Samosas, Chips and Yoga
In a period of a week I was asked my age by numerous people, each person being relatively new to me and me to them. In response, I would ask them to guess my age. It’s interesting to see how a person often tries to figure out how to not offend the other when guessing their age, not that it matters to me. Age is almost irrelevant, the only relevance that counts in terms of age, is what have you learned since being alive. Age can equal wisdom but it’s not a given. The older you are, hopefully the wiser you are, yet a child can have more wisdom in them than an eighty year old.
The first time someone guessed, I was a little shocked, twenty five years old they reckoned. “Come on, don’t stroke my ego” I protested. The lady, who was living out of her van while she went on a weekend course with Byron Katie, was quite adamant I seemed to be in my twenties and she herself was shocked by my age and didn’t believe me. A few more new acquaintances and a few more guesses, one in my late twenties and the other in my early thirties. When I did tell them my age they would follow up, asking “What’s your secret to looking so young?” Thinking off the cuff, I suggested it was because I haven’t had any alcohol or tobacco in three years and I don’t have a regular job. The interactions did make me think "Why are people perceiving me as being young?" I certainly don’t feel young in my body at least, and if you spent any time with me you would see that I have long periods of rest in which I stay as close to home as possible.
Over the last few years I’ve had to contain myself greatly, tuning myself to my physical needs, nursing this vessel back to a place where I can walk the hills of Scotland, from where I am writing this piece. It’s been hard, taking stock of myself, understanding what I can and cannot do. At one point I thought I would never get another chance, but yet here I am, still living, still breathing. Without the focus to want to live and to work towards being better at understanding my emotional, mental and physical self, I certainty would not be here to write this piece or enjoy what life has to offer.
I often think about children who don’t live past the age of ten. For them, that’s all they get, a few years on planet earth. Yet, they could live more in those ten years than a person who lives to be a hundred. Life isn’t about the age of a person, because there are no rules to how long you get on earth. Yes, you hope you get as much as possible, but there are no guarantees. Anything can and normally will happen. Youth really is about spirit, intention and experience. When you look at someone and they seem youthful to you, it’s the spirit you see, and anyone at any age can have that energy of a youthful being. It’s not to say I am always a youthful spirit, far from it. It’s not to say youthful spirit means you go to dance clubs and stay up all night. Youthful spirit is about how you view this life. Despite the hardships, I strive to enjoy, I strive to get as much out of life as I can. Sometimes I don’t succeed, but as long as I give it my best, I’m happy. Have I always given my best? No, there have been times where I haven’t. Those times generally occurred with a lack of wisdom and understanding, due to not knowing, and yes, with time, I have learned how to apply myself better.
On my way to the United Kingdom, I flew into Manchester and made my way to stay with a family friend who lives in Leicester, a place I spent some time as a young boy. Betty, who has basically known me since I was born, is in her eighties. If I was to tell people that I was going to stay with an eighty year old woman when I landed in the UK, they would probably wonder what the hell was going on there.
Around four years ago I stayed with Betty for a week or so, and was incredibly grateful to have a restful place to recuperate and enjoy some of the places I grew up. We visited tea shops, had chats and went to parks I used to visit as a kid. This trip was just a three day jaunt before heading up to Scotland. I did think at one point how strange it might seem to someone my own age that out of all the people or places I could stay on arriving in England, I would choose to stay with an ‘elderly person’ although Betty would berate me for calling her such.
At this stage of my life it’s not about age, it’s about the experience. I know that spending time with Betty will be both restful and insightful, two aspects of life I like. Getting good rest is a huge concern for me. When I was in Williamsburg prior to flying to Manchester, a friend invited me to a concert at Carnegie Hall where he was singing in a choir performing, among other work, a new piece set to the words of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who spent eight years recovering from a massive stroke. Initially knowing nothing about her, I did some research and read some interviews with her, in the hope of helping me to decide whether the concert was an event I wanted to go to.
In one interview I learned that, after she had her stroke, she bought a 80ft barge and moored it somewhere in the Mississippi Delta, if memory serves correctly. Within this barge she had a room to write, a room to sculpt, and a room to sleep. Sleep, she said, was one of the main tools for her recovery, a process where the mind is sorted and cleaned by the brain. Her mother would help her and after pushing to use her brain she would tire and then be allowed to sleep some more. Dr. Taylor states “The brain is processing literally billions and billions of bits of data moment by moment and when there’s trauma to the cells, by definition, the cells are not communicating with one another as they normally would. So information comes in confused and somewhat chaotic. Sleep allowed me to close out new, incoming stimulation and to process and file information that had come in to try to make some sense of it”. After reading this, I decided that I would take her advice and get some sleep rather than go to the concert. If I needed sleep, she wouldn’t mind, in fact she may have encouraged me to rest. So, I didn’t feel any guilt for sleeping and not attending my friend's concert even though I would have liked to. Rather, I weirdly felt for whatever reason, I was meant to be made of aware of her story and get this small piece of information.
Having had seizures, the last one which completely blew my mind to a place which has taken my years to come back from, I also have done a lot of sleeping, with the encouragement of my mother, and this has had a beneficial impact on my recovery. Just yesterday, in the place I am staying, there was a mindfulness and yoga retreat going on. It seemed like an event which I might want to join in on, but I had spent the previous two days hiking and was physically tired. I put my shoes on, and rallied myself to go and interact with the workshop attendees but then realised that what I really needed to do was sleep. I noticed I was pushing myself, as I had done many times before. So instead I decided to lay on the bed, with my shoes still on. An hour later I awoke feeling rested, calmer and more present. Afterwards I went down to meet whoever was still there and ended up going for a walk down to the loch with the workshop teachers.
It’s not always easy to get good sleep. A few days prior in Williamsburg, with garbage trucks picking up trash outside my window at 2am and men in three-wheel motorcycles blasting Luther Vandross at 6am, it was really hard to get good quality sleep. You have to sleep when you can, whatever the time of day. It’s much better and more efficient to have a nap for a few hours and be in good spirits rather than pushing yourself through a day without having a nap because you think that is more important than sleeping. When you are tired you tend to make poor choices, because you are not operating at your optimum level and you are essentially compromised. If you get some good rest and wake up feeling rejuvenated, the body and mind will allow you to make more conscious and beneficial decisions.
On my previous visit to Leicester, Betty took me to a family-run Indian shop in a corner terraced house with only cramped street parking that has been there for decades. They sell mostly savoury Indian street food. When I thought of coming to Leicester, immediately I remembered the Dhokra we ate last time, I could almost taste it. I asked Betty if she would go and get some for the day I arrived.
Dhokra is a vegetarian dish from Gujarat made with fermented rice and split chickpea flour. It’s delicious and can be eaten as a snack or a main course. Betty also picked up samosas and another savoury fried vegetarian dish which neither of us knew the name of, but we called ‘balls’. You can figure out what they looked like at least. Everything was delicious, and the day I arrived we ate this food for lunch and dinner.
Of course if you know anything about England, you will know that fish and chips is a staple food of the British Isles. Originally brought into the country by Jewish Portuguese and Spanish people, currently there are over 10,000 chip shops in England. In the 1930’s there were over 35,000, predominately feeding pre and post war Britain. In the village where Betty lives, there is a chip shop and so on the second day, as planned, I went to get lunch. While I waited, the owner, who prepared and served me the food, had a TV playing some reality show with a program about a police outfit dealing with drunk and disorderly men, spraying them with pepper spray. Watching those images reminded me of some of the places I lived in the Midlands, relatively near to the chip shop, before I moved to the United States.
It was here in a town nearby that fourteen year olds could get served in pubs and where I had to file a police report against a fellow student in my class who punched me a few times in the back of the head and gave me a black eye because of something I said to him in passing. On another occasion I was mugged, just thirteen at the time, by a young man in a hoodie who produced a seven inch blade and put it to my stomach while I walked home in the dark from field hockey practice. Those images on the TV reminded me of the grittier side of living in England, a side that obviously still exists and is something I do not wish to subject myself to, if at all possible. It’s also one of the reasons my father looked to leave, because of an opportunity that arose to have a more prosperous financial life.
Regardless of all that, the chips were delicious. I don’t know what it is about getting chips from a chip shop, but after pouring copious amounts of vinegar and salt, adding the mushy peas, peeling back the batter for the cod, and chowing down, you feel right at home. If there are two things I would eat in England, it would be Indian food and fish and chips. Although now I might add wild venison sausages from the highlands of Scotland which I got to fry up the other day. As I think about food in Britain, I could add many items to the list from gooseberries to pies, there’s lots of great British food, but I’ll leave that for another day!
Now that I’ve talked about Indian food and chips, I’ll move on to talking about yoga. "Where’s the connection with yoga?" I hear you ask. Well Betty has been teaching yoga for forty one years. She hadn’t always been into yoga; she came to yoga after seeing a class in a community hall where she was taking an exercise class. One thing lead to another, and while still in training she started teaching at the request of one her teachers.
Luckily I was in town for her weekly class, and so I could attend. Betty practiced mindfulness long before it became groovy. She teaches yoga in a way that I wish more people practiced. It’s a combination of mind and body. It’s the culmination of decades of experiential learning. Learning from other masters and incorporating their understanding and her own into her teaching style. A class with Betty might start off with a few minutes expression, focusing on a theme, an understanding, or asking the students to practice self inquiry. On this occasion the students where asked how they would like to feel when they left the session. She fielded the students for suggestions of things they may want to practice. One lady asked for a specific form of chanting that she remembered doing years ago with Betty. Another asked to do the warrior pose, and it was at the end of the session when Betty remarked that, although she didn’t do the warrior pose, a human being can be a warrior of light, of love and can enter the world as a peaceful warrior, because that force exists within us and we can carry that forth regardless of whether we do a pose or not.
We did some OM chanting, simple stretching and observational movement, much like that practiced in Feldenkrais techniques. The main theme of the evening, as I remember, was to make yourself more aware of yourself and more in tune with the mind and body connection. I heard some of the words and stories highlighted by Prem Rawat, her master and teacher, coming through her, reminding us of what’s important in life.
Yoga means “union”. To be in union with the divine. It’s the ultimate connection. It’s not about doing a specific pose, yoga at it’s core can be experienced by merely being, being connected to that divine. You can do that by closing your eyes and focusing on your breath. You don’t have to do anything to experience the divine, it exists inside you, making time for it is all that’s needed. Being reminded and having space to focus on the experience of the divine is important for humans. Some people find that inspiration from others, and most of us somehow forget the importance of this aspect of our lives and need reminding.
Some of Betty’s students have been coming to her for twenty years. Not only do the students benefit from the reminders and the time to get in touch with the mind and body, but so does the teacher. It’s rare that I go to a yoga class where I am reminded of the important things and allowed the time and space to connect with my body and mind. Much yoga today is about poses, it’s about movement and although it’s nice to get a physical workout, I find that what I need is connection. The more aware I am of my body and mind, the more I can make the appropriate adjustments to get my body into a good working order.
In talking about her practice and seeing Betty in action, I noticed that if I wanted to learn how to teach Yoga, if I had the natural aptitude, she would be someone I would wish to learn from.
With over forty years experience, she has so much knowledge, and her style of practice is much needed. With the proliferation of 200 hour trainings and teachers calling themselves teachers without possible ‘becoming a teacher’, Betty came out of a place of natural progression, not a self imposed progression, much like a true artist evolves, through work, desire and spirit. You can’t buy knowledge, you have to experience it and practice in a way that brings you closer to you so you know how to help others. Staying stretched is important but those that can combine the physical, spiritual and emotional practice of yoga are few and far between, and I suggest if you find someone that does this and does it in a way without the dogma, learn from them, for this kind of yoga is for all, and it can really help current and future generations of people get closer to themselves. As Betty might say, when it comes to being connected to the self, “pull up the anchor, I’m on board”.