We’ve spent a whole month in Bhagsu, India, just outside of Dharamsala, doing an intensive yoga course and teaching English to a couple of Tibetan girls. It’s been super busy but we loved it! Here’s what an average day was like for us:
7 am: Wake up and do kriya yoga (purification) exercises, which include (1) scraping the gunk off of our tongue with a spoon, (2) rubbing the whole inside of our mouths with rock salt, (3) using a “neti pot” to clear out our sinuses by inhaling water through one nostril and breathing out the mouth (this one really works well if you do it right but we had many not-so-fun experiences learning how to do it!), and (4) rinsing our eyes with cool water. There are several other kriya techniques that we learned in class but we haven’t ventured to try them yet as they are complicated and sound pretty uncomfortable….But we plan to try them at some point (probably when we are comfortably situated back home in the States) as we have learned how important it is to purify the body. After the kriyas, we usually lie around watching our newfound favorite waste of time American TV show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” (the answer is decided “no”) or rush up the street to get a fresh fruit bowl from Unity Bistro. We’re not supposed to eat anything other than fruit for two hours before our yoga class but if we don’t eat anything, we’re absolutely famished by the time our morning yoga class is over.
9 am: Walk up the mountainside (enjoying the beauty or hating the burning of our thighs, depending on the day) to our yoga class for the morning lecture and morning session of hatha yoga. One of our two instructors, Monika or Manu, teaches us about the new asana for the day, including how to hold the proper position, the benefits to the body and mind of the position, and where to mentally focus while doing the posture. The asanas started from basic postures like a standing forward bend and built up to shoulder stands and headstands. We bend our bodies in various ways we didn’t think possible! Unlike what we were used to in the US, we sometimes hold the poses for up to ten minutes at a time! They didn’t teach us any pranayama (yogic breathing) during the first month because they say it is too powerful energetically for beginners. We did experience many purification reactions (headaches, fevers, chills, soreness in the glands, etc.) during the month, so they are probably right! We have been dragging a lot of the month, but overall the yoga has really made us feel good. It’s going to be a challenge to figure out how to fit it in once we get back to the US… something tells us that we won’t have 6 hours a day to spend practicing!
11:30 am: After the morning yoga, we’re typically starving and head to a local restaurant for lunch. We’ve learned a lot about various yogic diets, including ayurvedic and the yin-yang diet and both visited an ayurvedic doctor to learn about our doshas (body types) and the foods that we should eat to rebalance the energies in our bodies. It’s challenging to figure out what to eat exactly given advice from so many people. If you combine the allowed foods from every different school of thought, you are literally left with nothing to eat except boiled cabbage. The yin-yang diet suggests that most people eat too many acidic foods (which basically includes anything good) and that we can build our inner strength, willpower, and balance by eating more alkaline foods. The most recommended foods on this diet are brown rice, whole grains, apples, walnuts, certain vegetables, and herbs. An extreme version of this diet, called Diet No. 7, developed by George Ohsawa, is said to have cured people from all sorts of long term illnesses. In it, you are supposed to eat only brown rice with sesame seeds for ten days. The idea is that 10% of your blood is replenished per day, so by keeping it up for ten days, you give your body a yang shock that is very purifying. On the other side, the ayurvedic doctor told us to avoid brown rice because we were both strongly of the pitta type (fire) and brown rice is considered heating, meaning it would cause us to be more imbalanced. So we spent many a day staring at the menu trying to figure out what the overlaps were and ended up settling on mainly trying to avoid processed food, white flour, and white sugar. It is so easy to eat locally grown produce (the Indian mangoes are to die for) and Bhagsu and McLeod-Ganj both have a big diversity in the food available (Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Burgers, Israeli, Italian, etc.) We have become big fans of a Korean restaurant (can you believe they have a great Korean restaurant in the middle of the Himalayas with no Koreans in sight?!) and also a good sushi place – both veg!
1 or 1:30 pm: After eating, depending on the day, we either head over to tutor the girls in English at a café in McLeod or Kelli goes to Monika’s belly dancing class…. Or, if we’re especially tired, we chill out in the room. As we talked about a bit in our last blog entry, tutoring the girls has been a challenge but we’ve had a good time and learned a lot ourselves. They threw us a “drink party” the last week we were there, where we went to one of the girls’ flats to chat and drink juice. They had wanted to make lunch but after finding out that we don’t eat meat, didn’t know what to make so it became just drinks. Haha. Probably just as well since we have yet to find Tibetan food that we like! The belly dancing has given us some time apart (pretty rare these days) and Kel has really enjoyed it. Monika mixes it up each time and incorporates all sorts of things from goddess dances, dancing with scarves, Shakira, to Tarot card reading.
4 pm: Afterward, it’s time for our afternoon hatha yoga session. In the beginning of the course, there was an afternoon lecture as well but as we built our strength and learned more asanas, we practice the full two hours (often plus) in the afternoon as well. The only difference with the morning session was that we do a series of twelve Surya Namaskars (Sun Salutations), a common yoga exercise that is more dynamic.
6 pm: Following the afternoon practice, there is another lecture that is usually quite interesting. Topics range from chakras and energy flows in the body, yoga philosophy, spirituality, purification techniques, healing therapy, meditation, to tantric practices. They usually just scratch the surface on a subject but are enough to open doors to things we hadn’t heard of before. Some things are really out there (at least compared to what we’re used to) but it’s been a ton of fun hearing what kinds of healing you can try. It takes the yoga a step deeper than the gym class workout style that we’ve been used to back home.
8:30 pm: Dinner at a local restaurant. We’re again starving by this point. The café behind our yoga school serves dinner, so we sometimes watch a movie related to the lecture topics with other students from the class… anything from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to The Matrix.
10:30 or 11 pm: Pass out from exhaustion. We did dabble with a type of yoga called Yoga Nidra (the Yoga of Dreams) but we have yet to master that one. Maybe that’s how we’ll solve the not having six hours a day to practice yoga when we get back! And NO we have not joined a cult!
7 am: Wake up and do kriya yoga (purification) exercises, which include (1) scraping the gunk off of our tongue with a spoon, (2) rubbing the whole inside of our mouths with rock salt, (3) using a “neti pot” to clear out our sinuses by inhaling water through one nostril and breathing out the mouth (this one really works well if you do it right but we had many not-so-fun experiences learning how to do it!), and (4) rinsing our eyes with cool water. There are several other kriya techniques that we learned in class but we haven’t ventured to try them yet as they are complicated and sound pretty uncomfortable….But we plan to try them at some point (probably when we are comfortably situated back home in the States) as we have learned how important it is to purify the body. After the kriyas, we usually lie around watching our newfound favorite waste of time American TV show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” (the answer is decided “no”) or rush up the street to get a fresh fruit bowl from Unity Bistro. We’re not supposed to eat anything other than fruit for two hours before our yoga class but if we don’t eat anything, we’re absolutely famished by the time our morning yoga class is over.
9 am: Walk up the mountainside (enjoying the beauty or hating the burning of our thighs, depending on the day) to our yoga class for the morning lecture and morning session of hatha yoga. One of our two instructors, Monika or Manu, teaches us about the new asana for the day, including how to hold the proper position, the benefits to the body and mind of the position, and where to mentally focus while doing the posture. The asanas started from basic postures like a standing forward bend and built up to shoulder stands and headstands. We bend our bodies in various ways we didn’t think possible! Unlike what we were used to in the US, we sometimes hold the poses for up to ten minutes at a time! They didn’t teach us any pranayama (yogic breathing) during the first month because they say it is too powerful energetically for beginners. We did experience many purification reactions (headaches, fevers, chills, soreness in the glands, etc.) during the month, so they are probably right! We have been dragging a lot of the month, but overall the yoga has really made us feel good. It’s going to be a challenge to figure out how to fit it in once we get back to the US… something tells us that we won’t have 6 hours a day to spend practicing!
11:30 am: After the morning yoga, we’re typically starving and head to a local restaurant for lunch. We’ve learned a lot about various yogic diets, including ayurvedic and the yin-yang diet and both visited an ayurvedic doctor to learn about our doshas (body types) and the foods that we should eat to rebalance the energies in our bodies. It’s challenging to figure out what to eat exactly given advice from so many people. If you combine the allowed foods from every different school of thought, you are literally left with nothing to eat except boiled cabbage. The yin-yang diet suggests that most people eat too many acidic foods (which basically includes anything good) and that we can build our inner strength, willpower, and balance by eating more alkaline foods. The most recommended foods on this diet are brown rice, whole grains, apples, walnuts, certain vegetables, and herbs. An extreme version of this diet, called Diet No. 7, developed by George Ohsawa, is said to have cured people from all sorts of long term illnesses. In it, you are supposed to eat only brown rice with sesame seeds for ten days. The idea is that 10% of your blood is replenished per day, so by keeping it up for ten days, you give your body a yang shock that is very purifying. On the other side, the ayurvedic doctor told us to avoid brown rice because we were both strongly of the pitta type (fire) and brown rice is considered heating, meaning it would cause us to be more imbalanced. So we spent many a day staring at the menu trying to figure out what the overlaps were and ended up settling on mainly trying to avoid processed food, white flour, and white sugar. It is so easy to eat locally grown produce (the Indian mangoes are to die for) and Bhagsu and McLeod-Ganj both have a big diversity in the food available (Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Burgers, Israeli, Italian, etc.) We have become big fans of a Korean restaurant (can you believe they have a great Korean restaurant in the middle of the Himalayas with no Koreans in sight?!) and also a good sushi place – both veg!
1 or 1:30 pm: After eating, depending on the day, we either head over to tutor the girls in English at a café in McLeod or Kelli goes to Monika’s belly dancing class…. Or, if we’re especially tired, we chill out in the room. As we talked about a bit in our last blog entry, tutoring the girls has been a challenge but we’ve had a good time and learned a lot ourselves. They threw us a “drink party” the last week we were there, where we went to one of the girls’ flats to chat and drink juice. They had wanted to make lunch but after finding out that we don’t eat meat, didn’t know what to make so it became just drinks. Haha. Probably just as well since we have yet to find Tibetan food that we like! The belly dancing has given us some time apart (pretty rare these days) and Kel has really enjoyed it. Monika mixes it up each time and incorporates all sorts of things from goddess dances, dancing with scarves, Shakira, to Tarot card reading.
4 pm: Afterward, it’s time for our afternoon hatha yoga session. In the beginning of the course, there was an afternoon lecture as well but as we built our strength and learned more asanas, we practice the full two hours (often plus) in the afternoon as well. The only difference with the morning session was that we do a series of twelve Surya Namaskars (Sun Salutations), a common yoga exercise that is more dynamic.
6 pm: Following the afternoon practice, there is another lecture that is usually quite interesting. Topics range from chakras and energy flows in the body, yoga philosophy, spirituality, purification techniques, healing therapy, meditation, to tantric practices. They usually just scratch the surface on a subject but are enough to open doors to things we hadn’t heard of before. Some things are really out there (at least compared to what we’re used to) but it’s been a ton of fun hearing what kinds of healing you can try. It takes the yoga a step deeper than the gym class workout style that we’ve been used to back home.
8:30 pm: Dinner at a local restaurant. We’re again starving by this point. The café behind our yoga school serves dinner, so we sometimes watch a movie related to the lecture topics with other students from the class… anything from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to The Matrix.
10:30 or 11 pm: Pass out from exhaustion. We did dabble with a type of yoga called Yoga Nidra (the Yoga of Dreams) but we have yet to master that one. Maybe that’s how we’ll solve the not having six hours a day to practice yoga when we get back! And NO we have not joined a cult!
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