40 Days To Health And Happiness

Yoga Class
Waianae, Hawaii
March 30, `73

Yoga class was a good fit for me. Although I couldn't commit to
everything, I did enjoy the exercise, difficult as it was. I may not
follow the teachings to the letter (or practice them either), but that
didn't mean they weren't beneficial. I planed on giving the class as
much effort as I could muster, otherwise, why even go?

Babbet picked me up for the first class. We drove to Waianae. When we
arrived we entered a large room in a public building. There were
already a half dozen people sitting on the carpet, stretching their
legs. A dozen more showed up before the class ended. There were a few
guys, but most were women. At the front of the room, Sahash and his
wife, Siri, sat facing everybody. They were dressed in loose fitting,
all white clothes. A cloth turban adorned Sahash's head. Both looked
to be in their mid twenties, and both were very beautiful people. The
first session was kind of informational, but we did some breathing
exercises and chanting after the lecture.

The class was advertised as "40 days to health and happiness."
According to Sahash, if a person could maintain a positive attitude
with promoting habits for 40 days, he or she could change their
destiny. I figured, what the heck, it was "pay as you go by donation,"
so I planned on giving the class a good effort. The teachings were
based on the premise: "a liberated person is always a happy person."
According to Sahash, once liberated, you became free from harm and
lived in grace and equanimity.

In order to become liberated, (in addition to taking Sahash’s class), we
had to promise that we would guard against letting the "evils" of the
material world usurp our "higher spiritual nature." In other words,
we had to practice a "good attitude" and stay away from things that
were bad for us, like alcohol, lying, and cheating. In order to do that,
to not be victimized by this dirty little world, we had to practice yoga
with heart. Via the heart, good habits would make one physically,
mentally, and spiritually happy. When all habits were promoting habits,
according to Sahash, liberation was near.

The hard part of course, as he pointed out, was that to become
liberated you couldn't practice demoting habits, or habits that made
you unhappy (I could have used more clarification there, but I let it
slide). Pursuing bad habits would leave you a physical wreck, mentally
insane, and/or spiritually defunct. More precisely, bad habits had to
do with greed, anger, lust, attachment, and negative ego. Only good
habits made it possible for you to avoid negativity. If you practiced
only promoting habits, you would change your destiny. It all sounded
too good to be true. I figured I would give it forty days and see what
happened, though.