Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi. Brian Leaf

7

       Tea with Oskar

      Not all those who wander are lost.

      — GANDALF, in The Fellowship of the Ring

      After hearing about Amrit, I still tutored, I still hung out with Yolanthe; I just didn’t do yoga anymore.

      Until I did. One day, only a few days after my yoga ban, I realized that I was in the middle of a yoga practice. I was not asleep or drugged; I was just doing yoga, in much the same manner that you’d eventually breathe if you had been holding your breath. You’d get distracted by something and find that there you were, of course, breathing. That’s what happened to me. I got distracted, so to speak, and suddenly found that there I was, practicing yoga.

      Around the same time that Yolanthe told me the devastating Amrit news, one of my oldest and closest friends was talking about traveling. Like me, Zach was at a crossroads and needed some time to think. His questions were different from mine — while my disillusionment sprang from a wayward guru, Zach’s centered on several early professional disappointments, a broken heart, and a very bad sunburn.*

      But for both of us, traveling seemed a way to find some answers.

      Zach and I spent a few months doing research. First we decided to travel the United States rather than Europe. Second, we decided to buy a van rather than patch together trains and buses across the country.

      I figured that on the trip I would experiment with yoga styles and find the one for me. I even found a few directories of yoga schools and teachers in the United States. It would be like speed dating after a rough breakup.

      Zach located a van for us to buy. We had almost settled on a retired Wonder Bread delivery truck, but instead we purchased a 1990 Toyota Previa minivan. We removed the backseats and replaced them with a futon. We designed the futon frame to lift at both ends so we could store our stuff underneath.

      On March 8, my parents threw a good-bye party for us. It was a heck of a scene. You will fail to visualize this event properly unless you have witnessed fifteen elderly New Jersey Jews passing around plates of pastrami and dill pickles and talking all at once. My paternal grandpa struggled to understand the mishegas of his grandson. He had no chance at understanding why two menschly fellows like Zach and I were “not in med school, already!” My mom cried as we pulled away in the van.

      Our first stop was a pilgrimage for me. I wanted answers, and I thought perhaps Oskar, the guy in sandals, beard, and all whites from Georgetown, could provide them. He had seemed so pure and so yogic. Plus, he had been my very first yoga teacher.

      Luckily Oskar was listed in the Yoga Journal directory. He taught and lived, it seemed, in Bethesda, Maryland, about twenty minutes from Georgetown. I felt about him the way a kindergartener feels about his teacher; seeing Oskar anywhere else but at yoga class, say, in a CVS wearing jeans and a polo shirt, would have me staring wide-eyed and openmouthed.

      I called ahead to ask if I could visit, and then dropped Zach off at a bookstore. I found Oskar’s place, and at first the whole experience was perfect, textbook. He had an old VW bus parked in the driveway. I rang the bell, which was short and sweet, a cross between a Zen chime and a gong.

      Oskar opened the door and looked just as I remembered him: relaxed smile, comfortable white clothing, big beard, sandals, as if no time had passed. Really very little had passed, but to me the time between my graduation from college and now, which had been only two years, was significant. To him, in midlife, it probably didn’t seem like very long.

      Oskar pointed me to the family room, while he went to the kitchen for mugs of ginger tea. We chatted, first catching up and then getting down to business. I told him about Kripalu yoga, the news about Amrit (he knew of this already), my disillusionment, and my attempts to stop practicing yoga.

      Oskar listened attentively. After I was finished, he started dishing out some very fine wisdom. He spoke in metaphor and parable. He told me that when the bee stings the deer (an interesting metaphor for Amrit’s sexual indiscretions), the bee is acting out its nature. And best of all, he told me that my attempts at quitting yoga, which ended with me unconsciously taking the practice right back up, demonstrated that I had been practicing for many lifetimes and that it was my dharma, my work in this lifetime, to pursue yoga and liberation. I was an old, wise soul, he said.

      I sat and listened. I was enthralled. Who doesn’t want to hear that they are an old, wise soul? And then suddenly I noticed that Oskar’s eyes were half closed as he spoke. I remembered that three years earlier, someone at Georgetown, who was doing a research paper on enlightenment, had told me that an enlightened person is so relaxed that their eyes are always half closed.