Part 1: Sivananda Yoga Ashram

During my one month India adventure, I spent two weeks at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram in Neyyar Dam, Kerala, 10 days at the Vipassana International Meditation Centre in Hyderabad and 5 days hanging out in Mumbai.

I had several goals for my trip: I wanted to see what India is really like and enjoy delicious Indian food, I wanted to experience what life is like at a yoga ashram, I wanted to see what it would be like to travel on my own for four weeks, and I wanted to improve my physical health through yoga practice. And then there was the most important goal of all: to learn more about myself and to achieve a more peaceful state of mind.

The daily program at the Sivananda Yoga ashram consisted of 4 hours of yoga (practicing yoga asanas), 3 hours of satsang (meditating, chanting and talks), about an hour of karma yoga (selfless service; taking active part in the ashram life by cleaning up, serving food or something similar) and one lecture. The day started at 5:20am and ended at around 10pm. My original plan was to stay the whole month at the Sivananda Yoga ashram, but I ended up staying for only half of that time.

At first, I really enjoyed staying at the Sivananda ashram. Especially doing 4 hours of yoga every day was great as I could clearly see the progress from class to class and after a while, the somewhat challenging karma yoga didn't feel that bad any more (more about my karma yoga duty later). However, pretty soon I realized that only two 30-minute meditation sessions per day weren't enough for me. Yes, I was sitting relatively still, but it I didn't feel that it was even close to meditation. Both my mind and body refused to co-operate. Instead of focusing on repeating Om, my mind was busy thinking about all that happened last year and about how after meditation, it would be teatime. Or then my mind would be desperate for the Swami to say Om indicating that it was time to chant. Or then I was falling asleep. Or silently laughing at the super-cute kittens who walked around the meditation hall meowing loudly. And instead of feeling comfortable in the cross-legged position, I was struggling with back-pain, neck pain, or restless feet. Or then there were mosquitoes. In sum: my meditation was mostly useless and rather than helping me achieve inner peace, it simply demonstrated me how restless and unfocused I actually was.

One day, I went to the temple to meditate during the break. Sivananda, the founder of the ashram, wrote in one of his books that it is often helpful for a novice meditator to keep the mind busy with a task instead of letting it wander aimlessly. So, I decided to give my mind a task of counting from 1 to 1000. Sounds simple enough. However, when I was down to about 300, I realized that the familiar voice in my head was starting with it's all-too-familiar story: "Maybe 500 would actually be enough... I bet I've been sitting here for ages already and what's the point of this exercise anyway." Annoyed by the voice, the other voice in my head decided that no, this time, I wouldn't give up. That I would actually continue all the way to 1000. Immediately after making this decision, I felt a heat wave go down my body. My hands became sweaty and my heart rate went up. It was a very strong physical reaction telling me that I (the complain-y part of me) didn't want to go through the boring task. At the same time, the other voice was happy and determined. After about 10 minutes I was done with the counting and felt like a winner. And exhausted.

I didn't have the determination to continue with my meditation practices during breaks so concentration did not really get any easier. Mostly, I blamed my restless mind for the problems I had meditating. I also attributed some of the blame for my meditation difficulties to the fact that the ashram was so crowded. During my stay, the ashram hosted a yoga teachers' training program in addition to the people staying there for the yoga vacation. Altogether, there were almost 300 hundred people around. The large number of people, in turn, resulted in a somewhat restless and noisy environment and I felt that that made my mind more restless. To find a bit more peace in the crowded ashram, I mostly tried to be on my own during the breaks, read or write my journal - but that just made me feel antisocial, not peaceful.

Naturally, the large number of people meant lots of great discussions with interesting people and a bunch of new friends, so it was definitely fun, too. However, for me, one of the main goals of the trip to India was to have time to think and meditate and focus on myself, and I felt that I wasn't able to completely fulfill that goal.

After being at the ashram for about a week, several people told me about a 10-day Vipassana course, a silent meditation course with no less than 10 hours of meditation a day. For all of these people, the meditation course has been a very powerful, even life-changing experience. A course like that sounded perfect: full focus on myself for 10 days - nothing could beat that! ;) Fortunately, there was another woman at the ashram who was also excited about the Vipassana meditation and after days of pondering if we should actually do it, we decided that we will - provided that there's a course available somewhere near Trivandrun in January. After hours of searching for information about the courses online (a super-flaky Internet connection in a place 20 minute walk from the ashram made the online experience somewhat frustrating) and finally calling a dozen of different phone numbers, we found a meditation center that provided a course in January, which still had openings for the course, and which wasn't too far away from Trivandrum.

Naturally, "not too far" has a different meaning when one is in India. In this case, we decided that a 34-hour train ride will not stop us from taking the course...