NomadYOGI

Ridiculously small kitten: “Myam myam myam. Njam njam njam njam njam njam njam! Myam myam myam nyam nyam myam. Mmmam. Mrrrrram. Meep!”

May those who hunger be blessed with nourishment. 

May those who are in conflict find peace with each other. 

A close friend of mine died this past Sunday. His name was Sagar. Even as I type this, it is impossible to believe. He was 28 years old.

We met ten years ago this coming fall. It was the first day of college, literally the day we moved into the dorms. I walked down our hall, looking for someone who had set up their television. My own roommate and I couldn’t figure it out. His was the first room I came across that had a working television. 

When I asked him if he would help us, his immediate response was, “Of course!” 

As he was hooking everything up, he said, “One day we’ll look back on this and say this is how we met.”

Sagar helped me on the first day we met and he never stopped helping me. 

To his friends, Sagar was encouraging, supportive, and always proud. He loved The Lazy Yogi and told many people about this blog even while I kept it quiet. When I switched from working in the film industry to pursuing my medical doctorate, he rooted for me and immediately got on board despite much skepticism and doubt from those around me. He was a true friend and ally. 

Wherever Sagar lived, that’s where the parties were. He loved hosting, he loved bringing people together, and he loved his friends. All through college people thought I was one of his roommates because I was always at his place chilling. 

After college he moved to New York City while I had to live at home in Connecticut. I came into the city every weekend and he would always have a place for me to sleep in his apartment. This very summer I slept on his couch many times. I slept in his bed the night before he died. 

The month before, he went to the doctor with a bad cough and back/leg pain. They did a scan and it turned out to be a rare genetic late stage lung cancer. He underwent surgery but his condition declined rapidly. I visited him while he was unconscious in the ICU on Saturday and Sunday. I visited his body after he passed. I still can’t believe it as I am writing this. 

The last two times I saw him stand out in my mind. The earlier time was our last nice day together. We drank on the rooftop of his apartment building in the Lower East side. We climbed the water tower and took in the view, talking about our plans for the summer and the future. He took a picture of me, which became my profile picture on Facebook. 

The second time was the last time I saw him before he was in the hospital. His pain was bad, his cough was bad. But he was so happy to see me. 

“Everything feels better when you’re here,” he had said to me.

When I left, he hugged me and told me he loved me. That was another thing I learned from Sagar. He always said “I love you” to his friends. Now I do too.

I have seen too many early deaths in my life already. My father died of cancer when I was in high school. One of my high school best friends committed suicide when I was in college. And now Sagar is gone. 

Fuck. He was the center of everything good in our massive group of friends. 

His death is senseless and tragic. One quote keeps going through my mind: “Nature is not human hearted.” 

No it fucking isn’t. 

I say this again and again: impermanence is inescapable. This life is not a means to an end. The end is death. No matter what we do, we take nothing with us. This life is an opportunity to love and to awaken. No more, no less. 

I don’t know how Sagar’s death will effect me. After my father’s death, I found myself on a spiritual path and it led me to meditation. I don’t know what’s next. 

All I can say is don’t wait. There is no later that we can depend on. 

Thanks for listening. May you all be blessed with health, happiness, and peace. 

Lao Tzu (via lazyyogi)

P

Tilopa (via motherofhermes)

Amen! Amen!

120216 / I learned how to breathe like the ocean

We grew up most of our lives with adults telling us that we’re a lost generation. I spent an ample amount of time in high school writing declamation pieces insisting that we weren’t lost. That we might sometimes get lost in all the technology around us, but we cared as much about the real world as those who came before us. As I grew older, I stopped writing pieces like that. At sixteen, bathed in the pale light of my phone screen at 3 in the morning, I realized that we really were a lost generation.

Lost, not in the sense that we’re a hopeless and misdirected bunch. Lost, as in we’re on a seemingly unending search for who we really are and there are no maps or compasses to lead the way. So, what we do instead is try to look for ourselves in other people, in faraway places, in the bottom of a beer bottle. And for a while, it works. We discover new pieces of ourselves that felt like they were there all along. But soon, with each new piece you gain, you lose another part of yourself. You keep trading parts, not quite sure where all of them are supposed to fit in your life.

Nowadays, I’m just trying to find myself through more productive and less destructive ways. Which is why I ended up joining Mysore style Ashtanga Yoga practices. At first, I was just tagging along with my mom (she had already been practicing for almost a year now) and watched them go through all these seemingly spine-breaking asanas with so much grace and sense of self. They flowed from one pose to the next in a world of their own. Watching them, I couldn’t help but want to see that world for myself.

The first thing I had to do was relearn how to breathe. They called it Ujjayi, which is an ancient Yogic breathing technique –  a pranayama. Ujjayi can also be called by another name, “ocean breathing” because it reminds you of the sound of waves. You had to take deeper inhalations and exhalations, drawing air into the stomach and then gently constricting the throat as you release air. The resulting sound from the inhales sound like ocean water gathering up into a wave and the exhales sound like waves breaking on the shore. In a room of students breathing like this, it’s not hard to imagine being on a seaside cliff with the waves rolling onto the sand in the distance.

Vinyasa is the coordination of breath and movement. Each pose or asana that you fall into requires you to take a specific breath, which means that there is only a set number of breaths you must take for each sequence of poses. As I taught my lungs to slow down, I also learned how to slow down my thoughts. I’m used to having a thousand thoughts running through my head, so having the chance to clear my head and focus solely on my breathing and movement was liberating in a way. It’s said that vinyasa is supposed to cleanse you internally, it starts a fire in your blood. It heats up your blood and purges your body of toxins. Archaic yoga gurus liken it to gold being heated up to remove impurities like dirt. By controlling your breath and movement, you slowly become a purer kind of gold. Isn’t that sort of poetic?

Ashtanga is a form of yoga that’s not for everyone, because it’s somewhat stricter and closer to the spiritual level than most yoga. It usually follows a self-led tradition, which means you must memorize the sequence of poses and their Sanskrit names instead of relying on the teacher to instruct you. The discipline required for it though is exactly why I liked it so much. It’s fulfilling. It focuses not on self-improvement, but on self-acceptance. It encourages you to move at your own pace and to trust your own body.