In case you were curious...

I've been in India for a month now and only twice have I enjoyed a "real" shower when I stayed in the hotel in Agra and with Rebecca and Leyla in Delhi. I've still yet to shower with hot, let alone warm water. Nonetheless, this sacrifice is very minimal and I quite enjoy the bucket baths by now. They're quite water efficient. The challenge is just pouring that first bucket of cold water on your head. Just like jumping in a cold pool or ocean, you get used to it immediately after 2 seconds of pain.

Anyways, I'm sure it's going to be a massive step up from whatever type of bathing I'm going to get to enjoy during my Himalaya trek. Just wanted to be sure I documented it before leaving the ashram in 48 hours.

Being appropriate

For the past 4 years, I've been living in fantasy lands. Places where you can get away with saying whatever you want to whoever you want without really having to watch your mouth. Physically and mentally I've more or less been consistent for the past 4 years, but verbally is another story. I like to believe that I had a relatively decent respectable mouth back in 2007, but I've since evolved into a carefree, vulgar, usually inappropriate person in my day-to-day discussions.

There's a few reasons I can identify for this. 1 main one is the Florida Betas an their seemingly invincibility to saying and doing whatever they wanted. It was always incredibly entertaining and I definitely took many lessons from them. Gainesville itself lent itself to extreme "get to the point not beating around the bush" honesty because you could say anything you wanted to any girl and if she didn't like it there were another 50 girls to try it on in. Then throw in China which is just a total joke of reality - I have zero important attachments and zero repercussions for saying/wearing/doing whatever I want. It's fair to say that at least 90% of the expat community and 100% of the chinese community think I'm crazy. And somehow I've thrived in that environment, giving less and less of a shit every day. If something is ridiculous, people expect me to be the one to volunteer to do or say it and I happily oblige. It's liberating to not have any concern about what others think, but the way I've been going about it is definitely a slippery slope.

So here in India, I've made a conscious effort to not be such an outward douchebag. I've been treating the experience like a series of survivor, getting to know most of my fellow students on a personal, familial level. As the only white guy, with all my stories and general character, I've obviously naturally stirred a lot of interest, but instead of padding my ego, I've been toning down my act. I haven't been hitting on any of the girls at all, of which there are definitely a few whom I would have otherwise gone for. This approach is interesting in that it has built me a considerable cache of credibility as opposed to the usual expectations of zaniness.

I haven't been cussing at all, and with the exception of dealing with my injury, I've been in a very positive state of mind. I can't say that I'll stay this way when I return, but I certainly don't miss being vulgar and agitated.

I know that the next month with a group of 9 Ladakhi guides/porters and 5 Trekkers will be an entirely different dynamic than this, which is often like a summer camp. It will definitely be interesting to see how I operate in that environment.

Mother worship and Omkar

Tonight we just had our 4th Puja of the course. The pujas are ceremonial events with a lot of chanting and singing and fire and dress up and offerings and beautiful yantra designs and all sorts of traditional symbolism.

The first 3 were held in an outdoor covered corridor (because we had pretty big fires going) and they all sucked. It was uncomfortable, cold, wet, bugs everywhere, and you felt disconnected unless you were in the 4-5 person front row. By the 3rd puja, I just showed up early and sat in the back so I could zone out and be comfy.

So needless to say I wasn't very excited about tonight's event. However, it turned out to be awesome. We held the puja indoors, with fantastically organized seating arrangement, beautiful candles everywhere, and it was a tribute to Devi, the Devine/supreme mother, or whatever you want to call her. The names aren't important, but the symbolism was. The main yantra is in the picture from 2 posts back. I am sure there are many star of David fans reading this so they should get a kick out of it. Lots of these in Vedanta symbols.

This time, instead of ceremoniously celebrating a confusing deity, this time we were told to focus our thoughts on our own mother, as she and Devi are the same thing in essence. This made things nice and practical. I'll spare the details on the chanting and the offerings, but suffice to say it was a beautiful ceremony and I got to think about my mom the whole time. (I wonder if she reads this blog). I feel this effectively makes up for my mothers day inactivity. The previous blog post is a picture of my "offering" area which you can see I put a lot of passion into as opposed to the folks siting next to me.

I also spent some time thinking about the other mothers who are near to me (Gigi, auntie belle, etc) and thought it was an excellent way to celebrate the meaningfulness of motherhood.

After the ceremony finished, swamiji had me come over to him to be given a spiritual name. A few other people in the class had received their names earlier in the course but I didn't want one then because I didn't think he could know me well enough by then. Tonight was a perfect opportunity to get the name, and it was funny because about 20 girls were standing there anxiously awaiting to find out what it would be. Swami started saying..."your spiritual name is..." an then because of the crowd, changed it to "his spiritual name is...Omkar". Which means "the sound of Om". Everyone oohed and Ahhed as apparently this is a highly valued name within India (with movies and songs about it as well).

Om is obviously a pretty important sound in yoga and has many high level meanings and symbolisms which you can go and wikipedia on your own. I'm happy with it.

Midnight and time for bed.

This is my mother's day gift (see next post)

Are pictures working?

Putting things in Perspective

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!!

2 nights ago during the talent show I busted out my star spangled banner and serenaded the group with a rousing rendition of our national anthem. Today I've worn the flag all day and even used it as my yoga mat. Again maintaining the title of most patriotic expatriate in the world.

Anyways, it's been 5 days now of no exercise for me. I haven't blogged in that time, as I was busy trying to sleep and recover. 2 nights ago (right after the talent show) I came down with a fever an couldn't sleep all night, then woke up with explosive diarrhea. That was fun! I ended up skipping most of the activities yesterday to recover from that episode and actually finally got some well needed rest.

This morning I woke up and FINALLY felt better after 5 days of no improvement and only additional discomfort. As the day has gone on, I feel very positive that I will have a full recovery by the end of the week. Still, I don't plan on doing any more of the asana classes as I don't want to risk re-injuring myself prior to the himalaya trekking.

Today's afternoon class was a "prenatal yoga" class, so it was perfect for my condition. I still skipped most of the poses but it definitely helped put me in the shoes of a pregnant woman if I am ever to teach one. I also have a lot more sympathy for chronically injured folks who aren't able to do most of the poses at all. So I guess that's a silver lining of the injury.

Also, it was interesting to analyze my injury under the scope of the vedanta philosophy we've been studying. Essentially, the idea is that all our personal attachments in life are only temporary and not "real". Therefore when we think we find happiness in these objects, it is actually a false sense of pleasure, as our true happiness is a result of concentrating our mind and bringing us close to our inner consciousness, which is inherently bliss. So technically even "my body" is a temporary object that we must detach from eventually. Therefore if we rely on the body to bring happiness, it will eventually also bring pain.

Yea I didn't explain that too well, but you get the point...

The other thing is...in my usual life, I easily go 5 days at a time without any exercise all the time. I even go 10-15 days often. And during these days I'm going out drinking, eating like shit, and being a total lazy bum. This particular setback only lasted 5 days and I was still an extremely healthy, relatively productive person. Still, I was totally devastated that I couldn't participate. It absolutely killed me to sit in the classes and watch everyone else do their poses as I was immobile. It really goes to show how addicted one can get to a healthy cleansing routine if practiced every day.

I just dropped my iPhone while it was charging and might have broken my USB charging cable...hopefully I can solve this somehow!

Otherwise, there's not much to recap over the past few days because I missed out on the weekend trip and other events to recover.

Hopefully I an juice this phone up and keep it going.

Whoops

Well now it's official...

I've gone from best shape and health of my life to most dehabilitating injury of my life in just 48 hours.

After Sheela's acupuncture last night I woke up this morning with much improvement but still planned o rest today. Well at lunchtime with everyone else practicing their poses I tried to demonstrate a headstand to help someone out, and as I came up, I totally aggravated re injury. It's now far worse than it originally was. I have nonstop pain and find it tough to even breathe.

There's nothing I can do at this point except completely rest. I'd say there's a lesson to be learned here but honestly I feel that I would probably do the same thing again in the same situation.

I'm quickly realizing that my physical body is far and away the object that I value more than anything else. I've lost cell phones, cameras, wallets, etc which all pissed me off and set me back, but this is much tougher to stomach (no pun intended). I am usually entirely dependent on my ambulatory capabilities, and when I can't even reach 2 inches to grab a pen without cringing, it's pretty depressing.

Everyone is very concerned and helpful which I appreciate but honestly the best thing for me is just alone time to refocus and reframe everything. My mind is getting extremely agitated as I google what kind of injury it probably is an how long it will take to heal. None of this matters. I just need to sack up and get it off my mind and rest. My himalaya trek is scheduled to start on July 16 and hopefully 2 weeks without any serious heavy lifting will be enough to heal before then.

Going to start reading again, which I haven't had any time to do since I got here. First up: autobiography of Gandhi

Could be worse.

Wish me luck