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.