All A’s: Ashrams, Ayurveda, Art, Architecture and Awareness

Ever since I was a little kid, I have always tried my best to get all A’s on my report card – I finished with 4.0 GPA in both high school and my Clark State computer programs. So I guess even when I travel, I’m still looking to do it a hundred percent.

My final few weeks in South India included brief stays at the main campuses of two of the world’s largest ashram communities as well as a stop in a city that is renowned hub of art and culture for southeast Asia.

I also visited some ayurvedic doctors who are helping me get body and mind around this pain that has been increasing in my left leg.

And during the full moon cycle that took place, it feels like the veil of reality has grown thin, allowing my awareness to perceive the true nature of existence with greater ease. I’ve been doing this for some years now, but it seems like it is getting stronger. I don’t know if it is the energy from the ashrams or the length of time I have devoted to study these esoteric states of being that is opening the doors of perception wider, but I can feel the oneness with it all to a much greater degree recently.

Isha – Sadhguru’s Community and a Really Big Shiva

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I showed up at the Isha Foundation outside of Coimbatore in the state of Tamil Nadu.

I had listened to some Sadhguru talks about various topics on YouTube but had very little idea what the Isha community was about – except that it is home to a really cool 112-foot tall Adiyogi Shiva bust adorned with a mala made from 108,000 rudraksh beads.

When I arrived, I thought it would be some sort of overpriced tourist trap, but to my pleasant surprise, everything was reasonably priced. You do end up spending money there but the prices are in line with what you find in surrounding areas of India, which is very cheap by western standards.

I had a very nice room for two people all to myself and meals were included for the standard thousand rupees I normally pay for a night in a hotel or guest house. It is definitely a bargain if you are planning to visit the ashram.

They advertise free yoga, but really that is just a course that shows two basic joint mobility exercises and a lesson on the Isha kriya, which helps connect us to the vedantic concept that we are not the body, nor are we the mind; we are ultimately the unchanging screen onto which the movie is projected.

But with all this extra time on my hands, I practiced some hatha yoga out on the patio facing the early morning rising sun.

In the mornings, I also went into the Suryakund pool, which is a bath of cold water in which three pods charged with energy are positioned, along with a cascading waterfall.

I followed this energizing bath with a visit to the Dhyanalinga meditation hall, which is a specially constructed room around a special Shive linga, which was designed and energized by Sadhguru and other yogis to harmonize with the seven chakras. Each day around 6 p.m., there is also a nada yoga, or sound meditation, session that was quite nice.

And the food at the ashram was bountiful. Everything was vegetarian and sattvic (the ayurvedic quality best suited to foster lightness and spirituality). There were lots of fruits, which I learned should be eaten before the main course because they prepare the body for food and also are digested most efficiently when eaten on an empty stomach. But if you get hungry for sweets, coffee or tea, junk food or all the other stuff we love and hate to eat, there are stores that sell it cheap.

The best known feature of the Isha campus – other than the fact that it is home to Sadhguru – is almost certainly the massive black Shiva bust. At 112 feet in height, it’s really quite a sight to behold. When I was there, crews were just removing some large flower structures that were put in place for the recent Maha Shivaratri celebration.

I only met a few people there as many of the community members are in sadhana, which oftentimes requires silence.

I’m not planning to move in any time soon and become a full-time sadhaka there, but it is definitely a nice place to visit and money spent there does go to very worthwhile causes in India and to generally foster a more peaceful and spiritual society worldwide.

Art of Living – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and the Sudarshan Kriya

I will skip over Kochi for the time being and write on the Art of Living community where I spent the final weekend before I came back north to Risikesh, where I am now.

Like Isha, Art of Living is the central base of a world-renowned guru named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and has centers in all major parts of India, along with locations in 180 countries worldwide. He is credited with helping bring an end to the bloody civil war that pitted the FARC revolutionary faction against the Colombian government for many decades, among other peaceful initiatives.

Unlike Isha, I actually enrolled in a weekend retreat there called the Happiness Program, in which I learned a powerful breathing technique (or pranayama) called the Sudarshan Kriya. Regular practitioners of this say that prolonged practice can not only foster happiness, tranquility and a meditative mind but has been credited with healing the body from disease or injury. They say 48 days of daily practice makes a noticeable difference. I am currently on day fourteen and will report back on this later.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from one of the top teachers there, Ananda-ji, who travels the globe offering more advanced programs in the Art of Living framework. He was entertaining, but much of his discourse was in Hindi, which I am actually able to understand to some degree, but I still miss the finer points of jokes and humor.

The course focused on some other techniques we can use to be happier in our daily lives – stuff like acceptance, humility, gratitude, service to a higher power and curbing anger, jealousy and other negative emotions as they arise.

There are five sutras:

1. Opposite values are complementary. For every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. For every great passion, there is an extreme pain. For all joy there is equal sadness. Security is inversely proportional to convenience. With all love there is loss.

2. Accept people and situations as they are. Acceptance is the answer to all our problems today. When we see God’s plan working just as it should, we are happier with the world around us. Do not try to control the world around us.

3. Don’t be a football of other people’s opinions. Don’t let other people kick us around like a soccer ball. It doesn’t matter what other people think. If 99 people give us compliments and one person criticizes us, we often focus only on the negative comment.

4. Don’t look for intentions behind people’s mistakes. If we look for intentions, we will be in tension. When we are constantly looking for what makes people tick, it is spinning our wheels about nothing. Sri Sri, however, writes in a book I was reading that sometimes when we see the real reason for someone’s behavior we can sympathize with them and this seems contradictory to this sutra. I try to think “Why do I behave the same way as the person I am annoyed with?” and then I see myself in that person. It is me, doing what I do and here I am getting mad about it. Like when someone is in a rush and pushes to get ahead in line, I just think that is what I do also. It is all me doing it to me and I am just on the receiving end now. If we want to change what people around us are doing, we have to stop doing that thing ourselves.

5. The present moment is inevitable. We are here now. Everything we have done in the past has helped get us to this point in life; so we should enjoy it. If we are happy it is of our own making. If we are suffering, we caused that also through our past actions and karma. Don’t regret the past or worry about the future. Be in the moment, here and now, as much as possible.

The other highlight of this experience was my new Russian friends, Tatiana, a young single mother and her four-year-old daughter, Erica, and the volunteer translator, Katarina. I saw lots of Russians in Goa, but I never really had much chance to interact. It was nice to get to know a real person from this land we often fear or look negatively upon. It’s important to remember that no matter how the world’s events are unfolding in the grand sphere, in the here and now, regardless of this concept of nationality, the people we interact are all the same, reflections of ourselves in the looking glass we call life.

Just like Isha, this is a great place to visit and the activities and causes they support are very worthwhile, but I didn’t quite feel “home” there, either. I do, however, want to keep practicing the Sudarshan Kriya and would consider advanced meditation programs or other activities in the future.

Art, Architecture and Culture in Kochi

Circling back to the week between Isha and Art of Living, I visited a city called Kochi and stayed in a district called Fort Kochi, which is known as a hub of art and culture.

A word of warning about this beautiful city by the sea, though: There are no real beaches to enjoy the ocean like there were in Goa. There is a walkway along the rocky shores with a few stretches of sand where you can wade into the water, but nowhere to sun yourself by the sea or go splashing out into the water. It is largely a fishing community and a base of naval and coast guard operations.

That being said, what Fort Kochi does have going for it is that is is rich with culture.

One of the most fascinating things I saw while there was a traditional dance form called Kathakali, where dancers are painted up and tell a story through their actions and expressions. There is no sound except the drums and cymbals used to accentuate the action taking place on the stage. The stories, specifically the ones I saw, were taken from the Indian classic, Mahabharata. It is a very colorful and vibrant dance style.

I was also exposed to this unique south Indian dance during one of my recent stops in Bangalore. When I was out walking, I wandered into a street festival and some people, who were fascinated with my foreignness, invited me to have food and then took me up to the front where two men were painted up, wearing large headpieces and carrying bows and arrows as they danced to drums and a horn.

After some additional research, I learned this type of dance is called Theyyam and the two dancers are actually playing the parts of two incarnations of Vishnu – Thiruvappana and the Vellatom Muttapan. I’m not sure what the story was about as they did not provide a summary like we got at the Kathakali shows. It was, however, a very fascinating dance to get to see up close and personal.

In addition to the dance performances, I also watched music by a group of Sufi musicians and saw a full moon flute concert.

But quite possibly the biggest art draw in Kochi is the Kochi-Muziris Biennale art exhibit, which had several sites across the town and one main site at a historic campus of buildings along the shoreline called the Aspinwal House.

There are thousands of works of art by practicing artists from not just India, but all throughout southeast Asia. This collection is not just art, in the traditional sense, but also works of social justice that raise awareness of topics such as damages to the earth’s water sources, deforestation of the Amazon, oppression of women or other social classes and so forth.

It was really quite an amazing exhibit with building after building filled with these unique collections. It was on par with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art recommended to me by a friend on my Rhode Trip through New England in late 2021.

Along with the art in Kochi, there is some nice colonial style architecture in not only the Aspinwal House location, but also sites like the Mattancherry Palace where the Kochi royal family lived during the time the Portuguese had a colony there. The churches of that era, especially the Santa Cruz Cathedral Basilica, are also quite impressive, although they still seem a little disjointed in India and its predominantly Hindu culture.

Ajoo, Ayurveda and Awareness

My yoga teachers in Kochi, Sajee and his son Ajoo, taught Sivananda style hatha yoga, with a heavy focus on meditation, relaxation, massage and expansion of awareness. It was a pleasant way to start the day every day -- except the increasing pain that has been radiating through my left thigh.

I had some ayurvedic massage done to help, which was quite nice, but was definitely not a cure. So I also visited an ayurvedic doctor who sent me for an MRI. It appears I have a prolapsed disc in my lower back. I think I am lucky I am in India as I can try some ayurvedic healing techniques before jumping right to the idea of invasive surgeries that only attempt to reconstruct the body without addressing the bad habits that lead us to harm our bodies to begin with. As I am learning, this kind of injury is not caused by some random injury but is instead the culmination of decades of bad diet, sleep habits and other factors, combined with my own natural tendencies and then some improper body actions aggravate the conditions to trigger the injury.

So instead of taking another hike into the mountains as the final leg of my trip to India, it looks like I will be visiting an ayurvedic healing ashram in south India for a panchakarma treatment to help address this issue. But it is also an investment that will help me cope with my body for the rest of this lifetime and beyond.

For as I have understood for many years, but am growing ever more comfortable with in recent months, is the fact that I am pure and uninterrupted eternal awareness. This body will eventually age and die, but that which I truly am will continue to survive unharmed. It is pure energy that can neither be created nor destroyed. It is constantly changing forms around me. The impressions of the senses and the visions and voices of the people I experience in my life are all manifestations of this simple but difficult to grasp truth.

I Am That I Am.

As I am learning here in India, this simple truth is the aim of all yoga. To accept that we are the divine; that there is nothing beyond this world that we inhabit, but we can change it to serve our greatest happiness if we turn our will toward that goal.

We can achieve moments of pure bliss known as samadhi, but ultimately we return to this infinite state of being and must live in contentment to the best of our abilities. The more we cultivate this sense of inner peace within ourselves, the more it will be reflected in the outer world. The people around us will be more calm. The noise in the hall will settle. And as we become better at this subtle art, we can silence the wars and the racial strife and put an end to the violence in the greater world we inhabit.

Until the next installment, may you enjoy peace and blessings, my readers.