Inge Friedrich-Rust (Divyadrishti)
Yoga teacher and psychotherapist
Kronberg, Germany
‘When I die, you will cry,’ Swami Atmananda said back in 1991 when she got ready to close the Singapore ashram to ‘leave the world behind’ and follow her beloved guru Swami Satyananda to Rikhia. ‘No, I will not,’ I protested meekly – and now I sit on the plane to India with tears rolling down my face.
Even though her departure back then gave me ample opportunity to practise the painful lesson of letting go, here it is again: the same pain, the same tears. Life seems to teach us over and over the same lessons, this unending cycle of getting attached and having to let go.
Some years ago when my children left home and I was grieving, she said: ‘You had pleasure; now you suffer. That is natural. What is there to complain about?’ Yes, I had infinite pleasure having found her back in 1981, and there is unspeakable gratitude that she came into our lives, into our family of five.
Love is the thread
‘A family is like a rosary,’ she once wrote in a letter, ‘and love and understanding are the thread that keeps the beads together. One should make every effort to keep this thread strong so that unity becomes unbroken, unthreatened. A stick of wood breaks easily, but if you put six sticks together and try to break them, you will not succeed. If the family is united, no one can break it.’
It was indeed her love that kept our family together in good and difficult times. Whatever happiness we have in our family today – reaching out to the extended family – is due to her love, blessings and teachings.
I had a good husband (whose goodness I often did not see) who – in her words – allowed me ‘to evolve spiritually while living with him’ as a banker´s wife, three wonderful children in whom she planted the seed of yoga – and there was this buddhu (idiotic) mind, to which she regularly gave a kick with loving, yet painful ‘shouts’.
When my marriage got very difficult and I had fantasies of taking sannyasa (renunciation) or escaping to a Himalayan cave, Swami Atmananda instructed: ‘Sannyasa is not for you in this life. You have chosen to marry – make your marriage work. Make your home into an ashram.’
My home was, indeed, like an ashram, a place of learning. No one could hold up more honestly and cruelly the mirror of one’s weaknesses than one’s family members, and often I did not like what I saw.
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