The Scene at Santosha's

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.

Two Temples

This is a video of a puja ceremony at a Hindu temple called Hoysaleshvara, about two hours outside of Mysore. The ceremony is a devotional exercise, conducted for the resident god (in this case, I believe it is Krishna). What you see is the bathing of the statue, by Brahmin priests, in milk. The statue is also provided fruit, rosewater, and other delicacies. The music in the background was performed by two men, one playing a saxophone. This ceremony was conducted on Diwali, an important Indian holiday known sometimes as the festival of lights.

More information is available here on Hoysaleshvara, describing its history and architecture.

We also visited a Jain temple (the first temple, Hoysaleshvara, is Hindu). To reach it, one has to walk up 650 stone steps, barefoot. This is not a small task in the heat of the southern Indian afternoon sun. At the top is a Jain temple with a sixty foot high statue of a naked saint, Gomateshwara (complete with what must be one of the world's larger, anatomically correct, granite depictions of human genitalia). You can read more online about Gomateshara.

This was a long day, and I was glad to get home. Even though the noisy Diwali fireworks and firecrackers were going off, I fell asleep immediately.

Cheers.

So Who Needs Lawyers? (w/ video)

The downtown market in Mysore is an amazing place, with vendors selling fruit, flowers, spices, coffee, trinkets, CDs, and who knows what all. There is an area where notaries and typists will prepare documents for you, using ancient, manual typewriters. I don't know all the details of how the system works, but we can be certain that New York firm rates do not prevail to document your deal.

Practice notes: after a somewhat bumpy practice yesterday, today's led session went well. Because the count is so comparatively long, I made myself slow down, which turned out to be a wise decision. It kept my heart rate down, and prevented me from crashing later in the series.

And Some Days the Bear Catches You

"Some days you catch the bear, and some days the bear catches you" -- old saying.

Everyone who practices ashtanga with any frequency knows that some days one has more energy, more flexibility, less stiffness, and everything is smooth. To balance this out, some days are choppy, the body is stiff, the mind is elsewhere, and you wonder whether staying in bed would have been an excellent choice.

After a number of high energy days, I had a typical sore-and-stiff-and-why-I-here day. Predictable and normal. With two days off this weekend, after tomorrow's led class, some extra rest is probably indicated.

After a visit to downtown yesterday, I'm going back later in the afternoon with a couple of other students. Perhaps another $1 meal at Hotel Dasprakash, where I ate lunch yesterday.

Today's picture is simply a house I saw on a walk up to the Green Leaf Cafe, a frequent hangout. I liked the colors and you will note a placard of Ganesh (a Hindu elephant god).

Cheers.

Market Visit (w/ Video) + Note on Flip Recorder

After some strong thunderstorms yesterday, the skies were clear this morning. Things are settling, slowly, into a bit of a routine. 4:30 a.m. still comes early, but I am slowly getting used to some of the daily experiences: breakfast of fresh fruit salad and some kind of smoothie (watermelon today), no TV (I'm not that big a Bollywood fan), timing phone calls home to accommodate the 9.5 hour time difference.

I went with some other students downtown for lunch, about a 15-20 minute auto rickshaw ride. After lunch, I visited the main Mysore market with them. The sensory overload is intense, with a rush of noise, color, people, and smells. The areas with flowers and with spices are impressive. This is not the Bardstown Road Farmer's Market.

The short video above is from outside the market.

About the videos on the blog: This is all made possible by my brilliant wife, who gave me a Flip Video pocket video recorder a few days before I left for India. Before getting this device, which is smaller than a pack of cigarettes, I had been a desultory and unmotivated photographer. I wasn't sure how much I would use the Flip, but it has been wonderful. It's supremely easy to use, and I can seamlessly (and mindlessly) move the day's video from the recorder to the netbook computer to Youtube. Then, it's easy to "embed" the video in the blog. David Pogue, the NYT tech guy, has written a good review of the device, which I recommend to all video klutzes like myself.

You Need Chestnut? (Yoga Practice Notes)

This post will perhaps have less interest for those who are not active yoga people.

What's it like to practice in Mysore, compared to daily mysore practice at Yoga East?

At one level, it's the same. The sequence is the same, the shala/studio etiquette is the same, there are adjustments. It's hard work, just like home. Everyone should be reassured that Laura is a very skillful, effective teacher who instructs in the true Mysore tradition. You won't feel like a fish out of water practicing here.

You will, however, feel a definite shift in the level of energy in the practice. Just being here has a distinct, intangible effect on one's practice; this is ashtanga central. There are more people (maybe 70?) and a number of them are excellent or superb in their practice skills. Everyone has come a very long way to do one thing -- advance their ashtanga practices. There is, then, a kind of atmosphere of intensity and energy which one can feel.

There are, however, plenty of newer students. Some people appear to be first time students (not first day, but just learning the sequence) and they appear to have Saraswati's full attention and interest. This, too, is like Yoga East. The practice really is for everyone, not just the stars.

There are some really good folks. I haven't seen any David Swenson or Lino Miele, but there are plenty of people working on intermediate, some of whom are most skillful. The second series people are a bit older, and I'm guessing that a lot of them are yoga teachers back home. A lot of the primary series students are in their 20's.

The age spread here is different from Yoga East, where we are a decidedly grayer crowd. I can't tell if I'm the oldest student, but I'm willing to bet that I am. It looks like there are three or four of us in our fifties, and I don't see anyone who I think is older than I am (almost 60).

There seem to be a lot of practicioners from Europe and from Australia and New Zealand. There definitely are some people from the U.S., and I've hung out a fair amount with a fellow in his mid-50's from NYC. He's a regular at Eddie Stern's Yoga Shala in Soho, and has been to Mysore some ten times -- a very good resource.

There is no reason why a regular Yoga East mysore person would not significantly benefit from study here, and no barriers in the studio at all. It's a long way to travel, but you would feel comfortable and energized.

Personal practice comments: I got the bind in Supta K again, after missing it yesterday. I "turned the corner" on one side in Marichy D, but couldn't clasp. I continued on, as Saraswati was busy. She shouted (in a nice way?) across the room, "You need chestnut?" I misunderstood, and thought she was asking me if I wanted an adjustment. In reality, she was telling me I needed to wait for an adjustment, so I waited a long time while she assisted other people, who had started earlier, in backbends.

So far I have not been stopped, and have continued throughout the primary series. I have a hunch, though, that after enough observation, I'll likely get a stopping point at Supta K or somewhere, as my limited skill set deteriorates after navasana.

Cafe Latte, Indian Style (w/ video)

Tea and chai are dominant hot beverages here. But a fellow visiting from stateside may want a cup of joe, so I set out on a two hour loop today to try my navigational skills in the Gokulam area of Mysore. What I did was remarkably trivial: went to a place with good latte (where all the locals were texting on the cell phones); went to the grocery store; and went to the bank. Absolutely mundane, but when one is in a genuinely foreign culture, it feels like a real achievement to undertake these tasks.

I've uploaded a photo of the Hindu temple which is just 100 yards down the hill, at the beginning of the post. Lots of color in this religion's art.

Here's a video link, I hope, to a typical Mysore street scene: