Food, Elephants and Tibetans

The Practical

On Martina's first trip here in 2008 she had the sudden thought on the plane, "uh-oh, I hope I like Indian food!" (No worries, she does.) This was not an issue for me, since I LOVE Indian food. Especially South Indian food. Eating is going really, really well here.

I am not cooking as much as I thought I would be. It's hot, I don't want to be in the way in our family's kitchen, and I'm surprisingly busy! Plus when you can get a healthy, delicious thali for less than two dollars... it's pretty hard to want to eat anything else. Let's talk about thalis. It's your own little mini buffet of bread, rice, soups, vegetables, lentils, and dessert. It comes in little cups or piles and you eat it with your hands. (This can be awkward at first. The first time we went out for one, we pretended to be absorbed in the cricket match on the TV at the restaurant so we could secretly spy on the guys next to us. What do you pour onto what? How do you not get rice all over yourself? I am getting more proficient.) The food is spicy and delicious and you get as many refills as you can handle. So yeah, we eat a lot of thalis. And there are a few enterprising families in the neighborhood that have opened cafes catering to the yoga community, where we typically have our veg, dal, salad, and chapati dinner. We also eat a lot of idlis and dosas at the street cafe around the corner. With the exception of the fruit and granola I sometimes eat at home, and the the homemade bread I sometimes eat at the cafe run by a Swedish couple, I am only eating Indian food. And I am very happy. The restaurant situation will definitely feel like the cruellest deprivation upon my return home (with coconuts running a close second).

On Saturday I tagged along with two other women on a day trip to Dubare Elephant Camp and Bylakuppe Tibetan settlement. The elephant camp was... interesting. I had been led to expect a happy elephant preserve, sort of like SASHA Farm but for our pachyderm friends. I was not expecting ankle chains and beaty-sticks with nails in them, wielded by the "trained naturalists" boasted of on the forestry service website. I did bond with one particularly broken-looking fellow during bathtime. He was just lying there with his trunk all curled in on itself, like for protection and comfort, like a little abused kid in the fetal position sucking his thumb. It kind of broke my heart. He let me rub his head and trunk and tell him he was a good elephant, and I could actually feel his massive body responding and relaxing a tiny bit under my hands. It was cool because it's not fundamentally different from reading, say, a dog with empathy and responding with compassion, but it feels so much more intense because it's such a big and foreign animal. It was a pretty powerful experience, even if it made me sad. One day we will learn.

There was not as much pathos at Bylakuppe. We visited one of the Tibetan monasteries there and saw three beautiful, intricately decorated temples. I sat outside one of the classrooms and listened to the novices practicing chanting and music... I could have stayed there all day. One of the older monks invited me into a temple and explained a lot of the statues and art to me, which was neat. He also said he thought I would be a Buddhist nun one day, but he didn't specify if he meant in this lifetime or not.

The Practice

At conference this past Sunday Sharath talked about how yoga is to challenge yourself spiritually, to compete against your own weaknesses and limitations and ego. He reiterated the need to love yoga, to love doing asana, to love the spirituality of it, to love your practice wherever it is. He also talked about how well the ashtanga system is designed, how all the steps are laid out to help us purify ourselves physically, mentally, and spiritually.

I have heard this all before but I am coming to a real understanding of it for myself. Yoga works. But you have to do it right. The structure is not random and the rules are not arbitrary. When you water it down to whatever makes you feel good right now, you miss the point and you will miss the results.

There are systems that have stood the test of time and proven that they can transform people. Then there are little offshoots of these systems that might superficially resemble them, but they have been adapted to cater to the limitations of the practitioners rather challenge them to overcome them. This is true of most mainstream yoga, meditation, and religious practice, think. If you really want to make yourself a different person, you have to find a pure method, and you will have to put in a lot more work and put up with a lot more discomfort than you probably want to. We aren't very fond of hard work and discomfort, of course, so we have ended up with all sorts of new liberated systems that are fine and pleasant and fundamentally pretty useless. As Rabindaranath Tagore said, "liberation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree".

The Path

One of the things I have heard from my vipassana meditation teachers is that regular practice gives rise to a different kind of mind, one in which universal compassion arises eventually arises easily and naturally. I used to think this was a cute idea. Then this weekend, during the events at the elephant camp, I observed something interesting in myself.

Once upon a time I would have felt what I called compassion for the elephant and anger at the trainer. But as I sat there, I also felt compassion for the trainer. Easily and naturally. Happy people aren't mean, and his inability to feel any empathy for the animal he was beating reflects a deep suffering within him. I watched him, with his angry face, sweating in the sun as he scrubbed violently at the elephant, and felt nothing but the same wish I felt for the elephant. May you not suffer. May you be happy. I have heard this all before and could have reasoned it out before but still felt angry. Truly believing and feeling it, and seeing it arise spontaneously was pretty cool.