While Guru Purnima is the day reserved for honouring our spiritual teachers, let’s not forget that teachers in many forms surround us. If we’re humble enough, we will find, every day and everywhere, these countless teachers: the Upa Gurus. An Upa Gurus is anybody or anything that helps you along the way.
It’s been said we should spend some time each day with those younger than us – especially children – and those older than us. Among them both, we find these Upa Gurus. Being with children reminds us of when life was a magical, more interconnected place, full of energy and endless possibilities; a time when the line between the everyday world and the world of imagination was blurred. Just watch a child when they enter a large uncluttered room. They dance and jump and run, so joyous to be free of obstruction. The limitless space calls to them. They are barely aware of its’ edges. They haven’t lost touch with that formless, eternal place we inhabitant in-between our many lives. It’s aura still permeates their lives.
On the other hand, we have much to gain spending time drawing on the wisdom of the Upa Guru elders. At their best, they exude the clarity and calm of those who have gone beyond the restless muddled emotions of youth and the unrelenting drive of middle age.
Zimbabwean psychiatrist, Dr.Dixon Chibanda, draws on the wisdom of these elders through a program called the ‘Friendship Bench.’ With a team of grandmothers, he’s bridging a terrible gap in the mental health care of a country traumatised by decades of violence. With basic training in cognitive therapy these grandmothers, now numbering in the hundreds, sit on a bench with their patients in a simple, relaxed atmosphere. With their local knowledge and practical wisdom, they easily relate and deeply feel for the suffering souls who come to them. Their free, non-technical interventions have steadied and saved the lives of many.
Now the ‘Friendship Bench’ concept has spread to many other countries, even – not surprisingly – to New York. The concept has broadened to include grandpas too and younger mentors.
Upa Gurus are not limited to the human world. The whole of creation is brimming with lessons if we have the eyes to see.
The ancient sages, in their cave and forest homes, were keen observers of nature, giving rise to many picturesque analogies. We read in the scriptures of how God is like a spider, creating a web world out of itself, maintaining it, and later taking the whole web ‘creation’ back into itself. Yogis are compared to the tortoise: withdrawing their senses from sense objects as the tortoise draws its limbs within the shell. Just fish live in the water yet are different from it, so the Atman, our soul, lives in the body but is different from it. We read of how the desire for sense objects is like a cloud of wild bees swarming around a tree.
Let us honour all teachers great and small, of all ages and types.
