A Day in Rishikesh

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  Rishikesh, Uttarakhand, India
Friday, March 27, 2009

7:30 am: Wake up (well, get out of bed, I usually wake up earlier but stay in bed because it just seems to early to get up while on vacation!). Perform kriya (purification) yoga. This involves scraping my tongue with a metal tongue scraper, then rubbing my teeth, gums, inner cheeks, and roof of my mouth with salt. Next I wash my eyes with cold water. The most difficult of the initial kriya techniques we learned is the Neti. This involves pouring warm salt water from a little plastic pot (Neti Pot) up one nostril, while breathing out of your mouth (don't want to forget that or it does NOT feel nice), until the salt water runs out the other nostril. Some days this goes very nicely, without any problems. Some days I am covered in salt water and feel as if I have been breathing through my nose while swimming in the ocean. As the days progressed, we learned a few other, more intense, purification techniques. But, you probably wouldn't believe me if I told you about them so I will leave it to your imagination...Lets just say I don't do all of them regularly and am not sure if I will do any of them once I leave here!

8:30 am: Walk across the courtyard to the yoga hall (very happy that I decided to move into the rooms the ashram rents out right across the way...short morning walk) for a lecture and 2 hour hatha yoga practice. Or, 2 and a half hour depending on who is teaching! Kush, our Indian teacher usually keeps us for longer. Each morning we start of with a moment of silence. We have been encouraged to use this time to consecrate our yoga practice. This is something I struggle with, as consecration involves asking God (or the Divine Consciousness or whoever you believe in) for permission to do the yoga class and to give all the rewards of the yoga class to this DC. As I still struggle with whether I believe in any such being I usually just sit in silence, hoping to reap some benefits from the class, benefits for myself but that will carry over to others. Sort of a Buddhist idea, whereby if I end suffering within me, I will be ending suffering in others.

We then learn a new asana, or yoga posture. We learn one a day, meaning that our classes were very short on yoga practice in the beginning but increase as the days wear on. The emphasis in this yoga school is on holding the postures for a long time. We hold some for up to 10 minutes. It's amazing to me at how quickly this time goes by, at how quickly a 2 hour yoga session can go by.

11:00 am: Head to The Office, my favorite local hangout with "the best chai in India" according to many people and the best fruit, muesli, curd, honey, according to me! The journey to the office can be a treachorous one, as you have to avoid the onslaught of cows, cow shit, monkeys who will grab any fruit you might be carrying, Indian tourists requesting to take your picture (why do they want a picture of me?? I always do my best to not take pictures of others when I travel but everyone wants my picture..."One snap, Miss, please"). There is a windy hill that is lines with Sadhus begging for fruit or money, fruit carts, and cows which is difficult enough to walk along but is made worse when motorbikes come FLYING along at speeds that are way to fast for anywhere, but especially in a pedestrian area! But, I guess they figure that their honking horn makes it acceptable!

At the bottom of the hill is a famous restaurant, Chotiwala. It has two Chotiwalas (men dressed in traditional clothes with their faces painted white and their heads mostly shaved but with a little black ponytail sticking straight up) sitting in the front of it and causes much traffic as all the Indian tourists stop to take pictures. Once they have finished their pictures, they will shove you out of their way if they want to pass you, regardless of how patiently you might have been waiting for them.

The next street is full of shops...colorful material for stoles and shawls, t-shirts with Hindu Goddesses, Ali Baba's (the pants tha tall tourists where). There are more food stalls set up, more cows, more beggars, and more tourists to get through. By the time I make it to the office, I usually spend a few hours, which is easy to do whether I went on my own or with friends. You always run into someone you know there and if not you always make a new friend!

My breakfast/lunch (it is really big!) consists of a chai and a huge bowl of fruit, muesli, curd, and honey. Unfortunately I have to ruin a bit of the food by sprinkling it with some kind of powder that tastes like pepper that my Ayer Vedic doctor prescribed for me to help with my digestion. The doctor takes your pulse with three fingers and then is able to tell a surprising amount of things about your health (such as my poor digestion). So, now I take this powder once a day, one pill twice a day and another pill three times a day. After three weeks, I should be better...we shall see!

2:00 pm: I do mix up my afternoon activities a bit. Sometimes I go for a dip in the Ganga...if you go underwater 3 times your are cleansed of all your bad Karma. The water is very refreshing (by which I mean FREEZING!) but you have to go in in all of your clothes or you risk being stared at by every Indian man and boy on the beach. Well, you will be stared at regardless of what you are wearing but I find the stares a bit easier to handle if I am wearing pants and a tank top. I think it's funny that you don't get any stares walking back home in dripping wet clothes, as this is completely normal, but swimming in a bathing suit is just way to strange!

I did make a visit to the Beatles Ashram one afternoon. This is the Transcendental Meditation Ashram (this is the type of meditation I learned way back in high school but unfortunately haven't practiced regularly through the years or else I probably would have reached enlightenment by now!) that was set up by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Beatles stayed there in the sixties and wrote most of the White Album there. It has been abandoned now and is overgrown by vines with parts of it falling apart but it is quite a sight!

Other than these activites, afternoons are filled with reading, chatting, or internet.

4:00 pm: Afternoon Hath Yoga class. This is similar to the morning class, with the addition of sun salutations, a common yoga practice, before we begin our actual asanas. This is again a two hour class, but may be longer depending on our teacher.

6:00 pm: Quick dinner break as we only have a half an hour till the night lecture. It can be difficult to fit dinner in as usually a group of us heads to the same restaurant and most of the restaurants here have one or two burners so the food can take a while! ALl the restaurants have pretty much the same menu, serving Indian, Chinese, Italian, Israeli, and Continental foods. All is vegetarian and all is dry (there is no meat or alcohol in the whole town!). This makes our yoga teachers very happy as they know we are completely pure-after a week of our morning cleanses we have gotten out any impurities we might have ingested previously and are not able to ingest any new ones!

7:30 pm: Evening lecture...we learn about many different aspects of yoga-the different chakras (energy centers), yamas and niyamas (forbiddances and recommendations) which includes non-theft, non-voilence, truthfulness, cleanliness, non-possessiveness and a few others I'm forgetting. The lectures are very interesting, although I don't necessarily buy into it all. Some of it is a bit too much for a western girl like me, especially one who has grown slightly cynical after teaching in the Bronx for the past 5 years. I never knew how cynical I could be until I came here and was surrounded by all of this positivity and desire to be good and pure. But, I do find the teachings interesting and will take from it what I can.

9:30 pm: After the lecture I usually hang around the lecture hall and chat with some of my classmates. Sometimes we watch a movie. All the movies in the yoga hall relate to what we are learning in some way but included in the movie selection is Matrix (I looked at it in a whole new light after only a few days of yoga school. really very interesting), the Love Guru, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Gladiator, and many other popular films. I seem to have some new found energy from doing all of this yoga and therefore stay up pretty late, considering what time I wake up. But, it is nice having many new friends to talk to about what we are learning and also to hear their experiences.
I do eventually force myself to bed, where it is time for Laya Yoga, the yoga of dreams...yes, we have learned how to do yoga in our sleep, basically involving being active in our dreams. Haven't quite mastered it yet but will work on it as one day I will reenter the western world and will probably not find time in my day for 6 hours of yoga practice!

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