26 October 2024
Kim,
I am rather spectacularly failing to heed your desire that I not mourn your passing. Though I greet this moment grateful for the manner of your transition, were you embodied, you would find me sitting here flowing many tears. And you are worth every one to me, and then some.
I wish to convey my profound gratitude for you. That I am privileged to have spent a decade as your student. That my practice and my life have been blessed by your tremendous wisdom, wit, and patience. That you prepared me to teach in the way that you did—and continued to, until the end. I am speechless at your boundless generosity, even more so that I have received so much of it.
There are a handful of moments in my life that reside in my mind acutely, as though they aren’t memories. Two, in particular, connect me to the Kriya lineage. The first, the first time I head Michael Bonamer give a dharma talk, which was around 2004. The second, a lunchtime during my first teacher training retreat, in November of 2014.
You were eating at a table with a group of us, answering questions. And you started talking about the locations of the chakras along the spine.
At both of these moments, I experienced the same thing: heart stopped beating in my chest, the mind intensely and utterly focused, and I was flooded with knowing that this is where I ought be.
I had been seeking that particular teaching on chakras for some years before that lunchtime, without quite realizing that’s for what I had been searching. I was that day—and continue to be—dedicated to the wisdom of your Teaching.
It’s a substantial frustration of mine that my life circumstances didn’t allow me to practice with you as often or as much as I wanted. Though, truthfully, I’m not sure in any circumstance could I have practiced with you enough to sate my desire. I am certainly guilty of parigraha when it comes to your Teaching and your time! Though I suspect that it was to my benefit that periods of studying with you were interspersed with time to practice and integrate what I had learned before I saw you again.
Because it takes time to make such big shifts in the body, the psychology, and the understanding of the world as I have. Because of this practice. Because of what I learned from you.
Michael once admonished us to “read the signs” that the bodies give us. You taught me how. To read my own body and respond to it, to read others’ so I may respond to them. You helped open me to a pathway of knowing that far exceeds my ever busy, too-analytical mind. To a life where asana is a whole separate language that I speak—one in which I dream, visions of which arise when I need direction.
To a life where I can read not only the signs of my body but of the world and surrender to its direction—instead of bulldozering my way through it the way I always had.
So many once-abstract concepts have become not only concrete, but allies under your tutelage. For example, as I have painstakingly educated my hips to do their work, organizing my root chakra and separating it from the sacral, I’ve developed a sense of self—and with it, strength and courage—a 10 year younger version of myself could not have imagined.
As a result of not one, but two rounds of your Pranayama workshop (I am a slow learner), I came to recognize my entrenched reverse breathing pattern and correct it. And to that single act, all other interventions for grounding and healing pale in comparison.
Some of my purest moments of joy happened on my mat with your instruction. Especially when you’ve cracked a joke and I’m falling out of a pose laughing. Doubly so when you’ve made me the example and are both working me to my edge and cracking me up in front of a room full of people at the same time! How blessed am I that so many of those delicious memories reside with me on my mat?
Kim, I cherish your tremendous gentleness and approachability. I never felt judged by or inadequate around you, which is not something I can say of all of my Teachers. Memory after memory of connected moments, awkward moments, peaceful moments, illuminating moments have flooded my mind these few days since I learned of your passing. Enjoying them, I marvel at your quiet generosity. The tremendous grace with which you met my struggles both on and off the mat. The way you could be so firm and so kind simultaneously.
Somewhere in the middle of my teacher training, I experienced something for the first time. We were at the end of a long day of practice. Setu Bandhasana was the pose. As I followed your cues, some thing erupted through my body, and suddenly I was crying uncontrollably. In those days, I cried barely at all, even when I wanted to (something that has dramatically changed in this past decade). I felt mortified and confused, and did the best I could to keep it under control through Savasana and into my room, where I sobbed for no apparent reason for a long time.
After I collected myself, I knocked on your door and asked what the heck had just happened to me. You said something that I have quoted to many of my students in the years since: it was an energy and it moved. And it maybe didn’t need any more understanding than that. That, by the mind trying to understand and identify it, the mind may inhibit its full exit from the body.
Last October, the last time I saw (and practiced with) you in person, I lingered a little after my friends had left your home. You turned to me with passion in your voice and said, “the karma is in the muscles,” by way of discouraging me from a soft tissue focused practice. Organize the bones so the muscles can release those old energies.
Alignment is enlightenment.
The second time I came to Albuquerque to study with Ramanand*, you shared a meal with me and some fellow teachers with whom I had traveled. Ramanand had just announced that he would not return to High Desert, as he was retiring as a traveling teacher. At dinner, Darren expressed something that I have felt many times: how terrifying it is when our Senior Teachers retire or leave the Earth.
You looked at us seriously and with no pity, and told us to get ready, because the time is already upon us. Ours is the time to rise to that occasion.
And here we are.
Kim, I am just one of many who have been touched by you and your Teaching. I delight in being part of the ripple effect of the good you’ve done on this Earth, and take such solace and joy in what harmonious karma will follow you as a result. May your soul drink deeply of the nourishment of your guides and know unyielding peace and rest in your return home.
In undying love, immense gratitude, and some heartbreak,
Tiffany
Kim Schwartz is Tiffany’s Teacher Trainer. He conducted teacher trainings for both the Temple of Kriya Yoga in Chicago and High Desert Yoga in Albuquerque. He died Monday, October 21, 2024 of lung cancer.
*Ramanand Patel, who founded the Iyengar Institute of San Franscisco, was one of Kim’s senior teachers. I also mention Darren Christensen, CIYT.