Gurus on the street. Gurus on their own television station. Even the Dalai Lama has his own website and free to air station, which by the way has the same logo as my Tibetan tattoo: light or lamp for the six lamps of Tibetan Buddhism. India, the heart of spiritualiasm, offers something for everyone.
While yoga in the west tends to concentrate on the practice of asana, with some pranayama and a little pratayama, essentially the first four body conscious limbs of Patanjali Jois' ashtanga (eight limb) yoga, eastern yoga is approached from the four internal awareness limbs, of meditation practices moving the mind to samadhi. So don't go looking for yoga in India and expecting it to be all mats on the floor, Lululemon and Downward Dog. It's more often going to be cushions, meditation shawls, incense and candles.
But when in India ...
Staying in a gated community in Gurgaon, I was directed to free yoga in the park: 5.45am every morning. Yoga mat in hand I greet the security guards in the pre dawn Dehli haze, as I find the entrance to the secret hedged yoga space. Much shuffling ensued as I tried unsuccessfully to set up inconspicuosly in the back. Directed to the front and given a large plastic drop sheet, my standard sized Gold Coast yoga mat looked ridiculous amidst the expansive blankets and carpets the indigenous yogis were waiting on.
'Do you speak Hindi?'
'A little.' Thinking my yoga sanskrit would at least count for something.
With hand flicking and pointing, I was assigned the 'helper' as my own personal translator, and sergeant major. Stumbling my way through what to my Vinyasa Flow style of yoga, seemed a disconnected disarray of poses, I frantically grasped for clues in the names of postures. Phew! Ustrasana: Got that. Surya Namaska: Thank goodness. Cat: What? That's dog! Oh well, obviously interchangeable. They both have four legs I guess. ... and then there was 'laughing'. I don't know if we were laughing as a posture or laughing at ourselves, but in the end I was just laughing at the ridiculousness of it. At last yoga nidra, but not as we know it. One of the class participants took over for this random rotation around the body ... for relaxation? What I thought might be an opportunity to pick up some Hindi, because I know the order of body parts, quickly reverted to more laughter yoga for me, as we went from ankle to neck to knee to who knows where.
After three mornings I was well and truly part of this yoga sangha. Walking to the shop one afternoon, a huge prestigious car pulled up alongside us, lowered the window and the gentleman driver called, 'Hello. Remember me from yoga? Where are you going? Jump in we'll give you a lift.'
We stayed in Naddi, above Mcleodganj in Dharmasala, and found the Sahaja International Yoga Centre just a five minute walk along the ridge, so of course I was always going to find it ... or it was going to find me. Sahaja means 'inborn or spontaneous' and yoga is 'union'. Together Sahaja Yoga is innate union; self-realisation and the awakening of our dormant spiritual energy, our kundalini. This meditation technique 'encourages' the kundalini to rise through the subtle system of the body, the three channels and the seven chakras. It brings clarity and a heightened state of awareness, identifying chakra blockages along the way. So far so good.
To quote my Timeless Guru, "Is it working for you, honey?"
"Well, yes. I did my photographic essay on the chakras; Kundalini Rising." (Instagram: sabineyoga)
Sahaja Yoga is a grounded tantric yoga practice, working from the known or psychomatic body to higher realms. While a bit ritualised, this approach is in harmony with the Vinyasa wave, restorative yin and chakra yoga asana practice. (www.sahayayoga.org). I attendedtwo sessions with a lady, 'Just call me Lakshmi.' It was a soft, easy space and ended too fast for me. My usual meandering way of meditating is concentration on the breathe, sense withdrawal, experience of opposites and visualisation. Sahaja cuts straight to the chase, focus on the point above the crown chakra, Sahasrara, and let's get on with it. Ten minutes and we're done.
"Hold your palms out. Do you feel any sensations?"
Left, right, palms, fingers. All correspond to different chakras and past or future. I was apparently holding on to past fears of insecurity. Well after all, we're not in Kansas anymore Toto!
Sitting on my mat the next morning, watched over by snow capped Himalayan mountains, my mantra came unbidden, 'If you can't make it happen here?', and I couldn't, well not in any deep revelationary way. My yoga practice was beautiful, flowing and warm, and that was enough.
In Manali, even closer to the top of the world, from my roof top yoga space, I practiced, and watched the sun's rays brighten the mountains closer and closer to me. I felt the warmth bathe me as I sat and meditated and waited...
In Shimla, in The Embassy Restaurant, owned and operated by a couple of Krishnamurtri followers, I found ubiquitous writings stuck to the walls, What is Meditation?
A conversation with the owner after dinner explored The Indian Mind and the concept of time only existing because of thoughts. Thoughts are not real, just a construct; therefore time is not real. Immediately we caught each other's gaze and the unspoken words were: 'Thoughts without a thinker.' -Mark Epstein, and “Then only are we really thinking when the subject on which we are thinking cannot be thought out.” Goethe.
Finding a space to lay my mat, on the balcony of the top floor of Hotel Sangeet, intuiting east, I am accompanied by the music of an Indian city awakening, complete with lung and throat clearing, and spitting the equivalent of coughing up two lungs. Dogs bark and monkeys fight over treasures across the rooftops, plus of course there is a symphony or cacophony of car horns. A white foreigner providing early morning entainment for the hotel boys who carry tea and coffee up multiple flights of stairs, I am stepped around and over by other hotel guests. A middle aged Indian man with beautiful English comes to share the space and practices pranayama while I flow through my yoga asanas, mindful of the movements but without time. I reach a place in my practice where at 'home' I most often find myself daydreaming. Today, for the first time in this new 'home' I arrive here, amidst the noise and busyness, the distractions and unfamiliarity.
After mountains and meditation, holy places and people, in the midst of life, is samadhi.
While yoga in the west tends to concentrate on the practice of asana, with some pranayama and a little pratayama, essentially the first four body conscious limbs of Patanjali Jois' ashtanga (eight limb) yoga, eastern yoga is approached from the four internal awareness limbs, of meditation practices moving the mind to samadhi. So don't go looking for yoga in India and expecting it to be all mats on the floor, Lululemon and Downward Dog. It's more often going to be cushions, meditation shawls, incense and candles.
But when in India ...
Staying in a gated community in Gurgaon, I was directed to free yoga in the park: 5.45am every morning. Yoga mat in hand I greet the security guards in the pre dawn Dehli haze, as I find the entrance to the secret hedged yoga space. Much shuffling ensued as I tried unsuccessfully to set up inconspicuosly in the back. Directed to the front and given a large plastic drop sheet, my standard sized Gold Coast yoga mat looked ridiculous amidst the expansive blankets and carpets the indigenous yogis were waiting on.
'Do you speak Hindi?'
'A little.' Thinking my yoga sanskrit would at least count for something.
With hand flicking and pointing, I was assigned the 'helper' as my own personal translator, and sergeant major. Stumbling my way through what to my Vinyasa Flow style of yoga, seemed a disconnected disarray of poses, I frantically grasped for clues in the names of postures. Phew! Ustrasana: Got that. Surya Namaska: Thank goodness. Cat: What? That's dog! Oh well, obviously interchangeable. They both have four legs I guess. ... and then there was 'laughing'. I don't know if we were laughing as a posture or laughing at ourselves, but in the end I was just laughing at the ridiculousness of it. At last yoga nidra, but not as we know it. One of the class participants took over for this random rotation around the body ... for relaxation? What I thought might be an opportunity to pick up some Hindi, because I know the order of body parts, quickly reverted to more laughter yoga for me, as we went from ankle to neck to knee to who knows where.
After three mornings I was well and truly part of this yoga sangha. Walking to the shop one afternoon, a huge prestigious car pulled up alongside us, lowered the window and the gentleman driver called, 'Hello. Remember me from yoga? Where are you going? Jump in we'll give you a lift.'
We stayed in Naddi, above Mcleodganj in Dharmasala, and found the Sahaja International Yoga Centre just a five minute walk along the ridge, so of course I was always going to find it ... or it was going to find me. Sahaja means 'inborn or spontaneous' and yoga is 'union'. Together Sahaja Yoga is innate union; self-realisation and the awakening of our dormant spiritual energy, our kundalini. This meditation technique 'encourages' the kundalini to rise through the subtle system of the body, the three channels and the seven chakras. It brings clarity and a heightened state of awareness, identifying chakra blockages along the way. So far so good.
To quote my Timeless Guru, "Is it working for you, honey?"
"Well, yes. I did my photographic essay on the chakras; Kundalini Rising." (Instagram: sabineyoga)
Sahaja Yoga is a grounded tantric yoga practice, working from the known or psychomatic body to higher realms. While a bit ritualised, this approach is in harmony with the Vinyasa wave, restorative yin and chakra yoga asana practice. (www.sahayayoga.org). I attendedtwo sessions with a lady, 'Just call me Lakshmi.' It was a soft, easy space and ended too fast for me. My usual meandering way of meditating is concentration on the breathe, sense withdrawal, experience of opposites and visualisation. Sahaja cuts straight to the chase, focus on the point above the crown chakra, Sahasrara, and let's get on with it. Ten minutes and we're done.
"Hold your palms out. Do you feel any sensations?"
Left, right, palms, fingers. All correspond to different chakras and past or future. I was apparently holding on to past fears of insecurity. Well after all, we're not in Kansas anymore Toto!
Sitting on my mat the next morning, watched over by snow capped Himalayan mountains, my mantra came unbidden, 'If you can't make it happen here?', and I couldn't, well not in any deep revelationary way. My yoga practice was beautiful, flowing and warm, and that was enough.
In Manali, even closer to the top of the world, from my roof top yoga space, I practiced, and watched the sun's rays brighten the mountains closer and closer to me. I felt the warmth bathe me as I sat and meditated and waited...
In Shimla, in The Embassy Restaurant, owned and operated by a couple of Krishnamurtri followers, I found ubiquitous writings stuck to the walls, What is Meditation?
A conversation with the owner after dinner explored The Indian Mind and the concept of time only existing because of thoughts. Thoughts are not real, just a construct; therefore time is not real. Immediately we caught each other's gaze and the unspoken words were: 'Thoughts without a thinker.' -Mark Epstein, and “Then only are we really thinking when the subject on which we are thinking cannot be thought out.” Goethe.
Finding a space to lay my mat, on the balcony of the top floor of Hotel Sangeet, intuiting east, I am accompanied by the music of an Indian city awakening, complete with lung and throat clearing, and spitting the equivalent of coughing up two lungs. Dogs bark and monkeys fight over treasures across the rooftops, plus of course there is a symphony or cacophony of car horns. A white foreigner providing early morning entainment for the hotel boys who carry tea and coffee up multiple flights of stairs, I am stepped around and over by other hotel guests. A middle aged Indian man with beautiful English comes to share the space and practices pranayama while I flow through my yoga asanas, mindful of the movements but without time. I reach a place in my practice where at 'home' I most often find myself daydreaming. Today, for the first time in this new 'home' I arrive here, amidst the noise and busyness, the distractions and unfamiliarity.
After mountains and meditation, holy places and people, in the midst of life, is samadhi.
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