Interview with Geetaji

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Chris: So when you are doing your practice it is not a matter of thinking, but it is a matter of experiencing?

Geeta: Yes, when experience comes, thoughts come later. Thinking or formation of thought, how to present it to students comes much, much later. The clarity of explaining to others comes later. But in my own practice, I am not really question- ing. I am just in it and I understand the difference and why the disparity is there. You have to adjust, that's all, and bring parity. You may make mistakes when you look at things. I may tell you to lift your right shoulder and you may have thought you needed to lift your left. But did you first reach there, from inside? That much you have to see.

Chris: As you say, it is not an intellectual process but an experiential one. That's what is hard to teach.

Geeta: And even though I have to miss my practice sometimes, whenever I practice I am going in. Even if I am in Supta Virasana I am observing from inside, what is going on, how the breath is moving, why the breath is less on one side, etc. So when I practice, I penetrate. That first step of penetration has to come. The amount of time you practice is irrelevant but if you have more time, you penetrate more. To anyone looking from outside my Janu Sirsasana might not be much to look at because I have to keep a bolster, blanket, everything for my head. But when I spent the forty-five minutes before class, it came better on the inside every time I repeated. I felt the difference. In the sense of "performance" my practice is a failure. But still I am practising and I continue with it because it is taking me somewhere inside. If it had not taken me to such depth I would have said goodbye to it. Others also can say, like Geeta, we also can't do so we will limit ourselves. But they may not be going inside. If I take them further than what they are doing on their own, they have to realise that they did not reach deep enough.

Chris: I am always impressed by what you know about women, the stresses in their daily life, about pregnancy and childbearing, about being a wife etc. And you have not experienced all these things. You hardly go out of the house and the Institute. How have you learned all these things? Do you experience them through other people?

Geeta: I don't know how it comes to me but it comes. I really can't say how it comes but certain things do happen and I get it. That is the fact.

Chris: You seem to have an intuition as to how each student feels. Like today, there was a woman with depression and you seemed to know exactly how she felt.

Geeta: Yes, I told her to lift her eyes and .that helped. I see that opening the eyes, opens the mind. It comes because there is an inner connection. Then you forget the past and come to the present. Otherwise you are brooding, you are in the past. Even in Setu Bandha Sarvangasana I told the students today to look at the ceiling and lift the chest so the whole cellular body goes upward. Yes, I have to admit that it is intuition which guides me to a great extent.

Chris: I know Guruji has said that in the medical classes when he has students with various ailments, he has to create the problem in his own body to see what to do. Do you also do that?

Geeta: Yes, to some extent that kind of imitation is there. But it is a feeling and I can't say that it is just penetrating into the body. Suppose you are complaining of ankle pain in standing poses. When I am practising, the depth is so much that I see that when you are complaining of your ankle pain what is likely to be happening. More than technique it is the feeling which is there that gives me the knowledge from inside, how each person has to be treated. Even in the case of a liver or gallbladder problem, I feel it from inside of my body. There is a sense. Suppose in forward bends someone says their abdomen is getting pressed. I feel it from inside where it is getting pressed. And the other day in class you may have seen this woman who complained of lumbar pain. I felt that her problem was in the shoulder blade and you saw that the moment the shoulder blade was taken inside, she was free from the lumbar pain. So how it comes, I can't say. But it is the penetration in the pose that tells us what is happening in certain parts of the body when we are doing the pose. It is just a freedom of the mind, you can say. And sometimes I explain in the class but I don't know to what extent you people understand. Even if I shout, there is a reason behind it. If I am strict with someone or losing my temper, outsiders might think that it is only at that level. But then they are not really understanding. I am just asking them to penetrate inside. It is so subjective that people will never understand without experiencing. Sometimes people talk about the sweet-talking teachers and we can't even imagine like that because we can't cheat. When you are seeing in front of your eyes that something is going wrong, you can't cheat.

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