Setting Sail

They say one thing leads to another, that one event folds seamlessly into its subsequent. If there’s any pattern or meaning to grasp in this flow of events, it’s only evident looking back, as at the wake of a ship.  All we can do day to day is head out on the water in some direction. I’ve always been good at that: heading out in a direction. I’m a good sailor in that way. And I’m old enough now to see, looking back, that it was perhaps not all so random as it seemed.

It must have been in the first few months of moving to New York that I first heard the words Kundalini Yoga. I was in love with my first dance teacher, Mary Anthony, and like all great romantics I hung on her every word because she was for me the purest representation of the artist: dedicated, beautiful, skilled, wise.  When she suggested I try Kundalini Yoga, I remember thinking, “that sounds interesting.” But I have always been strongly monogamous, and I cannot juggle more than one passionate obsession at a time. 

Some years later I was in love with another teacher who was firmly in favor of cross-training. In that context, she alluded to a form of yoga that was done with closed eyes, to create the right feeling, and well-practiced could enable you to hold up your body weight just on the tips of the fingers. Very mysterious. Naturally, I inquired after class. And even though I heard again that word—Kundalini—I was firmly obsessed with something else and never followed through.

Then some years later still, following the urging of a friend, I went with her to a yoga class. It was very crowded, and I am not one for crowds. But mercifully, we were all instructed to close our eyes and do a lot of rather strange and unexpected things with our breaths and bodies. Ninety minutes later I found myself in an uncharacteristically chatty mood and, waiting for my friend to leave, I turned to the woman on my left and allowed myself to be swept up into conversation. I can’t remember what we discussed, I felt distinctly hazy, but by the end of it she had persuaded me to accept her extra ticket to a Kundalini Yoga festival in the Berkshires.

A few days later I got off the bus in Massachusetts, tent and camping gear in tow, ready to settle in for a leisurely yogic vacation. What greeted me was the sight of several hundred people all dressed in white, their heads covered. For a moment I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I heard in my head the warning voice of my grandmother, who was ever vigilant against cults, urging me to get back on that bus. But I was tired, and I needed a vacation and my years in the dance world had taught me that, to those who are immersed in it, great art is just as much a cult as any religion could be. What did bother me was that I had packed mostly black clothes, and not a single piece of white other than socks, and it was annoying to me that I would surely stand out. But as I said before I have always been a good and curious sailor, so I set out in my direction. 

It is hard to say what exactly transpired in the few days I was on that retreat. All I know is that, upon my return to the city, I started spending all the time I could spare at Kundalini Yoga East, studying there as if it was a secret library. The great librarian of course was Angad Kaur, guardian of the sacred texts and keeper of the flame. I knew after a few classes that she would be next in the pantheon of my teachers. And so she was. And so shortly after I arrived I enrolled in teacher training and shortly after that I began teaching the Thursday 4pm class that I still teach today, and it all felt like a perfectly natural unfolding of events. 

It was that unfolding that carried me through the strangeness of Covid, the resulting loss of my job, the beginning of a new job working at Kundalini Yoga East and eventually the death of my father. So, when Sat Jivan Kaur and Sat Jivan Singh, the studio’s longtime owners, announced that they would retire and the studio would close I knew that I was not ready for the story to end.

I have been lucky enough to have restored to me through my practice a number of the things that I thought were lost to me through the perversions of my childhood: love for God and a larger, wiser sense of what God is, the joy of singing, an experience of communion with the wholeness of myself that is more than the sum of its physical and mental parts, and trust in the possibility of a functional family of frequency coming together to work on themselves and support one another. These are not the sorts of things that once recovered, one is likely to just let go.

I don’t know where this new chapter called Infinite Space will lead us. I’m writing the story as I go along, and the studio is now called Infinite Space in part to give us plenty of room for the unfolding to reveal itself naturally. I do know it’s worth heading out in a direction, and that everything along the way seems to have been urging us to just keep heading out in a direction. I can’t promise it will always be smooth sailing or how long the journey will last but I know that one thing leads to another and that which you ignore just keeps coming around until you finally get on board. 

So, all aboard! We hope you will come along and enjoy the ride!