Where’d It All Begin? Continued . . .

The Great Oom straddled the centuries. He was born in the 19th and died in the 20th. And while he was straddling the centuries he brought yoga to the United States from India. He was one of those fellows who is a little less than sterling in character, but not quite a rotter. No doubt he was kind to dogs and solicitous to those wealthy (particularly the wealthy ladies) students he shared the esoteric secrets of hatha yoga with.

He did some real good for those folks, but did he even notice the servant girl who attended her mistress as she dis- and re-robed before and after yoga class (or were they “treatments?”). Did he see how closely the servant girl attended from the corners of her eyes, or the subtle muscle movements she had to stifle as she tried on the movements inside her mind. I can’t know. I wasn’t there.

When the lady and her maid arrived back at the manse, the girl carefully attended to all her remaining duties and was released to her own food and rest at the end of the day. The girl made her way to her tiny, stifling room up near the attic and tried some of the poses. She did the best she could, without moving furniture (moving furniture would make noise and call down the housekeeper’s wrath upon her head). Possibly she wished, “I wish there were a way to do this yoga stuff without moving furniture.”

That thought sent ripples out into the ether (or the ground of being out of which all things arise). The ripples died away as the girl chastised herself for wanting something inappropriate for a good Christian girl and stopped trying to do yoga in her tiny, stifling room. Or maybe they died away because she found that she could do things in her tiny stifling room that weren’t yoga but they used the ideas, say, a twist sitting on the edge of her cot to relieve back strain.

Whyever she stopped thinking the thought, the thought had been thunk and having once been thought, it could more easily be thought again and again, and with each succeeding iteration of the thought the ripples grew stronger and took longer to fade away until it solidified into a standing wave.

That standing wave was my birth, sort of. Perhaps it would be better to say it was the birth of my desire to be. And the desire to be was the very first part of me to exist.