Chapter Three: Inside Out

After close to 9 months of hungrily scavenging the Waldorf world, I had started to feel somewhat of an imposter. I was gate-crashing teacher conferences in cities across the country. As a non-teacher (and non-parent), I found myself mentally apologising for being there.

This niggling feeling crescendoed to a sense of emergency at a particular teacher conference I attended in the beginning of January 2019. I didn’t realise then that it was possibly also the powerful solar eclipse energy that was pushing me to open up new potential in my life. With lunar and solar eclipses in the same cycle, the celestial acrobatics of January 2019 shook my inner world too. I was being pushed beyond my merry explorations of the Waldorf world.

That was the beginning for me. I left that conference knowing that I had to make something of all my learning adventures. That weekend, I also made a spontaneous connection — with a teacher from a `quaint-sounding’ school in South India — something about a colourful train. `How charming,’ I had said when she told me about her school with smiling eyes.

As usual, my month was packed with Waldorf training and spiritual meanderings. I had signed up for a Biography Life work training later that month, and planned some ashram hopping in Pondicherry (the Aurobindo ashram) and Tiruvannamalai (Ramana Maharishi’s ashram) in honour of my forty-first birthday. Both visits were momentous, somewhat culminating in a turning point for me.

As I checked in to the Mother’s Home guest house, the woman at the desk noticed that it’s my special day. Birthday babies are offered the precious possibility of sitting in meditation in the room where Sri Aurobindo attained samadhi. Sitting there in silence, tears brimming, I felt some unspeaking force hold me, lead me.

My time in Ramanasramam led me further inward, with Arunachala’s energy nudging me fiercely towards the next steps I needed to take.

I returned home (to Mumbai) in early February with a feverish collapse of my body. I had to move into my parents’ home, so I could be better cared for. The delirium continued, even as I remained adamant about working with nature cures and a smattering of homeopathy. Eventually, I had to be on a drip and in recovery for a month to build back my iron levels. And all through, the doctors couldn’t quite tell me what was wrong.

But, the Tarot cards gave me a glimpse as to what was going on.

I had been lying in bed — pontificating, taking stock of my life. My Waldorf Teacher Training was coming to a close. What did I want to do now? Was I simply going to continue training in anthroposophy and Waldorf ways, still skirting the possibility of teaching? I had got a few calls for film jobs. Did I want to go back? It was very tempting — to be wanted for work, at a time I felt so confused and incapable. So, when the Tarot cards came by for a sick visit, I was relieved. I wanted to make sense of what was going on. What were the invisible beings and my own life impulse plotting?

They spoke fairly clearly. This time of dis-ease and illness was more than just my physical body collapsing. I was being given time — to return to and cocoon in my birth-home with my parents, in the same room I grew up in. There was an unspoken, unknowable, energetic flow, a learning to give and receive that required my surrender, the relinquishing of my usual tendency to control — all a part of my journey to live more in tune with my inner being. It was a time of healing and integration, before Spring brought her blossoming; a time for wishing and visioning, for dreaming, for intentions — not for planning and making something happen, which had always been my superpower.

And, so I did. Lying there in bed, pumping up my haemoglobin with every spinach leaf I munched, I finally decided I would try my hand at teaching — whether I liked it or not, whether I was good at it or not. I had trained to teach, and I would try it out and see how it feels. It was my way of attending to the internal `emergency’ I felt. I started to vision the kind of place I wanted to be at — surrounded by nature, close to a spiritual centre, somewhere with a slowness in the air that would allow me to be more than be caught in doing, doing, doing.

I started looking for schools. Goa, Pondicherry, Tiruvannamalai. These were the obvious possibilities for the kind of place I was seeking. Then, Bangalore and Pune also came into consideration. I made short visits, sent emails to inquire, set up phone meetings.

And, then! On (another!) training in Hyderabad in mid-April, I met another teacher with shining eyes and a dancing smile. Chatting into the night after the workshop, we shared our journey and our excitement about the pedagogy. She told me about her school, and the “crazy clan” of teachers they were — the same school with the colourful train name. I was intrigued by how she spoke of her school, particularly her uncontainable joy for teaching that she seemed to share with her colleagues. I could almost hear their collective laughter ringing in her voice.

By now, I had gone down my list of possible schools and places to move to. I didn’t have much to choose from without compromising on what mattered to me. I came back home (or did I do it on the flight back home) and mailed this `quaint’ little school with a request to visit and possibly work there.

Less than a month later, with backpack in tow, I walked into the beautiful brick and mud campus of Yellow Train School in the dry Coimbatore heat. I was greeted, and soon enveloped, by the smiling, happy teachers. A prominent sign in the school scrawled artistically, “Happy Teachers Change the World”. I had never thought of it like that, but yes, makes sense.

And, just like that, I started my teaching journey, my new life in a new city.

In my filmmaking career, I had been careful to commit more than a few months (never more than a year!) to a film, but here I was, signing up to live and work in this city for two years (happily extending it to four years a few months later).

Yellow Train School has been all that I wanted for myself, and so much more. I could never have visioned this sort of life for myself when I was lying back in my sick bed a few months ago. Everyday I am intrigued by the life path that led me here, and I become alive to the idea of surrender to a Divine plan, to let go of managing and `making it happen’. But, more than anything, this journey has taught me how to manifest — to dream, to do my work in the world and then to surrender to whatever unfolds with complete trust, to live my life with a freedom that I couldn’t conceive of just a few years ago.

With the Grade One Class along with the teacher — after putting up the play `Briar Rose’