Amid feeling huge disappointment in traditional media these past weeks and a lot of generalized anxiety about the upcoming election, I received word that yoga teacher Rolf Naujokat had passed away. I’ve been mostly disconnected from the greater Ashtanga community for the past several years, but reading the many tributes to Rolf, a highly respected senior teacher in the Ashtanga tradition, served to loop me back into the field, and I recalled my time in Goa, India, more than a dozen years ago.
In 2011, I left Mysore for Goa to practice with Rolf and his wife Marci at their jungle shala near Anjuna on the Arabian Sea. I was following a long line of Ashtanga students who often capped off their extended visits to Mysore with a couple of weeks or months of practice with Rolf.
I found Goa to kind of like a Puerto Vallarta of India. Filled with European tourists and hippies and an accompanying tourist trade, the beaches were lined with ‘shacks’ serving food and beverages and there was a wider food palette — fresh fish and actual salads! — than (then) found in Mysore. There were retreat centers and nighttime bazaars, late-night markets, churches (a vestige of Portuguese colonization) and dance clubs, but Rolf and Marci’s yoga shala, called Yoga Bones, with its bamboo-mat covered earth floor was as bare bones as they came.
I’d practiced Rolf and Marci before, on a handful of their teaching trips to the Bay Area in the early aughts. And on my first trip to Mysore, in 2004, I inevitably seemed to start my practice next to Rolf. Having had an early start time and a far more advanced practice, he would often be completing an extremely difficult pose like Mandelasana just as I was rolling out my mat. I couldn’t help overhear his interactions with his teacher and was struck by his combination of humbleness, devotion and proficiency. In his own studio, he was just as kind, dedicated and low key. Students wrote him an email to let him know when they’d be arriving and were welcomed unconditionally. He looked like a sadhu, didn’t do social media, may or may not have had a website. Nonetheless, a steady stream of international students of all abilities made their way to his shala. In Goa, he taught all morning and invariably watched the sunset from the beach, accompanied by a mix of dogs and students. Sure he was teaching asana, but he was showing everyone a more ascetic way of being. I was only there for 10 days or so, but the experience left an impression. Life really could be very simple and vast at the same time.
This past week, I re-listened to a vintage interview with Rolf by Guy Donahaye and felt inspired for practice in a way I haven’t been in a long while. The timing couldn’t be better. A bow of appreciation to Rolf’s memory, which is proving very much a blessing.