Beyond belief

I'm perched in karandavasana when I realize help will not come. 

Karandavasana is possibly the hardest asana overall in the intermediate series of Ashtanga yoga.  It is so hard that women aren't held to the same standards as men.  All women except for me.

In karandavasana your forearms are on the floor and your legs are in the air like when you stand on your head except your head isn't on the ground.  Then you cross your legs like a pretzel (in the air) and lower them down to touch your armpits with your butt hovering in the air above the ground.  You perch there for five very slow, very deep breaths and then you slowly reverse the movements, taking the legs back up to the ceiling.  Then you hop your hands and feet into the bottom of a push up position.  So, yeah, it is hard. 

Men have to be able to consistently do the whole thing with ease and grace before being moved on to the next asana in the series.  Women only need to be able to come down and perch.  From there one of the assistants or my teacher picks you up and puts you in the original position but you do have to jump back correctly before being moved on. 

The female version I got, no problem.  I was moved on a few years ago and so today I do the usual.  I take my legs up, I cross them, I slowly lower down and breathe calmly, waiting for someone to pick me up.  Five breaths (which is all you need to do) go by, ten breaths, fifteen breaths, twenty breaths and I realize that help is not coming.  I sit down and look across the room to my teacher who is looking at me and then looks away.  This means "do it yourself because you can".  Standing next to me is one of the assistants and he is kind of chuckling to himself. 

"Really?"  I shrug and try again.  

No one comes.  And again.  No one comes. and again... Each time the two assistants are just shrugging and saying sorry because we all know that this is kind of a big deal and it is funny at how impossible it seems but he really wants me to come up by myself.  Eventually he does come over and helps me up.  He did this the last trip for a minute and I guess I never took the hint or at least not seriously or it is just a really slow process mentally and it doesn't need to be.  Sometimes it is hard to believe in yourself as much as someone else.  And this someone else I truly believe and want to see it through because he has absolutely no reason to need to believe in me.  He just does.

The one where I just can't because everything is happening so much

Yesterday started with that one-footed asana practice which was doable but there is this saying here that goes "practice plus one" and just eating would have filled the plus one portion.  But it was a holiday - a big one - and India always wins.  After practice I came home for a nap so that the whole routine is really to get up in the middle of the night, go to class and then come home and continue sleeping like nothing ever happened.  And if your practice time is early like mine then you get home and it is still dark and it was all just a dream.

So after I woke up for real I just wanted my usual which makes everything okay.  My usual is a stack of English papers and breakfast to-go from the stand up place.  Idli vada or set dosa "parcel-la". 

They were closed. 

So I went around the corner to the stand up sit down place.  Also closed. 

I look around and realize that for sure everything will be closed except for the vendors that have popped up suddenly selling banana leaves and other festival items (which are now abandoned everywhere and are causing a major cleanup issue).  I resign myself to the fact that I must either make my own breakfast (no) or go to one of the "yogi" cafes run by foreigners.  I am not a fan.  Expensive, not my taste, and a whole lot of gossip and over and over where are you from?  How long will you be here?  How many times have you been?  Etc.  All perfectly acceptable except that I just want my newspapers and idli vada in silence at home.

But fine.  I go to this place called Santosha and find a little corner on the floor around a small coffee table and I order food that the owner swears up and down is vegan.  It isn't.  Not pleased.

We have special tickets to go to the center to see the festival up close and personal.  It involves a lot of sitting in plastic chairs.  We think at least 5 hours of this.  When we arrive it is too late.  It was actually supposed to be much longer.  Arrive by 10:30 at the latest.  At 2:30 things sort of start.  In the interim you are just sitting there.   From 2:30 to 5:30 or later there are elephants and processions and dancers and a whole lot of splendor but we see none of it.  We arrive around 12:45 by rickshaw and it is just madness.  People everywhere.  Cars, buses, bikes, scooters, carts, vendors, everything everywhere all at once.  It is impossible for us to get close enough to present our tickets and get to our assigned seats.  We walk around and consider jumping a fence and more and more feel boxed in and drunk Indian men staring at us.

We find ourselves wedged between two buses with some sort of official attempting to negotiate with a police officer to get us to cross the parade itself so we can get to our seats.  While this is happening we are smashed between the two buses, single file with more Indians wiggling their way between us.  Somehow they made themselves fit.  The smell of alcohol was strong and just people staring at us even more than we were staring at them.  There were ten of us together and still I somehow managed to be robbed.  I suddenly had the sense that I should look down and I see my purse open and I look in and my wallet is gone and I notice the drunk next to me is trying to worm his way out and I start yelling like a maniac and I scare him and I see my wallet drop into a pool of liquid (hopefully water).  Everything is still in it and we decide to leave.  We go to Pascucci for pizza and pasta and AC and watch the events on a big screen TV.

We get back to our neighborhood (Gokulum) and ride our scooters home.  We usually park in front of the house on the little car park but our landlord has parked his car there even though he usually parks in the driveway and he specifically told us that we should park there.  By this time I have decided I am just finished and when I go to park in the street I forget to put down the kickstand and I start to lean the scooter to rest on the nonexistent kickstand and when I realize I am leaning too much somewhere inside I surrender to India and say "OK, this is the part where we all lie down."  My housemate is laughing and takes a picture and the moment is forever captured on facebook.

We agree to rest up.  India will be waiting in the morning.  I close my door and get ready for bed and hear "Alice!  Alice!  Outside my bedroom window.  There is no hiding.  India is everywhere.

Monday

This is the first kind of "regular" day for me in a couple of weeks.  I usually practice primary series on Fridays and intermediate series Sunday through Thursday with Fridays off.  When you travel the energy gets crazy and so you take primary which is earthy and grounding.  As comfortable as it is, it isn't my regularly scheduled programming and now that I'm back on intermediate I feel more like myself.  (Or at least more like what I'm used to which I'm calling myself but as yoga philosophy will tell you the self was there all along like a necklace you forgot you were wearing.)

Class happens each day in "batches".  The first batch starts at 4:30am shala time which is about 4:15am regular time which means waking up at 2:45am in order to be on time.  When I walk downstairs in the darkness and start up my scooter, sometimes (like today) I remember to look up and the stars are always closer than I think they will be.  There are very few street lights on and a few days ago a friend (who has lived in India for years) and I noticed for the first time that the street lights are turned on or off one at a time by a man who stops each morning and evening at each pole to flip the switch. 

Starting a scooter first thing in the morning can be a bit tricky and sometimes you have to kick start it or get on and roll it down a hill and try to start it with the momentum.  Turning the headlights on is not possible.  So you just take it as it comes and sometimes roll down the hill in darkness, ready to dodge sleeping street dogs and cows and pedestrians although there are very few of any of those at Brahmamurti (God's hour).  The air is thick and smells like nature more than anything else and everything has a layer of dew.  You can hear the sound of footsteps really far away and the occasional neighbor spitting and the scooter but that is it.  Not even the birds are awake yet.  In that kind of light, riding to the shala for practice, it sometimes feels like a dream and I remind myself that I'm awake and this is really happening.

Happy Vijaydashami

When you get an Indian sim card you also get text message adverts and sometimes when you make calls they will play an advert first and sometimes they will call you and just play commercials.  Usually I get "free STD offers" which has something to do with telephone services, but still.  Today I received a text message encouraging me to wish all of my family and friends "a very happy Vijaydashami and spread the message of victory of Good over Evil."  You see, it is a big holiday time right now and all the kids are home from school and the shops are stocked with festival items such as flowers and banana leaves.  Tomorrow is the puja for the vehicles and so we'll buy strings of flowers and turmeric to decorate our scooters.

Tomorrow is also the first day of led intermediate which I'll be doing on one foot for the most part so as not to reopen the cut on my toe which is pretty hard not to do in every day life but I'm managing.  In the afternoon we are possibly having "conference" which is a lecture with our teacher.  It all depends on the celebrations tomorrow. If we have conference, then we also have Sanskrit class.  And if it rains tomorrow then it means it will be a good year in Mysore.  Everyone is hoping it will rain.

Scrapbook - live from India

I'm in Mysore, India.  I'm posting photos here.  The Shala is still open of course.  You come!

Just an ordinary day

This is the one where I electrocute myself just a little and cut myself kind of a lot and it starts with early morning asana practice.   I had a couple of days off and the start times had been moved later one hour and now back to the original times.  So I arrived at about 4:15am which is 4:30am "Shala Time".  My teacher asked me if I would assist next month instead of this month so today I only did my own practice, had a coconut, and then headed back home to sleep for a couple of hours before breakfast.  We went to a little place called Anoki's which is owned by some French people and at 300rs is steep compared to my 60rs maximum usual at the stand up or stand up sit down place.   I had vegan crepes with spinach and hummus and vegan toast and a "massive" french press coffee which was too little too late but still quite welcome.

From there we went to Sudha's to pay my balance and drop off more items to ship.  Yesterday she told us about the Rangoli at her house and how it is a family tradition and they never plan it, it just flows.  "It is like a god" she says.  And they do puja for them and ones like this have the padma, the lotus, and so they are for Lakshmi or kind of are Lakshmi because everything is god.  Today no mention of how I've lost weight since last time, instead she told me that they like my kind of nose in India and that "it is called like the flower.  Champa."  I googled that.  I don't see it but okay.

It is an auspicious time to buy gold and so we ask her where we should go and where we should put it and head out on a mission to the center.  We buy new helmets that actually fit and stop at Shree Guru for a "Limited Thali, only" for lunch.  I couldn't remember exactly how to get where we were going but we got there and parked where we could.  We take about two steps on the sidewalk and I stub my toe.  It doesn't hurt but something tells me to look down and I see just blood everywhere and there is more of it with every step and I sort of hop around for a second and these guys in a gold and bangle store pull up a stool and tell me to sit and they come out with that cotton you find in jewelery boxes and people are gathering around to watch the cotton turn red and my face which might have been laughing or swearing I can't remember which.  One housemate runs to a pharmacy around the corner for supplies and the other stays with me.  The shop clerk goes and returns with bottled water and motions for me to hop to the curb because there is a whole lot of blood in front of the shop and then he pours bottled water onto my toe in the street.  An old man wearing a lunghi and button down shirt stops his scooter in the middle of traffic to watch and grin and wiggle his head at me a few times before carrying on.

My housemate comes back with peroxide and tape and I hop to the corner and there is a chai stand and a man brings over his chair for me.  I sit and yelp as they clean my toe surrounded by a crowd of Indians sipping chai and selling ginger and shopping.  We put a bit more jewelry cotton and tape it up and have lemon teas for caffeine and sugar and we ride our scooters back home and I'm shaking the whole time.  Don't worry, my housemates are taking good care of me.

Three

This morning we went to the stand up sit down place around the corner from the stand up place by the temple on the main road.  We had "big teas" with sugar, mine black, hers with milk.  We had idli vada which is two steamed fermented rice and lentil batter (the same for dosas) patties a bit smaller than a biscuit.  That's the idli part.  The vada is the same batter shaped in a donut with other miscellaneous vegetables added (and coconut) and that's deep fried and delicious.  We had them what I call "Indian style" which means you do like the locals do - the locals being about 20 or 30 Indian men because women cook for themselves don't they?  Unless they work at the stand up sit down place because the entire staff is male.  And unless they are us because we are fully prepared to let the men cook for us at the stand up sit down place.

So we have them Indian style which means that we take the sambar (a red vegetable soup that is spicy of course) and pour it over the idli vada.  We add a little coconut chutney as needed - which is nothing like that jelly-like substance you get at North Indian restaurants and is also spicy - and with a spoon in each hand, eat.  Two spooning it is what really seals the deal.

The teas come in metal cups nested in small metal bowls which appear to be saucers but they aren't.  You're supposed to pour a bit of the tea into the bowl and drink that.  "Bigger surface area" the waiter explained to my housemate the other day.  It makes it drinkable.  And so does serving it crazy hot because you have to have a death wish to drink the tap water.

Next came chanting class at the Shala followed by a short goodbye to my two students who are leaving.  They had planned to stay a month.  A week was enough. 

To stay here we have to be willing to be okay with things.  And it isn't just one thing here and there, it is everything all at once all the time.  The jet lag, the culture, the food, the ATMs, the power outages, the third world, the finding housing, the everything.  So we find small ways to cozy up like decent pizza, a good coffee, wifi, American movies, restaurants that don't make us sick, and nice people.  You just can't look around too much because everything is just right there.  Or you can, but you have to be willing to be okay with what you see which, again, will be everything.  For better or for worse India is a karma accelerator.

Two

It was quiet - mostly- and I was brushing my teeth at the sink maybe with bottled water, maybe with tap water, I don't remember.  Suddenly, the sound of running water.  I look to the right and next to the toilet is a pipe with water pouring out into the drain where the bucket shower water flows.  With the toothbrush in my mouth my eyes trace the pipe along the wall behind the toilet (western), it turns the corner under the window, and leads straight up to the wash basin where I am brushing my teeth.  I put something here and it goes out there.  The honesty of the situation is unsettling and I realize that this is a big thing about being here.  We see everything.

Day One

I didn't just arrive but I am now just getting settled.  It is around 3:30am and I'm drinking Indian instant coffee which is loaded with chicory.  Not ideal, but it is something.  The thing I forgot was how much work it is to get established in a new place in general and India in particular.  And this isn't really tough India.  Still, everything is just different.

Just being able to write and publish this post counts on many separate parts coming together at the exact moment I want to press "send", which of course, it often does not.  The space between the points requires patience and when they keep missing each other and never appear to be able to match up is when people freak out in a big way and leave.  I'm here with three of my students.  Two are seriously considering going back home. 

I arrived with the wrong power adapter.  This means no charging my computer.  This means no computer.  Or it means using the reception's computer at the hotel we stayed at with the hotel manager reading over my shoulder.  Finding a new adapter meant I needed transportation because we were staying at a hotel which wasn't very centrally located and I didn't have a scooter (now I do).  So we had to hail a rickshaw and argue about using the meter and about how much they would charge and make sure we had small change to pay and think of a place to go to buy the charger and will they even be open because this is India and also Dasara Festival and also I haven't been since 2010 and things change.  In the end my new housemate had an extra adapter.  It took a few days for her to hear me through her own fog of jet lag and patchouli and culture shock.

So now I have a working computer and cellphone and wifi (occasionally) and time to write (since most basic needs are now in place) and already too many stories.  My teacher says one month in Mysore is like a year anywhere else.  He's talking about the practice but I can believe it to be about just being here.  Even preparing my daily shower - bucket shower - is an epic event.  I had my first class yesterday morning at 4:30am which actually means about 4:15am because the clocks are fast at the shala ("Shala Time").  I was "late" which means that the students were no longer waiting outside for the gates to open but class had not yet begun.  I moved some mats over and claimed a little real estate up front on the stage.  A bit weird at first knowing everyone is looking in your direction even if it isn't at you but once class begins it doesn't matter.  There's just me and my teacher counting and my breathing and the sound of 80 some humans moving and breathing together.  I just drop into it and at a certain point come up for air realizing that my mind is really quiet and I'm just in it.  This is worth it and makes everything else OK.  I love being here.