In 2011, Dr. Newton Kondaveti and Dr. Lakshmi visited Seattle, where I was located at that time. After his second workshop in Seattle in 2012, Dr. Newton had announced that I and another student, Dipika Kapadia would teach Soul Coaches in Seattle. At that time, Soul Coaches had 100 topics and after much planning, we sent out that mail to Dr. Newton and the Soul Coaches team in Hyderabad. It said, “Dear Sir, we have announced the Soul Coaches Program in Seattle, starting on Sunday, Sep 16th, 2012” In this way, our journey of a hundred lessons was kicked off in the United States. But even as we started, I wondered how we would complete it.
Soul Coaches is a program architected by Dr. Newton which brings together the teachings of many wisdom traditions from all over the world into one course. It would take a sincere student several lifetimes to master any one of the topics taught in the course. Soul coaches brings the essence of these to students. And here lay our dilemma. We were apprehensive about how we would study the 100 topics well enough to teach them. When we first created our schedule, we realized that the program would need at least two years. We wondered how we would teach advanced topics such as Aura and Crop circles? With these questions and a bit of faith, we started out journey is Seattle.
I still remember when we were teaching one of the first topics - ‘Stages of Meditation’ as described by Maharishi Patanjali. There were four stages - Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi. While I had experienced the first three stages, the fourth one was described as a stage at which the Observer, The Process of Observing, and the Observed all merge into one. And I had never experienced this. All week long, I tried to understand it. I became vigilant in my meditation, looking for the three to meet, but it would not happen. Finally, after 6 days of trying, the night before the class, I felt the urge to meditate, so I went into the living room where we held our classes and sat down on the carpet. I closed my eyes and observed my breath, and before I knew it, I got the experience. It was a eureka moment, but I did not go running through the streets. Instead, I found not only the experience but also a way to communicate it. That day my faith was strengthened. I felt that there was a greater force sharing this wisdom and if we as teachers just allowed it to flow through us, we would find the means to deliver it.
As teachers, we came up with many creative ways to get people to immerse themselves in the material. Our goal was to engage them completely. We created guided visualizations, exercises such that made people act on their knowledge and games and sharing sessions. We created workbooks for an exercise called the ’40 point formula for meditation’, where a meditator, meditating for 40 days would apply one idea each day such as ‘Stop being an escapist/be a karma yogi’ and ‘Act the role you have chosen for this life - give impeccable performance’ and so on. In this way, many beautiful moments manifested in our classes.
We would bring food to share during the break and had many conversations with them. We dedicated 10 classes to Inner Child healing, 3 classes to Shadow work, as part of Wisdom of Deepak Chopra and Voice Dialogue. We put special effort into ‘Wisdom of Louise Hay’ and ‘The Four Agreements’ drawing upon the native American roots of the city named after Chief Seattle. In some classes, we studied books and in others, we saw videos on YouTube and wrote to Sir and the Soul Coaches team in Hyderabad. Like the Akshaya Patra, our bowl of wisdom always gave us something to share. Sometimes, right in the class, someone would ask a question that would make the topic very clear at least to me.
As the universe is a magical place, our magic soon began to transform our lives. A clear turning point came when in one of the Life University conference calls, we got a chance to talk to Vatsala Bodani. Vatsala had offered to meditate with people and immediately we felt a resonance to reach out to her. Vatsala, through her own example, showed us the importance of practicing what we preach. She helped us examine how we were living our lives. For the first time, I myself, through my own reactions started understanding how all the traditions that preach peace and love become the source of much evil and persecution in our planet. I understood that my own words and things I taught in class were not the way I lived my life. Once this realization happened, we understood that a teacher must set an example of whatever they wish to teach. And from that time we became vigilant about living what we taught. It was quite difficult in the beginning and still is, but having understood this in our journey of a hundred lessons, we knew we were heading in the right direction.
In this way, we completed more than half the topics. When Dr. Newton and Dr. Lakshmi along with our teacher Jayashree Ashok and Geeti Bhojnagarwala visited us in 2013 we asked Sir questions about the remaining topics. We were all in Hawaii, driving along a road when we asked our questions - How can we teach the Wisdom of Krishna in one class? What is the purpose of Crop Cycles? Which of the thousands of books about Buddha should we start with? and on and on. We recorded Dr. Newton’s answers on an iPhone and used the recordings as guidelines when preparing for the classes. All the friends including Sandeep and Deepthi Davu helped us prepare for the next stage of soul coaches.
Armed with this new knowledge, facing one change of circumstance after another, we went ahead with our teaching and learning. One topic at a time. It was not all smooth though. The Sangha in the US was much smaller and people dropped off because of jobs or moving away from Seattle. In some classes, which were also open to non-registered persons, we found people who disrupted the class and did not come with the intent to learn form us. We lost people when we took breaks in between for summer and winter vacations. But we dealt with each change of circumstance with a new solution, and in this way by mid-2015, almost three years after the course was started, we finished our first course.
When I came back home after teaching the last lesson in a coffee shop, I could not believe that we actually completed it. For many weeks, I did not even tell anyone except our team of Dipika and myself. It felt like I had held my breath with fear, not trusting that we could do justice to this work given to us. But gradually the reality started to sync in and on May 25th, we wrote another email to Dr. Newton and the soul coaches team, sharing with them our news of having completed our first batch in the USA. I felt like a child who had taken his first step.
When I look back at this journey of a hundred lessons I am reminded to Mahatma Gandhi’s words - “An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching”. This second gem given by Gautam Buddha - "To apply what we have gained in wisdom, is the most important lesson of all".
Saurabh
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment