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A principle in life to remember is to travel light.
You are traveling all the time.
Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.
– Yogi Bhajan
SEVEN YEARS
Memoirs by Kirpal Singh Khalsa
Following Winter Solstice 1973, Kirpal Kaur and I drove cross-country back to Colorado. After nearly 40 hours on the road we pulled into Albuquerque during an early evening snowstorm. The people at the Ashram welcomed us warmly, gave food and found a place for us to spend the night. As we were getting ready for bed a phone call came from Espanola. Siri Singh Sahib Ji had just left for the Grand Canyon. He may need to stop in Albuquerque for the night.
The ashram folks went into hyper drive, cleaning, getting rooms ready, cooking and preparing the ashram. We were exhausted, said good night, went to bed and quickly fell asleep. Some time later the door to our little room burst open, waking us with a start. Standing in the middle of the doorway, silhouetted by the hall light, was the Siri Singh Sahib, looking down at us. From our mattress on the floor he looked ten feet tall.
“Yes, I know them,” he said. Then he reached in and closed the door.
We lay there stunned. “What do we do?” I asked my wife.
“Do you think we should go out there?” she asked.
It sounded like there was a lot going on in the ashram. We were in our underwear and wiped out from the long drive. “He didn’t ask for us,” I said. We squirmed for a few more minutes and eventually fell back to sleep.
Next morning he greeted us affectionately, complemented my dress and joked during breakfast with ashram members. Nothing was said about the previous evening. After breakfast he and his party went west. We went north.
Over the years, our community in Boulder grew, yoga classes were strong and the ashram morphed from a tiny residence to larger and larger houses to accommodate our increasing numbers. Every year Siri Singh Sahib Ji would visit and spend time with us. He often stayed in Denver. Sometimes he stayed in a hotel in Boulder. On other occasions he stayed with friends in Boulder. He never stayed in the Boulder ashram. Truthfully, for years we could not accommodate him gracefully. It took us quite a while to upgrade the ashram to something even close to his standards.
Sometime in the early 80s we received the call from 3HO Headquarters that Siri Singh Sahib Ji was coming to Boulder and that he would stay at the ashram. We had a couple of months to prepare. We painted, laid new carpet, redid bathrooms, bought furniture and transformed the ashram into a graceful residence where he could be comfortable. He came. We had a wonderful course and everything went well. The morning he was to leave I sat with him in his bedroom talking. In a light, conversational mode he said, “Do you know why I never stayed with you before?”
“No.”
“Do you remember that time in Albuquerque?”
I remembered the door crashing open and him standing there. “Yes.”
“You should have been waiting on the front steps.”
He said it so gently, even with a touch of a smile, yet the words shook my very foundation. Seven years ago, I was tired, I had been driving for 40 hours and we were in Albuquerque. Hosting him here was not my responsibility. Of course, he was my spiritual teacher, but my relationship to him had limits. It was more important for me that evening to sleep.
Had I waited up for him and greeted him on the front steps, as he said, my love for him would have had to be limitless. In fact my relationship with him would have had to take precedence over everything else in my life. It would have had to be sacred. I would have had to hold him in complete reverence.
There it was. Suddenly, I understood my relationship to my spiritual teacher. If I valued his teachings, if I had any hope that these teachings would open my soul and free me from my personal entanglements, then I must hold him in utmost love and respect. It was my responsibility.
What does he get out of it? Nothing. He is just doing his job. As my teacher, a responsibility that he takes seriously even if I do not, it is his job to see that I do things right. If I am to be successful in raising my consciousness, then he will insist that I give him the respect he deserves.
He waited seven years for me to be able to hear it.
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