When I arrived in Granada I taught yoga for free. No studio, no fee, no schedule that anybody could rely on. People asked, I said yes, and we found a room.
I did not speak Spanish then. That matters more than it sounds. When you cannot explain something, you demonstrate it. You show the shape, the student copies the shape, and you adjust the shape. A class taught without a shared language becomes a class about bodies in positions, because that is the only channel left open.
I taught that way for a while and then I stopped. Two reasons, and the second one is the real one.
The first reason was practical
Free classes have a problem nobody warns you about. You cannot fix anything.
If somebody comes irregularly, there is no reason for them to come regularly. If somebody wants a workout, there is no framework in which you say that is not what this is. Money is a boundary as much as it is an income, and I did not want the income, so I had no boundary either.
I also did not want to charge. That was not a principle I could argue for. It was closer to discomfort. Taking money for something I had received free felt wrong in a way I could not defend to anybody, including myself. So I was running something with no structure, in a language I could not speak, for people who came when they felt like it.
That is not teaching. That is hosting.
The second reason took longer to admit
I was stuck in the surface of it.
Postures, alignment, breath counted out loud. All of it is real and none of it was what I was actually interested in. I had been circling the philosophical side for years, and the thing I was delivering in that room was the part of yoga that translates without words, which is the part I cared about least.
I noticed it in what people expected when they walked in. They expected India, and a version of India I could not honestly provide. Something calm and old and slightly sacred, with me as the source of it. I was a man from Delhi in his thirties who had come to Spain to write books and could not order coffee properly yet.
I could have performed the version they expected. Plenty of people do, and some of them do it sincerely. I would have been acting.
Where I actually went
I have spent the years since reading Osho and Jiddu Krishnamurti, and that is a stranger place to end up than it sounds.
Krishnamurti spent his life refusing to be what my students wanted me to be. He was raised to be a world teacher by an organisation built for the purpose, and in 1929 he dissolved it and told the people who had gathered around him that they should not follow him. He kept saying it for another sixty years, to rooms full of people who had travelled to hear him say it.
Osho is a difficult figure and I am not going to tidy him up. What I take from him is a way of asking questions rather than a life to admire. That distinction matters and I would rather state it plainly than pretend the complications are not there.
What both of them do is push the attention back onto the person doing the looking. That is the opposite of a class where I stand at the front and you copy my shape.
So the philosophical scope I wanted to teach was one that undermines the format I was teaching it in. It took me an embarrassingly long time to see that, and when I did, stopping was not a decision so much as a description of what had already happened.
What I do now
If somebody asks me for a class, I take it. That happens a few times a year and I enjoy it.
I do not run anything. I do not have students. I am not building toward a studio or a retreat or a certification, and I have stopped feeling that I should be.
There is a small loss in this and I want to be honest about it. Teaching gave me a room full of people twice a week in a city where I knew almost nobody, and I gave that up without replacing it. Writing is a worse deal socially than yoga, by a distance.
What I got in return is that I no longer pretend to be further along than I am. I read, I sit with it, I get most of it wrong, and I am not required to have an answer ready for anybody at seven in the evening on a Tuesday.
The postures were never the part I wanted. It took not speaking the language to work out that they were the only part I could give.
