A Perfect Illusion
Life Told Me Just What I Needed To Know...
Bharat Mata (Mother India)
October 2007. Six months after the Montreux awakening, I return briefly to Geneva to release the last of my belongings. Shifting from clockwork Switzerland to chaotic India is a wide stretch. And in that stretch something cracked further. India completed the fracture, and remade me.
India re-mothered me.
It healed what I inherited from Catholicism: my atheism.
Love it or hate it, India doesn’t leave you indifferent. I fell in love again. The heart chakra in the daily chaos, the stench of sewage and the sweetness of prasad, the heat that drives you mad and the cold that bites, from the shrewd reality of its poverty to the depth of its spirit, everything conspired keep the break open.
India rolled me in the dust like a chapati, baked me in the tandoor, and burned away what was not me. India returned me to the sacred. No dogma, no priest. Me and God. Raw. Direct. Intimate. Just the undeniable presence of Life in everything.
I did not become Hindu. No such thing was required. The eternal wheel, Sanatan Dharma, got me spinning in its wake. And when I spun fast enough, Sanjeev appeared. And the wheel spun faster.
Wanderer and Samnyasin
By all accounts, the years that followed were among the most incredible of my life.
With my partner Val, we traveled to India three times a year to assist in the trainings. The rest of the time, we roamed freely, learning, preparing, exploring.
Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia… each segment a verse in a long Asian love poem.
Nomadic and passionate.
Carried by the winds. Held by the land. Nourished by the soul.
We were being moved, like wandering samnyasins, following an invisible thread through pilgrimages, mountains pathways, and an inner silence louder than noise.
In service and in surrender.
We had found our sacred rhythm, and it was dancing us.
Eat, Pray... Leave
In two years we had undergone a vertiginous amount of trainings, meditations and practices. Travelers of both inner and outer landscapes.
October 2009, we arrived in Dharamshala, a familiar place by now, to assist another teacher training with Sanjeev.
We knew the chaiwalas, the tasty restaurants, the shortcut paths to the temple across the fields. Everything was ready. The machine was well oiled.
Then, one week before the training, I got the call: Sanjeev wouldn’t be coming.
He had been hired as technical advisor for the India portion of Eat Pray Love, a new Hollywood production of the 2006 best-seller by Liz Gilbert, played by Julia Roberts. I had never heard of the book. I didn’t care. I cared about the commitment we made.
I felt dropped. Burdened.
And now, the training would fall on me.
I was angry. And under the anger was hurt.
To me, commitment is sacred.
Trial by Fire
The training went ahead without Sanjeev. And it was a success. I led the whole thing, and nothing fell apart. In fact, something clicked into place.
My emotions settled but the resentment lingered.
“You don’t drop your engagements last minute.”
That story stuck. My Aries loyalty doesn’t bend easily.
What I couldn’t see then and what feels so obvious now:
In two years, I had gone from beginner to teacher.
With only one person to be grateful for.
And without planning it, I had just led my first full Yoga Teacher Training.
Not just delivered it. I thrived in it.
There was a clear path and I was home in that place.
Maybe even beyond home, maybe growing beyond the frame?
But at the time, all I could feel was betrayal.
The story of disappointment was louder than the voice of emergence.
Kintsugi
We spent the winter on Koh Mak, Thailand, in a bamboo house perched above a coconut grove and the shimmering Gulf. A lost paradise.
Until the letter came.
“You are not needed for the next training.”
Shock. Hurt. Betrayal, again.
But in that quiet place, something could shift. The emotional fog lifted. I saw it clearly now: I could never have left Sanjeev on my own. I owed him too much.
But this rupture, this divine discord, set us free.
And so, Yogi-Nomad was born. Our own yoga school. Our own ideas. Our own way. And over the next few years, we would teach many students.
The separation was not death. It was birth.
Eventually, I wrote Sanjeev a letter of gratitude.
I saw it now: the pain was the portal.
The anger was needed to break the bond.
And freedom… the gold we fit in the cracks.
Full Circle
Fast forward to August 2017. I live in California now. My yoga path has shape-shifted, repackaged as “life coach”. New words, same meaning.
I am planning a trip to Europe, so I reach out to Sanjeev to whom I have spoken a few times. Peace is restored. He invites me to stay with his family in Bonn.
I have something for you, I tell him “Have you heard of 5-MeO-DMT?” His voice lit up. "I’ve been researching it for a while” he admits. I smile. “I’ve been serving it. I’ll bring it along.”
Serving Sanjeev was one of the most profound ceremonies of my life.
A quiet act of reverence. A chance to give back a small part of the gold I received.
He emerges from the journey, radiant and still.
“All has been said, right?” he whispers.
I nod. No words needed.
Perfection as tangible as matter. Student. Teacher. All roles dissolved.
Only the dance remains, perfect in its design, even we lose control.
Especially when we lose control.
Blowin’ In The Wind
India had whispered it all along:
“To be free, you must be like the wind, untied, ungrasping, everywhere and nowhere at once.”
Life never once made a mistake.
Not when Sanjeev dropped out.
Not even when I burned in my resentment.
Life is right in every case.
What looked like breakup was space creation.
What felt like loss was the gift.
Now I see it so clearly: the roles, the reversals, the rupture, the return,
all just wind-blown chapters in a story written by something bigger than me.
No one to blame. No one to thank. Only awe.
The illusion was perfect.
The circle was complete.
And the wind keeps blowing.
Because everything is perfect. Always.
Hence, as Sanjeev said so often in classes: “I resist nothing that occurs.”
To this day I have remained in contact with Sanjeev and you you can contact here through his website if you’d wish to work with him. He is a deeply genuine Indian master. If you chose to connect with him please let me know. Not only I’d be happy to help could also make an introduction for the right person.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.