On Learning Yoga / Meditation - Chapter 1
My journey
Yoga is a big part of my life - I spent almost 3 years living at an ashram, from 22 to 25 years old. Since the age of 20 most days have involved hours of yoga.
Here is the story of how it happened.
Part 1 - The Origin Story
The summer of hedonism
In the summer of 2010 I was back in Delhi after my first year at the University of Toronto, and it had been a rough year. I had been far away from all that was familiar and comforting - cold, lost, and very lonely.
But back in Delhi that summer, I was living the very best life 20 year old me could imagine. I had friends, money to spend, a girlfriend, a car to drive, and absolutely no responsibilities or obligations.
I would go out everyday, eat well and drink, smoke, drive around, play games, get high, crash with friends. I was young, healthy. I knew even then that life couldn’t possible get any better. I was young, had everything I could want, and no responsibilities. I could not imagine a better life.
But I was miserable. Having dreamed all year about how wonderful it would be when I was back at home, and pursuing my idea of happiness in Delhi with such single mindedness, I couldn’t help but notice I was profoundly unhappy waking up each morning, and going to bed each night.
The only moments of joy were the ones where the food was in my mouth, in that first 30 minutes where alcohol was taking me from sober to happy high, the few seconds the car would take to go from 60 to 80.
I became cognizant of how ephemeral all the joy of the day was. I asked an older and wiser friend how to get long term happiness. He said there was no such thing.
The class
A psychology textbook had talked about things that cause long-term happiness and those that don’t. Yoga was one thing that was supposed to, and it was on my list of things to learn. I imagined someone coming over to my house and teaching me how to stretch.
I asked my parents if they knew someone, and they suggested a yoga class they’d attended year before. A session was starting next day, and so I said yes. The week long course was held in Chanakyapuri in Delhi, in July 2010.
On the first day of class, the person spoke about a lot of the things I’d been thinking about. He asked if the purpose of everything we’re doing is to be happy, is it not worth addressing that directly? I couldn’t have agreed more.
I discovered books by the person in our house that my parents had bought years earlier. I read them, and was presented with entirely different perspective on reality than I had encountered before.
That was the summer of my intellectual struggle. I read all the books I could find to try and figure out if what was being said might be true. I read the tao, parts of the bible and the koran, the torah. I read other Indian philosophers, accounts of people on psychoactive substances.
Later that summer I went to the ashram in South India to do another couple of courses. I was there for about a week, and absolutely loved it. I learned another practice, and was remember how happy and light I felt on the flight home.
Enthusiasm builds
Back in Toronto a couple of months later, I often found myself with nothing to do in the evenings, and started doing the practices I’d largely neglected. A month or so into doing them, one day, I found myself in a completely different headspace. It was a lightness that is hard to describe, but even 15 years later, I still remember the room where I did it, the way I was sitting that day. Starting that day, I did my practice almost much everyday for the next five or six years.
It was later that year I decided I wanted to spend some serious time at the ashram. I remember having an internal dialogue, when one of the two voices in my head said - “Dude, you are going to the ashram as soon as you are done university. Just accept it.”
The following summer I went back to the ashram and spent a few months there. I was doing fairly random work - office help, cleaning, food preparation. I worked for a while at the valuables deposit counter, and picked up some Tamil. I was occasionally very frustrated, but was very much enamoured and excited about the meditation and the possibility of living there.
I realize now I’ve not talked about meditation. I used to describe in those first few years as free drugs. You just sit and breathe and get high. And high in a way no other substance I’d tried or read about even remotely approached.
I was ready to take a leave of absence from university and stay for a while, but my parents insisted that I graduate first. I hatched a plan to complete the last 2 years of my degree in half the time.
In the fall of 2011 I started taking a double course load, and attended a pre-meet for a week long silence program that happens in the spring. I had no real intention of signing up, but the program was exactly during spring break, and I decided to do it.
The preparation for the program was really intense - about five hours of daily yoga including sitting on the floor for an hour straight, dietary guidelines that precluded dairy and sugar, and refraining from all substances.
I now found myself very much out of step other university students. I would eat only at home, not smoke, not drink, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time outside of practices and classes. That was a very intense phase of my life which consisted almost solely of yoga. I was living entirely in my own universe.
This was late 2011. I was 21 years old.
Silence
I attended a 10 day silence program in March 2012, then went back to Toronto to resume university. That summer I took again a double course load, and spent time in the US ashram. I loved it. Some memorable moments were travelling to Houston to help organize a class there, an insane 4 day program I helped with during which I slept maybe 8 hours. I was just in another world the entire 4 days. We also drove from Tennesse to Detroit via Indianapolis with a 24 foot truck we loaded the day before.
This was also the summer I fell quite in love with someone I met on flight back to Delhi from the silence program. I was almost done with my course work in Toronto though, and very fixated on going to the India ashram though, while she had yet to finish her undergrad in the States. We parted ways on the driveway of my aunt’s house in Michigan, where she dropped me off before heading back to University, a moment I still recall with a sigh, and a some pain.
My university obligations ended in August 2012. I spent some more time at the US ashram, and came back to India in October. After staying in Delhi to attend my grandfathers 90th birthday party, I headed to the ashram to live there full time in November of 2012.
Part 2 - At the Ashram
The first few months
My accommodation at the ashram was a dorm on the entire first floor of a building, where between 30 and 60 men lived in an open room. There were outdoor loos, no hot water, and no mirrors above the communal wash basins. There were no beds either, and we slept on yoga mats laid out on the orange carpets.
I had brought my laptop with me, but not wanting to keep in the dorm, I placed it in a locker in the office, and didn’t see it again for several months.
Smartphone had not become ubiquitous yet in 2012 - I had an old nokia phone, and almost no access to internet. There were no books or newspapers around, and no entertainment. Most other people were from small southern towns, and I didn’t really have any friends there.
My work in the initial months was very haphazard, though I working at the temples is something that stands out. There were two at the time - the Dhyanalinga, and the Devi Temple. The Dhyanalinga is a silent meditation temple, and the work was largely ushering people in and out and reminding them not to speak. The Devi temple had rituals and chanting, and in addition to ushering I helped with the arti’s and offerings.
I was eventually placed into an orientation program for us to experience working in different capacities and for them to evaluate where we might fit. It was a gruelling schedule- each day was programmed from 5 am to 10:30 pm. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and started becoming forgetful. It was around then I decided I could not become a monk, an idea I had been seriously considering - I recognized that a lifetime of 5 am wake ups was not for me.
The orientation program ended on the Mahashivaratri of 2013.
A little story from that Mahashivaratri -
After being awake 24 hours to support the festival, at 6 am I started walking to a nearby hill to complete a program that I’d been doing in preparation for the night.
One thing the program asked of one was to beg for alms, shirtless, in a public place. I’d done it in a Coimbatore market. The one thing I’ll never forget is how much more generous those with very little were than those with enough. In particular I remember one very old lady with seemingly not a lot to spare, who stopped to undo the knot in her sari where she carried her money, and gave me 2 coins. Humbling.
The last step of this program was to climb the hill, a 3 or 4 hour walk. Starting at 6, I made it up okay, but on the way down it got very hot and I became very, very dehydrated. I basically at some point, delirious, started running down the mountain, at great expense to my knees. I hitched a ride back to the ashram, and still remember exactly which water cooler I went to, the only one that dispensed cold water.
After the orientation they temporarily put me in the archives department, where my job was to transcribe talks. It was extremely boring - I was sitting in a room with mostly geriatrics, and my job consisted of looking at a screen all day. This was exactly the fate I’d tried to avoid by coming to the ashram.
I had been at the ashram about six months at this point, and honestly I was done. I was lonely and tired and worn out, and it just wasn’t a very enjoyable experience. The idea of becoming a monk had passed, and I was no longer sure what I was doing there.
But I was very curious about which department they’d put me in. The person running the orientation was a smart guy, and I knew he could see that I was smart, and capable, and struggling. So before I went back home to figure out what happened next in my life, I just wanted to know.
Late one evening I got message - meet Swami V**** tomorrow. I still remember where I was when I asked another monk - “Swami V**** means which deparment?”
“Home School”, he said.
And there it was I’d spend the better parts of the next 2 years.
More coming soon
<3
Devansh