Noisy peace (now with pics)

Two weeks in an ashram. How hard can that be? I asked myself. After all, I survived ten days’ worth of silent meditation. This should be easy in comparison.

Hmmm.

The first day started pretty well. I arrived at about 2pm, checked in, chatted to people, did some yoga and got fed. So far so good. Admittedly the food was a little dull, but not inedible. The dorm was clean, the people nice and the yoga good. I began to think that I might stay longer than just two little weeks. Foolish girl.

Things can change very quickly. One word: satsang. Twenty minutes of meditation followed by at least forty minutes of Hindu chanting. It started to go wrong for me about one minute into the meditation. Find peace, they said. Find inner stillness and calm. Peace? Perhaps if they provided industrial strength ear defenders I might be in with a chance. I’m not kidding. The music being pumped out of the nearby temple was at nightclub level. Someone suggested that they have to keep it that loud...after all, with 1.1 billion people competing for their Gods’ attention, they need to try hard to stand out.

So, inner peace having failed to be achieved, me and my increasingly bad mood moved into chanting. Now, anyone who knows me well can probably imagine how much I enjoyed this. Religion, ritual and group singing. I may have succumbed to the odd noribang in Korea and a night or three of drunken karaoke in Malaysia but rest assured, public singing is never going to be high up my to do list. Especially when sober.

I can honestly say I hated it. Ritual of any kind sets my teeth on edge. It’s a bit like nails down a blackboard to me. So by the time it ended I was seriously re-considering my earlier enthusiasm and trying to find out when the next train out would be.

To be fair, not everyone hated it. This was my issue. For some people it was a very spiritual experience, for some a minor irritation and only for the vast minority was it a form of slow torture.

Day 2 began at 5.30am with the early morning wake-up bell. We all gathered for Satsang at 6am and repeated the previous evening’s meditation to ear-ringing music and chanting to my gritted teeth.

Things picked up after that with tea, yoga and (still a little dull) food. Karma yoga duties were assigned (mine was cleaning the dining hall after dinner) and there was the day’s second yoga class. All followed up by dinner (now approaching the realms of very dull) and more satsang.

Repeat for 8 days.

Day 9. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t stand, I couldn't sit and I couldn’t bend - at least not without a little whimper. Now I know that I’m a wuss, but I’m also pretty sure that yoga isn’t mean to cripple you. So that afternoon I gave in and went to the gently yoga class (rather than the scary intermediate one). At the end I spoke to the lovely yoga therapy lady...it turns out that Sivananda yoga is especially bad for my kind of back issue. Oh good. (Don’t worry; I won’t bore you with the details. But I promise this complaint is not in my head, I have x-rays to prove it!). Trust me to pick the one style of yoga that will do me more harm than good.

Day 10. I escaped. I would have been crazy to stay. The satsang was turning me into a crazy person and the yoga was turning me into an OAP. Plus there’s only so much hatha yoga and breathing exercises I can take, even without the spine crunching backbends. Give me ashtanga any day.

The only question now was where to escape to. All the trains seemed to be booked for weeks in advance. But with a little persuasion (and I do mean a very little), a talked someone else into sharing the cost of a rickshaw to Varkala. It turns out the even yoga teachers can get backbended out.