Bogotá: Tu Caiste de Cielo (You fell from heaven)!

The Beginning

It is a rainy Friday night in Bogota, I have been here three days, and I am about to make two mistakes. First, I am going to try to take a taxi on Friday night at 7 pm. Second, I am going to take a taxi to some unknown address 79A and 8th, these numbers mean nothing to me.

90 minutes later I arrive at a Yoga studio near my house. I could have walked there in 10 minutes. The taxi took 45 minutes to arrive and another 45 minutes to drop me off. Traffic in Bogota is unbearable. I missed the class, so I sit and talk with the receptionist about my vision for starting a shared yoga practice in Colombia:

In my broken Spanish, I explain, “I’m hoping to cultivate a daily Mysore style Ashtanga practice in my home. Where do you think I could find kindred spirits who would gladly rearrange their life around a 6AM start time? I am willing to teach the set series of 26 postures for free, but the hard part is finding anyone, even one person, who is ready for this practice to be the anchor of their life.”

She looks at me inquisitively. And invites me to talk to one of the students in the class I just missed. Fortuitously, this student is the only Ashtanga teacher in town. She happens to be dropping in to this Friday night class I barely found.

The class ends, students stream out of the small, hot room and the receptionist introduces me to Juliana. I begin again, feeling somewhat practiced at giving my spiel in Spanish for my vision of a Mysore style yoga community in Bogota. Despite my poor grammar, she listens, nods her head, begins to smile and keeps listening.

She gets it.

I don’t know this person, and won’t get to know her for quite some time, but she understands exactly what I am trying to express. I get to the part where I ponder aloud about the possibility of starting a 6AM Mysore style Ashtanga community in a city that lives for “Rumba.” I finally pause, and pose this question, “How does one balance the pull of endless fiestas and salsa dancing with a 6AM rigorous yoga practice?

Her first words are: “Tu caiste del cielo.” (You fell from heaven). “I’ll be at your house at 6AM on Monday, what is your address?” She is not a woman of many words, and she is serious.

She patiently tells me “I practiced with Kino, one of the premier female Ashtanga teachers in the US, for 5 years and moved back to Bogota 12 months ago, the week after Pattabhi Jois died.”

She has been trying to keep up her practice, but like all of us, one’s practice suffers, weakens, and dissipates without a community and without a teacher.

The Practice

That was four weeks ago. Juliana wasn’t kidding. As is the case with many Ashtangis, she was dead serious. The practice attracts a certain kind of person☺

Monday morning, and each morning afterward, we complete the primary series in silence. Two weeks passed before we had our first conversation. I sort of love getting to know someone through the quiet of their meditation and yoga practice. It confirms my assumption that words are overrated. Sure, I didn’t know where she was from, what she did during the day, how her practice got so deep, what her intentions pointed to, if she had a family. But, I did know a lot about her practice and her about mine.

Her Ujai breath, the sounded Darth Vader type breathing we do in Ashtanda, was consistent—five even breathes in each pose. Her teacher, Kino, emphasizes that we should save 20% of our energy for the breath. It is so easy to over do the postures and lose the breath. One of my first teachers, Kirsten, teaches something similar. “You can lose your place in the sequence, you can decide to do fewer postures, you can rest, but never, never, never, lose the breath.” After practicing Ashtanga daily for 27 months I understand more and more what they are saying. Ashtanga, like all yoga, is a type of conscious body movement, a contemplative practice of physical meditation that hinges on the breath.

If I could boil all of Paul’s teaching down to one phrase, it would be, “Zone in, connect to it, feel it.” The point is the same, in life, or moving through a set series of 26 postures, we are inclined to zone out. Rather than wholeheartedly attend to what we are doing, my mind drifts to the floods in Pakistan, what my X’s did last weekend, or if I offended a colleague in Friday’s monitoring and evaluation meeting.

Practicing Mysore style Ashtanga every morning is a chance to build this muscle, the muscle of noticing when my mind leaves presence and to bringing it back to the breath, the body, and the bhandas.

Practicing each morning in my front lawn in Islamabad, when my mind floated away, Manisha always asked after practice, before taking her kids to school, “Where were you?” Without talking, without even trying to notice, you can feel the depth of silence, focus, connection in another person’s practice. Manisha was almost always dead on. Here in Bogota with my new yoga partner, we spent two weeks practicing together before had a conversation that was more than 6 sentences.

With a few encouraging questions, she was able to help me move back to a level of practice I had cultivated when I left Yoga Thailand 6 months ago . We practice and we observe. I find that my practice evolves best in self-practice, outside of retreats and studios. The depth and openings that stay happen in the quiet of my own home, listening to my inner dialogue and zoning in.

A week ago, I reintroduced Chakrasana back into my practice. Chakrasana is basically a backwards summersault between postures that allows you to transition smoothly between Supta pada gustasana and Ubhaya pada gustasana. I first integrated this posture into my practice last November at Yoga Thailand. Lots of us, scared to death to include it in our practice, took turns trying it in front of 30 students. It’s a posture that is not a physical challenge, rather purely mental. But in the middle of an intense self-guided, self-directed daily practice it’s hard to find the reserves to introduce new things. Regardless, here in Bogotá, morning after morning, reconnecting with my practice, it just opened up to me again. And boom, I could do it.

In the silence of our practice space, which is marked by increasingly consistent Ojai breathing. I executed Chakrasana and Juliana blurted out, “Good Girl.” How did she even notice that I hadn’t been doing Chakrasana? We didn’t talk about that for another two weeks. But, the joy of a shared practice are these moments, something is constantly transpiring within you, inside the silence and focus that shapes your life.

Today

We have been practicing each morning for a month now. With our shared practice firmly entrenched, we begin to talk. On the three-hour car ride to her family finca we cover the basics: where do your parents live, do you have siblings, what did you study, what do you eat, do you dance, how did you come to Ashtanga, do you meditate, who do you love, what questions are you living, what are your aspirations. It’s been a while since I told my life story, from scratch, to a person who genuinely had space to listen. The details I highlight on this Saturday morning as we drive through the mountains surprise even me. Her story reveals why her practice is rock solid. This is a young woman, 26-years-old, with the life experiences of someone double or triple her age. She is an old soul who has known pain and recovery. The practice is an anchor for each of us.

This morning, I’m spending the weekend with her family of vegetarians at their finca in Somagosa—with a day trip to the local ashram in Villa de Leyva. Turns out her sister runs a meditation and yoga center in Bogota, connected to the Aurovalley ashram in India and Swami Bhramdev is teaching at the ashram this week.

All fincas seems to have a few things in common: peacocks and horses, wind chimes and hammocks, chilly weather, and hospitable staff that make soup after soup after soup for the main meal of the day here, Almuerzo. No meal is complete without avocado, corn on the cob, aromatic tea and plantains.

Having exchanged life stories, we move back to the bind that ties us. Yoga. We are both 8s with 7 wings and we have big plans: Launch a Facebook page, teach a 3-day joint workshop to new students, invite these newly trained practioners into our daily Mysore practice, offer adjustments one day a week, bring a senior teacher to strengthen our Ashtanga community, teach in local rehab centers and maybe in a few years, open an Ashtanga studio and a Yoga Colombia resort.

I tell Juliana that in Pakistan, when I offered workshops, I would invite 200 people, 15 would come and one would continue. We are looking for that one. And that one is looking for us. Ashtanga yoga is not for everyone, but there is someone, here in Bogotá preparing to significantly change the cadence of their life. Like Sarfraz in Pakistan, this person might never have taken a yoga class and might not imagine that yoga, meditation and a vegetarian diet would ever be a part of their life.

It only takes one.

I sense the possibility that this is enough. Someone is waiting for us.

This morning, it seems to me, that it is Juliana who has fallen heaven.