Keshava jumps a bonfire – as imagined by ChatGPT. AI generated the face of a 16-year-old Keshava from the image of him praying below.
Does your life sometimes feel as if it has been laid out in advance? As if you’re riding a train toward a destination as yet unknown? Do there seem to be mysterious forces at work in your life that have opened opportunities and taught you lessons that have helped you become who you are? Is there a sense that your life has a purpose, and that you’ve found it, or that it’s waiting just over the horizon? Did you do things in your early life that you would not dream of repeating now, but that nevertheless taught you valuable lessons that helped you find your way.
I had a conversation recently with one of the principal teachers at the Living Wisdom High School in Palo Alto, California.
Keshava bows to the audience after singing a solo at Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, CA. Photo by the author.
Keshava Betts was born at Ananda Village and grew up there. In his work with teens, he has an uncanny ability to connect with them and understand what they’re going through. Keshava’s early life at Ananda Village prepared him to be a mentor for them, though possibly not in the way we might imagine.
Keshava: When I was a young boy at Ananda Village, I remember how excited I was to discover in Autobiography of a Yogi that the boys in Paramhansa Yogananda’s school at Ranchi, India excelled in a variety of sports, including combat sports. He mentions jiu-jitsu and traditional Indian sword fighting, among others.
When I was a young teen living at Ananda Village, there was a heated debate among the adults about the wisdom of kids doing intense sports, including combat sports.
My friends and I were decidedly on the “pro” side, as young men with heaps of aggression and testosterone who were training very enthusiastically in the martial arts.
Our parents had enrolled us in martial arts classes when we were young, and now we wanted to start fighting – not just doing katas or forms, but actual combat, and I remember how we got in lots of trouble for wanting to fight, because some of the adults were insisting that it was crude, animalistic, and incompatible with the community’s spiritual ideals.
There were also a number of adults who were supportive, however, including Gopal Sims, an Ananda member who is one of America’s highest-ranked karate black belts. Gopal was also a professional boxer and martial arts instructor, and I have vivid memories of how he trained me for a time.
Gopal Sims at Yogananda Fest in 2018, Palo Alto, California. Photo by the author.
Gopal Sims Biography (adapted from Google Search AI)
Andre Gopal Sims is a longtime Kenpo Karate practitioner and instructor. He holds a 6th-degree black belt and has won multiple international championship titles. Operating out of northern California, he taught martial arts, self-defense, and yoga at Sierra College for more than two decades.
Sims is highly respected in the American Kenpo community for his technical skills.
Early in his martial arts journey, he incorporated yoga to help control his combative tendencies, later utilizing these methods to help his students achieve a state of inner calm.
Sims has taught self-defense and martial arts courses for military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, using martial arts as a therapeutic tool to aid their mental focus and transition.
He has operated the Andre Sims Kenpo Karate School and has been deeply involved in his local community, including work with the Sierra Family Medical Clinic and community agriculture.
Keshava: I had learned a little bit of boxing and mixed martial arts and some ground fighting, and I could beat almost anyone who wasn’t trained, because with even a little training you can beat most people.
At one point, I took a martial arts class with Gopal. At the end of the class series, he had us put on boxing gloves and fight each other, and as usual, I sort of pummeled everybody, even though I was just fifteen or sixteen and I was fighting nineteen and twenty-year-olds. But I had more training, so I was able to outbox and outfight them.
At the end of the session, Gopal looked at me and said, “You want to do a round?”
I said, “I’d love that!”
Mind you, I was sixteen, and he was in his mid-fifties, but to my mind he seemed like an old man.
I’ll never forget how he put on a pair of giant pink boxing gloves and said, “Okay, I’m not going to hit you with my right hand, because it’s too powerful, and I don’t want to hurt you.”
And, you know, that was a bit of an ego-buster for a sixteen-year-old, to be told that this fifty-five-year-old guy isn’t going to hit you with his right hand because he can’t control its power.
Still, I was thinking that I had a tactical advantage, because he was old and he’d told me he wouldn’t hit me with his right hand, so I only had to be aware of the left.
We began fighting, and he was circling and probing my defenses, and then he set up a left-hand cross and punched me so hard that he knocked me to the floor.
I remember realizing how beautifully I’d been set up, because he’d baited me and I’d gotten careless. I’d shifted my guard, and just as I realized I’d lowered my hands I saw the Pink Glove of Death come zooming into my face. (Laughs)
I’d never been hit so hard. I literally sat down, and he didn’t knock me out, but I was completely unprepared to get hit like that – and I loved it!
I stood up and we kept boxing, and a few minutes later he hit me again, the same punch, and it was humbling. I could say “humiliating,” except that my ego was rejoicing, because I knew I was strong enough and aggressive enough and had the technique to overcome anyone else in the class. But mostly I recognized that the only reason I was capable of doing that was because I didn’t fear getting hit, and the others did. So, to face someone who actually had skill was very satisfying to me, even at sixteen – to discover what true greatness looked like in an opponent.
I didn’t feel humiliated. I was actually grateful. It was a humbling experience, but also an inspiring one, to see how masterful he was, and I had a lot of respect for him.
This happened at a time when I was beginning to be devoted to God in earnest, and although Gopal was very martial, he was able to inspire me in that way as well.
Here was this guy who could knock me over with a single punch, and who was stronger and faster and a better fighter than I or any of my teenage friends. Yet I discovered that he also had another very different side.
I remember going to my first eight-hour Christmas meditation, and how restless I was and how I was struggling to sit still. During the breaks I would stand and stretch, or I would go outdoors and walk around, and each time I would look over and see Gopal sitting there, unmoving like a stone, and he never stood up.
I think I even went home for a time, and when I came back for the conclusion of the meditation, Gopal was in the same spot, and it looked as if he hadn’t moved an inch.
The contrast between those two qualities, of a man who could be so powerful in motion and so stoic in stillness, affected me deeply, and I admired him for it.
I said, “Gopal, it looked like you literally didn’t move.”
His answer surprised me, because he didn’t say, “Oh, you know, it’s all about applying lots of willpower and discipline.” Instead, he laughed and said, “I guess Divine Mother didn’t want me to move, because She came, and I became so engrossed that I didn’t realize it.”
He was an interesting paradox of great martial power, strength, and valor. He beautifully embodied the classic martial ideals, but then I saw him express an even more transcendent power during the eight-hour meditation.
It was very intriguing to me as a young man, and I took it deeply to heart, and considered him an important mentor and role model for a number of years.
The point I want to make is that I can now look back and remember those experiences when I’m working with the teenagers in our high school. Because they have lots of energy and power, and I believe it’s very important for them to become consciously aware of the incredible power that they have, and that can move through them – to feel the vitality of their will, the energy in their bodies, and to have respect for that power – but then also to have held up for them examples of what they can be, not just physically but internally, by using their will to transcend the physical until the will becomes truly interiorized and part of a strong, confident, mature self-definition. And my memories of Gopal have helped me understand the kind of greatness that our teens need to have modeled for them.
We were just so bold. But then when I sang to God, I sang like I was going to try and rend the sky open, and then all of a sudden I would have moments when the veil would really part. And again, when I was singing the oratorio “Christ Lives” that Swami Kriyananda composed, I would feel the actual presence of Christ, because I had so much energy.
So there was the paradox that I loved riding motorcycles, and I loved being bold and dangerous, but then it gave me the energy to be able to know that God was real, and my personal experience of the music had an intensity that opened a portal for a true divine experience.
I honestly didn’t know how to live my life except by grabbing it with both hands, and if you said, okay, we’re going to sing well, or we’re going to meditate, then yeah, I was all in – yeah, let’s do it! And it was fascinating to me to see what a difference it made to have that kind of raw energy to work with.
When I was growing up, there were some boys who were very docile. One of the boys meditated an hour and a half every day, and he didn’t chase girls. All he did was finish his school work and study the scriptures, and he was, at the time, an ideal student. But what’s interesting to me is that he’s no longer on a path that demands lots of energy and willpower. God bless him, I hope he’s doing well, but he hasn’t succeeded a great deal in his life.
I don’t have many insights to offer, other than that I thought it was interesting how, by contrast, I, who was really irascible and wild, once I got the bit in my mouth and found my way, nothing could shake me by the grace of God, and I’ve been able to serve dynamically because of the power I had that enabled my teachers to help me cultivate any number of positive and helpful skills, from playing cello, to singing, playing sports, and teaching.
Keshava roughhouses with a student to help ease the tension of finals week at Living Wisdom High School in Palo Alto, CA. Photo by the author.
I believe the reason I ended up teaching teens is that there’s a certain service that I can uniquely provide because I went through those years in an extreme fashion, and I ended up learning a great deal from my experiences about using willpower to find true success and happiness.
I want to inspire the kids to live heroic lives, and to show them how to do it. I think that’s where competition is important.
The word “heroism” is very dear to me. In Education for Life, we believe that the Feeling Years from six to twelve are when you want to feed children stories of real-life people who’ve led great, heroic lives, and to inspire them with what humanity can be at its finest. And then the willpower years are when you begin to learn to act on those feelings and manifest that goodness and strength.
It’s important to teach kids how to become their idols. Everybody wants to be a good person. Everybody wants to be great in some way. And so a thing I particularly love about strength training is that it’s a talent-agnostic sport, and that regardless of the athletic talents you have, or don’t have, you can persevere and develop enormous strength.
I like that strength is a quality of heroism, in an abstract sense. So, to take a fourteen-year-old who can’t lift much of anything, and in a couple of years have him looking like a young superman, like Hari who’s on our team, is quite an achievement for him.
—Keshava
Rambhakta: Many people today are feeling lost or adrift, uncertain about the future, unsure of their purpose – even wondering if there actually is a bright purpose and goal in life that they can aspire to.
And yet, if we’re patient and invested in doing our best, it’s intriguing how our lives tend to reveal their purpose, giving us the skills we need to fulfill our destined roles – often long before the purpose is revealed to us.
Logically, then, it would seem that there is reason to be hopeful, if we can just be patient, seize our opportunities, work with our strengths, and do our best with the tools we’ve been given.
Keshava’s early teen years were wild.
“I had more energy than I could handle, and I often got in trouble with the school leaders and other authorities. I was riding motorcycles and fighting. I was hell on wheels, and I had so much energy that when I was fighting, I fought like a maniac. When we were riding motorcycles, we were lighting bonfires and jumping our bikes through them in our underpants with a camera, because we thought it was awesome.”
The point is that Keshava’s early experiences are now equipping him to understand his students and connect with them, because he knows from his own personal experience the full, raw willpower that teens are challenged to work with, and he understands the kind of help they need to learn to control and direct that power for their highest good.
He also understands the inner qualities of strength, courage, independent thinking, positive volition, and maturity that the teens’ souls are yearning to integrate into their lives, and that will give them the power to do great things.
How can we carry on, in the sure, confident knowledge that we are fulfilling our life’s divine purpose?
Swami Kriyananda urged people to form a habit of constantly talking to God – not with careful, formulaic speech, but in the normal, natural, silent language of the heart, as if we’re talking with a dear friend who loves us without limit and will never turn away.
Our intuition grows as we learn to still the raw, reactive emotions of the heart through meditation practices, and as we make God our partner in our life’s way.
When we get a taste for the inner stillness and joy of meditation, we begin to find guidance coming to us, in response to specific questions, and often even arriving spontaneously. Our lives become increasingly understood, meaningful, revealing their high purpose and giving us the faith to move forward.
— Rambhakta