Saturday, May 3, 2014

Ashtangis are Dicks

I've decided to take the plunge. I was as hesitant about the title of this first entry as I am about the whole concept of blogging. If you must know, I'm really not too keen on welcoming people into the twisted, often tormented, sometimes delusional confines of my sick old mind. Haaa! It's not so bad really, it's usually pretty fun in here, actually. Either way, I prefer to follow my friend Katherine's advice. "Just think that no one's gonna read it." So yeah, please don't. Go on, get out of here.

I'm in Mysore, India right now, and I just finished having a decadent Sunday breakfast. Toast soaked in ghee, coffee with milk and jaggery. Peanut butter cookies from the Chocolate Man.

It's my first time here and it's low season, mainly because it's really hot (we're talking like 39 Celsius) hot enough that you can see a layer of fizzy heat in the sky at midday, like a stove top. Hot enough that the first few days of practicing at the main shala, I was gasping and flapping around for breath like a fish out of water.

Also, the last day of practice with Sharath was April 4, so Saraswathi is the only one teaching right now. She's 73 and can easily slam you into the ground. Her eyes are a million different colors and I like to make her smile.

Anyway, being here has brought the following quote to mind: "Ashtangis are dicks."

A few years ago, I went to Granada, Nicaragua for ten days of Vipassana meditation at an old monastery. Basically, vipassana entails taking a vote of silence and sitting in meditation for around 8-10 hours a day. You can't read or write, exercise, or even maintain eye contact. It's the ultimate soul cleansing, word detox.

Much like Ashtanga yoga, the idea is that through prolonged meditation, you burn through the samskaras that you've brought with you from other lifetimes and developed in this one. Samskaras are patterns in our consciousness that can lead to great suffering.

As you may have guessed, burning samskaras ain't easy. It's physically painful to sit in meditation for so many hours (yoga helps immensely) and mentally painful to sit face to face with your own mind and confront it without any buffers or distractions. Just you and your mind. Brrr, scary, right?

When I arrived there everyone was unpacking and settling into the monastery rooms. My 'room' was a chapel where all the benches had been moved to the side to fit several mattresses on the floor. All the religious images had been covered with sheets or wrapped up in paper, but I could still see Jesus's bloody feet poking out from under a sheet. It was creeeeeepy, I must say. Very crrrrreeeepy. And as the days passed, people started leaving or moving out of the chapel. By the end of the ten days it was just me and another girl in there. I think we felt bad to move out and leave each other alone with Jesus on the cross.

So, before the silence started, people were gathered on the steps to the rooms and introducing each other. One woman told me she was a hatha yoga teacher and I told her that I practiced yoga too.

"What kind?" she asked.

"Ashtanga," I said.

"Ashtangis are dicks," she replied.

I think I jumped a little. What a strange thing to say before starting Vipassana. In my mind, I thought of all kinds of comebacks, surely generating a load of fresh new samskaras. My favorite one was "Oh yeah? well hatha yogis are losers." I imagined a street fight between an Ashtanga mara and a gang of other yogis.

I told her that was not my experience at all, that my fellow practitioners at the shala in San José were some of the nicest, friendliest people I'd ever met.

She said that she was referring to Mysore India, which was full of high strung, Type A New Yorkers trying to kick each others' butts or something.

Every time I meet new friends at the coconut stand after practice, or at one of the breakfast places, or I think of the New York ashtangis I've met, of my teacher and my friends at the shala back home, I crack up to myself. They continue to be some of the friendliest, kindest people I've ever met. About as much of a dick as anyone else.

Anyway, I believe that our perceptions of others are mostly projections of what's going on inside our minds. As Ram Dass says, "What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution."

Gasping for breath or not, currently, my mind's in a state of sheer bliss at the chance to practice with Saraswathi every morning, to be back in India and to find that everything runs so smoothly here in Mysore. It's easy to live here and so very unlike my experience of traveling the North a few years ago, which was exhilarating, life-changing, but...rough. Maybe it's just the nice, ashtangi-friendly neighborhood of Gokulam, where the shala's located. Maybe it's just the state of this mind almost three years into this practice. Is hashtagging allowed on here? #BlissISblissisbliss.













3 comments:

  1. Some day, I too want to journey to Mysore. Until then, I look forward to seeing it through your eyes. I mean: I'm not reading. I'm totally outta here

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  2. Hahaa! Hi iJuls! <3 I hope you make it out here too! Thanks for not reading ;)

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