Tuesday, February 22, 2011

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.

Monday, February 21, 2011

An Ode to Coconuts










The Practical

Let me tell you about the coconut situation. There are coconut stands on just about every major street corner, and one enterprising fellow who parks his coconut truck in front of the shala gate every morning and reaps all the traffic of sweaty, thirsty yoga students needing a delicious fluid and electrolyte tonic. I don't know how he scored that real estate, but he does a brisk business. We drink a lot of coconuts. There is also The Coconut Stand, which is where the bendy white people drink their coconuts at other times of day.

To drink a coconut, which costs 10 rupees (less than 20 cents), the coconut man hacks the top off of a tender young coconut with an intimidating curved knife and sticks a straw in it for you. You drink the coconut water, then he breaks the coconut open and you eat the coconut jelly or meat that he carves out for you with the same big knife (texture depends on the maturity of the coconut. I found the jelly a bit slimy at first but now I prefer it.) But the coconut's story does not end there. Then you throw your coconut on the ground, where it becomes a snack for a cow or a goat. Then someone comes along and gathers up the coconut shells and I think they burn them.

That is for young coconuts. For older, "grown up" coconuts (as Anita calls them in her adorable version of English), you don't drink them but you grate up the meat inside and cook with it or use it as a garnish. First you split the husk with another scary implement - this time a big pointy metal thing that you impale the coconut on and then crack it open. Anita makes this look easy, as she does with grating the coconut on her little knife/grater/stool thing (see photo, I can't properly describe it. But I want one.)

Then you use the grated coconut to make something delicious. THEN, you save the old coconut husks for the rainy season. Because you get hot water in the summer from a solar heated hot water tank on the roof, but this doesn't work in the rainy season so you burn old coconut husks to heat your bath water. Aren't coconuts the best?

In other news, it has taken a month but I have finally discovered something I don't like about India. It is getting _really_ hot, and I would like to be able to lounge around in a strappy tank top. That is all. But modesty rules are different here, so I have to wear sleeves even around the house (since we live with a family) and to dance class. I would smell a lot better if they were more relaxed with their dress code, but so be it. At least the shala is Westernized enough that I can practice in a tank top, otherwise I might die.

The Practice

Yoga is infinitely deep, even on a purely physical level. I could do nothing but sun salutations for the rest of my life and still not run out of subtler and subtler things to work with. Still, the ego has its own definition of progress, especially the modern Western ego that has been especially conditioned to conquer and compete and compare. "I want more postures!", it says. "I want to prove that I am special and talented!" I am getting better at ignoring this nattering, and today's practice was focused and rewarding for the little steps I notice my body and mind taking toward freedom. When I got to pashasana I actually thought, "Wow, that was tiring. I'm glad I get to stop here".

So, of course I got three new postures.

And, this will surprise no one, apparently I need to have a whole discussion with Sharath every time he gives me a new posture. Today went like this: I did my dropbacks and he came over and said, "korunchasana". I couldn't tell if it was a statement or a question. I said, "did I do korunchasana? No." He said again, "korunchasana". I said, "I should do it now? I already did backbends". He said, "I was supposed to give it to you today. If you don't do it today you have to wait two more days". I shrugged, "meh" (see above...) and he said , "Wednesday, " and held up three fingers, "korunchasana, shalabhasana, bhekasana". "I said, "all three in one day?" because I have never heard of that before. He confirmed his straightforward instructions.

So, I'll be pretty tired on Wednesday. Bhekasana is as far as I had gotten under Matthew's tutelage, so anything that comes from here on out will be new for real. Imagine the conversations I will have with him then...

The Path

What exactly is this phenomenon we call a human being? How is one supposed to work and how can I be better at being one? These are some of the questions that I've been working with lately and a big part of what took me to India. We are so crazily complicated. Reality is like a set of Russian nesting dolls. At one level, it is true that we are subatomic particles, which themselves are just temporary accumulations of energy. At another level, we are our cellular biochemical reactions, and then on up through our tissues and organs and organ systems... our primal brainstem instincts to our lizard/squirrel/monkey brains... to the transcendent inner light of pure consciousness that pervades the entire universe and that every spiritual tradition in the world teaches us is our true nature, and our job is to find our way back to it. The level of reality that is the LEAST real, whether you ask an ascended master or modern science, is this separate-self ego construction that we use to make our way through the mundane world. And yet... that is all we think we are!

"Reason says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. In between these two, our life flows."

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Travels within travels






The Practical

It's hard to believe I've only been here for 3 weeks. Time passes differently here. It seems like every night before I go to bed I think, "Man, I can't believe it was just this morning that I [did whatever]". I certainly thought that a lot this weekend during our fun, whirlwind adventure in Hyderabad.

On background: Dr. and Mrs. Reddy, the parents of our good friend Vikram, are Indian imports to Michigan and have lived there for the past few decades, but they maintain a home in Hyderabad where they very wisely spend a good part of the Michigan winter. When they found out I would be in India during this time, they graciously arranged for me and Martina to fly up to Hyderabad to visit them for a weekend.

The travel itself is a fun Indian adventure story. We had a flight booked from the Mysore airport going through Bangalore to Hyderabad, but when we got to the airport (after taking two bus trips and a bit of a walk), we were informed that all flights were canceled. We had gotten to the airport early enough that we still had time to get to Bangalore by car (!) so the airline arranged for a driver to take us on the four-hour journey. Okay! We got to Bangalore just in time for our flight to Hyderabad. Now, neither of us has a phone that works here. We have our iPhones set to airplane mode so we can use the internet when wifi is available, and we have a (very old, slow) laptop with wireless broadband that works most of the times we try it, but we are certainly not easy to reach, especially if time is of the essence. Turns out the airline had tried to contact us to let us know our flight was canceled, and when that failed they called Vik and woke him up in the middle of the night and then he couldn't get in touch with us either. But, everything worked out, like it always seems to, and by Friday evening we were enjoying a massive plate of delicious Indian food at a rooftop party thrown by some of the Reddys' friends.

Saturday was a full day of Hyderabad highlights: we started at Charminar, then did a little shopping for bangles at some of the famed area markets, then it was off to Chowmahal palace. Hyberabad was ruled by Muslims for many centuries and this is reflected in a lot of its art and architecture. In the afternoon we walked around the Golconda fort, which is up in the hills outside the city. Highly recommended if you are ever out that way. It is a marvel of all kinds of engineering, including acoustic: our guide showed us how standing in one specific spot you can hear someone clapping from the top of the hill. That night there was another party. The Reddys are waaaay more energetic and social than we are, they put us younguns to shame! On Sunday they took us to a family wedding in Dr. Reddy's hometown of Warangal. It is apparently not unusual here to go to a wedding of people you don't know - wedding invitations are understood to include "you, your family, and anyone else you feel like bringing". This one was a relatively modest affair of "only" about a thousand people. It was absolutely beautiful and fun.

A note on the road trip parts of our journey: Indian highways are an interesting experience. They run through towns, for the most part, so stretches of clear road are punctuated by all that towns bring: cross traffic, pedestrians, speed bumps, cows/goats/dogs/buffalo, street demonstrations, etc. Out on the highway proper there are two lanes in each direction, officially. But in addition to cars, highway traffic includes bicycles, bullock carts, motorcycles bearing families of five, autorickshaws with nine people in them, buses, small pickups overburdened with coconuts, giant flatbed trucks with so many sacks of something tied onto them they are more trapezoidal than rectangular... you get the idea. Because of this diversity of vehicles, highway speeds vary widely. Everybody wants to pass the people who are going slower than they are, but since there are far more kinds of vehicles traveling at different speeds than there are lanes, this is not always possible if you play by the rules. So, we learned, you make your own rules, and your road trip becomes a 3-hour long, horn-blaring game of chicken. But, everything worked out, as it always seems to. And it was neat to get to see so much of the countryside between our destinations.

Now we are back in Mysore after an easy trip on Monday. (Another tidbit about travel in India: they have separate lines for women and men at airport screenings for domestic flights, so that women can be frisked in private, and the women's lines are way shorter. ) It felt really good to get "home" and to be back in the shala this morning. I'm picking up my little routine where I left off: yoga, dance, Sanskrit, and philosophy.

The Practice

Ashtanga actually has six series of postures, and the one most people are familiar with is the first or primary series, slso known as "yoga chikitsa", or "yoga therapy". According to Guruji (as quoted by Kino), "First series: body is healing. Second series: mind, emotions is healing. Third and fourth series: demonstration only".

The second, or intermediate series, is called nadi shodhana and is a set of postures designed to purify the nervous system. Matthew me practicing it last year and I had worked up to the first 4 postures. But when you come to Mysore for the first time, no matter what you are doing at home you only practice primary and Sharath decides when to give you intermediate asanas. (It is funny that we talk here of "only" practicing primary... people who are not in the ashtanga world stare at me in shock and say you do WHAT with your body and for 90 MINUTES EVERY DAY?!)

On Wednesday of last week, Sharath helped me with my dropbacks, then said, "Monday, pashasana" (the first posture of the second series). I said, "I'm not here on Monday, I'm going on a trip to Hyderabad". (Claudia had a good laugh at hearing this, and said I must be the first person who has responded to getting second series from Sharath with, "sorry, that doesn't really work for my schedule".) So he said, "Okay, Wednesday, pashasana". Then he changed his mind and said, "tomorrow, pashasana". Yes, sir! Nerve cleansing commenced. We shall see what comes out of it.

I missed two practice days while we were in Hyderabad, which Sharath pointed out this morning. He told me and Martina we had to pay 500 rupees extra for not coming yesterday. Heh.

The Path

If you'll forgive me for outsourcing my blogging to the talented and prolific Claudia once again, she has a great post about meditation based on a conversation we had recently... so it's the lazy man's way of sharing my thoughts on that.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Life taking shape





The Practical

It's been just over two weeks, and I am settling into a nice little routine here. Our living situation is great; we are renting a room from a family a 5-minute walk from the shala. They couldn't be nicer, it is fun and comfortable to be in a happy family environment, and it is helpful to have them as a resource in learning to navigate a new city and culture.

In addition to yoga, Sanskrit, and philosophy classes at the shala, I have started Indian classical dance classes. I am taking Odissi dance lessons from a teacher I met through Martina. I love it! It is a very intricate style of dance and I am learning all the pieces one at a time: foot positions, body position, head position, neck position, eye position, hand gestures... slowly starting to combine them and add movement. It is hard, a lot of things to concentrate on at once! It is so much fun to be playing with dance again. I didn't realize how much I missed it.

I have now ventured three times out of our cozy little Gokulam bubble into the more chaotic world of central Mysore. Once for a deep tissue massage at a place called the Three Sisters - there is one sister who cooks and the other two do things like massage you with their feet while holding on to ropes suspended from the ceiling. "Modest" doesn't begin to describe their accommodations, but it was good stuff. Then this weekend Impa (the daughter of our host family) and her friend took me shopping at a bazaar and did all my bargaining for me so I didn't have to pay Western prices for the beautiful clothes and shoes I got (see above, advantages of living with a family :). And today Claudia, Martina and I went for "the best dosas in Mysore" as recommended by Claudia's rickshaw driver, to an unassuming little restaurant on the other side of town. They were indeed delicious. (More details and photos from that adventure on Claudia's blog)

Have I mentioned that I love it here? I love the food and the clothes and the history and the art. I love how ancient it is, how vast and colorful and vibrant. I even love it for the things that are supposed to be bothersome: I love the noise and the crowds and the chaos. I love that the streets are like a petting zoo. I love the attitude toward life that you have to adopt when the water turns off for four days.

The Practice

Remember how I was talking about getting to be a spectator to some amazing practitioners? Thursday while I was waiting for a spot to open up I got to watch Kino practicing some fourth series postures. Wowza. Friday and Sunday were led classes. Saraswati led the class on Sunday, adorably attired in a blue and white housecoat. She is 70 years old and all of 5 feet tall, but she can still spend all morning helping gangly foreigners turn into various yoga pretzels. Pretty impressive.

Monday and today was more Mysore practice. I am having fun watching how the practice unfolds and matures here. I'm making a strong determination to work on strength and arm balances, which is something that still eludes me. It will be interesting to see what happens with that. I think I need to fall on my face at least once and just get it over with so I can move forward...

The Path

I have been thinking about the importance of ritual in spirituality and life in general. Ritual and tradition are such a big part of everyday life here. We Americans tend to pride ourselves on being independent of such trappings. But where we don't have rituals that have been honed and handed down over many generations, we tend to just absorb and compulsively repeat whatever patterns of behavior we pick up from our cultural influences, which are not usually very skillful. (Just look at the way we eat.)

Thursday, February 3, 2011

You should read this, it's hilarious

http://earthyogi.blogspot.com/2011/01/im-completely-humiliated-by-yoga.html

One of the wonderful people I've met here so far is Claudia, a good friend of Martina's from her last trip. Her husband James is new to ashtanga but he accompanied her out here for two weeks and practiced at the shala. This is his post from his second day here. (He just went back to the States but is already planning to come back next year. )

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Home away from home



I have to say, I’m not really having major culture shock issues here. There are a lot of things about the little world I’ve found myself in that actually feel more comfortable than the world I came from.

You get to be barefoot a lot of the time

I’m still trying to figure out the exact etiquette on footwear. Shoes absolutely come off when you enter anyone’s house. Same goes for the shala and businesses that have a homey feel, like a lot of the cafes we go to. The other day we went for lunch at a fancy hotel and some of the waiters were wearing shoes, others weren’t. Like it’s a personal thing, no big deal. I think shoes are way overrated, and we would all be better off if we spent more time barefoot, so I’m obviously liking this bit.

You’re kind of a weirdo if you eat animals

There are more vegetarians in India than there are people in the US. Especially here in the South, vegetarianism is the norm. Restaurants that serve meat will specify on their signs that they have “non-veg options”. People who are non-veg find themselves apologetically overexplaining why they eat such weird things. It is a fun little through the looking glass world for us herbivores.

I’m surrounded by people who are really into things I’m really into

This is more of a function of being in yoga city rather than India itself. It’s not every day that you’re surrounded by hundreds of people whose idea of a good time is a day that starts with an intense 90-minute yoga practice, continues with some meditation, sitting around chanting in Sanskrit for a while, maybe studying the Gita, going to a pooja, etc. As Pete put it, “It’s like you get 82 days of GenCon, only much, much healthier”.

The practice

I am really loving practicing here. It is hot and crowded but the energy is incredible. I went to my first led class on Friday – I had been prepared to have to hold navasana, shirshasana, and uth pluthih for longer than I usually demand of myself, and that was certainly humbling. I am learning so much just from watching the way other people move – I almost want to show up an hour early every day just to be a spectator.

The path

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to
us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty." -Albert Einstein