is remembrance, keeping yourself on the path every moment, which is a hard thing to do.
Yeah. So that's. That's how he taught me.
[00:45:41] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
That's such a grace to have that, especially as one on one.
It's. Yeah, that's grace.
Because so many people, you know, they'll follow a teacher, and it's a large group of people. And, of course, you learn. There's a lot you learn from that person. But I just think to sit for someone one on one like that and really have that focus, obviously, it has shaped you and touched you deeply. And here you are now, doing your own teaching. I mean, I just. So much wisdom, Chandani, thank you.
[00:46:22] Speaker B: It is not my wisdom. This is wisdom. I'm just a conduit.
All the sages of past came. My mother came here. She talked. Out came the words. So many people were touched by her life.
Her yogi, my teacher, my direct teacher, gave me that language. And my mother, what she gave me, she gave me an. A different way to see someone live.
She's very gentle. And I think in all of my life, maybe five times, did I see her yet? Did she yell? She hardly yelled like most mothers yell a lot.
No, she didn't yell.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: When was her birthday?
What sign is she? Is she a Pisces?
[00:47:19] Speaker B: No, no, she's a libra. Oh.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: Oh, beautiful.
[00:47:25] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Okay, well, that makes sense because there's an equilibrium. There and those people are often quite good at looking at both sides.
[00:47:35] Speaker B: Yes. And she had a love of beauty.
[00:47:38] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:47:41] Speaker B: And not even just a love of, you know, the arts that. The art of living, any creative process, the coming into and the moving out, you know, a moment. A moment is art. It's coming out from the unmanifest. Something manifests and then dissolves back in. That's art.
Very beautiful. Yeah.
[00:48:06] Speaker A: My goodness. So you teach yoga.
What does that look like? I mean, it's. I'm sure, postures, but are you teaching as well, speaking to these people?
[00:48:19] Speaker B: Oh, yes, yes. I am very happy with the classes I teach. I feel that there is a resonance between myself and my students that is deep and nourishing for the students, but also nourishing me, opening in me that pathway to just Fully Share, because this PAth, this yoga path, is.
I consider it's phenomenal. So, you know, it is just phenomenal. It is unlike. It's such a jewel. It is such a jewel. So I teach two Zoom classes a week. One is through an art class, which is an art center, which is a community class. It's free for anyone to go to the art center, you know, takes care of me. So that is wonderful, because that group, you know, I do not want ANy financial constraint for a person who wants to learn yoga. You know, the classic saying is, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. If somebody's looking, I want them to be able to reach, if not meet somebody.
And, of course, if there's no teacher, your own life, your own experience, that light within is the teacher.
It will guide you if your intention is strong, if your desire is strong.
So I teach a class on another day, Sunday mornings. And that class, I teach a little bit more philosophy.
Those students are seriously practicing, not that the other ones aren't, but that class is a little more focused on giving more of the philosophy so people can really understand and develop a different way of looking at their lives.
And then I teach Friday evenings at a Zen center near me, and.
Wonderful. That's just a different experience to do that. But all of the classes have breathing. We do Pranayama, we do postures. But the way we're doing all of the things we do is with a focus and intention, a strong meditative feeling that I lead the students into at the beginning of class, so that the whole entire class, we are allowing our body to settle our mind, to become focused, and to feel.
We have become so divorced from feeling the sensations in our own body and trusting our own experience. So it is a beautiful class. And I give Sadhana for the end of the week. For the next week. Yeah. So everyone gets homework and it's wonderful. It's really wonderful.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: Would you. Is the ashram still functioning?
[00:51:33] Speaker B: Yes, the ashram is still functioning. I'm.
I.
It's run by two of her students, or specifically one of her students is the director. And it is when my mother taught, the whole desire of her teaching and opening the ashram was to relieve suffering and for people to become liberated.
So it was dedicated to the science philosophy of yoga.
Now, most yoga studios right now, and this includes the ashram right now. And, you know, there's reincarnation. You know, the wheel keeps turning, things change all the time, is doing very well, and students still come and it's more for. It's more of an introductory to yoga, whereas it's focused more on health and body practices and developing calmness and inner peace in that manner.
My mother had a lot of philosophy classes going on. You know, it was a. It was a very studious class, you know, center.
[00:52:46] Speaker A: Yes. That's what I feel we need, though, with the philosophy class, that we need that flow of wisdom, I think so important, especially from elders, you know, who have a lot to share and teach in that regard.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: No, I agree with you.
[00:53:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm so glad. It really sounds like you're carrying that forward. Do you work privately with students?
[00:53:12] Speaker B: If someone asks? Absolutely. Absolutely. Which is the best? You know, if someone is really serious, you know, it's very hard to.
It's not even hard. It's just such a wonderful thing to have someone care for you in such a unique way to be cared for, to have, you know, you could be in the middle of a situation, and a teacher that cares for you is going to help you navigate through that.
Because every moment of your life is circumstance.
Your experience is your world, because what is going on in the moment is your entire experience, your world.
So if the student is like, having a moment where they're, you know, very upset, very bewildered, sad, whatever emotion, there is a way to go through these things with awareness and to see the difference, to see that you might be sad or you might be having those feelings of sadness, but who is really being sad and who is watching being sad?
Are they the same? Are they different? Are they one after the other? Are they simultaneous?
You see?
[00:54:45] Speaker A: Yes. Makes me think of how when people are in fear, they can't access the higher thinking functions. And really any kind of emotion, it's understood in logic. As soon as your person on the other side of the argument becomes emotional. You need to end it because you're not going to get anywhere because you can't access that. But so I think of people who are troubled or lost, then what? That's exactly what they need is to connect with someone like yourself and who can kind of help them access, once again, that sort of higher order thinking. Well, maybe not thinking, but just that higher order connection, if you will.
So it helps you kind of rebalance and break this, in essence, it's like you're teaching people how to fish. Not giving them a fish, necessarily, but teaching them how.
[00:55:47] Speaker B: Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, developing an awareness.
[00:55:54] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:55:55] Speaker B: And of course, you know, we do use the mind to watch and to think and to process.
And that part of the mind, that's the third part is called buddhist, which means it's intellect. It's what you consider the higher order thinking, that ability to have a perspective, to be able to say, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. So I'm afraid of this. I haven't even gotten there, but I'm already. My stomach is already in knots and, you know, I can't function and I'm sweating, I'm in fear. Or I think this person's going to come to the house. I don't want to see that person. And you're in fear, you're terrorized. So you start developing the way to use the mind to fine tune the intellect, to fine tune the Buddhi, to become really aware so that you can see the movement of your experience and you can direct the actions that you might need to take, such as you might say, oh, this is happening. I'm going to take a deep breath.
So you can do a body, you can do something with your body or you can say, well, why am I in a panic right now? That person isn't even here. They might not even get here. You can replace one thought with another thought.
And so there are practices. There are many, many practices. So that higher order thinking is the intellect, the Buddhi, which when becomes so skilled and refined and purified to an extent, can start seeing what is known as. And I have a poem of my mother's that explains it. I don't even. We're touching it, but I'm like, I don't want to say it, but touch is that aspect of experience that is beyond words because we are so heavy into our thoughts that the who is.
No, what are the thoughts playing to?
You can think of it. What is the sound sounding against?
When there's actors on a stage, there's a backdrop there's always this going on. And, you know, we can have darkness, we can have light. Does it mean darkness is totally bad? No, we go into that quiet darkness many, many times during the day as we blink, we're constantly going into what's called the unmanifest.
My mom would do this. Close your eyes. Open your eyes. Close your eyes. Open your eyes. Where do you go?
Where. And we do this all day. We're blinking all day, but we don't ever think of that or what's under our feet.
You can't see behind you, you know. Very interesting when you start looking.
[00:59:08] Speaker A: So I'm going to, we're going to finish this first hour and, oh, we have so much. This hour melted, I must tell you. So I just love listening to you. And I've got more questions. So I invite listeners who are as interested as I am to please come to the mushroomsapprentice.com and join us there and soak up more of the just wonderful wisdom of this lovely lady.
