Meeting Your Teacher, by Mehtab

My wife and I met Gurucharan 13 years ago in a tent in the mountains of New Mexico at the annual Kundalini Summer Solstice celebration. He was a yogic counselor and we needed counseling. He told us to start teaching yoga, build a community and train teachers. And he said he would help us if we needed it.

We invited him to Austin the following year for our first big yoga workshop event. There was no Yoga Yoga yet – we were still teaching out of our home – so we had to rent a space for him to teach.

We found a meeting room in the basement of the Ramada Inn. I didn’t know it at the time, but the room was directly off from the bar – a sort of meet, greet and get yourself a drink room. As we set up the area for him to teach, you could hear the sound of clinking glasses and catch a whiff of cigarette smoke. We hauled in a gong that we borrowed from a teacher in Dallas past the barroom door to the curious glances of the drinkers. Then their eyes bugged out as they saw Gurucharan walk by, over six feet tall, wearing his turban, and carrying a gong mallet in his hand. It was going to be interesting.

At the end of the two-hour class, punctuated by mantras and calls for refills from next door, Gurucharan started to really wail on the gong during the final relaxation and meditation. It sounded like a fire truck running through the barroom. And then he stopped and it was so, so, so quiet. There were 18 yogis laying on the floor in bliss in one room and 12 drunks next door stunned into silence. For a moment, at least in our microcosm, the number of people meditating outnumbered the number of people drinking.

Then the ice machine dropped a load of ice like a melting glacier and I heard an awed and inebriated voice say, “Hot damn!”

When we opened Yoga Yoga, Gurucharan was the first teacher we invited to come and teach here. He helped start our teacher training program. He has been a personal counselor and advisor. Every year since we opened, we invite and welcome him to teach at Yoga Yoga. It is the least we can do for a yogi who played the gong in the Ramada Inn basement barroom.

Gurucharan will be returning to Yoga Yoga in April 2008. Click here to read more about these events.

Come see if this is the teacher you are supposed to meet!