Om Week

I am back from Austria. Glad to be back but not at the same time. The weather was fantastic, and you can't ask for better scenery anywhere. But I didn't see much of either really. I went to study yoga. The first half of the week was a workshop on how to adapt yoga to your daily life, and the second half of the trip was for teachers, a workshop on how to teach yoga to pregnant women. Since most every female I know is pregnant, I thought this might be an interesting theme.

It was, and it was also a fantastic place to be in the fall.

So what did we do? That is the question everyone wants to know. We go up every morning at 5, then we went to meditate for two hours. At 8 am was the asana class, thats the typical thing you think about when you think about yoga. At 10 am breakfast, purely vegetarian, non spicy, and organic. Then we had an hour of work around the center. Different jobs to help make the place run more smoothly. At we were free and I usually managed to convince my roommate Stephanie to come with me to the sauna or go for a hike in the mountains depending on how cold it was we chose one or the other. At 2 pm we had a theory lecture, at 4 a second asana class, at 6 supper, and 8 pm evening satsang, which is mediation and singing...

Anyone who has heard me sing knows what a horror this is, but I sing anyway. The first part of the week, we were only 10 people (11 including Sawimji) in the center, of the 11 only 3 of us knew the words to the songs,, the swami (monk) and the two other trained yoga teachers. The other two could sing,, thankfully so they carried the tune,, while I belted out my own version of every song and the rest of the crowd,, just tried to hang on. The singing freaked some out,, and they kept silence. I don't blame them I felt like that at first too, we sing in sanskrit so you often don't know what you are saying or why. It is also really hard to tell when one word ends and another begins, so you can't really read along and sing, you have to know the tune somehow. I just like the chance to sing as loud as I like as bad as I like and no one cares. So thats what I did.

Stephanie, bless her, doesn't sing any better than I do, but she is the adventurous type. She sang anyway, not knowing words, tunes or how to carry one. We were sharing a song book on evening, and there was Stephanie and I in the first row,, singing badly as loudly as we could.. We threw off the entire song, so swamiji tried to pull it back by singing louder,,, but that sounded even worse. The whole group was out of harmony,, totally not the purpose of singing the songs, and it cracked me up completely and you know what happens with laughter,, Steph was gone three seconds later. Know you have to understand,, this is like having a laughing fit in church,, you just don't and neither one of us could get it under control. Every time I thought I had it,, i would start to sing again, but of course that made Stephanie break out again and vise versa, we were as mature as 12 year olds. Trying to hold in the laughter, totally shaking with it, while trying to be inconspicuous in the front row.

It was nice to be able to laugh like a child again.

But saying that was the highlight of the trip is really understating ashram life. I love the routine of the ashram, I love the satva of the place. I wish more places were like that, and I guess the real challenge is just that, to make more places like that, or at least my own place. So far I haven't been so successful, thats why I keep going back to try to capture that tranquility for awhile until I am able to make it myself. someday someday.. the hope of the aspirant...

On the other hand this is what I found in the fireplace when I got home. That, and a cupboard full of food, a car full of petrol and a dog with a waggy tail, which are also pretty nice things too.