Some Swamis are Fat

By Ava Greene

"Some Swamis are Fat" is an informal approach to truth-seeking. Enlightenment and truth—what and where are they? Ava Greene, a yoga instructor, bares her soul in a quest that's both light-hearted and agonizing. Her late-night rants—including lucid realizations, cosmic questions, and quirky sidetracking—lead us easily along. Yet the metaphysical "dawn" Ava yearns for remains out of reach.

(excerpt:)
"Do you really want to just hit the road and follow the winds of fate?" Greg asked.

"No...that's not what I want. I just want to be fearless. But a part of me feels too practical. It's a polarity. The practicality of fearlessness is probably what I should look into."

(excerpt:)
"Some people don't have to belabor this stuff. Like slugging the ball over the fence, their lives are those kind of homers from the start—Greek fishermen, rice growers in Indonesia, those who never miss a beat, rise with the sun, and do their day's work, cyclically as nature. They go innocently around the calendar, decade after decade, marrying, parenting, aging, then dying; they hit the ball out of the ballpark first time at bat; they walk the bases. They're neither jaded nor part of the problem. Somewhere they chose (or didn't choose) not to have too many choices. Others of us play nine long evolutionary innings and on into overtime. Singles, doubles, a lot of fouling out."

It's not until Ava helplessly admits she's getting nowhere that a naked stillness sets in... And she then stumbles upon the essence of the quest: that surrender (from our own designs) can be the more direct path, while trying too hard often leads to more of the same.

"Some Swamis are Fat" is a not-so-serious look at what is sacred. You'll both lose and find yourself in the fresh, energetic writing. Gutsy and real, it will put you at ease with your own inner voice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781938691089

Book preview

Akua

—ONE—

EXPLORING THE DAWN

Exploring the Dawn, I thought, my next book. Two doves in the courtyard immediately took flight. What I need to do for the next part of my life is explore the dawn.

I must do this.. I’ve explored every other part of the day and night—I practically own two a.m. But I’m fried. And so are my owlish excuses. It will take me a while to get to the dawn. There’s something about writers and the middle of the night. It’s called silence.

I have here a photo of Mark Twain that was taken by Alfred Steiglitz in 1879. Just knowing the two of them were in the same room that day is nice. These were cool guys. The photo is striking—who knew Mark Twain was handsome?—and somehow represents why I must explore the dawn….they explored their "dawns. A new dawn is always in us, but we must constantly find it. My strategy is to go to the actual dawn to somehow access that elusive metaphysical one.

And so, as I meditate on my miraculous life, I find in the mailbox today a brown governmental envelope from the California State Tax Board with a check inside for $803., from two tax years ago. I looked up at the ceiling, What do you want me to use this for?

Write, was the answer. It seems indulgent succumbing to fun. But you wonder where the resistance comes from.

Loving one’s self is the journey. Like loving your pet or your car. Loving your digs, your friends, your life’s work. Loving anything. Yet we ride around in these selves with either exterior or interior neglected most of the time.

We aren’t taught to care for ourselves. In school we should learn less about algebra, less about frog innards and past wars, and take on: Nutrition, Solar Power, Capitalism vs. Ecology, Parenting,.(Dismantling Big Pharma might be useful, and Bicycle Maintenance.) Why do we have to wait till we’re grown-ups to figure out how to live? Past Wars would be an elective, along with Chemistry and Trigonometry.

When you compare the physical condition of our hospitals to that of our schools, there’s the tell-all. The salary of doctors to the salary of teachers. When you compare what’s on television to what’s outside a kid’s apartment door, no wonder everyone chooses the virtual experience.

One of my ultimate Earthly pleasures this past year has been teaching yoga…not unlike swimming in a clear turquoise bay with your eyes open underwater, marveling at the blues below and the sun-streaked powdery yellow above. Teaching yoga is a wonderful glide between the real, the sensual, the finite and the infinite. We often leave our skin and merge into softer, intuitive realms. I love the peculiarities of each class, each little group—that day, that hour—with no agenda, just open souls. We expand within our bodies, alone in the safest way. Quietly, we’re striving and learning, then resting and releasing. And when the hour-and-a-half is over, we’ve been somewhere.

It’s an honor to be presented with open souls. There’s no past or future, just today’s energy and today’s calm. And the money that comes in the mail from the yoga studio seems more like a gift than a paycheck.

THE WRONG SIDE OF DAWN

March 14, 1999 - 3:20 a.m.

The dawn I explore is always through the back door, the three a.m. or four a.m. entrance. Usually under heavy lids, intangible guilt, and a curious thrill of the moment. So far, that’s been my trajectory.

My angels and demons usually square off around one a.m., then they joust wildly until I finally collapse. The angels steer me straight as they prep and prime me for resistance, take care of me, distract me from trouble like an older sibling. But they’re only victorious before we get to the battleground. If temptation makes it past these sweet gatekeepers, and knocks, I fling open the door. And then I want everything NOW. There is no tomorrow, no consequence. I’m Everything Anonymous, The Moment Anonymous, Twelve-Step Everything. My yins and yangs charge each other over certain chocolates and cookies and late night ice cream. And once these wars start, my devils win.

But last night, as I settled like cement into my downy bed, I decided to let nature take its course. If I’m a burn-out, then a burnout I will be. If I never attain the yogic pedestal of perfect lifestyle, I shall be the un-yogi who wrote about polarities.

I decided that this vision I clutch in my psyche of my optimal self is not who I am. It is who I was. Yet when I was that younger, fresher entity, I was clutching a different perfected vision of myself, the vision of who I could become. In other words, I’ve never actually been who I really am at that moment.

And that is what I’d like to do now.

THE WRONG SIDE AGAIN

March 17, 1999 - 2:25 a.m.

Diary of an Un-yogi. I didn’t eat sugar for five years. I’ve been eating it again for three months now. I don’t even like it, but am letting myself do this. It’s the other side of something… like that other side of dawn. And it’s these other sides that tug us psychologically, through which we somehow carve a path called my life. It’s a balancing act. And it’s probably more fun to be the clown up on the high wire than the perfect ballerina.

So, if the ducks are out of line—the sugar, the bedtime, the creative voice making up new phraseology—guess I’ll just take the ride and trust the destination.

When I was seven and eight and nine, I wanted to take acrobatic lessons. Instead, I was given piano lessons. Periodically, I’d pitch the A-word again. The response: cello lessons. And choir practice.

Horseback riding lessons, I pleaded. The response: clarinet.

By the time I extricated myself from music, at eleven, it was clear that handsprings and horses weren’t coming from Mom and Dad, so I became self-sufficient. I’d get my kicks out there on my own. There was no way I would be understood by anyone who thought sitting in a stuffy room after school with your tiny legs wrapped around a cello was good for a kid. So I found thrills on the other side of honesty, and to keep my secret, created an ornery wall around my heart that Mom and Dad could never dismantle or suss. And boy did I have a yahoo time on that other side. For many years, I did gymnastics around the law. And cello music, to this day, sounds somber to me.

Then my older sister became not just a high school gymnast, but a performer extraordinaire. She claimed the domain of handstands, walkovers, back walkovers, while I cart-wheeled clumsily on the sidelines as a cheerleader. But I had my own clandestine territory—crime—which in those days translated to real nice clothes.

I’m forty-eight now, and over the years thoughts of acrobatics always crept in (What if…), and, more importantly, the thoughts about how crucial it is to really listen to children. (Listening could be another course in that updated school.) And also, if you can, really listen to yourself. What I heard when I listened was that forty years and a zillion pursuits later, I still miss those acrobatic lessons.

So last Wednesday I took a class.

There were seven or eight of us in this adult class, open to all levels and I was the only one over seventeen. I was also the only one still improving my cartwheel. The rest could’ve easily been in a Cirque du Soleil rehearsal. For warm-ups they did sideways splits.

The moral of the story, though, comes from Julie, a small, lithe gymnast, who at seventeen told me that because she’d stopped practicing for five years somewhere between ages six and seventeen, she’d totally blown it and could now never be professional.

We all always feel like we’re too old for everything, I told her. It’s ridiculous. And you telling me this at seventeen, when I’ve been watching you all evening doing half a dozen back flips in a row, and I’m here at forty-eight learning a backwards somersault, is the icing on the cake. I think she actually heard me.

All the kids were wonderfully accepting, illustrating no shock at my being there. By the end they even had me teaching them yogic