As MA Yoga Studies student Sarah Spiegel prepares to graduate, she reflects on her grant-funded conference journeys and how they have transformed her as a scholar and practitioner.
My first semester at Naropa, I had a burning question: how do you balance being a scholar and a practitioner?
I was delighted to have been accepted into the MA yoga studies program, and dove in without hesitation, but as I began to do coursework and homework and re-adjust to life as a student after over 15 years outside of formal education, I noticed a shift in my rhythms and how I was able to spend my time. This, of course, should have been no surprise – it’s graduate school – and yet I felt alarmed: would my pursuit of the scholarship of yoga take me away from my meditation practice, rather than deepen it? Suddenly, I was having to be diligent and precise with my time to make it all work, and it was not an easy transition.
I had heard about the concept of the scholar-practitioner, and I loved the sound of it, but I wasn’t totally sure if I bought it. Or at least, I wasn’t confident that it was a term that could apply to me.
Spring semester of year one rolled around, and the concept of “giving a paper” was mentioned, presenting your work at an academic conference. I was intrigued by this possibility. Despite my hesitations and worries about the effects my time-consuming studies might have on my practice, I felt a curiosity about diving more deeply into academia.
I asked Ben Williams to meet to discuss what the preparation for applying for a PhD program after graduation might look like. He suggested attending an academic conference: “You’ll go, and you’ll ask yourself, ‘Are these my people?’ And you’ll know if they are.”
Exactly one year later, I found myself standing outside the Omni Hotel in Boston, preparing to enter the AOS (American Oriental Society) conference. I felt a nervousness I had not felt in a long time. It was the anxiety of being a true beginner, and the creeping worry that everyone would see that I was just poking my head into the academic world and unworthy of being there.
I thought about the bumper stickers you see on cars of young drivers sometimes: NEW DRIVER. Maybe I should have a name tag so people would understand I was just finding my way around: BABY SCHOLAR. Scholar in training.
Inside the conference, however, I relaxed. Most of the papers I was interested in hearing were all happening in the same small room, and I realized that most people were also staying in that same room for much of the day. There was a mix of ages and faces in the chairs. In the back of the room was the scholar who literally wrote the book on Sanskrit, that I had spent the past year and half getting lost in: Robert Goldman. A SCHOLAR CELEBRITY. As I listened to the papers, I was amazed to realize that as a scholar, you can choose to spend your days, your lifetime even, deeply studying and diving into the thread that intrigues you the
most. These presenters were experts in nuances that captivated them, and the room came alive to support them and to have friendly debate and banter on the topics being presented.
One talk was devoted entirely to the interpretation of a single verse from the Raghuvaṃśa. When the speaker opened the floor for questions and comments, I was struck by how many attendees eagerly offered thoughtful insights on such a narrowly focused topic. Sally Sutherland Goldman presented a paper titled “Narrative Repetition, Rupture, and Transition: the Many Rāmāyaṇas of Vālmīki’s Hanumān” which explored the layered complexity of the tradition. I also met Ben Williams in person for the first time after nearly two years of online study with him, and heard him present a paper he had been working on “Mirroring a Devotional Hymn in Early Modern Kashmir: The Bhairavaśaktistotra of Gaṇeśabhaṭṭāraka.” Another presenter discussed the app iTabla, commonly used for playing Indian music and rāgas, and pointed out discrepancies between its notes and standard Indian musical notation.
Here were people who had turned their passions into their life’s work. Here was a room full of people who were spending their days and nights studying the very specific thing that was lighting them up.
As I listened, I wondered: what is a topic I can get lost in? What am I REALLY doing here? The tone of my question had changed. It wasn’t about if I should be there. It was about understanding what was lighting the fire that got me there and what role that would play in my path forward.
Over the next year, as I developed an independent study reading list and research question, my energy for my studies began to change. I got swept up in sanskrit, in the symbolism behind the syllables and in the spaces and the possibility in a visargaḥ. The Bhagavad Gītā started to jump off the page; no longer verses flat in black ink but sounds and vibrations in my mouth. I was READING the Yoga Sutras in Devanāgarī, contemplating their meaning, and hearing the subtle changes in my personal understanding come out in my yoga classes, conversations, and connections.
I started sharing what I was learning; it began to inform my practice in a real way. I started to see
the patterns and the echoes of lessons my spiritual teachers had shared with me in the texts we were working through and in the discipline of study. I was in a portal, through a door I hadn’t even realized I’d stepped through.
Something started to click during this process. The material was talking to me. It was drawing
me in. It was immersive. It was informing my meditations; it was making me hungry in the very best way. I couldn’t put it down – one rabbit hole led to the next. It simultaneously felt like a never-ending story and the very beginning of something exciting, mysterious, and hypnotizing. Reading and writing with such hyper focus was its own meditation, a sadhana in itself.
This past fall, I attended the American Academy for Religion Conference in Boston. It was enormous compared to the AOS, and as I walked through the doors of Hynes Convention Center, a sea of religious scholars circulated the halls with energy. I couldn’t help but smile as I approached the registration desk, picking up my badge amidst a crowd of people who clearly believed that a weekend spent listening to discussions on religious studies was the best way to spend it.
Despite the enormity of the conference, as I sat in on the papers this time, I recognized people. Some I had seen the previous year, and some were just moving on the same schedule as me – immersing in papers and talks on Tantric objects, on music in Tantra, and celebrating His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s life. As I sat listening to the panel on the Dalai Lama and his role and contributions over his lifetime, I looked up and was sitting across from Robert Goldman again. This time I smiled and waved at him, and he waved back.
The same people kept appearing in the same panels, creating a sense of camaraderie, banter, and shared energy. The room erupted in laughter when one panelist recounted the many terms he and his friends use for sightings of the Dalai Lama in Dharmaśālā – His Holiness in a car, His Holiness on foot, His Holiness laughing – each marked by an affectionate Hindi expression.
These were definitely my people. In that moment, I realized that I didn’t simply want to be a scholar of these teachings; I was, quietly and gradually, becoming one. I began to grasp the depth and possibility of the scholar-practitioner path: practice informing study, study refining practice, each illuminating the other in ways neither could do standing alone.
