In 1990 when I began teaching a yoga class for the City of Plano Parks and Recreation Department, there was one other yoga teacher offering classes in Plano.&nbsp; In addition to teaching group yoga classes, people came to me for bodywork, energetic healing and private yoga lessons. My business earned a small profit in the first year and has sustained profitability ever since. The freedom of&nbsp; being in charge of my own schedule as a small business owner offered exactly what I needed at the time to take my yoga practice to a deeper level.<br />
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By the next year, yoga's roots in the United States were taking solid hold. Some of the big corporations--Texas Instruments, Northern Telecom, and Frito Lay--began to offer yoga classes for their employees, having discovered that doing so promoted wellness and productivity, decreased stress levels, and lowered illness-related absenteeism. I contracted with Northern Telecom (later NorTel) and the following year with Frito Lay to offer on-site lunchtime yoga classes--2 per week at NorTel and 1 per week at Frito Lay.<br />
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There were still relatively few people teaching yoga in the Dallas area and only two small yoga studios I was aware of. Most classes were offered by recreation centers and a few open minded churches. Around that same time, Dallas Yoga Center began to host visiting yoga teachers of national and international standing. Attending their workshops helped me, among others, to deepen and grow my yoga practice and refine my teaching.<br />
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From this&nbsp; beginning, a groundswell of interest in Yoga that had begun on the East and West Coasts in the 1970’s arrived in the North Texas heartland of America by the mid-1990’s. Suddenly suppliers of yoga props were having to tell their customers that the demand for yoga mats had grown so rapidly that mats were all on back-order. I had two suppliers, one in Canada and one in Louisiana (Fish Crane) and neither had mats readily available. This was astonishing news. It was as if the news had suddenly landed in a “back from the future” event.<br />
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1993 was a watershed year for deepening threads of connection with Yoga and India. The Dallas area, a big center for telecom businesses, employed a large number of people from India in technical, engineering, managerial and other positions. Because I was teaching yoga twice weekly at Northern Telecom (NorTel),&nbsp; I came to know numerous people among the growing Indian population in this part of Texas. Many of the employees who attended my NorTel classes over a 16-year period have remained friends, and several have gone on to become certified yoga teachers themselves. They invite me to events offered in their community, and enable me to be in the presence of learned Indian Yogis, spiritual teachers and Gurus for lectures, Dharshan, Satsang, and fund raising community productions that&nbsp; benefit the needy in India.<br />
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Near the end of 1993, I had the opportunity to be in the presence of a young yoga guru from an ancient yoga lineage in India, Anandi Ma, at a public meditation event. My Polarity Therapy teacher Maruti Seidman, had told me about her and about his Guru, Dhyan Yogi. He knew that I needed to be there.<br />
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That evening, which ended in one of the most profound meditations I have ever experienced, was a mountaintop event for me. At the end of the group meditation, Anandi Ma invited those who wanted to pursue deeper studies within this lineage to remain after others had departed. She spoke with those who stayed about the gift of shaktipat and what initiation entailed and demanded of sincere seekers. I went on to attend training and received shaktipat and initiation into the lineage of Kundalini Maha Yoga. On the passing of Anandi Ma's Guru, Dhyan Yogi, this quiet, unassuming, deeply compassionate Guru, regarded as one of the women saints of India, became the new spiritual leader of the Kundalini Maha Yoga lineage and tradition.<br />
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The mantra meditation practice taught by Shri Anandi Ma changed my life and helped make me the person I am today. Her teachings and her Presence, whether in the physical or non-physical state, have been an enormously beneficent influence, one that I can pass on to my students as well.<br />
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Two concepts from India’s spiritual heritage that knowing her have impressed upon me and that resonate most deeply within me are:<br />
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1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The experience of deep veneration, respect, and gratitude for one’s Guru – the destroyer of darkness<br />
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2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The embrace of divine transformation, as visualized in the traditional Shiva Nataraj icon – Shiva dancing in the cosmic ring of fire, at once stamping on the head of the dwarf of ignorance and transforming ignorance into wisdom, liberation, and light, into, ultimately, enlightenment. We have no teaching like that in America nor in the varieties of Christian belief systems with which I am familiar.<br />
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Especially I embrace the understanding that our task is to directly and personally experience God, rather than to simply believe in God, have faith in God, or know about God. Yoga asks us to go beyond these limited states and through committed, individual practice to become expansive, to cultivate transcendental consciousness, uniting us with Source Energy, with bliss consciousness, with cosmic consciousness, with God. The field, the knower of the field, and the action of knowing the field merge into Oneness, undivided Intelligence, the All That Is, Brahman, God. Non-duality is the state of Beingness itself – beyond thought, faith, feeling, or belief.<br />
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It is a mystical experience that no words can describe, unbound by the limits of the physical dimension. And yet in spite of all the mystery, Oneness is who we truly Are.<br />
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Perhaps it is easier for a non-Indian to fully appreciate the gift presented in the experiential hands of Non-dualism. Perhaps if you grow up hearing about these ideas and their seeming senselessness to the rational mind, it is easy to overlook and dismiss them.<br />
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For me, the experience of Non-duality is rain in the desert after decades of drought. It feels like Home. I come Home to a place that I never truly left. A place I could never have reached or even imagined had I remained in the box of the religion I learned, grew up with, and experienced as a child and teenager.<br />
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For additional information about Shri Anandi Ma, please visit this link at Dhyan Yoga Centers: http://dyc.org/kundalini-maha-yoga/anandi-ma/<br />
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To be continued in Part 5<br />
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© 2010 Carol Stall, rev. 2015