OPEN BIRTHDAY LETTER 2021 BASE
OPEN BIRTHDAY LETTER 2021 BASE
OPEN BIRTHDAY LETTER 2021
Dear Friends
Many of you have written to me for my 79th birthday. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It is nice to know that I have left a small trail on this earth before leaving for the spiritual Himalayas.
We are living indeed in strange times, and I can’t thank the heavens enough that I have arrived at this age and do not have to worry any more about building a future.
On the contrary- Seeing that a lot of the time we are locked in and cannot teach person to person, and I refuse to teach via zoom, I am left with a lot of time on my hands.
It says: ‘In the end shall be my beginning’, but it also works the other way round: ‘In the beginning shall be my end’.
Automatically my thoughts went back to where it all started: A seventeen old girl starting practising yoga in the village, falling in love with it, and then bumping into the great classic of the nineteen sixties: ‘ Hermit in the Himalayas’, of Paul Brunton. My fate was sealed: I was going to be a hermit in the Himalayas.
I never made it there. Two years in university studying Sanskrit, getting bored with stuffed up professors, rushing off to India to study with BKS Iyengar, a complete unknown in the West, still studying Sanskrit texts.
Going back to Europe, doing my first teacher training class and writing a book on Hindu and yogic philosophy (hahahah, 24 years old yoghini who thinks she knows it all).
Second time to India, this time to Poona (old spelling) in 1969. Full blown studies. I always told everyone that I bought Sanskrit and yoga books by the kilo, not much off, daily dragging an old suitcase to the book store and buying, buying, buying.
Getting home to the hotel (Grand Hotel, which I had rented together with two other aspirant yogis) and between classes and practising asanas studying, reading old texts, new texts, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Hatha yoga pradipika, Gheranda Samhita, Siva samhita, Milarepa, Patanjali, Vedanta of Shankaracarya, Pranayama of Kuvailananda Kaivalyadhamma, and do not forget The Serpent Power of Arthur Avalon, a masterpiece in itself, etc. etc.
I think that it was halfway down the Brahma Sutra that my brain went finally into lockdown.
Zoom forward fifty years, in the middle of a physical lock down. ‘Not every bad thing is harmful’, as the Italians say , and the virus and lockdowns have given me plenty of time to pick up again where I left off many years ago, being absorbed in rushing around the globe and teaching.
So I am buying all my old friends again from Amazon, and spending time in the garden, savouring the old texts, fifty years older, and hopefully also a few years wiser. Savouring the Sanskrit texts like a gourmet meal.
So my friends, keep checking every now and then the website www.centeredyogadonaholleman.com for articles on the classical side of yoga. I am looking forward to sharing some of that with you in this upside down world.
Blessing to all of you
Dona
