By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
It was early evening one night in our campus dorm room. Four students to a room with two double decker beds. There were three of us that time. I forgot what we were talking about but somehow it strayed into yoga which was a relatively strange thing here in 1975, or about 50 years ago.
Mario Sopen~a was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with his hands stretched out so the backside of his right hand was resting on his right knee and that of his left hand resting on his left knee. His respective forefingers were bent so the tips were touching the respective tips of his thumbs, forming a circle on each hand as you would signify money. In that position, he perfectly looked like a yogi in meditation in some cave in the Himalayas.
Then in his usual glib-tongued way, he lectured us on what yoga was all about. He said, “the goal of yoga is perfect health.” The two of us who were listening, his fraternity brods, were attentive as he went on with his discourse.
By the way, Mario was from Metro Manila, and as I said, was glib-tongued. He was a “bolero” in a nice way. Likeable, he can sell ice cubes to an Eskimo, or a heater to a sweaty Bedouin in Saudi Arabia.
He can easily strike a conversation and make friends with a stranger-passenger in a jeepney. More so if that stranger was a beautiful fellow student in UP Los Banos. With his slim good looks of good height, by the time the lady disembarked from the jeepney, she would already be love struck.
He was one of two brods in the College of Forestry who were ultimate diplomats. With top-notch brains, they were square pegs in round holes. They could have made great lawyers or, even better, as heads of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
But I digress. Am writing this because Mario saved my life. I came to know about it much, much later.
For sometime after that easy discourse of his about yoga, I joined a yoga group in campus. One of those varied student groups in an American-like campus where students of innumerable inclinations respectively join others of similar feathers to form student organizations.
So I became serious with yoga. At that time, I was also looking for a change, particularly, for a philosophy and ideology I could live by. I never looked back. Up to now.
Long story short, I ended up in the UP College of Law in Diliman. While there as a full-time student, I was also trying to put up a small printing press business with no capital, and I was also into it full-time. This paper is a spin-off from that.
In that situation, I was always trying to extend the hours of a day. But 24 hours was just 24 hours. To cope, I became a regular consumer of energy drinks for about 45 years, or until about two years ago when I suffered a kidney and heart failure.
When I was being rushed to the hospital at the break of dawn, almost unable to breathe, I could only cling to life with the use of my yoga mantra(s), ideating appropriately, intensely praying (chanting a mantra is like an intense prayer) any of my blood vessels will not shatter. It could happen in a split second as my blood pressure was already in the stratosphere.
As I used to say, at that point, whatever you have, money, power, name or fame, are just a lot of shit.
So I survived. After three days, with wobbly legs, we got out of the hospital. Am still on the mend.
In a way, Mario saved me with his short yoga discourse that night in the dorm.
While we did not make billions like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who respectively came up with Microsoft and Facebook bouncing ideas with fellow students at their dorm rooms in Harvard, I actually got more. I got life itself and a philosophy and ideology I could live by. I feel contented and calm in health, in disease and in near-death.
We just received a few hours ago, word my mother-in-law just breathed her last. It happened on the same date her late husband did about 15 years ago.
Life goes on, as we go in sync with the whole of creation.**
