Wow! The last entry I posted was way back in Varanasi, early April… Could that actually have been 4 months ago? Believe it or not, I have recomposed these first lines of this blog entry probably 100 times in my head, over and over… Sometimes while doing yoga, sometimes when going to sleep, on hikes, while eating or meditating. I was thinking of the silence created over time, the potential loss of interest of you all, the commitment I made to keep it up, albeit irregularly and infrequently. It’s felt just like when I put off writing an email or a letter to someone. It gnaws and gnaws at me, but I still procrastinate and put it off a bit more.
The bottom line is that during this period I have definitely been into my Inner Journey to India.
If you wish to see the pictures at your own pace, full screen, slide show etc... log on to: www.picasaweb.google.com/Frenchyrjm
Days, weeks and months go by here with a muffled sense of time. We are living outside of our usual environment and seasons. Reference points such as holidays and social customs lack to punctuate our life and give us our bearings. We live by the local cycles - very different from the US -, in this country where the notion of time itself is completely elastic. As you will read further, in our case the yoga study program became our daily and weekly rhythm...
McLeodganj is perched a few miles above Dharamsala and is the home to the majority of Tibetan refugees in the area. The Tibetan government in Exile is located between Dharamsala and McLeodganj. Dharamkot, where we lived for these past 4 months is a little village of farms, houses, guesthouses and little restaurants spread out across a small valley and its surrounding hills, with no vehicle access, about a mile above McLeodganj, at 6000 feet (2000m) altitude.
Planning on staying several months at the Himalaya Iyengar Yoga Center (HIYC) (http://www.hiyogacentre.com/), we wanted to be close to our yoga study/practice and have more space than just a hotel or guesthouse bedroom. We rapidly rented the only apartment/house available in the entire valley from Sharat Arora, the yoga teacher. We had a small living room, a bed loft above, a bathroom without hot water, and a kitchen and hot shower one level below, down a rough, outdoor staircase. Read “walk in the dark and the rain for shower or cooking”. The furniture was one coffee table, one chair, a few mattresses as sofa and some cushions to sit on. And we felt so blessed to find exactly what we had wanted – at least the two essential criteria. Hot water in the bathroom would have been sheer bliss... Doesn't contentment have a lot to do with defining priorities and just letting go of non-priorities? And by the way, had we arrived a week later the house would have been occupied by old students who wanted it!
Sharat is a senior student of BKS Iyengar (http://www.bksiyengar.com/, http://www.iyengar-yoga.com/). Iyengar has been a prominent yoga master and author, who during the 20th century brought yoga to new levels of precision, alignment and body-mind awareness. Our schedule was immediately set. Thursday through Monday became our week, Tuesday and Wednesday our weekend. We woke at 4:50 am; I would open the hall at 5:00 for students’ access, start practice at 6:00 and attend class until 10:00.
The benefits from this yoga learning have been immense for me. They range from relieving many of my postural misalignments, physical tensions and pains (a result of numerous accidents, broken limbs and demanding physical work 25 years ago), to a heightened awareness of my body and its direct correlation with my mindset, morale and inner experience. It’s been an intense, painful and challenging journey and it's far from being over. I have realized what an unbalanced body I have been living with/in and the distance that remains to be covered just to come to basic physical harmony and feel that I’m currently addressing ailments that would just develop more and more in the coming years. Beyond rehabilitation lies the infinite depth of the yoga experience; I am already discovering more subtle levels of my body, mind and spirit over time.
After practice we would rest, have breakfast / lunch at home or at a local restaurant and spend the afternoon doing household chores -that the very basic living conditions made quite work-intensive-. We would also hike around the small hills and valleys, visit with fellow yoga students, walk into town for shopping and email, or stay home to edit the hundreds of pictures we took, play guitar or just read. We even started to learn silver jewelry making, that I pursued further.
But no writing!
Partly due to a severe right hand “trigger thumb” condition that had developed in Thailand, most probably induced by the considerable self-moves of our two houses back in California, my extensive journaling in Thailand, as well as several years of hourly use of my Treo email phone that I operated only with my thumbs. Beware PDA/Blackberry/Treo owners! I see a new type of work injury emerging, years after computer-work introduced carpal tunnel syndrome. The trigger thumb finally healed just a week ago, as a result of 2 cortisone injections (yuk), after 5 months of very limited use of my right hand.
Partly because I just needed to embrace the local life, paced by the monsoon weather, and not attempt to put into words my very inner experience... nor spend time on the keyboard and web technology (about 10-12 hours per blog all included).
Our sojourn and yoga study in Dharamkot lasted just short of 4 months, ending with a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat (http://www.dhamma.org/). We left about a week ago and after traveling a full day and night, arrived in Rajpur, located an hour from Rishikesh, in Northern India. We are now attending a 3 week Iyengar yoga program at the Yog-Ganga Center for Yoga Studies (http://www.yog-ganga.com/). Senior students of BKS Iyengar, Rajiv and Swati Chanchani are giving us a complementary approach and perspective that will enhance the solid and so precise foundations that Sharat taught us at HIYC.
We’re also discovering a new environment after having been so firmly settled for 4 months in such a sweet little valley. It was tough to leave, repack and become itinerant again, though the timing was perfect for us to move on to new places, people and challenges.
I almost forgot, late June I made a 6 day return-trip Himalayas-Manhattan-Himalayas for Meaghan, my daughter’s graduation from the International Center of Photography. She just finished her Master’s degree in Photojournalism. My dear friends Bernard and Catherine put me up in their apartment and Bernard came to the inauguration of ICP exhibit Meaghan was participating in. My sister Ann and nephew Alex flew in from California, my brother John and his wife Sheri from Texas, and my mother Jef from Provence. We had a 3 day family reunion celebrating Meagan’s successful end of studies and her the commencement of her photography and journalism career. She’s now back in Grenoble, France, in her first paying photography job, taking wedding pictures.
Mid August we’ll be heading to the Nepalese border for a visa run, then down to Chennai, in Southern India for 2 months of study at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram (http://www.kym.og/).
I’m planning to do some Global Human Resources consulting work in the November–December timeframe, preferably in Chennai/Bangalore, otherwise somewhere else in the world, and we’ll spend the winter in Kerala, the Southeastern state of India known for Ayurveda medicine, high literacy and a great quality of life.
This is just a quick catch-up, long due. The next postings will include Sweet Valley and People of Dharamkot, Yoga of organizations, Monastic Experience of Vipassana Meditation, Turning 50 in India, Tibetan Exile Brothers Connection, How Perfect Things Can Be When I Let Go of Control and Handle My Priorities, Kamala and Ricard's Top Ten budget traveler luxury items, and Nurturing Love.
Namaste and blessings to all,
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