Week One at Sivananda Ashram

I've done it this time. I might have taken on a bit too much, but time will tell. As usual, I will carry on, even though may body is not used to sitting cross-legged for 8 hours a day. Maybe because I'd been eating too much in the States, I decided to come to India to pray. (Think of the book "Eat, Pray, Love".) I hope love follows, because practicing yoga at an ashram is hard work mentally, physically and spiritually, that is when you're taking a 200-hour yoga teacher training that is offered in the States over a 9 month or year long program. I decided if I wanted to learn more about yoga, the best place to do it was in India where it originated. I'm not sure if Indians practice yoga in Ashrams, but they are certainly known elsewhere as there are 300 students here from all over the world. Hindi, Russian, Spanish, Ukranian, Japanese, German, Dutch, Canadian, and a few from the US.

Our day starts at 6:00am with 1.5 hours of meditation, a short break for tea, 2 hours of learning how to teach yoga physically, brunch which we eat with our hands (and don't think finger food as in the States, think stew), and then an hour of karma yoga (I.e. chores). At noon we have an hour of lecture, our first week was of chanting, another short tea break, then 2 hours of our main/spiritual lecture, followed by 2 hours of physical yoga. We then rush to dinner (did i mention we eat in silence?), and end our day with another meditation practice. Somewhere along the way we have to write up a summary of our main lecture, and lights are to be out by 10:30pm. My brain is a mix of Sanskrit, Hindi, chants and other unfamiliar things. It's more than learning another language. If you know me, this part of my brain is rather slow. I can already tell things are penetrating it when I chant in the meditation periods and the readings aren't so overwhelming. When I take time to look up, I see a beautiful setting of lush green trees and flowers, as I look out at the Sahyadri Hills and the lake formed by the Neyyar Dam in the southwest of Kerala India.