The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Art of Purring by David Michie Read Free Book Online Page A

use your awareness. Don’t try to avoid tightness by getting into a compromised posture; instead breathe through it! Not with force but with wisdom. Use your breath to create openness. Breath by breath, subtle change is possible. Each breath is a step to transformation.”
    I followed the class with keen interest from my stool at the back, pleased to have remained unobserved. But when Ludo instructed the students to perform a seated twist, suddenly 20 heads turned and faced me. Instantly there were smiles and a few chuckles.
    “Ah, yes—today’s special guest,” said Ludo.
    “All that white hair!” someone exclaimed.
    “Blue eyes,” said another.
    Then, as all 20 pairs of eyes were trained on me, a man remarked, “Must be Swami.”
    This provoked laughter as people were reminded of the local sage whose image appeared on posters all over town.
    I was relieved when the twist ended but immediately found myself being observed once again, when everyone turned toward me in the opposite direction.
    At the end of the class, as they lay on their mats in Shavasana, the pose of the corpse, Ludo told the students, “In some ways this is the most challenging pose of all. Calm body and calm mind. Try not to engage with every thought. Simply acknowledge the thought, accept it, and let it go. We can discover far more in the space between thoughts than when we become absorbed in conceptual elaboration. In the stillness we discover that there are other ways of knowing things than through the intellect.”

    After class, as the students were putting away their blankets and blocks and bolsters, a few paused to speak to me. While some returned to the hallway to put on their shoes and leave, most congregated on the balcony beyond the sliding doors. An assortment of chairs with brightly colored cushions and a few beanbag chairs were ranged along a faded Indian carpet that ran the length of the balcony. At a table stacked with mugs and glasses, someone was pouring water and green tea as the students settled into what was evidently a comfortable postclass routine.
    We cats are not fond of too much noise or movement, so I waited until they were all seated before slipping silently from the stool and making my way out to the balcony next to Serena. The final rays of the setting sun had turned the mountains a gleaming coral red.
    “Trying to breathe through discomfort when we’re doing yoga is one thing,” a gravel-voiced woman called Merrilee was saying. She had joined the class almost at the end, as though she had really come only for the social part of the evening. And was it my imagination, or had she surreptitiously slipped something from a hip flask into her glass? “But what about when we’re not doing yoga and we have to deal with problems?” she asked.
    “All is yoga,’” Ludo told her. “Usually we react to challenges in a habitual way, with anger or avoidance. By breathing through a challenge, we can arrive at a more useful response.”
    “Isn’t anger or avoidance sometimes a useful reaction?” asked Ewing, an older American who was a longtime resident of McLeod Ganj. Occasionally he visited the Himalaya Book Café, where it was said that he had fled to India after some sort of tragedy back home. For many years he had played piano in the lobby of New Delhi’s Grand Hotel.
    “A reaction is automatic, habitual,” Ludo said. “A response is considered. That’s the difference. What’s important is to create space, to open ourselves up to possibilities beyond the habitual, which rarely serve us well. Anger is never an enlightened response. We may be wrathful—speaking in mock-angry tones to stop a child who is about to step near a fire, for example—but that’s very different from real anger.”
    “The problem,” observed a tall Indian man sitting next to Serena, “is that we get stuck in our comfort zone, even when it isn’t very comfortable.”
    “Clinging to the familiar,” Serena agreed. “To things that