gratitude

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 7: A Waterfall of Inspiration

In Part 7 of my interview with yoga teacher Charu Rachlis , she shared how her own pyscho-spiritual practices keep her grounded and inspired as a teacher.

Sarah: Your classes are often packed. Why do you think that is?

Charu: I feel that people are looking for something more than just the physical practice. They want the same thing I always looked for in a teacher: someone who doesn’t mechanically repeat sequences. I only say things in class that I feel in my heart and that I’ve studied, experienced, and practiced. I’m humbled that this approach resonates for my students.

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Sarah: It must be intense to be the recipient of students’ love and devotion. How do you keep from letting that go to your head?

Charu: I have a very intense meditation practice. I have groups I meditate with and process with. I don’t see myself as a guru or spiritual leader. Teaching is a role, an opportunity, and a responsibility that was given to me. I’m humbled by that.

Sarah: You give the most amazing talks at the beginning of each yoga class, a combination of guided meditation and philosophical reflection. I’m curious if you prepare in advance a theme or topic you want to address.

Charu: No, I’m not in the shower planning what to say. It comes very naturally each time. My teaching is an extension of my personal journey. I’m committed to being consciously aware and to processing what I learn and experience. So when I open my mouth to speak to my students, I’m embodying and expressing whatever it is that I’m reflecting on at that time. What comes out of me when I talk is a flow, a waterfall of inspiration. I’m not interested in holding back or holding on. I think that’s why I’m a teacher. I’m constantly feeding myself and then in turn feeding others.

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Sarah: What do you wish most for your students?

Charu: I want them to understand that this is a lifelong practice. I want them to develop inner strength for whatever comes their way, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I want them to experience the miracle of embodiment. I hope that when they come to class, they can feel more connected with their own hearts. When I teach, the heart is the major target.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 8: Machines Spilling Out Teachers

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 4: Wow, This Is Me

In the fourth part of my interview with yoga teacher Charu Rachlis, we discussed her years living, working, and engaging in intensive Buddhist practice at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, punctuated by a return to Brazil.

Sarah: What was life like at the Nyingma Institute?

Charu: Karma yoga, which is what they practice there, is about hard work and working through your resistence to work. You watch yourself, your mind, your emotions. You watch time. Everything you do all day long is considered an opportunity for practice. I started each day with prostrations.

Charu at Nyingma Institute.

Charu at Nyingma Institute.

Sarah: Can you briefly explain prostrations—their purpose and how they are done?

Charu: A prostration is a devotional ritual that engages the body, mind, and spirit. You chant a mantra such as om mani padme hum, and hold an intention while you physically prostrate yourself. You can go all the way down so you’re lying face down on the floor and then come all the way back up to standing, or you can go halfway, or whatever is right for your body. I stopped doing them daily after I left the institute because sun salutations became my form of prostration—although lately I’ve been doing traditional prostrations for a few minutes at the end of my yoga practice on behalf of my mom, who’s been sick, and on behalf of the world.

But while I lived at the institute I did 108 prostrations each morning, focusing on body, breath, and spirit. During the day I worked for the institute’s printing press, Dharma Enterprises in Oakland. The press had a commercial branch and a sacred-books branch. The commercial branch, which had a regular paid staff, generated the funds that allowed the press to publish sacred books, which were labor intensive but not a money maker. After I’d been there a short time they put me in charge of the sacred books and gave me a staff of several people. I worked 13– to 14–hour days, inhaled toxic fumes from the printing press, lifted heavy boxes, got so many paper cuts. I gave my soul, and literally, my blood! Then I’d come home, have dinner—I always looked forward to the delicious vegetarian meals that were served—and then go to class. The instruction was focused on helping us deal with our relationship to work and all the emotional patterns that working such long hours can trigger. We’d study a particular topic—for example, time, space, and knowledge, or skillful means—for a week or so, and we’d apply the insights from the instruction to how we were doing our jobs. We also met individually with the teachers. They wanted to check in with us, see how we were developing, how we were dealing with the inevitable challenges of working that hard. In our studies we were dealing with a lot of big words and concepts in English, which was a language I was still learning. So in my limited time off, I focused with great intention on learning English, always paying attention to new words and looking them up in the dictionary, and asking my American friends to correct my speech. I was really hungry to learn this new language. It was like I turned off my Portuguese. I wanted to embrace my new life in the States, and English was the doorway.

Sarah: It sounds like the institute was getting a damn good deal.

Charu: They were.

Sarah: Is there anything about the experience that, looking back, you wish had been different?

Charu: No. I’d do it all again. I felt the whole experience was meant to strengthen me, and it did. It was too much for some people, and they left quickly. But it was one of the most powerful, transformative times of my life. I was depressed and insecure when I arrived, and I grew so much in my time there. And I got incredible feedback from my teachers. I thought, Wow, this is me, I’ve never seen myself like they’re describing me. I learned that I have an incredibly strong capacity to focus and deliver more than what is asked of me.

Don’t get me wrong—it was a very challenging experience for me on every level. I had to go through a lot of resistance—self-doubt, self-pity. One project at the institute involved building 108,000 padmasambava statues that were going to be placed at stuppas on a farm in Odiyan—a retreat center in Sonoma County that is not open to the general public. Sometimes after a long day at the printing press we’d be invited to help out with making the statues. In addition, I found a lot of the people in the community to be very shut down, compared to Brazilians, who are so expressive. I felt isolated and cried a lot. There were moments when I was on the verge of breakdown. Yet at the same time, I made wonderful friends. The Laotian immigrants who worked for the commercial side of the press were very warm. They laughed a lot  and brought delicious food to share with one another at lunchtime, and they would invite me to join in. They were a very loving community. I felt nourished by them; they reminded me of Brazilian culture in a way. I also learned that I could be myself when I met with the teachers one-on-one; I could share with them how challenging the experience was for me.

Charu with one of her teachers at Nyingma Institute.

Charu with one of her teachers at Nyingma Institute.

Overall, my time at the institute taught me how to express myself honestly and speak up for myself. After leaving Brazilian culture, where I had felt so stifled, coming to the States was a chance to discover myself fully.

And I thought Berkeley was the most beautiful, magical place. The institute is right next to the Greek Theater and the university campus. It was a totally different world than anything I’d ever experienced. In my time off from work, I would go to a café and have a cup of coffee and a pastry and then walk miles through campus and down the streets with their beautiful old houses. I knew where every public bathroom was because I would walk all day long. Brazilians will know exactly what I mean when I say I wasn’t used to this life at all.

Sarah: How long did you stay at the institute?

Charu: The first time I was there, I stayed for a year and a half, fulfilling the commitment I’d made. They wanted me to stay but I needed to be with my family again for a while, and I needed a break from the hard work, the loneliness, and the language barrier. It felt like I had been on a sabbatical and I needed to get back to the “real world.”

Sarah: Did you return to the secretarial job?

Charu: No. My family and friends thought I was crazy because most Brazilians would kill for that job. But I was not the same person I had been and I was not about to compromise the new discoveries I was making about myself. So I had no intention of going back to that job. I really needed time for integration.

Returning to Brazil was quite difficult. After that first period at the institute, during which I had worked so hard, I had held the illusion that in Brazil I would have more fun, have boyfriends, go out dancing, all of which I craved at that point. But those three years back in Brazil did not turn out like I had pictured. I was very depressed. I felt I did not belong there any longer. I was a fish out of water. Quite a strange time.

Then, after three years or so, the institute invited me back. I saw that things weren’t working out for me in Brazil, and I knew that if I went back to the institute I could make it work for myself. So I said yes. This time I structured it differently—I made it clear that I wanted to focus on making sacred books and on my studies, and not on commercial printing, although I did still help out with that sometimes.

Sarah: How long did you stay that second time?

Charu: I stayed almost two years. Then I decided it was time for me to move on. I felt that if I didn’t leave at that point, I never would.

Sarah: Why do you say that?

Charu: Because you have all your needs met there—room, board, education, friends, community, and a tiny stipend. But that’s not the life I wanted for myself. I was appreciative and grateful but I needed to venture out. The institute staff were very upset when I announced my plans—they really appreciated my skills and my devotion. But I stuck to my decision.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 5: Yoga Is My Second Child

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 2: Openness to the Unseen

In the second part of my interview with yoga teacher Charu Rachlis, she describes the mix of Catholicism, Macumba, and Candomblé she was exposed to as a child growing up in Brazil, and how she selected elements from each to form her own spiritual beliefs and practices.

Openness to the Unseen

S: Did anyone in your childhood model a spiritual approach to life?

C: Yes, my maternal grandmother. I was her first granddaughter. My mom was busy; my younger sister and I are only 11 months apart. So my grandmother took care of me. She was Catholic, but she wasn’t strict about it; she had her own form of devotion. She connected with the divine, addressed the angels. She never tried to indoctrinate me, never said, Let’s go pray—we’d just sit together and I would feel the divine in the way that she was and in the love she had for me. And she’d speak about the angels to me. She lived to be 90 years old. Till the last moment we had a powerful, loving relationship.

Charu with her parents and younger sister.

Charu with her parents and younger sister.

Charu’s maternal grandparents.

Charu’s maternal grandparents.

S: Given that Catholicism is the dominant religion in Brazil, I’m imagining that everyone there stands in some kind of relation to it.

C: That’s true. My father was an atheist and my mother has always believed in God. She goes to church on holidays and lights candles and prays. I attended Catholic school. I was baptized and did first communion and studied the catecismo. But I didn’t really understand much about the religion. I dropped Christianity after confirmation. When I got to be a teenager I really felt disconnected from Christianity. It didn’t feel right to have this god up there in the air judging everybody. It was very limiting and it felt connected to the dictatorship. It didn’t reflect what I was understanding in my own heart. I wasn’t clear about what God is until much later on, when I took up meditation.

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Even though Catholicism is strong in Brazil, many people including our family also have a strong relationship to the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé/Macumba religion. Candomblé is like an umbrella religion with many different branches, including Macumba. Candomblé is closely connected to African culture while Macumba has more Brazilian flavor to it. They’re both very alive in Brazil, more so than Catholicism.

We would go to Macumba healing circles to participate in cleansing, empowering ceremonies. In this religion, each individual has a special relationship to one of the many orixas, or deities. For example, my orixa is Oxum, the female goddess of sweet waters, which includes lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. She represents love, beauty, intimacy, fresh water. At the healing circles we would receive guidance in making offerings to our orixas. I loved the beautiful drumming and dance that are part of that tradition. Overall, I felt Macumba and Candomblé were much more alive and genuine than Catholicism. A lot of my friends felt the same way.

S: Was your grandmother into Afro-Brazilian spirituality too?

C: Not as much, although she did go to the healing centers. But her son was totally into it––he would receive different deities––and she saw the truth of his experience. She was very respectful of all the ways that people find their own truths.

S: Did Macumba and Candomblé influence your later spiritual path?

C: Absolutely. In Afro-Brazilian religion there are deities of the ocean, the rivers, the rocks, the forests. I developed a capacity to be in touch with these energies connected to nature, and I absorbed the religion’s openness to the unseen. I also really related to the rituals, which are conducted in a circle. When I open my circle in yoga class by guiding my students through a meditation, I feel like I’m channeling the energy of the healing circles I attended as a young person.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 3: In Exile in My Own Country

 

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 1: Let's Move Around; We'll Feel Better

Once it’s safe to nix the social distancing, I can’t wait to return to Charu Rachlis’s yoga class at Yoga Tree on Stanyan Street, where she’s taught for upward of 15 years. Charu’s teaching always works its magic on me, from her warm, lilting voice as she bathes us in healing words during the guided meditations with which she starts each session, to the clear, kind, and often humorous instruction she provides as we move through each pose.

My fellow practitioners are people of all ages and skill levels. Yet the varying capacities of her students seem to pose the slightest challenge to Charu, who somehow helps each of us work our own edge, always encouraging us to infuse focused effort with mindfulness and self-compassion.

One morning, leaving class, another student glowingly commented, “I feel like I’ve just been to church—a really good kind of church.” I knew exactly what he meant. As we spill onto Stanyan, we collectively exude a sense of grounded joy palpably different from the jittery, fried vibe we entered with 90 minutes earlier. What happens in Charu’s class is way more than a good workout.

So I was happy when Charu agreed to talk with me about the path she has traveled to becoming the extraordinarily gifted teacher that she is. I hope our conversation compels and sustains you while we all wait for the day when we can gather in person.

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Let’s Move Around; We’ll Feel Better

Sarah: How long have you been teaching?

Charu: I started teaching in 1996, a little bit before I gave birth. I had a very intense personal yoga practice. I was in a home birth group with some friends—we’d all gotten pregnant together—and they invited me to teach them. I started to teach formally in 1997.

S: Let’s talk about what led you onto this path. I know you grew up in Brazil—where exactly?

C: I was born in Rio de Janeiro. When I was less than a year old, we moved to Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil, to be close to my mother’s family. Then in 1964, when I was 7 years old, there was a coup d’etat. A military dictatorship was installed and it lasted for the next 21 years.

When you live in a dictatorship, all the freedoms are taken away. You can only imagine how this affects a population. The government censored art, books, music. I loved the music of the singer Caetano Veloso; his music was about integrating yourself spiritually, emotionally, and every way possible. He was exiled in London and could not come back to Brazil for many years. That was a huge blow for me. The dictatorship created so much fear. People were tortured and murdered.

I was still living there as a young woman when democracy returned, and it was beautiful—everyone was in the streets. This moment of great joy and people returning from exile and things opening up again. But my feelings about Brazil were deeply affected by all those years of dictatorship. It was like the dictatorship imprinted itself on me psychologically. Everything that I did there was in some way difficult. When I came to the States, every door opened up in a magical way.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When the coup d’etat happened in 1964, my father (who worked as a piloto de navio, a cargo ship pilot, for the oil and gas company Petrobras) decided we should move back to Rio de Janeiro. That was where his family lived.

S: Why did he decide that?

C:. My guess is that, seeing how the dictatorship was limiting access to opportunities, he felt that returning to Rio and working hard there to advance his career would allow him to make our life as good as possible given the tough circumstances. So we moved back to Rio de Janeiro and he studied in his spare time and eventually became a captain.

S: What was it like for you to move back to Rio de Janeiro?

C: I was extremely close to my mother’s mother, Mercedes. Leaving her was terrible. And life in Rio de Janeiro was completely different. Rio Grande was a tiny, peaceful town and Rio de Janeiro was a big, bustling city, but it was still a nice place to be—not as hectic as it is now.

S: Were you able to maintain your connection with your maternal grandmother after your family moved away from her?

C: Yes, very much so. Our family would visit her every school holiday. Later on, when my brother and sister and I were teenagers, we began to go see her by ourselves.

S: I know from reading your website bio that even as a child, you felt a lot of joy in movement and you developed an understanding of the healing properties of somatic awareness.

C: From the beginning, I felt the need to do some kind of movement. I seem to have come into this world knowing that the body in motion releases mental and emotional tension and balances us, and that we feel better as a result. My mom told me that when I was five or six years old, I’d be on the floor with my legs forward, or out, or all the way over my head. I had a few ways of stretching. She’d ask, What are you doing? I would tell her, I’m calming myself, I’m being with myself. From the time I was 13, even younger, I would walk on the beaches in Rio de Janeiro. I would feel the strength in my legs, and the energy I was receiving from the sand and the sun. I’d breathe in the prajna from the ocean very consciously, even though I didn’t call it prajna. Then I’d jump into the water to cool off and I’d feel a sense of oneness. I would describe what I was feeling to my brother, sister, and friends. I’d encourage them to join me—especially my brother and a good friend, who were a little bit overweight. I’d say, That’s OK, let’s move around, we’ll feel better. When I became a yoga teacher much later, my siblings and my friends from that time said, We’re not surprised one bit.

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S: Who most supported your way of being when you were a kid?

C: My parents encouraged me to be a good student, but the physical training I had to find on my own. My parents didn’t exercise. My brother is a runner now, and my sister likes going to the gym, but no one in my family shared my interest in yoga and meditation. When I was 14–15 years old, I went looking for a stretching class. At that time, I did not find any yoga classes. They were all about stretching. I wanted to find a teacher I’d resonate with, someone who loved what they were doing. I’d visit a class and say, No, not this one. Eventually I found a teacher, a young mother with kids. I saw that she struggled to earn enough money through her teaching, but her class was so filled with love and truth. She didn’t speak about spirit but it was there in her presentation and in her way of caring for her students. I told my mom about it, but it went in one ear and out the other. She said, As long as you like it, I’m glad you found it. She was busy raising my younger siblings.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 2: Openness to the Unseen

Managing to Build Bridges - Part 8: Do We Want to Be Right in a Dictionary Sense?

Nani has a gift for entering others’ cultures in a respectful and sensitive way. That gift, combined with her strong curiosity and sense of adventure, has led to a unique trajectory from her childhood in Indonesia to her current job as a project manager at LinkedIn. In Part 8, Nani reflects on the goals and challenges of translation and the ups and downs of working abroad.

Sarah: Is “linguist” a fancy name for “translator”?

Nani: Yup. My primary role was to translate and localize content into Indonesian in preparation for the launch of the Indonesian version of LinkedIn. It’s very interesting work to me because it requires awareness of contextual issues. For example, let’s say we want to point a user to the home page. You can’t use the Indonesian word for “home, ” or “rumah,” because that literally means “house.” I decided to use “halaman utama,” which means “primary page.”

Sarah: Tell me about the challenges involved in translation work of that type.

Nani: One challenge was that by the time I got the job at LinkedIn, I’d lived in the States for a long time. I still spoke ‘90s Indonesian. As I grappled with that challenge, lot of things I’d learned in my linguistics courses as an undergrad became real to me. Because of that training, I remembered to step back and ask myself: What is our objective with this translation? What factors should be considered in arriving at the best translation? Indonesian is much more fluid than English. There are often two or more ways to spell one word. There’s the official listing in the government-sponsored dictionary, but that’s different from the spelling people use in daily life. Besides spelling, there are all sorts of issues such as degree of formality and influences of regional languages in Indonesia—for example if you’re addressing elders versus younger people; ways of speaking between people in big cities versus not; and of course the nuances of language on more than 17,000 islands that are part of Indonesia. Even if you try to come up with the lowest common denominator for a particular term, it still won’t necessarily do the work you need it to do.

I tried to fold all these nuances into my translation work. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m seen by the Indonesian translation community as a hard person to work with, because I often challenged the external translators I was managing.

I once applied for a position at a different tech company, and part of the application process was to take a test, translating English into Indonesian. Surprisingly, I did not do well. But because the company I applied for had a policy of transparency, the hiring manager told me how the test was evaluated. It turned out the reviewer was evaluating my work based on what’s officially correct in Indonesian language, but not necessarily how people speak day-to-day. I illustrated this point by running a Google search for the two terms. The one I chose yielded hundreds of thousands of results, while the one the evaluator considered correct only yielded about 20. This showed not only that spelling in Indonesian language is fluid, but also that the way everyday people spell Indonesian words may not be the same as how those words appear in the dictionary.

As a translator, I think it’s important to ask, Do we want to be right in a dictionary sense, or do we want the most engagement from the people we are trying to reach?

At an art exhibit in Stockholm.

At an art exhibit in Stockholm.

Sarah: In spite of the fact that you considered going to another tech company, you’ve stayed at LinkedIn.

Nani: Yes. I feel that LinkedIn has always supported my professional development and they’re open to my ideas. For example, when I’m ready for a new challenge, I’m given one. I told my previous manager that I was interested in being promoted, and he suggested that I take on a new project. I ended up working with the research team to conduct qualitative research in Indonesia. I also led an international research project in which my team members interviewed members from different parts of the world. It was great because I was able to use research skills I’d learned in anthropology—gathering ethnographic data through one-on-one interviews, doing archival research, creating reports. Because of that work, as well as my collaboration with a cross-functional team, Customer Operations, I was promoted to a senior position. After working with Customer Operations for a couple of years, I also started working with a new team, Marketing. Not long after that, I became a Marketing Localization Program Manager. As a program manager, I streamline processes to help improve communications and operations among multiple teams in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Sarah: That’s a consistent theme in your career trajectory. You love streamlining operations in organizations.

Nani: LinkedIn has given me the green light to make those kinds of improvements. I’ve worked there for more than seven years now and I attribute my longevity to that. I feel valued. I’m also grateful that the company has sent me to Dublin for an assignment; I had always wanted to experience living in Europe.

With colleagues in Dublin.

With colleagues in Dublin.

Sarah: What’s it like to live in Dublin?

Nani: It was difficult at first. I felt overwhelmed by the foreignness, the short days and cold rainy weather, the loneliness. It triggered memories of being 17 and having just moved to the U.S. I remember after a few weeks of being in San Francisco, I broke down in my brother’s kitchen, taking in the fact that I was now in a new place, with no friends, where even communicating was a challenge.

What I’ve realized is that loneliness follows you, no matter where you are. For better or worse, I’ve often experienced loneliness, ever since I was a child. It’s not the kind of loneliness where you feel you have no one to spend time with. It’s more a feeling of alone in the world—what a friend of mine calls “existential loneliness.” Perhaps I thought if I moved away, I would lose this feeling. It turns out it’s still there, but with newer, different distractions. I’m feeling more at peace and accepting of this fact over time.

With colleagues in Sunnyvale.

With colleagues in Sunnyvale.

What I love about living in Europe is the ability to travel to other countries—both the planning and the experience of traveling. Since I arrived in December, I’ve been to eight countries in Europe, including countries I’d never been to before that I’d always been curious about, like Hungary, Austria, and Denmark. I’ve learned more about myself and what kind of traveler I am.

Being based in Dublin has its own challenges in terms of my job. For example, time zone differences between the U.S. and Ireland affect my work hours, which means I sometimes work until 7, 8, even 10 at night. On the positive side, if I plan ahead, my schedule is more flexible. For instance, when I know I’ll need to work late, I do other things in the morning. I once spent a weekday morning swimming in an outdoor pool in Vienna—that was lovely.

With friend Marina in Dublin.

With friend Marina in Dublin.

What I continue to love the most about life, no matter where I am, are those rare moments that give me feelings of gratitude and contentment. A few weeks ago, on a Friday, I attended a company party at an outdoor park. It was almost eight in the evening, but it was still bright, and the air was balmy, very rare for Dublin. I was on my way home, walking to the train station, but changed my mind and decided to walk home, even though Google Maps said it would take an hour. I strolled through Sandymount, a coastal suburb in Dublin, surrounded by elegant houses with shiny windows and beautiful front gardens. I didn’t have any obligations waiting at home; there was nothing I needed to do except enjoy the moment.