A Little Place Called Crazy Town

“Two one way tickets to Crazy Town please,” Heidi said at the bus station in San José earlier this year, and we shrieked with laughter.

It’s raining and thundering and huge bolts of lightning are descending all over Mysore. The sky is at war with us. The power just went out in the middle of a Skype conversation with my sister in the U.S. and now I can’t finish my work. All my editing and design software seemed to crash this week too and I wonder if it’s time to simply throw the laptop into the Kaveri River. Or into the Ganga up north. I wouldn’t even bother with a puja. That is so tempting. Then I could just read and write poetry in notebooks, take naps and sit in meditation all day long. Like a monk or a shrub. 

The topic I wanted to cover today is of the utmost importance.

Crazy Town is both a place and a state of mind. If you’ve ever been a journalist then you would know this town very well.

It pops up behind you like a movie set when the world picks you up in a whirlwind and you’re forced to give up control and things start to spin wildly around you and mad laughter rises like soap bubbles from the depths of your soul. It may include PMS symptoms such as crying wildly in pristine beaches or yelling at innocent taxi drivers. Feeling completely at ease and not giving a damn about any consequences are required to gain admission into Crazy Town. In Crazy Town you’re always despeinada.

You may find yourself there because life has just tossed you around like a salad and then barfed up non vegan ranch dressing all over you. Or perhaps you were born wearing Picasso goggles. Born and bred in the C.T.

Last October, my best friend Heidi, a guy I liked and I went to the beach. It may sound like I’m always liking guys but come on, he’s only the second one I’ve mentioned on here. And really, that’s what happens when you’re a single, heterosexual girl. A woman, to be exact.

Anyway, we were in Cahuita, which is a gorgeous Caribbean beach town in Costa Rica, like the beach towns in your dreams, where they cook rice and beans in coconut milk and the sand is marshmallowy white.

This guy, to whom I wrote a beautiful love letter on the back of a world map that had to be read above 10,000 feet, he was so organized, methodical and practical in his approach to life. He was an engineer and he must’ve thought that we were lunatics. (He actually confirmed that later). Anyway, he had to leave the following morning and as he was walking away from our cabina I told Heidi, “He was just a visitor here…in Crazy Town.”

That is to say, he was not a resident, he’d simply dropped by for a weekend visit but his home was actually somewhere that he later christened Organization Town. I go visit there sometimes.

This is how Crazy Town was born.

That day, Heidi and I laid our sarongs on the sand and sat in front of the ocean to compile a list of people we thought might be Crazy Town residents, visitors, and people we’d probably never, ever see in this town. We texted a few people to confirm. Then we stumbled into the home of a famous, very old Costa Rican Calypso legend named Walter Ferguson and Heidi, who has a beautiful voice, sang to him, we took photos and decided to interview him on the spot.

Crazy Town may sound childish or insane and it is, I’m not going to lie.

It will make you sing “We didn’t start the Fire” at the top of your lungs and strike up a conversation with attractive Spanish men sitting in the car next to ours in the middle of a traffic jam. It makes you scribble “Toxoplasmosis of the crotch” in notebooks and then laugh about it for years to come.

It’s whatever makes you feel ALIVE like one of these Mysorean lightning bolts, crashing and sparkling and being, just BEING, fiercely, unapologetically.

It may be emotionally exhausting to live here year round, but I do hope everyone gets to visit, at least once in their lives.

And if you decide to make it, Heidi and I will be waiting. We’ll hold up signs saying: “Welcome to Crazy Town” and maybe we'll serve you complimentary drinks.

How Low Can You Go?

Bang.

That's the noise my head made when it crashed into the ground this week as I was doing the dropback sequence. 

Between the second series backbends, three urdhva dhanurasanas, three dropbacks (which I can't yet get up from on my own), three assisted backbends and one attempt at heel-catching per day my lower back is in shock mode. 

Strangely, it's not too sore or anything. And strangely, I don't feel nervous or psycho after practice every day, which is what usually happens when I OD on backbends back home. Either way, I feel that once my lower back and I get through this, a set of wings is going to sprout out of my ass and carry me deep into the terrifying jungle of second series. 

Well, this week, I was so tired of bending back, that my arms simply refused to extend faster than my head. 

Luckily, apart from letting out a deep, maniacal howl,  I survived the emergency landing. 

In fact, it served a magnificent purpose.

See, a miracle had happened a few minutes earlier. The Mysore Magic kicked in and somehow, with a facial expression that probably looked like I was giving birth, I pushed with all the power in my being and managed to spring up from laghu vajrasana all on my own. It resulted in another uncontrolled landing, this time on my face, but I cared very little for the lack of grace, inside of me there was a party going on. Oh yea, I got up, oh yea, here we go, oh oh oh yea.

The rappers in my head were still going at it by the time I hit backbending. 

And then came the big bang. 

I immediately understood that it must've been Providence, begging my ego to wrap up its little party. It worked wonderfully. Nothing like falling on your head for your ego to zip it. 

And that was that. If I hadn't landed on my head, instead of "Bang" I would've surely started this post with "OMG, guess what? I got up from laghu... It was SO awesome." 

So, tomorrow I'm taking my remains to the 3 Sisters in Laxmipuram, to see if they can patch me back together again with their ungodly castor oil bath. And to prepare for Kapotasana. May 26th, Saraswathi said. Oh lordy. 

Tomorrow is May 18th, the date when Guruji left his body, and I'd like to do something special, so I hope the castor oil doesn't leave me terminally exhausted. I'm not exactly sure what it'll be yet, or who will want to join, but thanks to two friends here, I already have a little secret surprise planned for Ashtanga Magazine, this magazine that I started this year with my teacher back home and a friend. It's online, www.ashtangamagazine.com but hopefully one day we'll make some money and take it to print too. 

I was going to write about something completely different but I got distracted. My friend Marcos back home, who's really sweet and plays the guitar like a fiend, he'd like to come to Mysore too and practice and the other day he asked me if it's a good idea to come here in low season, and I actually wanted to discuss that. 

I've never been here during high season, so I can't really compare, but I can comment on low season. 

For starters, Sharath isn't teaching now, so unless you're willing to practice with Saraswathi and miss out on weekly conferences, you shouldn't come now. 

Low season is hot. HOT. HOT. So...if you can't stand the heat...

Also, a lot of popular places in Gokulam that asthangis go to during the year close as soon as Sharath stops teaching. Mostly restaurants like Anu's, Anokhi, Vivian's, and Kushi, which was open before, just closed for a month this week. But a few places are still open: Tina's and Chakra House, Sandhya's in Laxmipuram, the 3 sisters (they cook too, and it's yum), Anima, Café Pascucci, and of course all the hotels, like the super nice Metropole and the Green Hotel. Personally, I find it kind of nice that many of these restaurants that cater to westerners are closed now, in that sense it feels like the low season experience is a bit more authentic. Maybe just a tiny bit more like it was back in the day. 

A major advantage is that you can pick and choose where you want to live. Usually, all the places closest to the main shala are booked solid. But now, you can actually arrive here, look around and have your pick, everything's available. Three friends are actually staying right across the street from the shala at Saraswathi's old house, which means they roll out of bed and roll into the shala. It's awesome to go to their place and look at all the old photos of Guruji and his family hanging on the walls.  

Next, the shala is not overflowing with people. There's actually enough space in there for everyone.

I also feel like our gurus are more accessible. As in, if you feel like having a chat with Saraswathi, you can just drop by in the afternoon and chances are you'll find her there. Sharath walks up and down the street all the time and cracks a smile whenever you see him. Little Sambhav often plays outside or hangs out at the shala too. 

Oh yea, and not to forget, because Sharath isn't teaching, Saraswathi's students get to practice at the main shala, which is pretty awesome. 

At first, when I arrived it seemed like there was no one around. I can be a lone wolf anyway, so I didn't mind this at all, and was gearing up to have more of a spiritual experience. 

However, you will start to meet people and realize how awesome everyone is, and how amazing it is that you all have yoga in common and can pretty much talk Ashtanga 24/7, and then your social agenda can get a little packed. I have to work on freelance stuff so I'm not on full vacation mode like most of my friends, but still, we're having a blast. In fact, we're eating a bit too much. I got a little worried today when I  had to clutch my rolls and move them out of the way so I could bind in the Marichyasanas. So, my goal next week, is to exercise more self control (that can be a hard one for me, I love food).

Oh, and my final observation will be an advantage to some and a disadvantage to others: we're all beginners. I know the very humble advanced students say we're all beginners, but I really mean it. We're in Ashtanga diapers. What I mean is, there are no Kino MacGregors around this time of year. I think the most advanced student at the shala right now does half intermediate. A few people are starting from scratch and a lot of people are not hardcore ashtangis or devoted to the lineage, they're just trying it out or in the middle of traveling. So, I don't know how advanced practitioners might feel about this. But I suspect it's beginners' heaven. At least it is to me. 

Anyway, if you have any low season questions, feel free to drop me a line.

My heels to my hands in Kapotasana: "You can't touch this!" 

A Few Lessons I've Learned about Living and Dying

Yesterday was Mother's Day in many places, and although there were no visible signs of it in Mysore, Facebook was bursting with photos and quotes.

It made me think quite a bit about my mother, who actually believed that Mother's Day was just a commercial scam (I inherited this idea from her, among other things). 

Although she was alive and healthy-looking a year ago at this time, she passed away in September, right after my 35th birthday, right before I was supposed to come here. I ended up cancelling that trip and that's why I'm here now. 

Every day, when we practice here in Mysore, I look at all the photos of Guruji and Amma, his wife, hanging on the walls of the shala. And I wonder how Saraswathi feels about not having her parents around anymore. She is so full of love.  

Saraswathi's going to Varanasi with her daughter Sharmila and her grandkids this week to do a puja on the Ganga for Guruji, who left his body on May 18th. At some point while I'm here, I'd like to do the same for my parents. Last time I came to India, I didn't feel that I was ready for Varanasi. I guess the time has come.

My mother's the second parent who's died on me in this lifetime, and although she and my father taught me a great many things, I think they taught me the most crucial lessons I've learned so far by transitioning out of this life. Even for that I am grateful to them. 

I bought a book here the other day, and in the preface it says that Mozart called death the key to unlocking the door to true happiness. And I get that now.

I'd like to share some of these lessons because maybe someone will find them helpful.

Dying is ok.

Really, it's not that bad. I mean, of course, we're animals and most of us are programmed with a survival instinct that makes us repel death. And that's natural. But, after watching the two closest people to me decay and leave their bodies, I can tell you that it's perfectly ok to die. 

My mother was the closest person to me on Earth. We used to bicker a lot, because we were like, extensions of our own minds, but I fear that no one will ever make me laugh as hard as she used to. I wasn't even aware of any of this until she was bedridden. Her death shook me to the ground. Suddenly, I had no home base, and I missed her. I missed hugging her because she was like a cute little polar bear. And well, she was my mother.  

Then one day, I read all this stuff written by Ram Dass. I love that guy. 

Like me, his mother died when he was 35. And like me, he went to India the year after. That's when he met his guru, Maharaji. 

He seemed to have turned out all right, and that made me feel like everything was going to be ok. 

He talks a lot about death, and in one of his writings, he mentions that the problem is how we perceive it. 

Once we understand that it's not the worst thing that can happen to us, once we see it as something beautiful, as the equivalent of being born, and as the book I'm reading says, as a chance for our souls to achieve wholeness, we understand that there is really no reason to grieve for our loved ones who've died. They are ok. And we will be ok too when the time comes to shed this skin. 

We have less time than we think. 

Carpe diem is correct. Yea sure, people are always saying this, but we should be really aware of it and act on it. We don't know when our time is coming, and sometimes, we delay our plans based on an erroneous perception that the people we love and ourselves will be around forever. Mañana is a very popular philosophy where I'm from. But you see, you never really know if you'll be around mañana. Whatever it is that you have to do here on Earth, do it now. Regardless of what other people think or say. If you need to quit your job and move to India, do it. If you're going to write a book, start writing. 

Last July, my mother and I had plans to go to this port city in Costa Rica called Puntarenas, sit by the ocean and have a Churchill, which is a decadent mix of shaved ice, condensed milk and powdered milk soaked in red syrup. 

From one day to the next, she was bedridden. 

The fact that we didn't have our Churchill is really not that bad, but you get my point. 

No matter what happens to us, we can always choose how we react to it. 

Actually, to be honest, this lesson floated into my consciousness one night in Thailand, at a permaculture farm near Chiang Mai. I'd smoked a lot of weed and went to the dorm room to lie down and suddenly this idea hit me out of nowhere. We can choose what we feel. It was like an orgasm. The most revolutionary orgasm I've ever had. 

This happened before I'd discovered yoga and now, as a yoga practitioner, it makes even more sense to me. 

The thing with yoga is that it calms the mind. So it's easier to catch our thoughts as they race around all over the place. It's easier to observe and understand them. 

I was really young when my father died. Seventeen. And I had no idea how to process what had happened or deal with it. I spent the next decade grieving, self-destructing and being unaware of many of the amazing things and people around me. Not that I wasn't having fun, I had a blast. Ahh..the terrible twenties. 

When my mother died, I recognized the familiar tormented feelings of utter sadness, and I immediately said to myself, "I am not grieving for another ten years. Fuck that!" 

Of course I had to go through a period of mourning, and I tried not to repress a single emotion. 

But knowing that we are the masters of our minds, and embracing carpe diem has led me to consciously choose to be happy. 

The world is full of beauty and kindness and we can choose to focus on it. To focus on the people around us who are not dead. To focus on life, which is happening now, around us, in all it's glory, regardless of what has happened to us and what is going through our heads. 

Don't ever assume that your plans are set in stone. Because in the end, the universe will do whatever it damn pleases.

India is a really great teacher of this lesson, try traveling around here by train. 

Last year I decided to work about twenty jobs so that I could come to Mysore, with a stopover in Sweden where I'd visit some guy I liked. I was living in the gorgeous Costa Rican beach town of Nosara. And I wasn't enjoying my present. I was working two jobs at a yoga retreat there, practicing in a rush between jobs and coming home exhausted only to open my laptop and work on freelance writing and translation projects. I must've been the only stressed out person in the history of Nosara. I had no time to sit by the beach and watch sunsets or hang out with my awesome friends. Finally, I collected the cash I needed, bought my plane tickets went to San José, got all excited, and then suddenly, my mother was bedridden. The Swedish guy disappeared. And I understood that over the last few months, I should've worked really hard at enjoying my present, not the future. The universe had pulled another one of its funny little tricks, and this one came in the form of a slap in the fucking face, so hard it left me reeling.  

And unfortunately, I have to admit that I have trouble with this lesson still. I have a tendency to work too hard, it runs in the family. 

Except now, I make a conscious effort to take breaks, to not be in a rush, to never end conversations because I need to get back to work, to pet puppies, smell flowers, graffiti walls and enjoy life. 

People's bodies' may die, but they don't.

This is a very common spiritual teaching, so I've been familiar with it for a while now. But immediately after my mother died, I realized that she was still with us. I felt it very strongly. In fact I was afraid that I had swallowed her soul by mistake because when she was on her deathbed, I was holding her hand and pressing a little Shiva pendant on it, breathing and repeating mantras in my head with my eyes closed so that I could stay calm. I wondered if the mantras and Shiva had made her soul stick around. My sister was on her other side and I have no idea what she was doing, but she stayed calm too. We'd both read a lot about the moment of death and we knew that people around a dying person have to stay calm to ensure that they go through a smooth transition. I'm so happy that we could give her that. 

When my mother stopped breathing, I had no idea that she'd left her body. My sister figured it out, and I couldn't really believe it, because I felt that she was still there. We had to check about twenty times until we finally realized she was gone. From her body.

Before I left Costa Rica I thought my mother's presence would be staying home. But she didn't. She came to India too. I find that I can't even miss her because she's around me all the time. 

I may be crazy, that's one possibility. But I'm also aware that yoga clears our nadis (energy channels) so our perception is magnified.  

Either way, if you're worried about losing someone close to you, don't be. They may leave their bodies behind, but what they really are, which is LOVE, will be around forever. 

I always felt like I'd skipped a generation. My parents were really old when they had me and people always thought they were my grandparents. I'm aware that when most people lose their parents, they're much older than my sister and I. But I'm pretty grateful to have been fast-forwarded these lessons at our age. I know they're going to make the rest of the journey much easier, however long it lasts. And sharing them? Ahh that makes me even happier. 

Paining

So, you know Sharath's quote "First month paining, second month tired, third month flying" about practicing in Mysore? Well, my first full week of practice with Saraswathi at KPJAYI is now over and I have to declare that I am definitely paining.

This morning, getting out of bed felt kind of like this:

Saraswathi and Sharath run on different schedules, she teaches from Monday to Saturday and Saturday is led class, which is particularly hardcore. This morning she kept us in sirsasana and utpluthih for what felt like an eternity. 

Last week, I took ladies' holiday and then it was Moon Day, so I practiced a mere four days and my body was fully functional. 

This week, my joints sound like a bowl of rice crispies, they keep popping and crackling. 

Back home, I practice consistently and suffer from the usual sporadic aches and pains. Shoulders, neck, lower back, wrists occasionally. Nothing major. 

But here, my knees are bobbing every which way, weird jolts of pain keep traveling up and down my entire frame and whenever I sit, i find it increasingly hard to get up. Grandma style. Granted, here in India, sitting happens on the floor for the most part.

Saraswathi asked me to start second series this week, and that could have something to do with it. I'm on laghu vajrasana right now, and I'm afraid it could take a few lifetimes to master the getting up part. Every day, she has to grab my hips and yank me up like a broken jack-in-the-box. 

It could also be the heat. The shala, have I mentioned it's like a sauna in there? 

But I do believe there's something magical in there too. 

Some friends and I were laughing at the stench of the carpet in the shala, and someone said it's probably absorbed a few decades of sweat, including Guruji's. 

And I suppose it could be true. Whether it's his sweat, his prana, Sharath and Saraswathi's presence, the energies of thousands of dedicated teachers and practitioners who come to the source each year, or all of the above, something in there makes you give it all you've got every second that you're on the mat. 

The results are astonishing.

After a few days, I'm about a centimeter from grabbing my wrist in supta kurmasana. I'm dropping back like a fiend and I wouldn't be surprised if I catch my heels one of these days with Saraswathi's expert hold on my hips. Plus, after practice, you're just blissing out non-stop. 

Also, I've always had this thing with sirsasana. It terrifies me. The idea of not being able to see behind you and falling over to the other side... Oh..the horror! 

When I started to practice almost three years ago, I remember dreading sirsasana from the moment I got on the mat every day. And as the finishing sequence came closer, I'd get seriously nervous. It was like, sirsasana was a mean high school bully and I was a wobbly little elementary school geek. Sirsasana was always out to get me. 

I practiced falling on the grass and I'd scream like a lunatic and the fear wouldn't budge. It was extremely annoying to me that sirsasana, the "king of asanas," and all its benefits, were unavailable to me. Simply because of this inexplicable fear. I felt like such a pussy. 

Was it Deepak Chopra who said that all fear is fear of death? Well, to me, sirsasasana was kind of that. A confrontation with death or insanity, two of the most disquieting options we can be faced with. Sirsasana turns the whole world upside down, and falling from its heights is the ultimate relinquishing of control.  

Over the years, the fear has become manageable. I can get into the asana, breathe and come back down without completely losing it. But I never feel overly confident in sirsasana. You never know when the fear will overtake you again and thrash you around like a wipe out...

But now, in the shala, I feel like someone's got my back, even though Saraswathi has never come close to me when I'm in this asana. 

I wouldn't say that I've mastered sirsasana, hell no. I still can't get into B and come back up. But at least the fear seems to have dissipated. The other day I caught myself looking forward to it, and it's actually beginning to feel like a rest pose, which is exactly what it is. I guess it's bound to happen, when the rest of the practice becomes so excruciating and draining, there is nothing like hanging out upside down for 25 breaths.

Ahh the Mysore magic!  

Devanāgarī (देवनागरी लिपि)

Salutations to the Supreme state of Being.

Sanskrit scriptures always start with this message, so I figured that's how I'd open this entry. 

This week, a handful of other KPJAYI students and I started taking Sanskrit lessons and studying the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the most ancient and well-known yogic texts around. 

Our teacher's name is Lakshmish and oddly enough, the class takes place in the ladies' changing room at the main shala. Lakshmish writes stuff on a small whiteboard next to the lockers and we gather around him on the floor. He's a Brahmin, so he learned Sanskrit when he was just a kid and had to memorize lots of yogic texts. It's amazing to hear him recite them and I love how the light and dust particles float in through the window and descend on us like microscopic snowflakes. 

I've been trying to learn Sanskrit for a while now, and back home, I looked all over for a teacher. My research led me to the University of Costa Rica, where I managed to track down one of the country's two or three teachers. I sat outside her class for an hour, waiting for her students to finish an exam, and when she was getting ready to go, I burst in and asked if she wanted to teach me. She had a big, round, friendly face and she burst out laughing. 

"Why do you want to learn Sanskrit?" she asked.

"I don't know."

She told me that I'd have to enroll as a student at the university and that she recommended to come to India instead. The courses at the university were just a tiny brushstroke of what is a massive, lifelong field of study, and even if I dedicated the rest of my days to learning Sanskrit, I'd probably never be able to read and understand any of the scriptures. What a bummer!

Anyway, I was impatient at the time, so I looked around for more options but finally, knowing that I'd end up coming back to India eventually, I decided to wait.

And now...years later, here we are, learning Sanskrit inside the ladies' room. 

One of the first things that Lakshmish taught us is the meaning of the word Devanāgarī. 

Devanāgarī is the script used to write Sanskrit and a few other languages, such as Hindi. It means script of the city of the Gods (Deva = God and nāgarī = city) and it's such a beautiful word. 

I found out that Sanskrit was also written using a script called Siddham, which is even older than the script of the city of the Gods. Ever heard of siddhis?

I feel like all of the answers that I've been seeking my whole life are written in Sanskrit. And that it stores a lot of secrets. 

Yesterday we talked about how yogic knowledge used to be passed down only to a select few. It had nothing to do with caste, or education or any of those things. It was a matter of devotion. Yoga gave people lots of powers that could be misused. (I'm guessing they involve levitation and predicting the future and that kind of thing), so gurus had to be very selective when they chose to transfer their knowledge. I guess that's not the case anymore, now that yoga's so commercialized and has been reduced to an asana practice that people equate with aerobics or some other butt-sculpting method. 

Anyway, I'm convinced that all these sages and ancient yogis had it all figured out. And I don't mean that they could stop their own hearts or choose when to leave their bodies, although, apparently, they could. I mean that they understood why we're here and who we really are and what this is all for. Maybe they didn't even care for these questions.  

And it's such a paradox...India is such a paradox. It blows my mind that all this knowledge is stored here, you'd really never guess it when you get off the plane and step into the chaos...This beautiful chaos that I love above all else. 

This is Kushinagar up north, from my last trip here. It's where the Buddha died.

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.