Meeting of the Mothers
By Theresa Shay
In 2012, my dad met Kaliji in Central Pennsylvania.
This June in Zürich, Switzerland, fourteen years later, my mother met Kaliji.
The first encounter was entirely unexpected. Mom and I had driven in from Germany with challenges along the way. Mercury was in retrograde, causing travel disruptions for the entire TriYoga International team headed to Switzerland.
Mom and I stopped on the Autobahn for lunch. The day was blazing hot. When we returned to the car after the rest, we cranked the AC up as high as it would go to keep from cooking while we navigated the GPS setup in the rental car. At that point in the trip, it still took us a good while to get the tech reconnected each time we started the engine.
At last, we had the route to Zürich on the car screen and the voice commands queued up. I put the car in reverse and a serious string of warning lights and sounds erupted. The message was clear. I braked.
The dash showed a red-hot engine, and the car would not go faster than a crawl. Mom convinced me to jump a curve (she has a bit of a wild side, I learned on this trip) to get the engine far enough under a tree to be in the shade. I popped the hood and headed to a bench to stretch while Mom rested and the engine cooled.
This had the desired effect of allowing us to drive again, but the undesired effect of adding nearly an hour to the trip. By the time Mom and I rolled into town and found the Airbnb, I had only enough time to swap my driving outfit for yoga clothes and brush my teeth.
Google maps reported a 15-20 minute walk to the hall. Imagining myself dripping in 100 degree sweat and slipping in one minute before-if not one minute after- Kaliji, I asked Mom, like when I was a kid, to drive me to class.
We turned the corner onto the last street, and a bright woman walked out of the hotel, her clothes flowing behind her like a string of party lights. Kaliji! But, wait, did I have the wrong location? Indeed I did, but now it was the right location since I’d found Kaliji.
I jumped out to greet and waved goodbye to Mom.
Kaliji didn’t miss a beat. She pivoted directly to the driver’s window to meet my mom. In this way, the Zürich program began with the great joy and honor of introducing my mothers to one another – the birth mother who brought me into this world, and the spiritual mother who taught me to love it.
After spending meals and social time with the TriYoga community throughout the weekend, Mom was glowing like a TriYogi. She’d identified the 10-beat raga at the concert, met people I’d talked about for years, consoled one of the program participants in a heartfelt conversation and tearful hug, and walked further than she had any other day of the trip.
I knew she had received all the gifts of a TriYoga program even though she’d not rolled out a yoga mat, when she summed up the experience in three words: “Such good energy!”
Indeed it was, traveling in Europe with my mother.
Theresa Shay is the founding director of TriYoga of Central Pennsylvania, where she teaches weekly yoga and meditation online and trains others to teach TriYoga®. Each week, she shares wisdom cultivated from decades of TriYoga study and practice.
Learn more about her here. Theresa can be reached at Theresa@PennsylvaniaYoga.com. Find her on Instagram @theresa_of_triyoga for more inspiration and light.