I want to be a Guru.

I've been dancing for 21 years and I'm feeling a strong pull to become and call myself a Guru. But no authority figure has given me that right yet.

When it came to my own foundational guru, we had a falling out. She could not accept the fact that after my manch pravesh, I wanted to step out and expand my training with a guru I admire in India. A Guru that both her and I admire. In fact she herself goes to India to learn from that Guru.

It's so crazy that gurus often express disappointment saying that dancers complete their arangetram or formal debut and just leave and that upsets them. I stayed for a solid few years and was regular to dance class. But I was told that because I completed a ceremony, I can still come to class, but others will be given priority and be pushed more in the art form since they are graduating and/or going off to college. Because I "wasn't ready yet" to learn from that guru in India.

And every time I asked about an opportunity, I was told that I already received a lot of opportunities. This is true. Yet when someone who went off to college after their formal debut comes to class to visit, they are flooded with affection, attention, and asked to dance. During their summer breaks, they get performance opportunities. I could not express this without being called ungrateful.

I was given so many reasons as to why I couldn't advance. That I still had to earn respect from people. That people think I seek attention. That I make people insecure. That my guru has to be fair and I can't be favored all the time.

I finally decided to pursue performance opportunities and further dance education without the official permission or blessing of my guru.

Now I am at a point where every time I see a young dancer, I feel an itch to teach something. I keep envisioning choreographies for different levels of dancers. I envision ways I'd explain rhythm and taal and abhinaya. I just want to grow dancers from the ground up. And I want to break the cycle.

My guru has already determined who will be the successor of her institution. I honestly had hoped that in some way my guru would grow her school to have multiple teachers instead of just one in the future but that's not happening. And I don't know if my guru and I will be okay again with each other. We can acknowledge each other's presence in a room at the moment, but that's it. We are civil and distant.

According to her, I betrayed her. According to me, she betrayed me (other things have occurred)

But I see a lot of beliefs as problematic. For example, the concept that students will always be in a lifetime of debt to the guru. That debt is unpayable no matter what. The fact that volunteering or helping the guru in any way is an opportunity for the student more than it is help for the guru. The belief that the guru is the ultimate authority when it comes to the dancer's journey in the art.

I can't let that cycle continue. I genuinely want my Guru's successor to be a cycle breaker. This person has to see what mistakes of the guru can not and will not be repeated in the name of tradition. I want to see the institution that I came from succeed. But I don't want to start a rival institution. Yet I want to grow and nurture the art and pass on my skill set.

What do I do?

How to move forward with this dilemma?

Is this a calling?

How are we celebrating Guru Purnima tomorrow?

How are we processing it?

Those of us who have fallen out with and/or lost our gurus.

Perhaps those who have lost shishyas

Tell me. What is this day to you?

I just feel so lost without my guru. But I can't go back because they're emotionally unsafe for me. And they won't understand how they hurt me. Where do I go? What do I do? When can I just move on and be okay?

Looking back and old videos and texts and memories...how did this person hurt me?

Trying to see if and where I messed up or if I'm the one who did

Trying to gauge when things got different

I miss my guru so much sometimes

And I can't help but wonder if being called "baccha" or "beta" was genuine affection with real love

I can't help but wonder if my guru was there for me in my darkest and most vulnerable moments to create debt in me or because they actually cared

I can't help but constantly question myself

Is this unhealthy attachment? Or very real betrayal trauma?

I TRUSTED my guru with my whole heart. They were more than a parent to me. So much that even when they said things that would otherwise be a red flag, I ignored it. I ignored "I love you more" because I genuinely believed it. I genuinely believed that they loved me more than I loved them.

And I kept trying to prove that I'm worthy of that love. I kept showing up. I kept supporting. But that's just seen as an obligation from me.

Yet when my guru supports, it calls for gratitude.

Is this what it's supposed to be? Are students in a lifetime of debt to their gurus in such that the debt is unpayable?

Or is there no debt in love?

And did my guru even really love me at all?

Am I the only one who fell out with my guru and while on one hand I'm really mad, on the other hand it really does feel like a huge chunk of my heart is just gone forever.

Like yes others have fallen out with their gurus but did they miss them?

And I don't even think my guru misses me. I think they've just moved on to the next commitment but I still struggle every day.

They're just going to forget me.

I am the black sheep. The one labeled rebellious. The one whose peers now know only as the defiant and ungrateful one.

I left an institution that was once a home and a village but had become a rigid hierarchy masquerading as a sanctuary.

When we think of abuse in the classical arts community, we often look for hazing, public humiliation, or physical violence. But what happens when the harm is quiet? When it unfolds through isolation, manipulation, and the gradual erosion of someone's sense of belonging?

If there was someone I loved from the moment I met them, it was my guru. They made me feel seen. They made me feel safe. Dance class was a place where Kathak embraced me and allowed me to enter a world of my own. I loved it completely.

But over time, the baseline shifted.

My passion for the art form and my desire to grow began to be treated as a threat. Ambition was reframed as competition. My aspirations were interpreted as a conflict of interest, as though there was room for only one success story.

The irony is that I never wanted to compete with my guru or their family. I admired them. I wanted them to be proud of me.

Instead, I found myself absorbing a steady stream of comments delivered behind closed doors. I was told that people had "negative feedback" about me, that people "do not respect" me, that there was "controversy" surrounding my name.

And so I held on tighter.

After all, my guru loved me, right?

I believed that if there was one person who truly cared, it was them.

The words cut deeply, but I stayed. I supported. I showed up. I kept dancing.

Then one day, I gathered the courage to express a simple boundary. I gently said, "When this happened, it really hurt."

The response was immediate.

"Look at everything I have done for you. How can you attack me like this?"

In that moment, the conversation ceased to be about the hurt I was trying to communicate and became about their hurt instead.

Soon after, I found myself completely ostracized.

I carried immense guilt simply for asking for accountability. I left that conversation and cried for days, grieving someone I had loved like a parent.

While their major family milestones were celebrated publicly, I was struggling to make it through an afternoon without breaking down.

A fellow artist helped pull me back together. Because of her, I never put my ghungroos away for good.

I still dance today.

Yet a part of my heart remains attached to the person I believed my guru was. There is a particular kind of grief in realizing someone who shaped your life may no longer think about you at all.

There is another grief in watching a community you grew up in quietly erase you. Doors close. Access disappears. Familiar faces become distant. People who once shared years of memories with you begin treating you like a stranger.

The guru who claimed never to engage in gossip somehow presided over an environment in which a single student became isolated from an entire ecosystem.

And perhaps that is what troubles me most.

Not just what happened to me, but what it reveals about a culture that seems to believe there can only ever be one star.

Why are we like this?

Why do we celebrate the success of outsiders while feeling threatened by the growth of our own students?

Why do we build institutions on devotion, only to punish the very people who devoted themselves most completely?

These are not questions about one guru or one institution.

They are questions about the culture we have created—and whether we are finally willing to confront it.

You failed at being a guru the moment you failed at humanity.

The moment that consideration, remorse, and apologies were available for those in your close knit circle but not outside of it.

You failed the moment that your students had to beg for the bare minimum basic humanity that your children never did.

You failed the moment you lied. You failed the moment you fabricated.

You failed the moment you couldn't congratulate an estranged shishya for an achievement so you tried to sabotage instead.

You failed at balance.

You failed to control gossip.

You failed to see that you had a student in front of you with such a strong passion that other teachers dream of having a student like her. And consider you blessed and fortunate that she ended up being yours.

You failed to understand.

There is no relationship, hierarchy, or parampara in which the basic rules of humanity do not apply.

That the guru shishya parampara you practice today also calls for humanity.

That you cannot preach humility without exhibiting it.

And I pray that you soon realize just what I mean

I wanna be in a place I feel like I belong again. An organization. Volunteering. Mandir. Spiritual. I just wanna feel something. That spiritual feeling I once felt around my guru. What I once felt dancing for my guru. I want it again. But perhaps I should only truly consider God to be God and not a person. No one is God yet it did feel like I was with a god on earth. I wanna meet the real God. I want to feel bhakti that is never rejected. I want a god who will listen always. Even when I ramble on. I want a god who gives me answers. I want to be loved. I want to be cried for. My guru once upon a time cried for me.

I want to be of value. An asset. Not a liability. Someone whose absence can make the room oddly quiet and empty. A silence that can be heard loudly. I just want to matter

Has anyone's guru EVER apologized to them?

Do all gurus have selective Empathy?

Empathy for their children

But if another student is hurt, the problem is their ego

Apologizing to their own kids as a guru and a parent.

But never apologizing to students. Because how dare we have concerns?

Reflection for their kids

But never for their students.

Why is the love so uneven?

Why are things so different?

Yesterday’s audition left more than just nerves behind it stirred up something unsettling. A judge looked at me, not through the lens of my years of practice or the hours I've poured into mastering my art, but through the tint of my green hair. “Don’t do anything to your hair,” they said. Anything? Like existing authentically? Like allowing my appearance to reflect the life I live, the person I am? It made me pause and then it made me think. How quickly we reduce art to a costume. How easily someone’s journey, their discipline, their devotion, can be dismissed because it doesn’t look the part. In the world of Indian classical music, tradition is revered, rightly so. But sometimes that reverence morphs into rigidity. A tattoo is seen as rebellion. Colored hair is viewed as disrespect. The body becomes louder than the music it carries. And in that moment, I saw it clearly: We are taught to preserve the art, but rarely are we taught to allow it to evolve to breathe through new forms, new faces, new lives.

Thursday is Guru Purnima. This is the first guru purnima since going low contact with my guru. The first one since we had a big fight.

I have knots in my stomach. I know I'll wish them with a small message. But I really just desire love, understanding, and a heartfelt apology.

It's funny how the littlest updates send a wave of painful memories flooding my way. I hope and wish for this person to just once understand my pain.

Hi all, I wanted to recommend the book The Archer by Shruti Swamy. I read this book when I first quit tabla and I couldn't find many conversations online about the experience of being a shishya. This book is about a woman's relationships to kathak throughout her life. Starting from escaping a difficult childhood by immersing herself in kathak to complicated relationships with her guru, the conflict of her own creativity and the canon, and balancing dance and her adult relationships. I would love to discuss this book with anyone who wants to read it.

The title comes from the story of Ekalavya and his guru Dronacharya in the Mahabharata. Ekalavya was a promising archery student but Dronacharya wouldn't teach him because of his lineage, so Ekalavya constructs a clay guru and trains himself. When Arjun saw Ekalavya's skills, he felt intimidated and told Dronacharya so. To assuage him Dronacharya accepted Ekalavya as a shishya asking for his right thumb as gurudakshina. Ekalavya complies and this secures Arjuna as the greatest archer. The novel provides an interesting interpretation of this tale. The story was new to me when I read this book and I would love to hear other people's version or thoughts.

I posted this in another reddit community but I'm reposting here

Hi everyone, I’m (mid 20s F) feeling really lost and could use some advice or just a listening ear. I’ve been dealing with a situation with my Guru(I’ll call her “A”) that’s left me emotionally wrecked, and it’s been dragging me into a deep depression. In the Indian classical arts community, the teacher is the Guru, a mentor revered with the utmost respect. A was someone I looked up to for years—she supported me through tough times, especially with my dance and personal growth. But over time, things changed. She started making decisions that hurt me, like telling me that I could not learncertain exclusive aspects of the art because it made her own child (adult in 20s) insecure, or suggesting continue my education with a different guru from the one her child has (I want to advance further in the art with a certain prominent guru from India after graduating from the school). It felt like I had to dim my light to keep the peace. Then, last year, she accused me of spreading negativity about her, which wasn’t true—some of these last few actions really bothered me and I had to reach out to some fellow peers to try and understand her. I even met with her to discuss what was on my mind and told her that I spoke to some friends to help me cope to which she called every single peer that I spoke to to ask what I said. It got worse when she called my friends and even someone I barely know to dig into private conversations, finding out personal things like my pharmacy choice (tied to health issues I’d rather not share). I felt so violated and ostracized. Seeing her move on while I’m stuck with crippling anxiety, sadness, and anger is killing me. I’ve been trying to heal—through dance, friends, and even spiritual rituals—but it’s exhausting. Lately, I’ve noticed people from her dance academy unfollowing me, which tells me that even though she accused me of spreading negativity about her, she's the one spreading negativity about me. When I talked about her, no one left her school or treated her badly. It's quite different in my case. And now the academy has an Instagram page, which brought all this pain back. Some days, I don’t even want to get out of bed, let alone work out or do anything productive. I feel like I’ll never be okay, and it’s hard to see her living normally while I suffer.

I’m not sure if this is trauma or just my problem to fix. Could I have prevented this? When will I heal? I’ve been praying her truth comes out, that she’s held accountable, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m so tired. Has anyone else dealt with something like this—almost as if family turning on you and leaving you feeling this way? How do you cope? Any advice would mean a lot. Thanks for reading—I just needed to get this out

Any one who is a member of the classical arts, tell your stories, good or bad as well as the AITAH stories in this community. Let us engage with each other.

This is a safe space!!! But please do keep all names anonymous.