Survived India!

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Wow. I just went from a city of 22,000,000 to a town of 1,600 on the other side of the world in 36 hours. Wow. I made it. I’m in one piece, healthy and happy. I barely got sick. And I managed to trick jet lag by staying up until 5 am my last few nights in Delhi. After a taxi to a plane to a bus to a plane to a shuttle to a plane to a train to a train to a train to a car, I arrived home to Vermont last night around 8 pm. I had a salad (!!!) with my mom, went to bed at 9:30 pm, and woke up at 7 am feeling surprisingly well-rested and alert.

So there’s a thing called reverse culture shock. It seems to be bigger and faster than regular culture shock because all the differences hit you at once, instead of slowly revealing themselves as you get to know a place. You’re back in a place that’s familiar, except nothing works as you’ve grown accustomed. A lot of my experiences in the past (long hikes, meditations, etc) have given me the sensation of a crust being cleaned off my brain, allowing me to see things with new eyes. Right now is the strongest I’ve ever had this sensation. My brain is entirely crust-free.

Here’s what is different:

Clean air. I just went for a three mile run and my lungs feel wrecked from four months of the pollution. We’re so lucky here.

Clean water. From the tap. Amazing. It tastes like unicorns and rainbows. Clean ones.

Trash. Where is all the trash? Not burning in a pile next to the street?

Empty space. There is so much space here, and so few people to fill it. But they do manage to fill it, because

Personal space. You don’t get any in India. People here expand to fill the space they’ve got. Touching suddenly feels weird. I probably touched (inadvertently, shaking hands, etc) more strangers in the last four months than the rest of my life in the states.

Bare legs. Whoa. You’re wearing a miniskirt on a train?

Phones. Most people in India have phones, but they don’t stare at them as much. They’re usually in a group of real-life people instead. It felt like all the New Yorkers on the train had their heads down.

Quiet. It’s so quiet my ears hurt. I didn’t know this was a real thing.

Lawns. Houses. Cars. All so big.

No people. Even Penn Station felt like a tidy little community gathering. Nothing like a ‘crowd’ anywhere. But still people seemed to be in a big rush. I didn’t see a lot of rushing in India, or at least not a lot of stressful rushing. You’ll get there when you get there, and that’s mostly out of your control. Which relates to

Stress in general. People here have it, a lot. In India, there is non-stop honking in the streets, everyone is constantly cutting everyone else off, dipping in and out of lanes. But nobody takes it personally. It’s just how things work, and there’s a sense of “we’re all in it together”. Here it feels a lot more like a competition. And big trucks.

Trucks. And people driving them. If you had enough money to have a truck in India, you’d probably be using it to ship goods and you almost definitely would not be the one driving it.

Highways. They pretty much don’t exist in India.

White people. Black people. India is mostly all the shades in between.

Communication. I can understand everyone. I kind of wish I couldn’t. But mostly people don’t seem to be communicating, they’re in their own bubble.

Dogs. Someone had a dog with them at the grocery store. I was not afraid of it biting me and sending me to a hospital for a rabies shot. Also no scary monkeys.

Trains. Here they’re late and clean.

Bathrooms. They’re everywhere! No more pee anxiety!

Recreation. People are doing things for fun all over the place, and a lot of it involves exercise. I didn’t see much exercise for health or recreation in India, and what little there is mainly consisted of getting huge at the gym.

Bare feet. Without fear of hookworm.

Did I mention the clean air? I also have a strange desire to take pictures of people sleeping in awkward positions on the train. This might not have to do with culture shock.

I can already feel my brain adjusting to the vibrations of life here. We’re such adaptable creatures. I feel really lucky to live in such a healthy place full of so much opportunity. Now I want to do something with it.

Meeting the Dalai Lama

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I’ve been staying in Mcleod Ganj for two weeks now, the home of the TIbetan government in exile and the Dalai Lama. It’s just up the hill from Dharamsala in the Himachal Pradesh region of northern India. Like most places I’ve been in India, this place is completely different from every other place I’ve been in India. Only the difference is more extreme. The Tibetan community and culture changes the vibe completely. There are also a lot of westerners here, but they tend to be socially-conscious volunteering types rather than travelers looking for the cheapest bed. It’s just about the calmest, cleanest, most
coffee-filled city I’ve visited in India.

I’ve been into Buddhism since I was a teenager, so part of my idea coming here was the hope that I’d get to see the His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Based on his official website (he also has Twitter), it seemed like he might be in town for a few days between trips to Japan and Norway, but that he wouldn’t be holding any public audiences. Then last week while returning from a hike, a man recognized our new friend and Pacific Northwest yoga teacher, Paul, and stopped us. This guy had done an acroyoga workshop with Paul four years ago in Mysore. Who knows how he recognized him, but he told us that the Dalai Lama would be holding a receiving line for foreigners on Saturday, and that you had to register at the Tibetan security office. We booked it down the hill to the office, got there 45 minutes after they were supposed to close but just as they were getting ready to actually close. It turns out we would have been able to register the next day as well, but registering that afternoon saved us a multiple-hour wait in the line.

Saturday came and it turned out about four times as many people as they expected had registered for the event (1600 foreigners and 400 Indians – I could have told them this would be popular), so the Dalai Lama would be standing with small groups for photos and giving a talk instead of receiving everyone individually. This rarely happens for westerners, so we basically got super lucky to have this opportunity while already in town. We arrived around 6:30 AM, slowly got shuffled into the courtyard in his residence, and stood around for a few hours. Eventually we were instructed to organize by country and break up into groups of 40-50.

Sometime after 10 AM, His Holiness appeared from his residence, grinning and wearing those awesome tinted glasses he wears in all his photos. I’ve heard people talk about how the energy in the room changes when certain great people are around. I had some feeling of this when visiting Amma’s ashram, but it was not as tangible as this. When the Dalai Lama appeared, everyone immediately buoyed up out of the haze of hours of waiting around. I could feel a sensation of opening in my heart, and a huge smile immediately formed on my face. Part of this is due to expectation being satisfied. A bigger part, I think, is the collective energy of the group. And a third part, which I can’t explain but may be the real reason, is the energy and aura of the person. I don’t know what to think about auras, but you can tell when someone has good energy, and this guy has great energy. Supposedly you could feel the Buddha’s aura from three kilometers away.

As the Dalai Lama walked from group to group, every movement seemed to be filled with joy and kindness. He joked around naturally with everyone, received their greetings with grace, and transmitted an amazing sense of compassion. It was all a little bit rushed because of the size of the group, but he took the time to connect with people who felt compelled to ask or tell him something. The photo itself wasn’t such a big deal. It was a lot more fun to watch this 78 year old man navigate a crowd of 2,000 adoring fans.

Dalai Lama

Posing with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his residence in Mcleod Ganj

After all the photos were taken, the Dalai Lama made his way to the stage to give his talk. It was great to hear his voice, and his laugh is unbeatable. I took two main points away from the talk, though the whole thing was powerful. First, that all the struggles created between groups of people are based on secondary (or tertiary, or lower) characteristics. Skin color, religion, ethnicity, nationality, economic status, politics. All are secondary to the fact of our common humanity. It can be so difficult to see beyond these apparent differences, but the fact is that each of us is one of seven billion people on this planet. We’re all striving for pretty much the same thing: a happy, secure life. He also gave a shout out to India for being the largest democracy in the world, and for having such a strong cultural attitude of nonviolence and tolerance. There are always exceptions, but it is remarkable how many different kinds of people live so densely here, yet in such peace.

My second major take-away was on the secular education of compassion. Formal education systems around the world focus on facts and analytic thinking in the maths and sciences, and leave ideas of kindness and compassion to religious and community organizations. It turns out compassion is not religion, and there’s no need for it to be confined to a segment of life with so much other baggage, and which is absent from so many people’s lives. Cultivating compassion is crucial for living a joyful and happy life, even for atheists. The more I read about neuroscience, the more I understand that this is a quality of the human brain, and has nothing to do with God or saints or what-have-you. It’s science. “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion” – HHTDL. I have a lot more thinking to do about this, but I’m pretty sure I want to make it a big part of my life.

The main piece I’ve left out of this story of meeting the Dalai Lama is plight of the Tibetan people, and the fact that all of this joy and kindness comes from one of the most persecuted and repressed populations in the world today. I’ve been finding out much more about the issue since I’ve been in town, and I hope I can relate some sense of what’s happening in my next post. To be continued…

Yoga yoga yoga!

Iyengar Yoga/I am not a Yogi

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I have a confession to make. I’m not doing yoga how you’re supposed to. I don’t even want to. But I’m going to keep doing it anyway, and even teach.

I just finished a 5-day Iyengar yoga course near Dharamsala. Iyengar yoga was founded by B.K.S. Iyengar, who is basically the biggest yoga all-star in recent history. Definitely top three. This course was taught by Sharat Arora, a student of Iyengar’s, so this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to the source. I should start by saying that I enjoyed the course thoroughly. Sharat is an amazing teacher, full of life and inspiration. In five 3.5-hour sessions, my practice has been fine-tuned, and in some places completely overhauled.

Here’s the deal: Iyengar yoga is focused strongly on proper alignment and balance of the body. It doesn’t care much about strength or flexibility, and all sorts of props (blocks, belts, chairs, bolsters, blankets, etc) are used to make it possible for anyone to get into the best alignment in each pose. The teacher put a lot of emphasis on relaxing into each pose while maintaining alignment in order to release all the tension in the body.

Philosophically, the idea here is that balance in the body creates balance in the mind, and releasing tension in the body slowly eliminates tension in the mind, which is the root of craving and aversion. All this is more compelling and intricate when properly described, and my experience has suggested to me that it’s completely true. The teacher remarked that only this type of balance is “yoga.” All the forms which emphasize strength or flexibility are not real yoga, rather acrobatics or calisthenics. And on the my fundamental level, I have to agree with this as well.

The problem with strength or flexibility yoga, is that the poses continually create more craving to do harder poses, or to go deeper into the ones you know. Most recently for me this has been about handstand and scorpion. I want to be able to stand comfortably on my hands, and I want to be able to touch the back of my head with my feet. This is generally kind of weird, is not sustainable for the whole life, and is definitely not aligned with yogic thinking. Iyengar yoga does a lot better in this regard. There aren’t that many poses, they’re all accessible, and even more so with the props. You don’t have to go deep into the pose to get the benefits. As long as you keep proper alignment, you’ll reduce the tension in your body and become calm, more free from desire.

But I still want to be able to do these harder things. I want to deepen my yoga practice and my poses, to be stronger and more flexible. The more I learn about actual yoga philosophy, the more I realize that this freedom from desire is not really what I’m looking for in my practice. Maybe from meditation, but not from the yoga itself. Instead, I use the poses to balance my life on a larger scale. I plan to keep doing all sorts of things that create imbalance in my body: running, rock climbing, having worldly possessions and desires. To be totally immersed in the yogic life, all these things must be given up. Other physical activities just create tension and desires.

They’re also fun. The occasional frisbee tournament or running race is thrilling. Getting strong for rock climbing allows more rocks to be climbed. Life may not be able climbing more rocks, but I like it. Basically, all these imbalanced activities also create powerful experiences. Experiences broaden the mind, expand horizons and comfort zones, give meaning. A wealth of experience is not necessary for finding enlightenment or “inner peace,” and in fact based on this line of thinking, probably makes those things harder to reach.

These other forms of yoga, however, are wonderful for reducing the tension created by imbalanced experiences, for calming the mind, and for living a more examined life. Some people might be ready to go full steam ahead along the yogic path (not nearly as exciting as it sounds), and this pure form of Iyengar yoga seems to be a real way to do that. But I’m not ready to give up the experiential life, full of ups and downs and all-arounds. The world is big. There are so many good people to meet. For now, for me, yoga will make all those experiences better.

Amma, Opening the Heart

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From Verkala we decided to take a few-day excursion up to Amma’s ashram, the home of the famous hugging saint. I hadn’t heard of Amma before arriving in India, but some people were talking about her during the yoga teacher training. She is said to be fully enlightened, and communicates her love and wisdom by hugging. She’s given over 30 million hugs so far around the world. The organization which has grown up around her in the last couple decades also does great humanitarian work throughout India and around the world. We were planning to stay two days, ended up staying five, and could have stayed much longer if other experiences weren’t calling out so loudly.

Even after five days there, I still don’t know what to think of the Amma experience, or even where to start relating it. Partly it felt like a cult, partly a relaxed and friendly ashram, and partly like the real thing: tutelage under an enlightened guru. There is powerful energy there, and it seems to be stronger the more you’re willing to surrender to the experience and to Amma herself. Her hugs are very good. It feels a little like Jesus Camp for people who have been turned off by Christianity. The place sets off all sorts of warning bells for me, but something about it felt completely true and authentic.

Part of my intrigue with the place relates to thinking I’ve done and conversations I’ve had recently about the heart. Specifically about opening the heart and living vulnerably, rather than living from the head. I’ve found that I approach life very rationally, and look at almost all difficulties from a logical perspective. Often I view creative problems from a rational, head-derived perspective, even though those aren’t head-problems. Even my yoga often comes from a place of speculation and over-thinking, rather than one of feeling and emotion. All that said, I’ve created quite a good story of heart-work going on in my life, and I’ve learned to project that that is what’s going on, even when it’s not. Sometimes I really do feel that my heart is leading the way, but not often enough. Too often I use my intellect to know how I should respond, and do that rather than acting from the heart.

I’m not sure this makes much sense from an outside perspective. The basic idea though, is that everything I do will be that much more meaningful if it truly comes from my heart, not through a veil or facade I’ve built up over years of analytic thinking. My yoga, my art, my music, my relationships. So it’s a big thing to work on, and I feel like being at Amma’s gave me a good environment to get focused on it, to practice opening up. Even just being on stage with her while she’s giving hugs (which she does about 10 hours a day), I could feel an energy creating pressure in my chest, perhaps peeling away some kind of sheath around the heart. The more I was willing to accept this experience, the stronger it would become. By the end of the stay, I felt much more open than when I arrived. There’s no way for me to know if this kind of energy is real or imagined, but at a certain point it doesn’t matter. It heals and helps, and that’s what counts.

One piece I thought about a lot during the stay was the balance of feminine and masculine energy in the heart. A lot of advice about the heart is based around learning to love oneself. I think this is crucially important, but I have never quite related to it because it comes somewhat naturally to me. Maybe this is the masculine approach to the heart; it’s the baseline I’m starting from. The piece that I think is much harder for me to internalize is the other side, the place where women naturally come from – giving the heart away. I don’t want to draw too many broad generalizations here, but this has been more or less my experience. Naturally, women tend to nurture and give their energy away, men tend to protect and keep their energy close. To balance the heart, I think I need to practice more giving my heart away, surrendering, devoting my energy to someone else’s good work.

I have some ideas for doing this, mostly involving volunteer service. I’m hoping to serve a Vipassana meditation course when I’m up north next month, maybe volunteer with an organization in Dharamsala, and definitely get more connected with community groups once I land back in the states. Meanwhile, I’m trying to approach my stay in India with open eyes and an open heart. It can be hard, but it is totally worth it. I can already feel a change in my perspective, and in the way people interact with me. I think this is the biggest work for me to do on this trip.

Love the Practice, Not the Result

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Everyone’s heard that we’re supposed to enjoy the journey, not the destination. It’s trite to repeat it, but somehow that phrase has never done it for me. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, or maybe the words just don’t sound right in my brain. But the sentiment is 100% crucial for growing in positive direction. For me, it’s much more useful to think of it in terms of practice and results. Love the practice, not the result.

My biggest experience with this recently is with yoga. Yoga is nothing but practice. That’s all there is. No goal. Let’s face it, we’re probably not making it to samadhi/nirvana/ultimate reality in this lifetime. Maybe it’s cool to be able to do a handstand or put your foot behind your head, but yoga isn’t the fastest way to achieve those goals either. It’s a way to slowly improve the mind and the body, and the pleasure is in the daily experience of the action.

The same is true of art, writing, anything creative. If I ever think about painting in terms of “I need to paint something awesome that people are going to love and put in a museum and make me rich,” I’m never going to paint. I’ll be stymied with fear of failure, because not reaching that goal would be failure if that was my only reason for doing it. Instead, I sit down to paint because I love the feeling of painting. The brush moving over canvas, leaving a bright color in its wake. Sometimes it evens ends up being a piece I like to look at when it’s done. Not always, but often enough, and more often the more I practice.

You’re probably saying, “Yeah right, but some of us have jobs” (that’s fair, but sometimes I do have a job, too). There are definitely times when we need to put the nose to the grindstone, get some hard work done just for the sake of finishing it. Doing your taxes, final exams, the presentation for a client meeting tomorrow. That’s all well and good, and we do need to find the energy to make it happen. But for the bigger things in life, the ones that take up most of our time and most of our emotional energy, we need to enjoy the daily practice. There’s no reason to try to be a professional musician if you hate to sit down with your instrument and hammer away at etudes for hours a day. If three hours of yoga practice everyday sounds like the most boring and/or exhausting thing ever, maybe yoga teacher is not the right direction for you. And it turns out that loving the practice does lead to being great at something. It takes time, and sneaks up on you while you’re busy focusing on the thing itself, not the goal.

What do you love to work on? Art? Writing? Programming? Some people love Python, and that is awesome, go for it. Sharing your knowledge with others? Helping people make ends meet? Brewing beer? What can you sit down to do, be fully present in the act of the practice, yet removed from some distant outcome? I believe this is one of the most important components in a life lived consciously. I certainly have a way to go to answer these questions, but it’s a journey worth being on.