India 4: You Won't Do Much Yoga In India

You may or may not come to India to do yoga. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, you do. If you come on a retreat or with the express intent of studying with a teacher for a month you will most likely do yoga every day, carefully packaged, planned or curated. If, however, you strap your yoga mat to your rucksack and lovingly carry it from street to street, hostel to hostel, train to train, nine times out of ten you won’t find the right space or time to roll out your mat for your practice. That one time that you try, your ujayi breath is cut short by the dust. And you might feel like you’re not doing yoga! In India!

Early feelings will arrive of guilt, frustration, even loneliness and wondering “what’s it all about, man, if it’s not about yoga?” You visit temples. You are cleansed with sweet holy water. You dodge goats and begging children in the street. You hear the call to morning prayer from the mosques. You hear the chanting to Shiva from the temple at dusk. You rise with the sun and drink chai on the street from paper cups with the locals, turning heads as you stand there clutching tea and a cigarette (you never smoked before you came to India, but the stress of the streets might make it inviting). And still you might feel like you’re not doing yoga!

After the hustle and heat and dust of the streets, you’ll find pockets of quiet where your mind is lulled into a state that you could call meditation without even trying; and isn’t that the golden egg of western seekers, to achieve that blissful state of non-thinking, without effort? You could be walking in the jungle on a safari trek, looking for tigers and monkeys and avoiding the spiders as big as your face, and watching your feet and following a steady pace, only thinking of the heat and the quiet when in a moment (you don’t know which moment it was) the humming of the crickets becomes louder and fills your ears and your mind and even your eyes, the buzzing becoming a vibration and you become so aware of every leaf and flower and bug and smell and the brightness and you know what it means to go wandering or walkabout, to commune with nature and find stillness and contemplation there, and then you think about how this might be yoga and come back to thinking of your mat and your backhanding practice, and you lose concentration and you stumble.

In a town that is holy but feels anything but amongst hoards of tourists (local and foreign), Blackpool-like beach fronts, bad food, bad restaurants, no place to rest, here is where the three seas meet and there is the holy rock that a holy man prayed on to the Goddess and so the rock became holy squared, blessed to the moon and back. The heat is heavy in your limbs and you plod down the road, till you find that point where the seas meet and the sun sets, and sliding in from a big rock to the water, clothes clinging to you, waves tossing you against sharp rocks, you stumble amongst waves back to the sand and laughing, dazed you watch the sun sink into the seas as it paints the sky a hundred layers of lava. And more than in the jungle, so much more, your mind simply switches to a state of deep relaxation and nothingness. The sky is orange and red and purple, the moon is a luminous blue behind you, and there is a buzzing, a vibration again in your lips and your teeth as you settle into the stoned-like feeling of emptiness, that lasts all evening. You’ve forgotten all about your yoga mat. And still you’re not doing yoga in India.

You begin to find gratitude easily. You don’t need to sit at the end of a long day that was filled with coffee meetings, sushi or tacos as standard for lunch, wine or cocktail as standard after work, the smiles and stories of friends filling your ears, wracking your brain for five things to be grateful for. You are filled with a rush of gratitude when a stranger speaks English with a smile, you buzz with contentment to sit down after walking for 5 hours in the sun, you eat gratitude with every bite of papaya after a week of rice and spices, you fall asleep with no mobile phone as there's no wifi, and fall heavy and deep, to wake 8 hours later at sunrise. You're grateful for silence, for a shower, a bucket of hot water, of cold water, of clean air, of sunlight that doesn't burn, of a clean toilet, of any toilet. And witnessing others, you realise how much you have to be grateful for at home. 

Gratitude will seek you out in India, mindfulness will follow your every step, and there is no other way to be but exist in the Now amidst the tuk tuk filled roads, watching your step ahead and under foot, navigating the dust and the heat and the beeping and shouting of "ma'am, good offer", steeling your face to avoid unwanted attention but opening your heart to take it all in. 

You won't do much yoga in India, if yoga is the one hour that you unroll your mat to move your physical body. Or if that one hour on the mat is the anchor you need to remind you how to practice off the mat for the other twenty three in a day. You won't do much asana on the road, amidst the dust and the heat. But you will find yoga in the momentary silence between each tuk tuk horn, in a bucket of hot clean water, in your walking and breathing and every moment you are mindful, which will be every moment, for there is no room for a wandering mind on the rushing, hustling, happy chaos of India. Amidst the horns and the shouting and the three songs blasted from megaphones competing for airspace and ears, amidst the coughing and dust you’ll find yoga. For the heavier an object that lands, the deeper an imprint it makes. The hotter water boils, the cleaner it will purify. The intensity of the pressure effects the totality of change. The louder the noise, the deeper the silence that follows. And India is all noise and then all silence.