Interview with Geetaji

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Chris: Did you ever think of your practice as a duty?

Geeta: No. I would not have mentioned about the nephritis in my book if my publisher had not insisted that I point out that yoga had helped my nephritis. But my interest in yoga was intuitive and after the nephritis I took it seriously. There might be people more serious than me, who do yoga day and night. But I take it that not only in this life, but in the next life I will be doing yoga, not as a duty but as a way of life. I won't say it is my life mission; it's my life.

Chris: In the book, Guruji says that the medicine that the doctors had advised for your condition was too costly. Do you think that if you had had the money, Guruji would have taken that route?

Geeta: Actually I don't think so because he had tremendous faith in yoga. As the kidney was affected permanently, yoga was the only medicine.

Chris: When you started teaching, did you ever think it would be your life work?

Geeta: I started teaching in 1959, when I was in school. I was practising and the teachers saw me. We had competitions in the schools where groups would perform, giving a demonstration. At that time my teacher asked me to help her with a yoga demonstration. Guruji was just coming into the limelight and there were articles about him in the local papers. So people started recognising him as a yogi who had taught famous people. So my teachers recognised me as well. In the early years when they were doing group demonstrations they had never introduced Sirsasana and Sarvangasana. So that was the first year that we introduced these poses for a performance. I was the organiser for the teaching of the poses and the formation of the performers to make it an attractive demonstration. I even taught them Kapotasana and Raja Kapotasana. It was a big success and we received a prize. So that's how I began teaching in school. In 1961 I passed my final exams and started teaching yoga. At first I started because Guruji was going to England and some of his pupils asked him whether I could teach them in his absence and he permitted it. And I kept teaching at my school and some of the other schools started asking me to teach them also. That is how it continued.

Chris: So it just happened. You didn't really think about how to start teaching?

Geeta: No, I never thought about it. I just started like that. I had not planned it.

Geeta: No, except that I had an inclination towards medical studies, but my energy was not sufficient for that. And that interest faded when I developed such a keen interest in yoga. And it wasn't that I was initially interested in treating people with yoga. My interest in therapy came later. As I started teaching, students would tell me about their different problems and for them yoga had to be therapeutic. But my interest is mainly in the whole of yoga. Therapy is a necessary by product of teaching, and it came on its own as I was teaching. Even for my nephritis, I didn't do yoga as a treatment or take it like a medicine. My practice was my practice. Yoga was my interest and I used to do all the poses from A to Z. I kept Guruji's album of his poses open because we had no book. Light on Yoga came much later. So all I had was his photographs. I used to open it and seeing the pictures I used to perform.

Chris: And there were no instructions?

Geeta: No, and Guruji could not teach me because he was busy with his own work. We hardly ever saw him because when he was home for lunch, we were at school. And he didn't come home until around 8:30 at night, when it was time for us to go to bed. But my mother would tell him how regular I was with my practice. I practised directly after coming home from school. I was quite disciplined not to eat anything after school but to do my practice of 45 minutes to one hour before having something to eat. That discipline came on its own. No one had to force me. And now self-discipline has become my nature. I never had any plans to become a yoga teacher. It too was a natural evolution.

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