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February 28, 2014

To Meet a Man Who Knows. ~ Kushal Malhotra

Task: Deep depth of field, blurry motion, & silhouette in single shot.

“Everybody’s talking at me

Can’t hear a word they’re saying

Only the echoes of my mind”

~ Midnight Cowboy

If you’ve ever seen “Midnight Cowboy”, some of you New Yorkers out there may have felt a connection to Dustin Hoffman’s character and his feelings of dissolution at the awesomeness of the city. It’s a divine play of beautiful follies, flashing pleasures, dark desires, dreams broken and come true, connections that mesmerize…only to sadly disappear, as miraculously as they arrived.

In New York, our proximity to each other creates more bumping into; more bouncing balls means more collisions.  We experience encounters after encounters. One crazy spirit after another, we meet people who like us, are consumed in the sea of our self-induced dramas. But, we seem to only come up for air every once in a while so we can look and see kindred spirits. One wonders how or why these meetings ever come about.

How could I be reading a book about a wandering yogi who meets a piano player and find myself having a conversation with a man who just happens to be a Zen inspired pianist? The surprise renders my ego speechless.  For a moment I can come out of myself and experience something greater—a coincidence too crazy for me to explain away. So my mind rests and my heart can listen in on the miracle.

Our little miracle would occur in a West Village coffee shop. Turning my may through Chapter three of Hesse’s, “Peter Camanzind”, the book’s main character is traveling to Italy, the country of his idol St. Francis of Assisi. On his way, he meets a meets a piano player in Zurich. On my own way to The Dharma Yoga Center, I meet a real life pianist. That was my miracle. The pianist had recently read Chandra Om’s biography “Dharma Mittra; A Friend to All”—that was his.

My new friend never practiced yoga in the modern sense of the word (asana and yoga pants). He explained that his work, his music was his dharma, his yoga.

What struck me most was how he spoke about Dharma Mittra—he spoke with such love and respect. It was shocking. He had never met him or even taken one of his yoga classes, yet he seemed to have understood his message. He sat and explained the way of the enlightened. He spoke about various Zen masters, transcendentalists, monks and spiritualists.

He identified a problem: what to do after enlightenment. When there is nothing to do, how do those who are set free convey the message? Usually, these people have no real profession—most masters are in the mountains or in temples far away from the rest of us.

Others write books and give lectures; they touch our spirit and our heart. But in Dharma Mittra, we have one that touches us (quite literally).

Of course, the miracle has to vanish. My ego, my melodrama back in charge of me, I am left with the memory of perfection.

And so we said our goodbyes. I walked that day to the Dharma center with a new found appreciation of permanence. Yes, my meetings, my coincidences, my life is but a fleeting series of happenings, arising and passing into memory all to be forgotten as I will be myself (soon forgotten). But in Dharma Mittra, I see a soul which cannot be lost, that which is never born and never dies.

Why is he so special?

The answer lies in his ego (or lack thereof). He is arguably the most legendary teacher in this hemisphere. Yet he doesn’t know it himself. Or if he does, he could care less. He has dissolved his false self to reveal his spirit. If we care to look (not with our eyes which want to see pleasure or our ears that want to hear pleasure) we’ll see our own spirit in him. Dharma shows us that his spirit is not his at all.

It’s ours.

He is realized, yes. But he happens to have a job too. He’s a yoga teacher. So he’ll tell us to go from cobra to down dog. He’ll come in and adjust. He’ll do the stuff we’ll get at the gym, or at that studio where that instructor that was just ranked the hottest in RateYourBurn.

Actually, Dharma does a lot less than those yoga divas. There are no movie soundtracks, no stories of what the teacher learned at Burning Man, no flirtations shrouded as meaningful spiritual conversation. There is just a realized soul who happens to be teaching a yoga class.

To find Dharma, you can’t look with your eyes or listen with your ears; you have to open your heart and find a way to receive.

“After Enlightenment, the Laundry.” ~ Zen Proverb

Dharma teaches by example; he is his message. I can’t be sure he is enlightened mainly. It takes one to know one. But it is my sense that he is. Dharma’s laundry is teaching yoga and he does so with a passion that is passionless; a charisma that is egoless.

When he speaks he doesn’t talk about the physical (ironically, he’s perhaps best known for a posture of asana which are the standard for perfection in physical yoga practice). After class he’ll ramble in “Portu-glish” about life and living and dying and the ever watching “witness.”

I usually find myself leaving his studio trusting in my permanence and with less fear I find myself feeling like the better part of that old “Midnight Cowboy” track:

“Bankin’ off the northeast wind

And sailin’ on summer breeze

Skippin’ over the ocean like a stone…”

Love elephant and want to go steady?

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Editorial Assistant: Leila Jankowski/Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: Katina Rogers/flickr

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