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Finding spirituality on trip to India

Mariellen — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:49:35 +0000

The soul of the world

I enjoyed reading Christine Garvin’s article, Can You Develop Your Spirituality Without Visiting India? on Brave New Traveler (part of the Matador Travel Network).Of course, I whole-heartedly agree that finding or increasing your spiritual awareness is not about location. Spirituality is an attitude and an understanding. You can find it, learn it or increase it anywhere and anytime. In fact, the lessons often come from the unlikeliest people and places. You don’t even have to go to a temple, church, mosque, gurdwara, mediation centre, ashram, monastery or what have you. Once you begin to see the world from a spiritual perspective, you may never need a formal teacher again.

Yoga is my spiritual path and my teacher, Swami Brahmdev (known to his students as Swamiji) of Aurovalley Ashram said there are two conceptions of yoga. The one that is popularized in the west is that yoga is something you do. According to Swamiji, however, “Yoga is established in your understanding and attitude; it is a way of life. Yoga is living with a yogic attitude – naturally and with simplicity. When that attitude is born, you are a yogi, no matter where you are.”

But I take exception to the Brave New Traveler article subhead “Forget flying halfway around the world to find happiness.” I encourage you to fly to India — or sail or walk or go by camel if you must! — if you feel the urge. I felt a compelling desire to go to India about five years ago, and to say I’m glad I went is the biggest understatement of my life. Going to India was the best thing I ever did. I am writing a book about all the gifts I have received from three trips there.

Everyone’s path is different and for me, India is my spiritual home. The “advances” I made on my spiritual path while traveling and studying yoga in India for 11 months may have taken me a lifetime here in Canada. I recently wrote an article for a Canadian travel magazine, India is Yoga, that addresses the question: why go to India for yoga? I asked three Indian yoga teachers, including Swamiji, for their opinions, and their answers are worth reading if you are interested in the subject.

It is my experience that, generally, India has a milieu or energy that I find very spiritually conducive; whereas I feel the opposite is true in my home town, Toronto. I am not saying you can’t have a spiritual experience in Toronto or that you are guaranteed to have one in India, of course. As I said, a lot of it is attitude. I go to India with the attitude that I am going to learn, and I do. Just learning to go with the flow of train delays and crowds and sights of appalling poverty can really open you up, if you let it.

Until you experience India, and yoga in India, you probably won’t be able to understand just how different it is over there, as compared to here. God is ever-present in India. God is celebrated, worshipped and invoked in road-side shrines, massive temple complexes, at tiny altars in many stores and in the prayer rooms in most homes; and in the thousands of sacred places — rivers, mountains, tress — and places associated with sacred events, such as Krishna’s birth or the battle of Kurukshetra. All of India is a living, breathing sacred place that is alive with history, myth and the stories of the epics and the gods.

And of course it is not just that the people are religious. They are also, for the most part, very spiritual. My own experience is that the people of India are kind, helpful, open and much more content and — dare I say it? — happy than we are in the materially affluent west.

To people of a certain temperament, like me, all of this makes a big impact.

Joseph Campbell would say that if you are a seeker, if you are on a quest, at some point, you must leave your community. There are certain predictable steps or stages in the hero’s journey, and leaving your community to go in search of treasure — your holy grail — is one of them. It doesn’t mean you have to go to India, of course. A pilgrimage is a very personal thing.

But by going to India, you are at the very least bound to gain some perspective, which I think many westerners could benefit from — as only about 8% of the world lives as luxuriously as we middle-class westerners do. (I wrote more about this in my post, Life is perfect. Or, as the Globe and Mail ads say, “It’s not just news. It’s a wake up call from the other side of the world.”)

It probably all comes down to your attitude. I often say that India is like the cave that Yoda sends Luke into. Luke asks, “What will I find in there?” and Yoda answers, “Only what you bring with you.”

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India is Yoga

Mariellen — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:15:02 +0000

Originally published in Dreamscapes magazine.

View of the majestic Himalayas from Anand Prakash Yoga Ashram

As I sit writing this on the balcony of my room at the Anand Prakash Yoga Ashram in Rishikesh, India, the melodious sound of people singing kirtan (devotional songs and chants) floats up from the yoga hall below. From here, I have a breath-taking view of the imposing foothills of the Himalayas and I can feel the invigorating mountain air as it sweeps into this serene valley, through which the jewel-green Ganga (Ganges) River flows. It is easy to see why legend refers to the Himalaya range as Dev Bhoomi, land of the gods.

Rishikesh is a small and relatively (by Indian standards) peaceful town that meanders along the narrow valley on both sides of the Ganga, connected by two impressive suspension bridges, Laxman Jhula and Ram Jhula, which are open for pedestrian traffic, bicycles and motorcycles only. Seers – rishis – and sages have been gathering here, at this picturesque spot on the Ganges, since before recorded history to prayer, chant and meditate. Indian pilgrims and foreign yoga students alike flock here to stay in one of the town’s many ashrams and soak up the devotional vibes. It is often referred to as the yoga capital of the world.

“Yogis have been coming here for long time, and they created vibrations in their bodies that have gone into the Ganga water, trees, stones,” says Yogi Vishvketu (Vishva) who, along with his Canadian-born wife, Chetana Panwar, founded the Anand Prakash Yoga Ashram in Rishikesh two years ago. “People who come here feel it immediately. I have seen people coming here from all over the world. They experience immediate healing and they change on all levels, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual.”

To Vishva, who has trained since the age of eight to become a yogi, and who holds a Phd in yoga from the university in nearby Haridwar, this is one of the main reasons why yoga students are drawn to Rishikesh. The other is the opportunity to be exposed to the whole philosophy of yoga. “Our intention in creating this ashram is to give westerners a safe and clean environment in India to experience both the beautiful, magical energy of Rishikesh and to heal themselves by following the Indian yogic system. We chant, perform rituals, sing kirtan, observe yogic diet and lifestyle and give people the whole picture of yoga.”

For me, the highlight of staying at Anand Prakash is the 6 a.m. yoga class with Vishva in the rooftop yoga hall. As we move, chant and meditate under the guidance of this bliss-master (Vishva is the happiest person I have ever met!), the sun rises from behind the mountains and bathes the room in a golden glow.

The first time I visited Aurovalley Ashram, about 10 kilometres south of Rishikesh, I took a short nap soon after arriving and fell into the most restful sleep of my life. I felt the profoundly peaceful energy of this garden ashram almost immediately and knew it was my spiritual home.

Several hand-painted signs on the ashram grounds proclaim, “All life is yoga.” This is the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, one of the great Indian thinkers of the 20th century, reduced to its essence. Aurovalley was founded 30 years ago by Swami Brahmdev (Swamiji), a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s teachings. It is a garden ashram, surrounded immediately by meadows and, in the distance, by the mist-covered hills of Rajaji National Park. Nature is ever-present at Aurovalley in the form of fragrant tropical flowers, fluttering butterflies, colourful songbirds, fruit-laden trees, gardens and glorious sunsets. Regular visitors extol the ashram’s healing benefits.

Swamiji explains there are two conceptions of yoga. The one that is popularized in the west is that yoga is something you do. According to Swamiji, however, “Yoga is established in your understanding and attitude; it is a way of life. Yoga is living with a yogic attitude – naturally and with simplicity. When that attitude is born, you are a yogi, no matter where you are.”

Swamiji doesn’t lecture or teach. Every day he sits outside the ashram library building, under a mango tree, and people gather to ask questions. Does one need to go to India to learn to be a yogi? “If you want to buy vegetables where will you go,” he answers, with lightness, and a twinkle in his eye. “India is a university for the world to understand more and collect more information on this subject.”

The International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers is a nonprofit organization founded by Swami Vishnu-devananda. He established the first Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center in Montreal, Canada, in 1959 and there are now close to 80 Sivananda ashrams and yoga centres around the world. Mani Chaitanya, director of the Sivananda centre in New Delhi is a tall, slim soft-spoken man who chooses his words very carefully. The Sivananda centre is an oasis of calm in a very hectic city, and it is where I practice yoga when I am in New Delhi.

“Yoga practitioners are naturally curious to discover the roots of yoga,” he says. “In India, people can discover a spiritual way of understanding life. They can experience a new lifestyle and incorporate it into their own practice.”

Mani explains that Sivananda offers westerners a systematic method for learning the traditional yogic lifestyle and balancing it with the demands of modern life. “It’s a unique structure that is easy and effective to practice in daily life. You can learn to manage a spiritual life that doesn’t take you away from where you are.”

Sivananda is a worldwide network, a gateway to yoga for westerners, and the same method is followed in all locations. One its main attractions is that the ashrams are located in peaceful places, away from city life. The Neyyar Dam location in Kerala, south India, for example, is set in a lush tropical paradise surrounded by sacred mountains. The ashram offers yoga holidays as well as various levels of teacher training programs.

Many people come from all over the world to study and practice yoga in India. And while there are countless methods and styles; teachers and ashrams, they are all streams leading to and from the same ocean of yogic wisdom.

Navjeet Kaur Mackie is a yoga teacher from Mississauga, currently living in Nova Scotia. She studied yoga in North America before heading off to India in 2007 to deepen her practice and understanding of this ancient tradition.

“India is yoga,” Navjeet says. “India is where I found the very essence of yoga, and discovered that yoga is not only a practice on the mat, but a way of life. Even though yoga is everywhere in India, Rishikesh is where I practiced my physical yoga the most. The feeling that you get when you visit Rishikesh is one of peace and serenity, but still infused with the typical Indian charm. I would recommend India to anyone and everyone who has found themselves on the yoga path.”

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Catch this point!

Mariellen — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:57:36 +0000

When my teacher, Swamiji (Swami Brahmdev of Aurovalley Ashram, Rishidwar, India), says something during satsang that he wants to underline, he says, “catch this point.” It’s a great example of a non-native English speaker using the language in a particularly creative and effective way.

I have been back in Canada about six weeks since my latest trip to India, where, among other things, I spent time at Aurovalley Ashram — my favourite place on earth — learning the wisdom of integral yoga and feeling inspired by Swamiji’s complete commitment to transformation of consciousness.

So I am now home, facing a difficult life situation, and trying to “catch this point.” I am trying to process, integrate and put it into action everything I learned from my recent two-and-half-months in India. In some ways the journey begins when you get home. You realize what you’ve learned, how much you’ve changed, and how differently you now see the world.

The main points I am trying to catch are;
1. I am largely, if not exclusively, the creator of the difficult situation I now find myself in. The fact that some of the decisions I made that led me to this place were largely unconscious, and driven by fear and/or grief, does not let me off the hook. I am responsible for my life.
2. The “answer” to my dilemma will not come from outside; it must come from within, from an increase in my conscious awareness.
3. This situation, though it is causing me to suffer, is a gift; it is a chance to learn, to grow to become more aware. The appropriate — and most positive, useful — response is to be grateful for this opportunity.

In other words, instead of buying and downing the expensive ice cream bar last night, I came home and lay on the floor and did some deep, conscious breathing. I allowed myself to breathe into my fear and anxiety. Then I fell asleep and dreamt I was trying to cross a busy street with no streetlights or barriers of any kind, and cars were rushing towards me in the gathering dark with their headlights off. Almost halfway across, I ran back to the safety of the curb. It seems like as good a metaphor for the activities of the subconscious as any!

Awareness is the key

Every good teacher I have ever known teaches awareness. Last night I saw a man wearing a T-shirt that read “There is nothing that beer can’t fix.” My T-shirt would read, “There is nothing that awareness can’t fix.”

As always, I did a lot of healing and becoming more aware when I was in India. For one thing, I have a new awareness of myself as a middle-class person. I realize I was born a card-carrying member of middle-class Canada. It’s like being in an exclusive club — a bubble. You get a lot of benefits along with a deeply etched worldview about how things should be. You expect a lot from society and the world at large, and use your status as bubble insider to protect you from the harsh realities of life.

But my travels in India, the recession and my own current life situation have served to pop the bubble — or at least, make it a lot more transparent. It’s very hard for me to actually imagine what it’s like to face the world without a family, three good meals a day, a safe and comfortable home, a credit line, a university degree — all of the props of middle-class life. Like so many others, I have been essentially living beyond my means, certain in the assumption that my middle-class world will support and rescue me. And this is something I now have to face.

Life outside the bubble

But what do people do when they don’t carry the middle-class card and don’t have all of its exclusive privileges? How do they live with no recourse to credit or hope of landing a well-paying job?

It’s not easy to travel in a place like India where you have to confront poverty, social inequality and disparity. It’s not easy to be a “conscious tourist.” It’s not easy to not let it affect you. In fact, I would feel a lot worse if it DIDN’T affect me. I am glad it is changing me and making me more conscious and I hope more compassionate, empathetic and responsible. That’s the reason I go to India, really. I learn as much about the process of self-discovery from travel in India as I do from studying yoga at the ashram with my guru. And that’s as it should be.

And I’m not the only one who thinks awareness is the key.

I am looking forward to reading a new book by Austin, Texas-based author Shelley Seale called The Weight of Silence: The Invisible Children of India. Shelley and I met online, and I participated in an online Q&A she did last week with the Voluntary Traveler on Facebook. You can read the transcript here.

Shelley has traveled extensively in India, researching her book and volunteering at orphanages run by The Miracle Foundation. With this book, she hopes to give voice to the many children in India who are homeless, abandoned, orphaned, poor or in some other way lost between the cracks of society.

Someone asked Shelley what can we do? She answered: “There are many things that people can do, from really small and easy to the big things. I think sometimes these problems seem overwhelming, insurmountable really, because they seem so huge and anything we could do seems a drop in the bucket. But Mother Theresa once said that each of us might just be one drop in the ocean, but if that one drop wasn’t there, it would be missed.

We can’t all abandon our entire lives to go work in the slums of Calcutta, but there are lots of little things that are easy to do, and if enough people did them, would make an incredible difference.

The first step is awareness, and everyone who is on this discussion or reads it is already there, and I thank you. It’s a huge thing, just right off the bat, for ordinary people who aren’t affected by these things directly to simply CARE. And spread that awareness on to other people.”

Another project I learned about recently on the Internet that also stresses awareness was started by Amanda Koster. Salaam Garage “leads trips that combine cultural immersion travel with citizen journalists (that means you) collaborating with NGOs around the world.” She is leading a trip to Jaipur, Rajasthan, India in September. It’s a great idea.

Thank you for reading. Please visit Breathedreamgo or stop by my Facebook page at Breathedreamgo.

Sharing India’s wisdom with the world

Mariellen — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:40:21 +0000

Dr. Deepak Chopra

While I was in India this winter, I read an article by Dr. Deepak Chopra in the Times of India (March 29, 2009) entitled “Over to India,” about what India can teach the west. In it, he says that the modern era is characterized by “a headlong rush into the arms of science and materialism.” Both, he says, are deeply flawed for solving the human dilemma. “The late Robert F. Kennedy put it pithily when he said that the gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”

The human dilemma — which is really about the path to happiness society, and each individual in it, takes — will not be solved by external means, e.g. more oil , a better missile defence system. “If the path to happiness is external, disaster will eventually ensue. This is what Indian spirituality discovered thousands of of years ago.”

Dr. Chopra believes that in spite of India’s infatuation with the west, India “possess the seeds of a viable answer to the human dilemma. A single concept plucked from the the teaching of yoga, ahimsa, fueled massive political change in the Gandhian era.”

He says that “for 20 years, I have sustained myself on the belief that that the ancient rishis were the Einsteins of consciousness. This shift in perception implies a revolution in how we live our lives.”

“Whoever shapes reality shapes the future. What India offers is the breakthrough idea that reality is shaped in the mind… Aham Brahmo Asmi means I am a cell in the body of the universe… The universe thinks, acts and perceives itself through me… It responds to my intentions. Could any concept be more radical, more Indian?”

In the article, Dr. Chopra explained that any form of constraint can be overcome through inner transformation. “To be transformed, you must extricate yourself from the idea that externals define you. You are defined by who you are inside, by your level of awareness.”

Chopra believes that the world could be transformed if people followed the ancient wisdom of India, the teachings on inner transformation. “India reigns supreme in the area of consciousness. It holds out the best hope for reinventing the world by reinventing our inner aspirations.”

I completely agree with him. This is the premise of yoga, the reason I go to India and what I want to dedicate my life to understanding and sharing. Each of us is much more powerful than we realize. We can change the world by looking inside and changing ourselves.

The Indian masters have long known that we, each of us, manifest our life and our destiny largely through our thoughts, words and deeds. It is indeed worthwhile to bring more awareness and consciousness to what we think, say and do.

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