Why Guru Nation?
So what’s the deal with my website’s name of Krista’s Guru Nation? Am I touting myself as a great teacher ready to guide the nation?
No. Nope. It’s more the opposite of that.
The name came up in a conversation I had with Holden, my 13 year old son, about Fantasy Football. (Many of our best conversations involve football these days.) Our nuclear family plus my two brothers formed our own fantasy league this fall and Holden and I were throwing around catchy team names that suited each family member. We were having fun and really getting the juices flowing when Holden suggested that my team name be “Guru Nation”. It had a yoga twist, it was bad-ass, and it met my seemingly subconscious desire these days to be in good favor with my son. It fit perfectly.
As I started building this website as a professional yoga instructor, I still found “Guru Nation” pithy and sassy (like me). But the name “Guru Nation” suggests the opposite of what I have surmised about yoga and what I have personally experienced in my own yoga practice. Call me crazy, but my quirky old self likes the irony.
Here’s what I mean by suggesting that a nation led by me as a guru is the opposite of my experience with yoga and what I really need to share:
Every single one of us has everything we need right now to affect the changes we want to see in our lives.
No guru required, but a little guidance from someone on the same path (maybe a yoga instructor like me?) never hurt. Especially someone who just wants to share the benefits they have found in yoga. And the practice of yoga gives us techniques we can use to know ourselves better.
My consistent yoga practice has helped me build energy in my physical body, allowed me a way back to the awareness of my essential, unchanged self without the chatter of my mind obscuring the way. It has helped me develop a connection between my body, mind and soul. When I see things more clearly, I tend to make more skillful decisions about how I want to live my life and affect the people and world around me.
I’m a sucker for a good yogi biography and one of my favorites has been Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope (author, yogi, and psychologist). In it, the author writes about his experience living in a yoga hermitage for ten years. This is what he discovers in the end:
“Before yoga, before meditation… that grace had been with me all along. It had always been there…. Whenever we relinquish our craving, clinging, and grasping; whenever we stop the war with reality, whenever we are totally present and undivided, we are immediately in union with our true nature…. You are everything you ever wanted. I write this to myself as a reminder as much as to you, dear reader.”
I love the idea of our whole diverse and divided country uniting in the pursuit of self-inquiry through yoga and discovering they have everything they need inside them already to live the lives they desire.
If you haven’t seen the movie Kumare, I’d recommend it. It’s a documentary about a man who searches for a guru in India to guide the development of his spiritual life. He becomes disillusioned by the “gurus” he meets and decides to make a documentary about affecting spiritual growth in a group of people by becoming a false spiritual teacher. He really does a great job of convincing people he’s the one to follow and many people begin to look to him for guidance. He pays close attention to his followers, listens intently, and when they ask him for guidance, he skillfully puts the question right back on them.
As Kumare builds up this community where he is the “guru”, he builds up the confidence in each of his students and strongly makes his point about the power of self-transformation. Many of the students really start changing their lives for the better even though they are following someone who is literally making shit up as he goes along. I won’t spoil the ending, but this social experiment really brings the point home about having everything we need to make the changes we want to see in our lives.
Apparently Kumare’s followers and I are not the only ones who want to change. According to the latest Yoga in America study produced by Yoga Journal Magazine, the number of yoga practitioners has increased by 30 percent in the past four years. Their 2008 survey accounted for 15.8 million yoga practitioners, but the latest figure shows that 20.4 million Americans are now practicing — about 8.7 percent of U.S. adults.
So here’s my little shout out for “Krista’s Guru Nation”. It’s about my life and my yoga journey and my rise with the tide of so many other Americans looking for ways to improve our lives. Yoga offers me access to an effective and alternate life philosophy and gives an alternate way of thinking and being in the world. Perhaps like me, other people feel sickened (yes, literally ill) or merely disillusioned by mainstream American culture. I have learned through my inquiry that I need:
· Substance over appearances
· Sustainability over material over-consumption
· Sharing over greed
· Spaciousness and reflection over busy-ness and over-scheduling
· Collaboration over zero-sum competition
· Kindness and understanding over efficiency and marketing, and
· Meaningful, lasting connections over shallow, sensational “bucket list” experiences
Does this sound like you? If you’ve landed here and found you’d like to become more skillful, more authentic, more “You”, then I look forward to walking this path with you.
Dr. Kelly Flanagan, in his blog Untangled sums it up perfectly when he says, “I’m not here to prove myself. I’m here to be myself…. the great calling upon your life is to find your way into the center of your heart, where the story is simply about being yourself—loving what you love, and living what you are here to live.”
No guru required.
