In Training

For a full six months before I left for Sri Lanka and India I had the mindset that I was in training. Intuition told me to be vigilant in preparing this vessel for the trip.

I was diligent in my asana, pranayama and meditation practice as always and I amped up my generally healthy diet to the next level. Virtually no wheat, no dairy, no sugar and lots of extra protein. 

Having been to India previously I knew how taxing on the body, mind and spirit this trip could be; I wanted to be in the best possible shape I could.

As I'm writing this I'm sitting in my room in Rishikesh. I've been on the road for six weeks now. And of course, as always, intuition was correct. I see clearly the benefit of the effort that I put into my spiritual, physical and mental health both before I left and while I've been traveling.

Finding healthy food was virtually impossible for the first four weeks of the trip. The Indian diet, or at least that which I had access to, was exclusively comprised of wheat, dairy, sugar and one vital extra component; grease in the form of fried food.

I made the best choices I could but I had no choice but to eat. At week three I felt the negative impact of the Indian food diet manifest in my body. 

Luckily a week after that I returned to areas that have many Westerners. Areas with Westerners equals access to the Indian version of western food. This meant a return of plain vegetables, the staple of my diet. 

But I digress; you know how I love talking about food...

The point that I'm trying to make is that it takes a lot to be here and be healthy. There is an intense amount of sensory stimulation present on an almost continuous basis. All six senses are constantly receiving  input (mind being the sixth sensory organ in Buddhist cosmology).

I get a break from all the input when I'm in the haven of the room that I am fortunate enough to be residing in here in Rishikesh.  Although  even as I write this from the luxury of my clean bed I hear screaming outside of my window. 

I find it occasionally disconcerting the way people seem to be screaming at each other here. I don't understand the words of course but the tone in which people speak in both Hindi and Tamil frequently sounds like they're yelling at the person they are addressing.

Another aspect which can feel assaulting to the senses is the traffic, honking and interactions between motorized vehicles and pedestrians. Over here pedestrians do *not* have the right-of-way; there is a different concept of personal space here.

Motorized vehicles whether cars, trucks, auto rickshaws or motorcycles will not stop or yield for beings walking on the road. It is incumbent upon the pedestrian to get out of their way. They blow their horns ferociously and will miss you literally by a few inches. One has to be aware as they're walking down the street so as not to get run over. 

Perhaps the most insidious stimulating factor is the vibrational energy that is present in this country. It is palpable. It is powerful. It is real. 

I think that is why some Westerners come here and become extremely uncomfortable. We are not exposed to this in our world. 

There is a vibratory energy present here which is underlying everything. It could be profoundly unsettling for someone who is not in the right shape to handle it.

I was in training, and continue to be while I am here, to have the ability to navigate all of this with ease

At Mooji's satsang people have been flipping out. By this I mean in two of the four days of teachings last week a number of people started to either shake, laugh hysterically or hyperventilate.

I don't quite know what to make of this. I had been thinking that these people are simply unbalanced or craving attention or are deluding themselves because they have a strong desire to have a profound experience.

But perhaps it is the effect of all of these overstimulating factors, particularly the strong vibrational energy here, on people with constitutions not strong enough to be in tune with the crescendo.   

This morning I went to a sacred cave and was meditating for a long time there. I am in tune with vibrational energy, it is a byproduct of all the practice that I have been doing for these years. I didn't used to have the ability to perceive it but I do now. And the energy in this cave was quite strong. 

Other people came into the cave and were meditating as well. After some time a man sitting across the cave from me started shaking and bouncing in a manner similar to some of the people at satsang. It made me think that the man in the cave was clearly reacting to something. 

This was an Indian man, not a Westerner. I say this because this is not someone who's come to have a "cool experience" in an exotic far away land.

This is the long way of making the point that I am grateful to be in tune with my intuition. Six weeks in and four more to go...I feel healthy, strong and peaceful. That is no small feat!

Phase 3 Begins

It seems a frequent occurrence that I have the desire to blog about my experiences here in India and the thought arises "how can I possibly convey that experience to anyone who hasn't lived it themselves?"

This is the case with the epic day I had yesterday.

I think of this trip as three phases; phase 1 was the time in Sri Lanka, phase 2 was all of the movement through Tamil Nadu (five locales in three weeks), phase 3 will be five weeks in Rishikesh.

In order to travel from Pondicherry to Rishikesh we spent one night in an airport hotel in Chennai and flew from there to Delhi on a 6:15 AM flight.

For reasons I don't understand Swamiji was under the impression that the drive from Delhi airport to Rishikesh would only take 3 1/2 hours. Our expectation set we arranged for a driver to pick us up at the airport.

As we began the drive through Delhi I was pleasantly surprised to see a significant difference in the area around the airport which encompassed the first 35 or 40 minutes of our drive.

There were neatly manicured lawns, bushes and parks. There was almost no liter and I didn't see a single cow or person who looked downtrodden on the side of the road. This was quite a contrast to when I was here three years ago.

Within 10 minutes of leaving the airport we encountered our first traffic jam. Highways in India do have designated lanes. The same dotted lines separate the lanes as they do at home but in India they seem to function as mere suggestion, as opposed to the rigid dividers in America. Here people drive wherever they can fit, as opposed to fitting between the lines.

There were an inordinate number of traffic circles and turns that the driver took in that first 40 or 50 minutes. It seemed an extremely complex route; I was astounded that he knew where he was going from memory.

The density of the traffic would thin for a minute or two and then thicken again. All the while the driver, who said his name was Bobby, threaded his way through and around all the other vehicles.

After the first 40 minutes of the drive the Delhi that I remembered reappeared.

How can I explain the shanty towns that we drove past? I am at a loss to explain what these "homes" looked like or what they were constructed from.

All I can say is that I know squalor when I see it. I know abject poverty when I see it. The conditions I observed was a level beyond that description.

The ubiquitous well-maintained roads of Tamil Nadu became a thing of the past. Here in the north the road suddenly becomes not a road. There will be pavement and all of a sudden there simply isn't any and you're driving over dirt and rocks; then the pavement will reappear.

For the first hour and a half the traffic, turning, honking and weaving around the other cars felt relentless.

About two hours into the drive we were finally beyond Delhi and the adjacent major town. Around this time I saw a mile marker which indicated that that Dehradun was 204 km away.

On my last visit I flew from Delhi to Dehradun, the closest airport to Rishikesh; because of that I knew how far we had to go on this leg of the journey.

204 km is about 150 miles. In America you could drive on an interstate and cover that distance in three hours if you were going slowly and took time out to go to the bathroom, as I often do. Having just spent the last three weeks driving around Tamil Nadu I knew that 204 kilometers was going to take a while.

We began traveling through the smaller towns I've come to recognize as  distinctly India. Shops with their fronts open to the street, steel gates rolled down for the closed shops, tea stalls, vendors selling chips and snacks in little packages all connected to each other, cows and men.

Many many men. To my eyes it looked like packs of men in the streets. In some of the towns that we drove through the masculine energy was intense and a bit disconcerting.

Groups of men sitting in tea stalls, groups of men standing on the street, men riding motorcycles all around us, men in the cars and trucks all around us.

Every once in a while I could pick out a female form amongst all of those people. Never did I see one of those female forms smiling. But then again the men don't smile much either.

One of the big contrasts between Sri Lanka and India is the difference in smiles. In Sri Lanka people smile all the time, here not so much.

At hour three it was time for a bathroom break and some food since we haven't eaten yet that day.

Bobby (not his real name I'm quite sure) took us to an Indian version of the highway rest stop. It was clean and I scored some actual boiled vegetables which thrilled my digestive system.

At that point we were about 150 km from Haridwar, the town that I knew to be only 25 km south of Rishikesh. 

We had just traveled a fair portion of road that was well-maintained, didn't have traffic and we were cruising along at 60 miles an hour which was great. I thought we would make it in another three hours time.

Back in the car we started to get to a prettier rural area. Many crops and fields of sugarcane. The air was better (did I mention how polluted the air was in Delhi?), the scenery was nice and there was no traffic.

I should mention at this point that Bobby is the calmest wild man I've ever encountered. Some of our other drivers would honk their horns like maniacs. Not Bobby.

He didn't use his horn much, he just went for it.

Passing trucks, cars, buses, auto rickshaws and motorcycles he'd move into oncoming traffic and calmly make them get out of our way through sheer ballsy-ness.

I'll forgo the detail of hours four through seven but I think at this point you get the idea.

Suffice to say that in that time we encountered a political protest, another traffic jam, lots more disappearing/reappearing roads and Bobby's never ending mastery of the Indian road.

We arrived in Rishikesh at the Sivananda ashram before sundown (it is always my strong preference to arrive someplace in India before it's dark); what I found there is a story for another day.

4 Days in Coimbatore

When Americans think about India we tend to think of it in monolithic terms. Erratic, kinetic, cows in the road, vibrant colors, dazzling sights, smells and sounds.

I had that impression from my time spent previously in the north of India. On this visit I've started in the south, in Tamil Nadu.

Although Madurai was much gentler than the north it still gave me that sense of India; endlessly fascinating and incomprehensible.

Coimbatore is a whole different scene; it is modern, clean and western (ish).  One can see clearly the influence of the west here.

While researching Coimbatore online I read that it was the Detroit or Manchester of India; meaning it is an industrial city. From that I inferred that there would be more affluence here, more western influence and there is.

As has been the case thus far (except for the beach town Hikkaduwa in SL) we are the only Westerners I've seen with the exception of the people at the Integral Yoga Institute here for a one-month teacher training.

Although I have not seen any other white faces I see evidence of us everywhere.

There are many nice shops here with glass windows, western clothes, coffee and not so much tea. Nice cars thread their way through auto rickshaws and barefooted motorcycle riders. Advertisements for expensive products and salons all with white models.

In the neighborhood where our western style business  class hotel was located we would go out about 7:15 in the morning to one of the little local temples to attend puja. 

As we would walk to the temple we saw many Indian people out for their morning constitutional. They were walking around wearing sneakers, iPhones and earbuds.

This last phenomenon is a contrast from when I would walk in the north or in Nepal. In Nepal people would stop me as I was walking and they would ask "where are you going?"

I would say "I am taking a walk. I am just looking." They could not understand what I was talking about. The concept of simply taking a walk for exercise or sightseeing was not something that could be understood in their cultural context.

On one hand it feels nice to have a little bit of a respite from the "otherness". To have a luxurious warm shower and be someplace where it all makes sense, where the difference is exotic as opposed to slightly disorienting .

On the other hand I prefer to be in that place where minds drops completely, where intellect has no choice but to fall away because everything is unintelligible.

It's all good!