Vows, Dharma & Stormaganza

From Mysuru To Sarasota and RuPaUl to Patañjali

Put an Ashtanga yogini (aka an “Ashtangi”) on a 40-hour journey from Mysuru to Sarasota with a Lufthansa entertainment library and suddenly in-flight films become svādhyāya (self-study).

Svādhyāya is one of the essential Niyama (personal observances) that the 8 limbs of yoga ask of us in the path to liberation.

And frankly, I’m drawn to more consciously digest the media I consume. Like food, the stories we consume are the vibrations that fill us. “You are what you eat.” So this blog post/essay is also an exercise in media metabolism…

THE JOURNEY

Somewhere in the sky between Bengaluru, Frankfurt, and Newark, returning to the USA after more than a year of living and working in India, I found myself watching, among the many, many movies available, 3 films that I probably would not otherwise have made time for: Bhool Chuk Maaf, a comedy about a Hindu man trapped in a time loop after forgetting his vow to Lord Śiva; Midwinter Break, a drama about an Irish Catholic woman reckoning with her marriage and a promise she made to God decades earlier; and Stop! That! Train!, a queer camp comedy in which a fabulous cast of drag queens save a runaway train from disaster, starring RuPaul as Madame President.

A Hindu vow. A Catholic vow. And an impending train wreck prevented by the Queen of Drag. Naturally, in my book, they all lead back to the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali!

The Loop

In Bhool Chuk Maaf, Ranjan desperately needs a government job so his girlfriend’s father will let them marry. He bargains with Lord Śiva: give me the job and I’ll do a good deed. The job comes. He forgets his vow to Lord Śiva. Suddenly he is stuck reliving the same day before his marriage, over and over again. Groundhog Day by way of Varanasi.

Ranjan spends much of the movie trying to discover which good deed will release him from the loop so he can fulfill his vow, let time move forward, and marry his bride to be. Eventually he learns that the government job he received in the Irrigation Department was corruptly taken from Hamid, a Muslim man who had actually earned it and genuinely wanted the work because his village suffered from water scarcity. In one iteration of the day, Hamid takes his own life out of despair for not getting the job. In another, Ranjan manages to save him and try to plead him to look for another job. Even saving Hamid’s life is not the good deed that sets Ranjan free. The next morning, he wakes up in the loop again.

It turns out the problem was never that Ranjan hadn’t done enough good. The problem is that he was trying to repair the consequences of an injustice while keeping its reward. He wanted Hamid to live and he wanted Hamid’s job. He wanted to fulfill his vow and retain the very thing whose acquisition had created the moral problem in the first place. Only when he relinquishes what was never rightfully his does tomorrow finally come.

The liberating question changes from: What good thing haven’t I done yet? to What am I unwilling to relinquish?

GOD SAVE MY CHILD

In Midwinter Break, during the Troubles in Belfast, a younger, heavily pregnant Stella is caught in gunfire and shot in the abdomen. Lying bleeding on the pavement, terrified that her unborn child will die, she begs God to spare her child and promises in return to devote her life to God. The bullet miraculously passes through her and the child survives.

Decades later, Stella is a grandmother considering a divorce. Her husband drinks too much and she’s fed up with the way they’ve been living the end of their lives. She thinks that she might be able to lead a more religiously devout and fulfilling life among sisters of the faith, and in that way, repay the spiritual debt she feels towards the miracle God granted her in saving her child. But her husband doesn’t believe in God the way she does and he tells Stella that the miracle of his life is actually their marriage, being together all these years. He wants her to stay with him on the promise that he will change his drinking habits.

So what do we owe the divine, or another person for that matter, when something we desperately long for is graciously given? And what about what we receive that we never asked for?

Does God really need our transaction in order to deliver? Or do we need to make our spiritual relationship transactional in order to deliver to God?

RESPONSIBILITY

My own “vows” arose a little differently. When my best friend from NYU, Kemdi, became catastrophically ill, she asked me to record her recovery and help tell her story. She died before we could finish the documentary, and a family disagreement made fulfilling that promise nearly impossible. Later, through my next endeavor that is Jhaptal, extraordinary Indian classical musicians entrusted me with their time, music, and stories. I felt responsible for transmitting what they had shared with me. However, while staying in an ashram in Mumbai to make the film, I was raped by an unknown man who broke into my room, and healing became more urgent than finishing a documentary.

What happens to a promise when circumstances beyond our control make fulfilling it impossible, or when surviving what happened in the process must come first?

People entrusted themselves to me, and somewhere along the way I turned that trust into promises of my own. But trauma happened and I needed to heal, too.

Sometimes the time we genuinely need to heal begins to become a whole life organized around what must be healed, finished, or resolved before we can move on.

Perhaps this is another way vows enter our lives. Not: Give me this and I’ll give you that, but: Something has been entrusted to me. I won’t forget it.

Sadly though, that can slip into something like: I won’t let this suffering be in vain, so I’ll just suffer more!

Some things arrive without our direct asking. Some without our conscious consent. Must everything we suffer be redeemed, transformed into meaning, or made useful?

Enter the Drag Queens

In Stop! That! Train!, best friends Tess and DeeDee lose their jobs on the Stank Rail and quickly dress themselves up for new roles aboard the Glamazonian Express. Then a catastrophic “stormaganza” sends the high-speed train hurtling towards a total disaster, with RuPaul as action-hero Madame President called-in to save the day.

The whole movie plays with social wounding around work, status, sexuality, and American class consciousness at high camp volume: coach versus first class, uniforms and titles, who serves whom, who gets respected, and who is actually doing what needs to be done when everything goes wrong. Great comedic line: “Tell me straight. Okay, now tell me gay.”

What looks like a ridiculous spoof on the surface is also a savvy story underneath about divided people coming together and bringing exactly what they have, including what they have survived, to a collective crisis. Trauma doesn’t simply disappear. In the act of helping one another though, trauma begins to heal itself.

After two movies questioning personal vows and karmic debt, this one seemed to say more collectively:

We don’t necessarily need to have redeemed or to have healed the past before moving forward. We need to work together now, and we just need to stop a fucking train.

IN SUM

Film 1: What if getting the job you desperately want means taking it from someone else to whom it rightfully belongs?

Films 1 and 2: What if your fortune leaves you feeling indebted to the divine, but you don’t know how to do the work to repay that debt?

Films 1, 2, and 3: What if your real work isn’t to redeem the past at all, but to bring what you have, including what you’ve survived, to the work that needs doing now?

pERFORMANCE

Patañjali names asmitā as one of the five kleśas, the afflictions that generate suffering. Often translated as “egoism” or “I-am-ness,” asmitā is a confusion of identity. We identify with our limited ego, our roles, histories, bodies, achievements, failures, and all the things we can say I am about. This causes us suffering because they are impermanent, because we mistake them for something more fundamental.

Drag and acting and yoga are not all the same thing, but they all delight in making identity visible as performance. An actor consciously inhabits a character. Drag takes the signs of gender and persona and turns the volume way up. Yoga asks, in another register: Which of the characters I perform have I forgotten are characters? I don’t want to collapse these traditions into one another, but I do enjoy their association.

The filmmaker. The faithful friend. The witness. The person who finishes what she promised. These may all be noble identities. But if I cannot imagine being free without first satisfying their demands, perhaps even “the one who owes” has become an identity.

Vrata

The Sanskrit word “vrata” is richer than our casual English “promise.” It can mean a vow, an observance, a chosen discipline, a commitment that begins to organize how one lives. Perhaps a vrata transforms experience into responsibility: This happened. Something was entrusted to me. I will not live as though it didn’t.

Kemdi wanted to turn her suffering into something that could help others suffer less. At the time, I was moving in Buddhist circles and had become inspired by the bodhisattva vow, the cherished Mahāyāna commitment to seek liberation, awakening, not just for oneself but for the benefit of all sentient beings. Alongside it is this intoxicating idea that our suffering can have some kind of transcendental meaning, that what we endure might somehow become a path toward freedom for self and other.

The Irish Catholic in me recognized Christ in her suffering too: suffering she prayed to transform into salvation.

I was in my twenties, spiritually ravenous, and training to become a filmmaker. Maybe you can see where this was going. I wanted filmmaking to save my friend’s life and, while we’re at it, save humanity. A modest career ambition.

After my dear friend died, the work became tangled in grief, family conflict, and questions of ownership. Twenty years later, I am still working on telling the story. It has changed into a written form, and I have changed with it. Which is precisely the question: when does devotion become debt?

Jhaptal carried another kind of trust. Extraordinary musicians gave me their time, words, and music; some of them are no longer alive. I feel responsible for transmitting what they shared with me. But I have also struggled with integrating the experience of sexual violence that occurred while working on the project, for which there was no public remorse, accountability, nor social justice. I suffered years of post-traumatic stress. Finishing a film became less urgent than figuring out how to inhabit my mind and body again.

The films had to wait. I had to wait. Even so, through all these years I have wanted to fulfill these promises: Finish telling Kemdi’s story. Finish making Jhaptal. Finish what you started before you begin another life-sized-creative-thing.

There is a difference between what happened, what was entrusted, what we promised in response, and everything subsequently added to the promise.

WHAT DO I NEED TO RELINQUISH?

I have spent much of my adult life choosing work according to meaning. It has made me rich in yoga practice, teachers, students, friendships, travel, languages, study, art, music, and encounters I could never have imagined otherwise. While I have not yet married nor had kids, typical hallmarks of social belonging, I genuinely feel wealthy and integrated in many ways.

Except, rather inconveniently, in money.

Financially, I have found myself returning to the start again and again, enough to recognize my own Bhool Chuk Maaf.

Somewhere beneath my choices has been an almost devotional proposition: If I remain faithful enough to meaningful work, eventually it will take care of me.

Maybe that is something I need to relinquish.

Dhana Lakṣmī, material wealth, need not be the embarrassing, vulgar cousin of spiritual abundance. Money can be shelter, agency, healthcare, generosity, mobility, time, and the material support that lets dharma continue. Perhaps it does not magically arrive with integrity because I pursued meaning. Perhaps it, too, needs cultivation.

So I am opening to a different proposition: If I learn to take care of myself financially, perhaps I can remain faithful to meaningful work without hoping it will take care of me in return.

Meaning nourishes my spirit. Money nourishes my life. I have to cultivate both.

Jhaptal does not have to make me financially secure for those twenty years to have mattered. Kemdi’s story does not have to vindicate the choices I made because I vow to tell it. Financial security does not have to arrive as the divine’s eventual reward for choosing meaning over money, people over profit. Maybe building a materially sustainable life is not a betrayal of anything.

Maybe it gives me somewhere steady enough to stand and communicate what things mean.

Which Train NEEDS STOPPING?

For nearly twenty years, finish what you started has sounded like an ethical imperative. Perhaps it still is. But tucked underneath has been an unspoken ultimatum:

Finish what you started, or you can’t really have a creative career or a life of your own.

I have lived enormously. I have studied and taught yoga, traveled, written and published, acted on and off stage and screen, learned languages, built programs, loved people and been loved by them. But my creative career has remained strangely provisional. I never stopped creating, yet the unfinished work has always stayed in the way: take this opportunity to finish telling the Kemdi story. Use this opportunity to finish making the Jhaptal documentary. Honor what was entrusted to you. Then move on to make the next big thing.

Maybe my loop is not that I haven't finished, but that I keep believing finishing will release me.

And suddenly the runaway train comes barreling back into the story. Kemdi’s story isn't the train. Jhaptal isn't the train. The trauma isn’t the train. Even wanting to finish these projects isn't the train.

The runaway train for me, personally, may be the track of thinking that I cannot fully proceed until I do. The belief that the past must be resolved before the rest of my life is allowed to move forward.

Which brings me, via RuPaul, back to Patañjali.

Yoga Sūtra I.2:

yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ

Yoga is nirodhaḥ, the stilling or cessation of the vṛttis, the movements and patternings of citta. Patañjali doesn't say stop the work, stop caring, stop creating.

It is the pattern that must stop running away with us.

Perhaps aparigraha, non-grasping, asks me to loosen my hold not on Kemdi or Jhaptal, but on the bargain I attached to their completion: When these are finished, something will be settled. I will be released. I will have permission to proceed.

What if completion cannot do that? What if the work can simply become work again? Kemdi’s story can become a book. Jhaptal can become a series or an archive. Another film can exist beside them, and so can another book, a play, a livelihood, a marriage, something I haven't imagined yet.

The creative life doesn't need to stop. The runaway train does.

And Patañjali tells us what follows:

tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe ’vasthānam

Then the seer abides in its own nature.

mahāvratam

So back to vrata, the vow, the commitments around which we consciously come together.

In Yoga Sūtra II.30, Patañjali gives the five yamas: ahiṃsā, non-harming; satya, truthfulness; asteya, non-stealing; brahmacarya, wise restraint; and aparigraha, non-grasping. The next sūtra explains that these yamas are to be practiced beyond limitations of circumstance (caste/class, place, and time) as the mahāvratam, the great vow of yoga.

That vow doesn't depend on finishing a project, living in a certain city, being financially rich or poor, succeeding or failing. It asks something much more immediate:

How am I practicing yoga here and now?

Can I refrain from harm (ahiṃsā)? Tell the truth (satya)? Respect what is and isn't mine (asteya)? Use my energy wisely (brahmacarya)? Release what I am grasping (aparigraha)?

Maybe these restraints (yama) are enough of a great vow (mahāvratam) to organize a meaningful life around.

And this is why I keep returning to Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, not as an ancient philosophical text to intellectually master and return to the shelf, but as an active yoga practice that proposes to transform and liberate this lifetime.

So this is what we explore in the Online Patañjali Yoga Sūtra Study Circle: potent ancient teachings that ask contemporary questions that pertain to stopping the runaway trains in the lives we're actually living… love, work, dating, identity, money, ambition, attachment, body-mind, family, friends, society, environment…

Interested in joining the conversation?

You can register for the next round of the Online Patañjali Yoga Sūtra Study Circle today!

Visit aquamarine.yoga/sutra-study to learn more.

Stop! That! Train!

atha yogānuśāsanam
Now, the teaching of Yoga.