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Once I found a small paperback about yoga at a book market. I was thirteen or fourteen and had never heard about yoga. It cost 1 guilder. I could afford that from my pocket money Why I bought it, no idea.
Once at home, I started reading and looking at pictures until, after a few weeks, I could stand on my head like my father could. I always wanted to imitate him. My father could even walk on his hands. Not just across the room. He did that outside too. Like that time in Istanbul where we lived as a family in the 1950s. We had lunch with friends of my parents on a holiday on, or rather under, the Galata Bridge. The bridge over the Golden Horn.
Patricia and I were the only children in the company. At the end of lunch, the men trumped each other with their strong stories. When my father - champion strong storyteller - said he could walk on his hands, the bet was quickly made. He would walk on his hands across the bridge for a bottle of whiskey . I found it very exciting because over four hundred metres is quite a long way. It was crowded on the bridge. With the many fishermen, walkers, beggars, families, children playing and tram and car traffic. My father stood on his hands and walked. We jubilantly followed. Everyone moved aside and many joined in. It was a colourful procession that walked along clapping hands. The fishermen even turned around because they did not want to miss this spectacle. He won his bottle of whiskey.
Two years after buying the booklet, it disappeared into the cupboard with the yoga. My life took its course. I married at twenty-one, soon had two sons and I did what I knew. I was imitating my mother.
Until a skiing accident left me unable to play sports. Then I remembered the yoga book and what I had read there about self-healing and got to work. I also now bought the real yoga books. Later in the early 1970s, I discovered a yoga studio in the Archipel area of The Hague and when, after months of training, the injury to my knees was somewhat tolerable, I went to a real yoga class there for the first time. I stepped into a world completely unknown to me of Baghwan devotees, incense, aura healers, self-made shamans, mantra singers and meditation. My yoga teacher, trained with Baghwan in Poona, India asked me to take over her classes after a while and with some regularity and advised me to go to a training course. So by the time I was 32, I was qualified. And more important than that: I knew a little more and just enough to have my own yoga practice.
Yet after a few years the injury (to both knees) returned. One doctor predicted me a future in a wheelchair, another specialist said operate. Yet another said never do it, it will never be right again. I could no longer climb stairs, cycle and worse than anything, I was absolutely not allowed to practice yoga or teach. And I believed that.
Within a week, I was working in an office. Meanwhile, the injury did keep me busy. It couldn't be true, could it? A wheelchair. In the early mornings when everyone in the house was still asleep and in between jobs, I started sitting still. You can call it meditation or something else. In any case, it brought me closer and closer to myself, giving me a better view of how I was functioning. Eight inwardly turbulent years passed and by the time I was 40, I was divorced and my knees had healed.
I am sure I have told this story before. So why am I telling it again? Because I had lost that one first booklet in the countless moves and came across it again a few weeks ago at Leva para Ler (a public, free library of second-hand books you can bring and take away) here in the village market. I picked up the thumbed booklet and re-read it with a smile.
Since the healing (without intervention from scalpel-happy doctors) of my knees, I have been doing self-healing. Whether it's a cold or pain in my neck, everything has its own story and I listen to it. It's the most normal thing in the world for me and I wish it were like that for everyone. You don't have to do yoga or be able to walk on your hands for that, you know. You just need to be able to do three things:
believe it can be done (believe first then see);
be able to silently look at yourself within;
enter into a respectful dialogue with your cells.
Easy does it!