Sadhana...

I remember the first time I heard this word, it was when I was in Boulder, Colorado after a practice led by K. Pattabhi Jois one morning. I was sitting with a group, none of whom I knew, but we were all in it together so I was just absorbing what I could.

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One lady was talking about taking off for a year and was just working on her sadhana, and blah, blah, blah. I don't remember everything, just that I had never heard that word before. Now, I am pretty smart and from the context she used it in figured out she meant her daily yoga practice, or at least I thought that's what she meant. So when I arrived home, at the families' house I was put up with, I asked Mary Lou about it and she confirmed that it probably did mean that, and maybe her other practices, such as meditation, chanting, etc. Things all in the "yoga" wheelhouse, so yoga was her sadhana. Whatever that meant to her.

That stuck with me and I realised I had some reading to do, so I read every book that I could find about yoga, and realised that sadhana could mean different things to different people and no one could really judge that, it was up to you what was your "spiritual" practice. So sadhana basically means a daily spiritual practice, or even a daily discipline.

The last few years as I've gotten deeper into Tantrik practices my idea of sadhana has shifted. I feel very fulfilled by them in a different way than I ever did by my asana practice, although my asana practice has always been important to me. I seem to have lost the link to the fire that made my asana practice a sadhana, and would like it back. My daily sadhana is still there, but the physical side has been lacking.

Now, I'm still practicing daily, I just have more and more trouble getting up so early, going to bed so early and finding the motivation to do it at those early morning hours like I used to. I like to practice before I teach, Sharath likes us to practice before we teach because then we're really in tune with the students, and getting up at 4am I enjoy, 5am even better, but earlier than that is killing me these days. And in order to do all the things I like to do to feel really balanced and in top form I need to begin the asana part of my sadhana by 3am, or a bit earlier is even better.

I know to many of you this sounds crazy, and to me sometimes it does as well, but it's the norm for most Ashtanga Yoga teachers, and has been the norm for me since Pattabhi looked at me in Boulder at one evening conference and said "You, getting up 4am, before working, doing sadhana early morning, whole life changing, whole life!" And I went home, whined about it to my then partner who then poked and prodded me that if I was taking this man as my guru, or teacher at least, and he made a suggestion then I should at least honour that by trying it, if it didn't work then okay, but at least try and honour him by attempting to make it work. Oddly enough, this is one of the things that also broke us up, but that's another story...

So I did, and it was hard at first, but delightful. And I do love not being like the "normal" people all around me, I like to be the weird one. This made me really weird, even though no one but me knew it, so I was able to continue it for some years, actually until 2008 when I stopped Ashtanga for a time, but I began Kundalini and they did sadhana even earlier in the morning, so it stayed with me until that last year in India, when I was practicing with Sharmila Desai at 6am, and then when in Mysore for the following 8 months was also practicing starting at some time between 5am and 7am. Now it's just not in me anymore. A couple days a week I can do it and love it, then the other days I'm fumbling around trying to figure out when to do it, when to eat so doing it is possible, etc.

But I digress, this was about finding the motivation to pull my asana practice back into the sadhana category in my mind, and once I can get there the getting up early won't be such a problem anymore. I'm working on it now, even as I type this. But am still not finding the how or the why, the why being the most important part. But I know the why, the asana practice moves my energy, keeps my body happy and healthy and functioning well, helps my mind stay in a good place and it keeps my emotions from burying themselves in my body anywhere.

I started having trouble here with my practice some time in December, I thought maybe it was because of taking all these different mushrooms and their effect on my body which mostly had been good, but also made me a bit tighter. I think it could also be product of the effect of the desert on this body, which has been anything but good. The mind seems to still be okay, the body seems to be the only victim of the desert. And the feeling of Maa is very strong here, but that keeps my mind in a good place too, so maybe it actually is that? Who knows. What I need to figure out it is how to do it anyway, and move through this phase in my life, in my practice, in my sadhana and use this sadhana to keep the fires burning, the tapas of which makes me a better teacher, a better yogi, a better Tantrik practitioner, all of which makes me a better human being and that is all I can hope for. To be the best me that I can be...