The teachings are working when you start to appreciate the creativity, the service, the trust and the love it took for your true teacher to even begin to teach you. Gratitude is the result. The awareness of just how unaware students are of there teacher’s teaching is what makes them students. This unawareness is defined through a lack of, or a display of gratitude.

“Yes, sir. I want to do what you want me to. Thank you so much for the reminder again. Thank God, you put up with me.” The Siri Singh Sahib, Yogi Bhajan, and I were seated in the New Mexico Estates on a crisp Tuesday afternoon. I remember that it was Tuesday because communication on Tuesday, Mars day, war day, should be done consciously, and this was a Tuesday, the worst day to need his help as, inevitably, it would take longer and more doubt had to be overcome.

“Can you please get out of your own way.” We were walking around the ranch on a rather crisp late morning in April in 1991. It was our beloved teacher’s habit and pleasure to walk and view his estate. It felt as if I were walking with a king and he was inspecting the grounds of his castle. It felt like that because that’s what he experienced. I loved living in his world.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Actually, it was forty years ago. The Siri Singh Sahib, Yogi Bhajan, and I were sitting in a small restaurant, Jasons, in Westwood in late spring of 1979 enjoying a falafel. Jason’s was a small but famous stop in LA because their middle Eastern food was rockin! This was back in the days when the two of us ventured out alone each afternoon. We were just leaving a movie from around the corner and the falafel hit the spot. “Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, what changed your life. You’ve told me many times about your earlier life, and you have hinted that is was not always a pretty picture. What happened?”