There's no deadline for grief

...Meaning, it might take a while.

After years of keeping this blog, I have had the opportunity to speak with a number of ex-classmates, talk to people, and have real conversations about growing up in 3HO Sikh Dharma.

When I do take time out of ordinary life to reconnect or have a conversation, what usually follows is a familiar pattern and string of emotions. First, I experience a little bit of euphoria because I was able to reconnect with an old friend. But after that feeling wears off, I feel exhaustion, thirst and brain-fog. My emotional state is sapped, my thoughts become sort of non-verbal and I don't possess enough brain-power to process my feelings. Then I go through a night (or two) of restless sleep and hypnagogic states of nervous internal dialogue. Still, I go about my day, telling myself This Too Shall Pass.

During this fog-brain state, I will experience a nervous energy and a feeling of true dread. There's a heavy pit in my stomach and a churning pulse in my abdomen, neck and face. My vision starts to feel a little off, glassy sort of. What I am experiencing is a sludgy kind of anxiety, and I have come to recognize as a sign to get myself some self-care.

Even if I get care, sometimes I'll ride the anxiety for a while, trying to process my feelings and sort them out in a coherent way. I might scour the internet for any sign that our story – the un-varnished one, that is – might be getting told by more people. That bit-by-bit we will come forward and speak our truth, discuss our experience, and process it like the fully-aware people that we are (right?).

It's happening now, and I'm hoping more will follow. Sonofasikh is a blog written by one of my schoolmates as he processes his childhood by revisiting the place where it all went down. It's funny, charming and nostalgic. And it is especially poignant. My goodness. His account of being tortured by Nanak Dev Singh–this singular moment among far too many–was nevertheless astonishing and horrifying. And it was heartbreaking. But it was revelatory too, because I found myself able to live inside his experience and fully be a part of it and empathize with it in a way I hadn't done before. I must admit, I had become so familiar with my own family experiences of assault and battery that, well, they just take up more room in my consciousness. This shook me out of that myopia, and for that I am grateful.

But it also made me feel so much sorrow and so much loss.

***

Our experiences as 3HO children were both collective and individual at the same time. We each experienced and remember slightly varying versions of the same kinds of abuse. At the time, our only way of commingling those disparate forms of antagonism was to form a sibling-like bond, and forge ahead as best we could. But we had so little space to experience the full range of emotions that are so crucial in childhood development. Empathy was often sacrificed in our day-to-day coping. So much so, that it became nearly amputated from our lives. And our parents were cut off from it in their own cultic environment too.

Empathy. It's not the same thing as compassion, love, forgiveness or acceptance (all important faculties). Empathy is the ability to validate another person's feelings by acknowledging their experiences, even when you might have a different point of view. People like us–the indiakids–may not be aware that we might lack empathy. It was actively revoked from us, and we were not shown how to demonstrate it to one another. If we have developed it, we have had to take whatever kernel exists inside ourselves and grow it on our own... and probably as adults, and probably in a very flawed and messy way.

I don't really have a way to end this post... I guess I'm still processing.

💗

Can someone regret something even if they've never apologized for their role?

Last week, Dr. Dre issued a public apology to the women he beat up back in the N.W.A. times. While it reeks of PR, it's still a step in the right direction. Perhaps now he can put his money where his mouth is and donate to causes that prevent domestic violence, and to those that help victims of domestic abuse.

And here we are. Looking at domestic violence and physical abuse through the lens of Popular Culture, as if it happens elsewhere. No. Abuse in 3HO Sikh Dharma was (and likely is) right in our own homes, schools and institutions.

Yet, to date, not one adult Guide who was in India while we were in school there has ever come out publicly or apologized publicly. Yes, Nanak Dev is deceased, so it's too late to hear those words from the person who was most abusive. But there were plenty others that were both abusive themselves and/or complicit in not doing anything while kids were being beaten.

I find this to be shameful.

If rappers can do it, why can't they? Maybe it has to do with real regret, as opposed to lip-service regret. Maybe none of them really regret their behavior? Maybe they don't think it was wrong? Maybe they are too fragile? Maybe they struggled to get back on their feet after India that they just needed to re-establish themselves, forgetting about all the young adults that had their own futures ahead of them? Maybe it didn't occur to them that the kids they beat and the kids they watched being beaten will take those involuntary scars with them for a lifetime.

Like Dee Barnes said "I have a souvenir I never wanted".

No one wants those kinds of souvenirs. The people who inflict harm on others are culpable until their victims get justice. Bottom line. There is no other way to have a civilized society.

If our childhood Guides think it's okay to simply go on, holding their heads high against the reality of what they have done, they are wrong. One man has chosen to take it to his grave. Will the rest of them follow suit, or will they do the right thing?

On punishment

We were punished a lot. Even before India, at children's camp, we were often given very unreasonable and bizarre punishments. I'll go into those children's camps again soon... Sometimes I think GNFC was actually a haven from those camps - once we were sent off to school, we didn't have to go to camp anymore.

As I process a jumble of memories from that time, when some of us were as young as six years old, I think of our bizarre, and well, cruel and unusual punishments. The most common corporal punishment for the small children at GNFC was murgha (rooster). Murgha was humiliating - we were often singled out by the teachers, sent to the corner and ordered to crouch down, wrap our arms under our knees and pinch our own ears. There were times that a group of children were ordered tot do murgha - when it became a little easier to bare, but then the matron or teacher would still manage to single a kid out and make him or her perform the punishment for a longer, more unreasonable amount than others. The position cuts off circulation to the legs and head and caused dizziness, headaches, and leg aches. If the kids rear-end wasn't low enough, the teacher would hit it with a cane - more punishment.

What were the provocations that led to murgha? Geez, I can barely remember - I remember it being ordered almost randomly, and because of the tiniest infraction, like being last in line or losing your toothbrush. I was actually a good kid, and like I said in previous posts, I managed to stay under the radar. But I remember having to do murgha all the time! It didn't matter if you were a troublemaker or not - the punishment was across the board and systematic.

Murgha is a tradtional punishment (and when I say traditional, I mean, yes, they still make kids do it!). The most sadistic part is that it really only can be done by small children, who are still flexible and skinny!

So I wonder how this Indian tradition fit in with the ideologies of 3HO. When we told our parents what we had to do, they shrugged it off. They had already used other, perhaps less torturous, yoga poses as punishments, and they were already conditioned to throw us into a cold shower, clothes and all - and they thought those things were okay to do, because Yogi Bhajan said it was and in fact was the one to teach it to them.

All three: Murgha, Yoga as punishment, and cold showers ALL fit under the same umbrella of corporal punishment, and in America corporal punishment is abuse. Perhaps it was more convenient for YB to have us be in a land that hadn't considered that yet.