Food is central to the life experience anywhere, but it is especially important to the yoga community in Mysore. I have started to frequent Santosha's cafe for breakfast. It's right down the street from the shala, and seems, for the moment, to be the central gathering place for yoga students.
This morning at my breakfast table were Jimi from Belgium (his parents named him for Jimi Hendrix), Kathy from Australia, Yoni from Korea, and Carlos from Madrid, Spain. Carlos is the only person in the yogashala who is possibly older than me. Many of the people at Santosha's are in their 20's, maybe their thirties. Kathy is a yoga teacher from Australia who travels 4-6 months a year in India; she mostly teaches Iyengar but is "brushing up" on her ashtanga. Jimi is in teacher training at another one of the ashtanga studios in Mysore, not AYRI. Carlos looks like a businessman, and he's here for four weeks, practicing at the shala in spite of a recently broken foot.
The crowd is decidedly not US-centric. It is also not baby boomers. And it is decidedly refreshing to be away from the baby-boomers-control-the-universe syndrome. A lot of the people at Santosha's are studying yoga for at least a couple of months, and have fairly open-ended itineraries. To say that it has a different atmosphere from my daily, professional world in the US would be an understatement. The people generally remind me more of the scene in Telluride, Colorado, where one person is back from mountain biking in Utah and the next person is ready to go ice climbing in Chamonix.
I don't think any of those folks would understand a "billable hour."
Here is the Santosha website. Of course, they are on Facebook, too.
Cheers.
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