The Bath-Time Guru

I recall a satsang – don’t worry if you don’t know what that means, MS Word doesn’t so I’ll start again!

I recall a meeting addressed by a man called Florian who talked about a “shit guru.” This was someone, he explained, that taught spirituality in India by finding a pile of shit and sitting in it. “That’s all he did” explained Florian as everyone laughed, and I realised how such a practice would be an awesome challenge… I could not do it, so someone who could, wow…

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You’ll see why this came back to me as I let the water run out of my bath this morning, and the irony and wisdom (for me) of choosing something a lot less challenging. Hah! I wish.

I’m no guru, but I found a delightful practice developing as I recalled the words of another wise man, John Gray. In his wonderful book, How to Get What You Want and Want What You Have, John describes a way of letting go of negativity as you lay in the bath with the water draining away.

This morning I found myself doing this, and focussing on the minutest… MS Word doesn’t know that either but I’m sticking with it! …focussing on the minutest tickles and strains in my body as the water level fell and sensations of weight returned. I realised that what John suggested was valuable for me because of the attention it got me to place in my body.

Again and again, I notice benefits when I come out of my mind, my head, and regaining awareness of my body, and the consequent deepening and broadening this awareness over time. Something I describe as presence.

Now I saw an opportunity: the bath-time guru! To be someone who just sits in the bath and watches (inwardly) as the water drains away, “listening” to the minutest sensations and feeling the healing touch of the falling, meniscus (MS Word knows that for goodness sake!), tickling me in delightful places I generally pay so little attention to they might as well not exist. Images of me sitting in a bath on a dirt road in India, looking across the way at a man sitting in shit…

Returning to the moment I took the bath-time ” practice” a little further. Once all the water had drained I was more present to the depth within, and saw how easily my awareness would shrink to a spot, or wander off into thought, so each time I gently loosened it to include feeling my inner body again, bringing attention back without criticism or impatience. Then I thought, foolishly (ahhh, what a guru the fool is!), it would be a great idea to keep try to maintain this broad deep awareness as I got up and dried myself. I realised I would have to do this in slow—very—very—slow motion. I accepted the challenge and almost immediately discovered how hard it was! Foolish! Right away impatience rushed into my body and tried to wrestle it from my attention. Another guru was born, the slow-mo-guru.

Soon I would have a family of gurus! All united by the one thing that I have learned to value over and over, placing loving attention in my body, and staying loving whenever I notice it has been distracted, become focussed, or taken off into thought. Or become unloving .

I far prefer the bath-time guru to the idea of being a shit guru, but I see the value in both, as well as the fool, the slow-motion guru and countless others. It has though never worked for me to find a practice and stick to it military style, or with the slightest discipline. But somehow I always find my way back to awareness. If I were ever a guru, I guess I might be the ad-hoc guru or the no-practice guru. I guess my teenage son would say “no dad, you really are a shit guru,” just to wind me up, and he would have a point.

So by all means try the bath-time guru practice, or even, if you like a lot of space, the shit guru practice. But perhaps there’s an even better practice—you. What guru are you? Let me know in a comment, or you own learnings, not just about awareness.

Oh, and how about the “f**k you MS-Word” guru? Perhaps that’s already taken.

Mark Hughes
London Counselling