By the time Ishaan reached Chapter Nineteen of She Who Became My Guru, the afternoon sun had begun its quiet descent behind the cedar-clad ridges of his Himalayan retreat. A thin veil of cloud floated lazily across the peaks, diffusing light like an old memory—neither too bright, nor too dim. He sat cross-legged on the floor by the open bay window, a mild breeze carrying the scent of pine and distant rain. The pages of his own book fluttered gently on the table, as if eager to remind him—this isn’t over yet.
He turned to the chapter titled Dreams, Myra, and Mystery.
And just like that, it began happening again.
Back then, he never saw it coming. The awakening. The spiral. The slow but powerful inward turn of his senses.
But it didn’t begin with scriptures or chants. It began with her.
Not in the ashram. Not during a retreat. But in the cluttered corridors of Pine Crest School—amid exam stress, adolescent jokes, and half-said goodbyes.
Her name was Myra.
Everyone saw her as just another brilliant, quirky, vibrant schoolmate with that odd yin-yang mix—wild laughter and sudden silences. But to him, she had always been something else. Something unnameable. He could never quite look at her directly for long. Something stirred. Something too vast for a teenage mind to hold.
She made him restless—but not in the way of infatuation. It was more like standing near a forgotten temple: you don’t know why your chest tightens, but you feel something ancient awakening.
Back then, he called it attraction.
Now, reading his own words, older and inwardly calmer, he knew it was initiation.
The dreams started the same year his curiosity toward yoga and mysticism bloomed. He would see her—not as a classmate—but as light. Sometimes sitting beneath a tree reading ancient texts. Sometimes walking silently through ruins. And sometimes, simply staring at him with an unsettling stillness that made everything else blur.
He once told Gagan about a dream, casually.
Gagan had chuckled, “Oye, she’s your dream girl in the literal sense now!”
But Anjali—Myra’s observant friend—had overheard and said something cryptic:
“Not all dreams come from sleep. Some come to wake you up.”
What confused him most was that the pull toward her never felt impure. His growing interest in Kundalini, in chakras, in breathwork—somehow, she kept surfacing in the background of all of it.
Like she was threaded through the sadhana itself.
The tipping point came one dusky evening in the school library. He was reading a translated copy of the Devi Bhagavatam, and as if scripted by fate, Myra walked in and sat at the adjacent table. For a moment, he forgot the book entirely. Then she asked, without lifting her eyes from her notes:
“Do you think all energy is feminine?”
He froze. “Why do you ask?”
She shrugged. “Just curious. Shiva sits still. Shakti moves.”
That line haunted him for weeks.
At that age, he didn’t yet understand how lust could be lifted, not denied. He only knew that trying to suppress what he felt led to tension, and indulging it dulled his clarity. It was Govind bhaiya—his elder cousin, silent seeker, and mystic-in-hiding—who gave him the key.
“Energy doesn’t ask questions,” Govind had said one afternoon while flipping hot parathas. “It just moves. Where you let it move is your sadhana.”
Those words were the silent switch.
The chaos he felt—so easily mistaken for teenage hormones—was quietly turned inward. The same pulse that stirred when Myra looked at him now found refuge in dhyana. He began using her as a dhyana-mudra without even knowing the term. Not her form, but her presence. Her mystery. Her silence.
Mr. Dutt, their unconventional teacher, had once noticed Ishaan unusually silent in class.
“You look like you’re meditating, Sharma.”
“Maybe I am, sir.”
To which Mr. Dutt had only smiled and whispered, “Good. But meditate upward.”
In one of his deepest dreams, years later, Myra appeared again—older this time. Not aged, but ageless. She stood beneath a tree made of light, its leaves shimmering like miniature galaxies. In the dream, he was fully conscious, aware he was dreaming, and yet unable to wake. It was not sleep—it was a journey.
“Myra?” he had asked, voice quivering.
“No,” she answered softly. “Not anymore.”
“Then… who?”
“I am what you made of me.”
Her eyes held a mother’s compassion, a friend’s mirth, and a Guru’s power.
“You carved me with longing,” she continued. “Then sculpted me through silence. Now let me dissolve into stillness.”
He reached for her hand, but she melted into light.
That dream marked a turning point.
From that day, he never saw Myra as a lost love. He saw her as the force that first cracked open his inner world. The fire that didn’t burn—but transformed.
She had never truly been a girl. She had been the Shakti principle in disguise—clever enough to wear adolescent charm, but wise enough to leave when the work was done.
She was the movement that led him to stillness.
He still remembered how difficult it had been to explain this to Vedika, his wife.
Not because she wouldn’t understand—but because he feared she might.
But Vedika had only smiled, serene as ever, and said:
“If she opened your path, then I’m grateful to her. We all have someone who breaks us open.”
He had stood quietly, humbled by the depth of her presence. She wasn’t jealous. She was aware.
“Besides,” Vedika had added, “if she was your Guru, she chose well when she stepped away.”
Now, at 52, surrounded by the scent of cedarwood and the songs of whistling thrushes, Ishaan closed his eyes and relived it all—not as memory, but as living now. He had long stopped distinguishing the outer world from the inner one. Everything was part of the same eternal unfolding.
He thought of Vinod, his genius classmate, who once joked that Ishaan was “writing devotional poetry disguised as teenage love letters.”
He thought of Ranjana didi, who called Myra “your spiritual vitamin.”
He thought of Anjali, who knew far more than she ever said, and whose quiet nods had once reassured him more than any words could.
Even now, even after years of advanced yogic states, silent retreats, and mystical highs, that first flame—the tender confusion of seeing Myra for what she really was—remained the most sacred moment.
The gateway.
The adi-darshan.
As the chapter drew to a close, the clouds parted, and golden light poured onto the hilltop like prasad. Ishaan rose, book in hand, and stepped out into the open. The valley stretched endlessly before him, soaked in silence and light.
He stood there, breathing slowly, the book held close to his chest.
“Myra,” he whispered—not as a name, but as a mantra.
A bird took flight.
The wind brushed his face like a blessing.
And in the stillness that followed, he didn’t feel alone.
He felt guided.
Always guided.
By her, and through her, and beyond her.
By that which she had always pointed toward—the One who has no name, no form, yet wears every face we’ve ever loved.
Demystifying Kundalini 