It was a quiet Sunday morning.
The kettle hissed faintly as steam curled toward the sunlight spilling into Ishaan Sharma’s modest study. His Himalayan home, now his spiritual retreat, lay nestled between deodars and silences. The world had changed. The pace had quickened, technology had taken strange shapes, people no longer paused. But Ishaan… he had slowed down. Deliberately.
At 52, his salt-peppered beard curled gently over his kurta collar, his eyes still sharp but wrapped in softness—the kind that life bestows only on those who have wept deeply, loved truly, and died inwardly more than once.
As he sipped from his brass cup of tulsi-chai, he opened his old leather-bound journal—one of the many from his Pine Crest School days. And without effort, memory poured in—not just as thoughts, but as living breath.
He closed his eyes.
And the dream began again.
He was sixteen. Or perhaps seventeen. Those years blurred. What remained sharp was that night—a night soaked in longing, ripe with ache, saturated with purity he hadn’t earned but had somehow stumbled into.
He had cried himself into sleep with Myra’s final letter pressed to his heart. Her handwriting still felt warm. The candle had danced one last time before surrendering to darkness.
And then, it happened.
In his dream—or what he now knew wasn’t a dream at all—he had stood at the edge of a garden humming with mist. Not the school’s garden, not Dadaji’s orchard—but a strange otherworldly space drenched in jasmine. The air had shimmered. The path had glowed. And he—still a boy—had walked barefoot, weightless, toward a spiraling tower made of living light.
Now, as he sat in the quiet of his study, he whispered aloud, “I still don’t know if I walked up that tower… or if it rose within me.”
Each chakra had unfolded like a memory:
Muladhara—the base—was that childhood shame, that moment he’d failed to protect a wounded bird.
Swadhisthana—his adolescent desires, his first confusion about love and purity.
Manipura—the fire of rebellion, the pride of outshining even Vinod in a science project.
Anahata—the sacred wound of loving Myra, and letting her go.
Vishuddha—his silence during Dadaji’s funeral, and the truths he couldn’t voice to anyone.
Ajna—the flash of insight during Mr. Dutt’s last lecture before retirement: “Every question that burns in you is a forgotten answer trying to rise.”
Sahasrara—the summit. The dissolution.
He had floated in light. And then they appeared—his Dadaji and Myra, not as themselves but as a radiant union. In the dream, they merged until they were indistinguishable—one soul, one light.
Ishaan still remembered their words, as if whispered in his ears just yesterday:
“You were not walking toward us. You were walking into yourself.”
That sentence had unraveled everything. All searching, all yearning—it had never been about someone else. Not Myra. Not God. It was always the Self, waiting in silence.
He remembered waking up that morning and just knowing—not intellectually, not even emotionally—but in every cell: Kundalini had risen.
There were no visions that day, no levitation, no miracle. Just a calm that pierced bone. A stillness that didn’t need a name.
At school, Gagan had teased him mercilessly, “Oye Ishaan, you’ve turned into a perfect baba overnight? Should we start touching your feet?”
They’d all laughed. He had laughed too. But deep inside, something had crystallized—something ancient and irreversible.
Even now, as he stared at the tea swirling in his cup, he smiled faintly. “You were right, Gagan. I did become a baba. Just didn’t wear orange.”
That afternoon after the dream, he’d gone to Mr. Dutt.
He still remembered the quiet exchange beneath the old Bodhi tree.
“I saw her,” Ishaan had said.
Mr. Dutt had kept watering the tree without looking up. “And did she show you who you are?”
“Yes,” Ishaan had whispered, “And also who I’m not.”
Mr. Dutt had paused, looked at him, and said, “Some dreams are not dreams. They are the soul’s way of skipping linear time.”
Back in the present, a breeze blew through the window. Pages of the journal fluttered like wings.
Ishaan ran a hand over the entry that began, “She Who Became My Guru”—his first attempt to capture what Myra had truly meant to him. Not as a teenage muse. Not as a romantic flame. But as a living portal—the very image of divine shakti who tricked his ego into surrender.
She didn’t teach him in the traditional sense. She was the teaching.
He had loved her fiercely. But what she awakened in him went beyond name and form. Beyond gender. Beyond story.
Now, five decades wiser, he no longer craved her return. She never left. She was there in every mountain breeze, every silent tear during meditation, every unexpected burst of joy while watching a child chase butterflies in the fields.
That evening, Ishaan walked to the far edge of his land, where an old peepal tree stood. He sat cross-legged beneath it, just like in his school days.
Far below, the village was beginning to light its evening diyas. The temple bell rang once. A distant cow mooed.
He closed his eyes—not to meditate, but to listen.
Not to seek, but to remember.
And from within, rising like the soft breath of dusk, came her voice:
“You don’t need to look for me anymore, Ishaan. You became me the day you let go of me.”
He smiled.
His breath deepened.
The sky faded into indigo.
And from the silence of a well-lived life, a boy’s dream whispered again.
—
Some memories do not belong to the past.
They are portals.
To our beginningless Self—
Waiting always,
In the garden of Light.
Demystifying Kundalini 