Things are never as they seem. Opportunities to teach yoga philosophy to children abound!
We are back in Buenos Aires after a rather interesting experience at the Nuevo Vrindavana Eco Yoga Park in Argentina. At first we openly embraced the worm compost eco toilets, and the cold nights abated with layers of heavy wool blankets. We enjoyed the rustic charm, and how time and the outside world disappeared while on the farm. Every morning an amazing cacophony of a variety of distant roosters, birds, sheep and cows awoke us, as if the whole animal kingdom rose up from the depths to welcome us back to the world. I loved the heavy fog on the morning landscape, the cows and horses grazing in the field of early dawn light. Being so close to nature and animals is a calming and spiritual effect that touches the depths of your being, awakening you to something familiar you had forgotten but could not articulate.
I taught yoga classes to the group of four foreigners and one Argentine yoga teacher, who were “volunteers.” The kids and I helped cook in the kitchen, weed the garden, put mud on the eco-buldings. We ate vegetarian food, mostly deep fried chapattis, bananas and other assorted food from the garden dressed with sunflower oil and flax seeds. My son commented that he liked it here and that he and his sister fight less. They could run around free in the country. I was disappointed that we won’t make cheese or yogurt, as the neighborhing farm wasn’t doing it that week. I did meet the woman who had the organic farm with the cheese, she was very nice and brought her 11-year-old son over. He was home on a Friday because of a paro, a teacher’s strike.
Foggy mornings on the eco yoga park in Argentina
One afternoon, as my son and I walked around the grounds, he asked if Muslims and Christians all lived together here that they would kill each other. I said people are all dying for their metaphors, dying for an idea that they have about god. Even the Krishnas. My older sister, Narada, has been a Hare Krishna devotee for more than 30 years, so I know a bit about this. I explained to him that the idea of Krishna is to help our little minds grasp something that is ungraspable, that god is infinite and beyond all concepts and words. So we have to have some words or pictures to help us see it. This “it” being some depth, something that informs all of creation, like a big ocean beneath everything in front of our eyes. He said he understood. Not bad for a 12 ½ year old. He remembered the Zen story of heaven and hell I used to tell, where the state of mind of anger and wanting to kill somebody is being in hell. And when you are in bliss and love, that is heaven.
Weeding the organic garden
My son always came to the kid yoga classes when he was young, but rarely wanted to come to my yoga classes afterwards. But since I was teaching for the adults, to my surprise, he came. He said he liked it and it made him feel good. He was “rusty” he said. But I said with practice it will come. During class, since it was so cold that morning, I used a Sufi story about staying centered in good or difficult times, and related it to the Bhagavad Gita, which teaches that the sage is unperturbed by loss or gain, comfort or discomfort. He is equal-minded in everything. This is the true sage, true wisdom. So we all practiced in the cold, warmed up with the yoga, and it was great for everybody be together. We were a tribe.
The next day, we went into the town of General Rodriguez where the young women, the “madres,” have a school and live. My kids and I practiced together, and I realize that this was the first time ever that we had done a class together where I was not the yoga teacher, not the leader. It was so enjoyable to just enjoy the class and be with my kids doing yoga. I could look over and smile at my daughter, rather than worry if she was behaving. The kids did remarkably well, and during shavasana it was fun to reach over and touch my daughter’s little hand. I was happy that they knew all the yoga poses, and did them with some ease, as well as little kids can.
Images of nature calm the soul and touch the depths of your being.
Until we start our official online school, the kids’ writing and spelling work is their travel blogs. My son asked, “How do you spell Krishna? Vishnu?” We talked about the different incarnations of Vishnu, who comes to restore order.
Whenever righteousness wanes and unrighteousness increases I send myself forth.
In order to protect the good and punish the wicked,
In order to make a firm foundation for righteousness,
I come into being age after age. (4.7–8)
He came first as a fish, then a turtle, next a boar, then a lion-headed man, then a dwarf, then a sage with an axe. Then came Rama, Krishna, the Buddha, and the final incarnation is yet to come, Kalki, who will bring balance back to the world. Personally I think it will be as a woman, as the feminine is badly needed to restore balance, like Durga’s job, and that patriarch cultures have changed mythology to suit their needs before.
Back in the big city of Buenos Aires
In the wooden cabin where we lived, in which one burned down a few months ago, gasp! there was an interesting painting in our room. My kids and I looked at it. It depicted a spiraling stage, marching through time, filled with people in the “Karmie” world. Singers, football players, shoppers, people trying to get ahead in the world. Skulls and bones peer ominously beneath the stage as everyone marches into the jaws of a big clock. Only a Krishna devotee is crawling off the stage, climbing up the stage ropes as Krishna’s blue hands reach to him from above. I explained to the kids that it’s all a metaphor. We are in this “stage” of time and space, duality. Krishna is beyond that. Singular. God, the transcendent, something beyond all this. That’s where we can reside. Where we can identify and find safety and groundedness. Because things change. I explained that we will leave the yoga farm and be back in Buenos Aires. Eventually we will be back in the United States. The only thing permanent is residing in this moment, feeling this breath. I’m not sure they understood, but the visual image was helpful.
People came and went here. They were mostly young. The Australian teacher on 8-month holiday. A lively young British man who has been traveling for six years. He gave me the scoop on growing dreadlocks, which he had and has since grown and cut off. He said it got really heavy surfing. There was the Argentine yoga teacher, who gave me a wonderful neck massage with juniper oil to relieve terrible headache I had one day. And then the Dutch woman and has been in Argentina three years. She has a little dog, Nikita, who has an underbite, a lot of personality, and follows her everywhere. We all clicked and piled into her car in the afternoons and head to an ice cream shop for some dulce de leche and to use the internet.
The Krishnas preach their dogma a lot. All of us foreigners started thinking there was something wrong at the farm. Tons of wasps showed up in our cabin and I felt that was a bad sign. I wondered why this big yoga farm was so abandoned, in disrepair. I heard that the person who runs it isn’t such a good person. Not so Krishna as you would believe. I asked him why my rate was so much than the others. Turns out he was charging me as a tourist! It was very clear that I was here to volunteer, teach yoga, teach yoga to children, garden, serve. I don’t come to pay to work! Espceially when a nice, warm bed in a hostel in Buenos Aires is cheaper than this place! The website said as tourists, you do things like art, yoga, Tibetan bowls. None of that was offered, nor mentioned that it was only seasonally offered! He said they only accept three volunteers during winter. Nothing about that on the website! I felt insulted, taken advantage of. There were five others here as “volunteers!”
All of us foreigners thought it was beginning to be a creepy place and didn’t trust the person who ran it. One young man, a true devotee, seemed to be the only one doing all the work around the farm. We all felt he was being taken advantage of too. The foreigners helped me book a hostel. So much cheaper than a hotel! I’ve learned too how expensive it is to get money out of an ATM, and they limit how much you can withdrawl each time just to get fees! I confronted the person who ran the farm about how misleading it all was, but they had locked the gate! So I figured to pay and get out! We all left and are now in a very comfy hostel in the heart of Buenos Aire’s theater district. We have all been hanging out as a tribe. I love the community and my kids love the other foreigners too. It takes a village! Sadly, they are all moving on soon. Our apartment is ready September 1.
All in all, I learned to live completely simple. The very basics. And after living basicly in a run-down farm, ANYTHING would be better. To start all over. I don’t need all those consumption comforts of my old life. I don’t even have a cell phone anymore! I did borrow the Dutch lady’s phone to call a taxi. People wonder how to make a living as a children’s yoga teacher. I say, cut down your expenses and discriminate between your wants and your needs. You don’t need much to live, and by turning off the television that outer image that does not connect with your real experience begins to dissolve. The spiritual life comes flooding in when you get rid of so many material issues and activities that are time and energy-consuming. Things the US economy forces you to participate in to survive. Like a car, a phone bill, having a lot of shoes or things to lug around, wash and take care of. Without all that stuff and cluttered activities you can just live and be centered in yoga.
This all has not been easy. It is quite stressful to deal with children in a foreign country. My daughter is a bit sad that she won’t, for her fifth grade year, be in school back home and be able to participate in a science field trip called Cal-Wood. She misses her friends. One night, however, coming back from the internet café with all six of us piled in the Dutch woman’s car with her little dog hanging out the window, she slammed on the brakes as a herd of white and brown horses came running across the road in front of us in the darkness. A young man on horseback took up the rear, with another boy on a bicycle behind him. We saw these amazing creatures charging in front of us, the car’s headlights lighting up the horse’s wild eyes.
I asked my daughter, “Are you still sad that you won’t be at Cal-Wood?” She smiled.
We bought some handmade wooden puzzles of South America, North America and Europe at the Recoleta fair. The kids loved putting the puzzles together. We are going to the exploratory science museum here in a few days.We are still working on our writing, blogging, reading history. It’s a little hard to do asana here at the hostel, but once we are settled into our apartment in a few days, things will change a lot.
The journey continues. I am sustained by the grace of Lord Shiva.
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