Having No History

Relationship

When nothing is left unsaid.

Garrett Sarley was the CEO of Kripalu when I went through their yoga teacher training program in December 2009. He spoke to our cohort one evening. The talk was listed on our schedule as Dinabandhu, his Sanskrit name. We didn’t know what to expect.

He covered a lot of ground. Many of us spoke after the session of the impact this understated man had upon us. He didn’t do anything spectacular to draw our attention, yet he held it. One class mate commented that he sat still, in hero pose, for the entire two hours, speaking to each of us as if he was in our own living room.

He identified three stages of yoga and outlined them as phase one: defining the material, phase two: the mechanisms, and phase three: implementation. I was already rapt, but during phase three my focus became even more narrow.

Sarley talked of relationships and interconnectedness. He told a story of how one evening when he was asleep, he heard a noise downstairs. His wife had not yet come to bed. He described the noise as the kind that woke you up, but ordinary enough of a sound that you can roll over and go back to sleep.

He didn’t go back to sleep though. He got out of bed to investigate.

His wife had collapsed. As it turns out, she had had an aneurysm (or something similar that if treated immediately, had a good chance of survival). And, because he did rise, found his wife unconscious, and called emergency, his wife got the treatment needed and recovered.

Sometime during the chaos of the emergency Sarley related that time stood still as he was confronted with the possibility of losing his wife. He had one thought; was there anything he needed to say to her? He realized, in that moment, he did not. The phrase he used, that I still remember today, was “we had no history.”

My initial thought, when parsing what he said literally was how can that be? They’ve known each other for 30 years, of course they have history! But as he related what this means, Sarley explained there was “no unspoken energy.” There was no resentment, because nothing was left unsaid.

The idea of having no history hasn’t lost its poignancy. I’ve carried it with…

Related posts:

I often find myself in situations saying yes, like buying a product online which I don’t need or returning a favor even if it is infeasible to do so. Sales operators, automobile dealers, and the and the e-commerce industry use compliance techniques to influence people...

The new Activities Coordinator in our senior home found out that, five years ago, I ran Saturday Night Classic movies for the residence. I remembered it well. Humprey Bogart played the lead with…

Billboards for drug sniffing dogs, cheap lawyers, gun shows… Just a few of the messages often found on billboards in low-income census tracks with high-levels of health disparity.