The wind is my fourth guru. The wind moves unceasingly, touching flowers and thorns alike, but it never attaches itself to the objects it touches. Like the wind, I learned not to prefer flowers over thorns, or friends over foes. Like the wind, my goal is to provide freshness to all without becoming attached.

Lord Dattatreya

Growing up, we often heard elders taunt someone with “Bāhar, ki hawā lag gayī hai isko”, meaning the wind of modernity, of disrespect or anything they found contrary to their accepted way of life. There are many such idioms and proverbs woven around wind and its kin. To go against the wind, to catch the wind’s direction, lighting a lamp in wind and what not. Even when there were no pens, humans wrote poems to the wind. We entrusted it with messages we could not deliver ourselves.
“Boohe baariyan te naale kandhan tapp ke, aavangi hawa ban ke.” – You may bar every door, seal every wall, but I will come to you as the wind. The lyricism suggests that while you can resist everything, even the fiercest love and longing that wells up from within, you cannot resist the cool breeze that touches you. Even if I cannot reach you, that same wind has already touched me. Ancient Indian texts are replete with such longing. Lovers waited for it, saints sang to it, and travellers prayed for it. One line from the film Refugee has stayed with me for years, and I find myself humming it every now and then, “Panchhi, nadiyā, pavan ke jhonke, koi sarhad na inhe roke…”– Birds, rivers, gusts of wind; no border can hold them back. What a profound observation!

Borders exist only for those who erect them, Homo sapiens, alone among beings. The wind, and all it carries – birds, love, words – asks for no passport. It crosses nations with the same ease with which it crosses a meadow of wildflowers. It cools a bull labouring under the midday sun, and moments later, grazes a blade of grass with the tenderness of a mother. It carries the incense from a temple to a worker in a sulphur factory, the smoke of a distant campfire to an isolationist, pollen destined to become forests, clouds that will soon break into rain, and prayers heaved into the dark. It favours none of its burdens and simply moves. Wind has so saturated our life, literature and common parlance that it becomes difficult to meditate upon it, unburdened by the layers of concept and conditioning primed onto our subconscious over millennia. So when Dattātreya names it as His guru, the perspective begins to dwindle if not change; our inherited notions start to feel strangely lucid.

When I first read this teaching, the opening of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra came to mind, the encounter involving Matanga and Ānanda. On the verge of seduction by the beautiful Matanga, Ānanda was rescued by the Buddha, who appeared as Ānanda called upon Him. It is said that the Buddha’s wisdom engulfed him like a sudden gust of wind, and then arose profound instruction on the nature of mind. The Buddha later revealed the futility of desire; Matanga herself eventually became a bhikkhunī and attained full arhatship (enlightenment). I am also reminded of another rendering of the tale, adapted into a play by Rabindranath Tagore as Chāṇḍālika, (Must Watch) she and her mother resort to witchcraft to ensnare Ānanda and then pay a heavy price. When he finally returns at the end, he has lost all his lustre. I take this to mean the withering effect of desire, the subtle incursion of Māra. Yet the moment he recalls the wisdom imparted by the Awakened One, he is freed from every trace of black magic, which here stands for the manifold snares of craving. This is precisely what the wind of true wisdom does, it touches everyone equally. Wisdom freed not only Ānanda and Prakritī, but also everyone who witnesses this chain of events across time and space. Guru, in all His humble grandiosity enters our life like a gust of wind carrying His grace which soothes all parts of us, especially the uglier ones.

We notice everything the wind touches, almost never the wind itself, even when we are caught in a typhoon at sea or a sandstorm in a desert. We see the devastation and its aftermath, we feel the terror, but not the force that bore it into being. I once read, “When the student is TRULY ready, the teacher disappears.” Maybe, that is why Dattātreya chose the wind as one of his gurus, because, as they say, the greatest teachers are often invisible, and the Guru-Tattva subsumes all names and forms eventually, including our own.

Numerologically, four represents foundation. The four directions, the four Vedas, the four stages of life. It fascinates me that Datta’s fourth guru is something that appears to have no foundation at all. Wind cannot be held, owned or imprisoned. It has no colour, no permanent form, no favourite destination. Yet remove it for a few minutes, and every distinction we proudly carry, be it wealth and poverty, caste and class, success and failure, saint and sinner disappears. Breath along with death is the greatest equaliser we have. Mother Earth taught us equanimity as we talked about in a previous post. The wind teaches us impartiality. A cool breeze comforts everyone. The scorching loo burns everyone. As Datta says, it does “not to prefer flowers over thorns, or friends over foes.” It does not stop to honour our choices; who deserves relief and who deserves hardship. It remains faithful only to its own nature and it is my firm belief, that a well lived is the life lived in flow, in radical acceptance of what is and all irritation and remorse arises because of resistance to the Divine Will.

Wind is Shakti. Everything alive moves. Rivers journey toward the sea. Blood courses through the body. Sap rises invisibly through trees. Celestial bodies move constantly. Birds traverse continents. Seasons arrive, linger, depart. Even grief and longing, when we cease to resist, begins to move, and eventually pass. The only things that truly decay are those that have ceased to flow. A stagnant pond breeds sickness. Air trapped in a closed room turns stale and thoughts rehearsed without rest become obsessions. Yathā piṇḍe tathā brahmāṇḍe, as is the individual, so is the cosmos. If the outer world survives because of the movement of wind, then our inner world survives because of the movement of prāṇa. Yoga describes five primary prāṇas. One governs breath, another elimination, another digestion, another circulation, and another speech and higher expression. Five invisible winds, ceaselessly at work, asking for no acknowledgement at all and we rarely think about them until something goes wrong.

It took me years of meditation to realise that spiritual insight and nervous system healing are not always the same thing. I could intellectually understand forgiveness, impermanence and witnessing, yet my body continued reacting in familiar ways. The mind had learnt the lesson; the body had not. Trauma had become my muscle memory. For years I believed meditation alone would dissolve these patterns. It transformed my relationship with my thoughts, but some reactions remained stubbornly unchanged. Only recently did I understand that the body, too, HAS to be invited into healing and our breath is the invitation, the gate and the gift.

I still remember my first experience with Sudarshan Kriya. During one of the breathing cycles, my hands and fingers contracted so intensely that I couldn’t move them for several minutes. My arms and hands got twisted. It frightened me. Later, I learnt that certain breathing patterns can temporarily alter blood gases, producing sensations such as tingling or muscle contractions in some people and it was nothing but prāṇa flowing to those parts. For next few days, I found myself calmer in situations that would previously have unsettled me. Life had not changed at all but nervous system was trying to. It was more liberating than I could’ve ever imagined in my dreams.

According to my experience, nearly every wisdom tradition eventually arrives at the breath in one way or another and as a student you are brought to square one to wonder how well you have integrated the same lesson learnt previously in different words. Civilisations separated by geography, language and history coalescing at the same place; there must be a reason for it. If you wish to understand life, begin with breath. The Upanishads call prāṇa the very life of existence. Patanjali, in Yoga Sutras devotes an entire limb of yoga to prāṇāyāma. The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra posits the breath as a doorway to the Infinite. Buddhism begins with awareness of breathing (anapanasati). Chinese medicine speaks of qi and Hara Line which I personally practice. Even the holy books begin with God breathing life into creation. I understood its importance through shamanic and alchemical teachings but I would like to keep them for another day.

In the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, when Ma Parvati asks Shiva, “Who are You? Where may I find You?” He could have spoken of anything grand like galaxies or universes. Instead, He points to the tiny space between inhalation and exhalation. The Infinite, He says, may be found there. I OFTEN imagine that moment. Two eternal lovers sitting together after countless ages. The beloved asking her husband-lord-guru the most intimate of questions. And Shiva, instead of sending her to mountains or scriptures like before, directing her towards something she had been carrying within herself all along. Every time I read those verses, they move me to tears. The Infinite has never hidden from us and we have simply been looking everywhere except where He waits or rather longs for us to return. Thus, realising our own divinity is next to impossible without connecting to our breath on physical and subtle levels. And then become the breath that carries this beautiful music of our existence, irrespective of the instrument.

Sri Krishna in Bhagvat Gita says that just as the wind carries fragrance from one place to another, the embodied soul carries the mind and senses from one body to the next. The wind carries perfume but never becomes perfume. It carries fragrance, smoke, pollen and dust as I mentioned before, yet remains untouched by all of them. This is the ideal life of a yogi blissfully unaware of everything that’s not breath.This is why, I believe, so many traditions associate the element of air with the mind. The body may still be sitting in pin drop silence in one room, but the mind has already travelled across seas. Before breakfast it has revisited childhood, replayed an argument from years ago, imagined tomorrow’s failures, compared itself with strangers, worried about unread (or unsent) messages, calculated future finances, fallen in love, experienced heartbreak and returned home. Nothing in this universe seems to travel faster than thought. Today’s suffering is often manufactured in precisely this way. We worry about promotions that haven’t happened, conversations that never took place, what someone might have meant, whether we chose the right career, whether we are falling behind everyone else, whether people approve of us, whether we are good enough. Meanwhile, outside our window, the wind continues moving, utterly uninterested in our imaginary catastrophes and unyielding trenches of illusions we keep curating and destroying.

Meditation teachers repeatedly tell us to observe thoughts and let them pass. For years I wondered why. Why not analyse them? Why not understand every single one? Because my over analytical mind could not fathom it. I always need to understand things, give my thoughts rational explanations and imaginations an illusory grounding. But they are what they are, mindless chatter and illusions of certainty. Over time I have realised that thoughts are indeed most like the particles carried by wind. A breeze enters your room, brushes against your face and leaves. You don’t chase it down the street asking where it came from or where it is going but if it carries dust, cardboard, broken shards, polythenes, or god forbid an insect with it, you squint your eyes and squeeze your nose. We do exactly that with our thoughts. We welcome every passing gust into the house of the mind and then wonder why it becomes crowded or if we should start another Magnesium supplement to cut down on this endless self-talk and over-stimulation that has been driving us mad.

Indeed, the mind is an extraordinary servant but a terrible master. And wind teaches us this every moment. It moves, yet it does not accumulate. It touches, yet it does not cling. And our thoughts, too, were only meant to pass through us, not define us. For me, therefore, air has become one of the clearest manifestations of Shakti in motion. Shakti itself is neutral. Like electricity, it simply takes the direction consciousness gives it. Whatever receives our sustained attention begins to gather energy. Love grows when nourished. So does resentment. Many esoteric traditions describe repeated thoughts as gradually acquiring momentum until they begin shaping our perception of reality. Whether we call them thought-forms, egregores, tulpas, pendulums or simply deeply conditioned mental patterns, the underlying principle is that what we repeatedly feed eventually begins feeding on us. I shared this on my channel.

This understanding completely changed the way I looked at karma. Humans sometimes wish suffering upon those who have hurt them, believing justice will somehow be served. But every hateful thought first passes through their own consciousness. Before it reaches anyone else, it has already altered their insides. If I keep sending resentment towards someone, I continue feeding that relationship with my own prāṇa. The wind carries whatever I entrust to it. Wind itself has no nature except impartiality that Datta talks about. If I hand it fear, fear spreads. If I hand it kindness, kindness travels just as rigorously. I make my own world. When guru’s wisdom seeps through lifetimes of ignorance, the first veil to lift is the illusion of separateness, between self and world, within and without. When that truth percolates deep enough, even the illusion begins to appear illusory, for there remains no separate self to witness what is real and what is not. The burden of freeing ourselves from the ceaseless cycles of birth and desire, all that is unmoored from breath, rests on us alone. And if we are fortunate, we find a guru like Baba who extends a hand like a helm in the Bhavachakra.

The wind’s profound lesson calls upon us to cherish the sail, guides us to embrace the extraordinary simplicity with an open heart. It encourages us to accept each moment fully, free from emotional attachments and resistance to our thoughts. These thoughts often emerge from our longing for pain or pleasure, mere ripples on the vast surface of our consciousness, never defining it. I am reminded of a touching story from the Shri Sai Satcharita. In Chapter 20, Baba guided Das Ganu to Kaka Saheb’s house during his struggle to translate the Īśāvāsya Upaniṣad. There, he encountered Kaka’s maid’s little sister, who was overwhelmed with joy upon receiving a new sari. She reveled in that moment as if there were no tomorrow. Yet, the following day, she stored it away, displaying neither sorrow nor joy. In that very moment, Das Ganu grasped the essence of the Upaniṣad. All sensations of pleasure and pain stem solely from our own minds. The girl’s circumstances, the poverty, the tattered rags, the new sari, the act of giving, and the acceptance, were all intertwined with the divine presence, pervaded by Lord. When we recognise the Self within all beings and all beings within the Self, what basis is there for grief? Anger, infatuation, and sorrow arise only from our inability to see the Ātman everywhere. For those who have realised everything as the Self, the typical struggles of humanity lose their grip.

Move without clinging, carry without claiming, and touch without possessing. Desires will rise and fall like gusts. Joy and sorrow will sweep through like weather. But you are not the gust, not the particles it carries or the emotions they evoke within you, you are the openness through which it passes ceaselessly, as Pema Chödron says. When all ripples settle, you can see your true face in the depths and call yourself by your true names. And remember to live fully without considering any moment as transitory, act resolutely because everything you touch gets life, and surrender utterly, for the One who moves the wind moves you too. The One who is wind, is you too.

Love,

P

Note: This essay is part of “The Twenty-Four Mirrors”, a contemplative series on the Gurus of Lord Dattātreya. All Rights Reserved.

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