The last travel post left off with me arriving at Akshi Yogashala in Rishikesh, India after some treacherous travel days. This post was postponed due to a weekly update off my life in the ashram not being very interesting, so I figured a big post covering the whole thing would be more worthwhile. Unfortunatly, that means this post will likely be four times as long as a usual one, and due to the fact that I wasn’t with my phone much, it will have significantly less pictures. That just means I will have to keep your interest with information.

To start, “My Soul On Fire” is the name of two of my favorite episodes of Scrubs from its final season (the best show in existence, if you didn’t know) and ever since hearing the title, I have been obsessed with this phrase. Throughout this trip, I have had this constant feeling of my soul being on fire. Travel more, read more, learn more languages, write more code, make more friends, more more more. I was excited to finally write a post titled “My Soul On Fire” and saw yoga, meditation, and pranayama as the perfect chance to do so. My original thinking was that maybe all of this stuff would set my soul ablaze, and I could aptly name it, but after a month of slowing down, I realized that my soul has been on fire for a while now.

Akshi Yogashala ended up being the perfect choice for me. Rishikesh is brimming with yoga schools and I just wanted one that was Yoga Alliance certified, and they all are. My engineer skills came in handy when going through and cross referencing all of the reviews, number of reviews and types of yoga/classes taught at each. I got it from over two hundred down to five and then class starting time and tuition cost ended up putting me at Akshi. It was away from the busy streets of Laxman Jhula, had a nice courtyard right when you walked in and due to me being the only guy, got me a private room. So now for what I did there.

Just to keep this post a little more organized, I am going to break down each of the areas that I was taught then cover some things about Rishikesh and India and then do my usual story telling style. Without further ado, let’s begin.

The Only Routine With Me Is No Routine At All

I was never shy about saying that I was scared about spending a month in the ashram. It is likely quite obvious that I am a busybody and am always doing a million things at once. The daily schedule for the ashram was as follows:
05:30am – Tea
06:00am – Hatha Yoga
07:45am – Pranayama
09:00am – Breakfast
10:30am – Anatomy/Philosophy/Teaching Methodology
11:45am – Mantras/Adjustments and Alignment
01:00pm – Lunch
02:00pm – Break
03:00pm – Anatomy/Philosophy/Ayurveda
04:15pm – Ashtanga Yoga
06:15pm – Relaxation/Meditation
07:30pm – Dinner

Everyday. For four weeks. On Sundays, our day ended after lunch and Wednesdays, we had off entirely besides a planned excursion (I will cover these), but otherwise this was my life for a month. Needless to say, this was a significant change of pace for me. After the first week, I stopped going down for morning tea and opted to use that time to listen to music in my room. I am not going to give you a lesson on each of these things, but here’s a rundown of what each generally is and what we did in them from day to day.

Forget What You Know

This entire post really needs to be preempted with the fact that I signed up for this certification for the same reason I sign up for anything, I wanted the information for myself. If I can use the information to help someone else, perfect, but otherwise, I saw the potential for yoga to help me increase flexibility and reduce to some common injury areas for me. Also, doing things slowly, taking time to meditate and generally just focus on being calm are outside of my usual comfort zone, so I wanted to see if I could do it. I was pretty certain daily meditation or being a vegetarian would kill me, and I was almost right, but we will get to that later.

Spiritual is not a way that I would ever describe myself, and I tend to think that a lot of that stuff is just ignorance of facts but the more I have learned about things I had originally written off, I have found that it is just different words for the same thing. The amount of things that the Western world considers spiritual voodoo, is actually backed by science, but they just aren’t using the medical terms for it. A lot of the stuff I learned, works and is based on actual science that we also learned. Some of it is a bit more out there, and likely won’t make it into my normal routine.

For the entire month, I made an agreement with myself that I would go into everything wholeheartedly as if it were something I believed in my whole life and after the month I would pick and choose which I would continue. I recommend this approach, it let me learn and enjoy a lot that I would have likely blown off had I not been so open minded.

Handy Notes

Here’s some quick terms that I am going to get out of the way so that I don’t have to repeat a million times and you don’t have to be confused when I mention them. Shoot me a message or an email if there’s a word I use in this post that doesn’t get covered.

Prana – Sanskrit for a unit of universal energy. Breathing brings this in and out of our bodies.

Asana – Sanskrit for pose. Techniquely means stable and comfortable, so even if you are in the correct pose, you are not in the asana unless you are holding it comfortably and stable.

External Yoga

Hatha Yoga is one of the six main paths of yoga. It is known as external yoga, because it covers the physical portion of what yoga pertains to, with Raja Yoga covering the internal. Hatha is the slow stretching yoga, usually paired with Vinyasa to create the fitness style yoga that is so popular in the Western world, but not here. Every day at 6am, we would slowly stretch out our bodies. A slow, monotonous daily routine that my brain took weeks to cope with without feeling the need to fall asleep once we hit the laying poses. Different sanskrit names and asana sequences filled the normal Hatha routine compared to our more standard Ashtanga practice. Hatha could change day to day depending on what part of us the teacher felt like we should be stretching that day. Hatha is likely the style I will teach anyone who wants me to introduce them to yoga, as it is less intense than Ashtanga and can be customized to each person or for specific goals. This class gave me a much greater understanding of the role each muscle and tendon plays in sitting, stretching and laying down.

The Expansion of Energy

In Sanskrit, Prana means energy and Ayama means expansion, so pranayama is the expansion of energy. Mostly, this was different breathing techniques. We learned a new one every day for the first few days and we would do a few sets of each breathing technique before adding a new one. By the end, each day consisted of doing an increased number of repetitions of five sets of different pranayamas. Each pranayama is described as helping different things, as well as being advised against for people with different ailments, from anxiety to depression to high blood pressure. Some increased the flow of energy, some slowed the heart rate, others increased focus. Alongside their desired effects, learning these techniques also taught us how to do different types of breathing. Abdominal, thoracic, ujjayi (throat) and yogic (all three at once) were all taught over the course of the class.

Alongside the different breathing types, we also learned to apply locks. These are said to keep energy from leaking out. There is a throat lock, an abdominal lock and the pelvic lock. Certain pranayamas called for different combinations of locks in their more advanced forms. The abdominal locks were actually a very common bodybuilding trick in the Frank Zane era for showing off abdominal control, which was an interesting skill to be taught and already know from the past. All of these further just increased attention to and control of the breath.

This class also included the shat kriyas, or body cleansings. Of the different ones, we had to practice three of them. The three we learned included the neti pot, rubber neti, and a specific dhauti. The neti pot, you have likely seen for cleaning your sinuses. Lean forward, pour in one nostril and watch water come out the other nostril, easy. The rubber neti required you to put one end of a long piece of rubber up your nostril and put it in until it entered your throat, at which point you pulled it out of your mouth. This was a big point of tension for a lot of people, but was no worse than anything in a Spartan, so I did it like it was an every day occurence. The final dhauti required you to drink three cups of warm salt water and then to vomit all of the water out, cleaning your stomach and esophagus. As I mentioned with one of the posts about food poisoning, I taught myself to puke on command year ago, so this was super easy for me, but not such a pleasant experience for everyone else. Overall, a cool class with an awesome teacher covering strict control of your body.

I Am A Soul, I Have A Body

The anatomy classes were things I had already learned during school and my personal trainer certification. These focused mainly on how breathing worked in the body and the functions of the spine. Learning each section of the spine and the muscles/tendons controlling these areas helped us to learn why certain asanas required certain muscles to be engaged or why certain adjustments should be made. Important for me, it helped with correcting some lower back issues caused my tightness from weightlifting and sitting at a desk. Other portions of the class were dedicated to showing the relation between yogic teachings and actual medical realities. For example, yogic teachings state that breathing brings prana into the body, so essentially oxygen, and the prana moves through seventy two thousand nadis to carry the energy throughout the body, which correlates to the blood vessels where the oxygen is carried through. How correct it is, I didn’t bother to check, but it was close enough that I never bothered fact checking.

This class was a bit slow for me as I knew it all, and being one of the only native English speakers, essentially functioned as a class for me to translate Indian English to something the other classmates could understand. It’s one thing to be fluent in a language, but to be able to understand technical terms is another thing entirely, compounded by the fact that those terms are being said by another non native English speaker. Overall, a good class to keep my scientific brain from writing off the whole experience as witchcraft and conspiracy theories.

Why Though?

The Philosophy class covered all of the things taught in the yogic teachings, from the definitions of all of these sanskrit words, to how energy functioned in the body, to the different types of yoga. Some of the main things were the main principles of yoga, such as the rules and regulations, as well as the different types of yoga and their uses. A ton of information here that helped keep things clear in the other classes.

Those Who Can’t Do, Teach

For three days, we had a teaching methodology class. This mainly covered things like how to structure a class, how to approach different situations, how and when to speak. A lot of this information we learned by experiencing our two yoga teachers lead us through sequeneces every day, but this covered a lot more of the planning and situations that will arise. A good course to have before our required teaching.

One Om Together

The course I was least excited for, mantras, ended up being one of my favorites. The course teacher was the wife of the director of the school and she was originally from Russia. She was awesome and was very clear about the fact that although all of the mantras mention different gods and Hindi things, that it was not inherently religious. We discussed different versions of mantra chanting and had to memorize about ten mantras. After learning them, we heard them everywhere, as they are usually sung over a melody and played like normal music anywhere else. The most simple mantra was just “Om” (Aum) which is the universal sound. It technically means god, but it is more symbolic of universal energy. This chant begins and ends almost every other mantra. Once you got the hang of it, it came more from your chest than from your vocal cords, and frequently, after about a dozen chants, you were told to focus on the feeling that was created from the chant. Try it, it makes focusing so easy.

The other mantras we learned were all meant for different things. Many were to receive help clearing negative energy or the create a bond with a teacher. Ashtanga yoga has a set opening and closing mantra. There is also a mantra that was done before any time we ate. My personal favorite was one to Ganesha (maybe you’ve heard me mention him before), that is said to help remove obstacles. Overall, a great class but we only had it for the first two weeks.

Good, But Could Be Better

Adjustments and Alignments were a source of dread for me when they started. Bulky muscles are not something that seemed to be common in the yoga community of Rishikesh, so mine were a common point of criticism for the classes. They held me back from certain things, as my muscles were able to counter a lot of the adjustments done, especially since the girls in the course were about half of my size and I can only relax my muscles so much. Add on to this that I work on computers and my hips and hamstrings are even tighter from that, and my flexibility is shot. My flexibility is quite high for someone my size thanks to volleyball, but the leg muscle from volleyball decreases my flexibility in certain areas. Oh well, many painful classes later, some of those issues have been reduced.

The class essentially ran us through some common poses and what you can do to help adjust a student to the correct version of the pose, or variations you can give them to strengthen their body for the correct pose. It also covered some great things to do to open up your hips, hamstrings, shoulders and chest, all of which I plan to add to my normal routine so maybe one day I can actually be flexible.

Just Add Turmeric

Ayurveda is basically Indian Life Science. It covers the idea that each person is made up of some variation of the three doshas and each person’s personality and health is diffferent based on this combination. It was kind of cool to learn about, as my main dosha, Pitta, explains my body type, eating habits and generally necessity for cold and sweets. It covers different foods for people to each depending on the weather, eating and sleeping tips and some other things. Most of it was interesting, and if nothing else just promoted a healthier lifestyle. Some of the things were counter to what I have learned and personally experienced with nutrition, but like everything else, I will take the useful parts and discard the things I find less useful. This was another three day course, but there are many course offerings on just Ayurveda, so maybe one day I will learn more.

The Eight Limbs of Yoga

Ashtanga Yoga means the eight limbs of yoga. This form of yoga covers internal and external yoga. Unlike Hatha Yoga, this form is unchanging. Their are six different series, with each needing to be mastered before you can move onto the next. We learned the first series, which we were told takes about five years of daily practice to master. There is a set sequence of poses (which takes about an hour and a half) and specific moves for each inhale and exhale. This course was done by tradition, so we did the class with doors and windows closed, no fan, and no water, even though it was over one hundred degrees. They believe the sweat is purifying, so maybe I overpurified.

Personally, this was my favorite. I will cover the teachers later, but our teacher had been practicing daily for three years, and he was a great teacher. He brought a strict following of tradition and his voice was powerful. This was an hour and a half of constant poses, which is an insane amount of work. While it didn’t satisfy my body’s necessity for powerful work, it did leave me feeling like I did something. Unfortunately, due to lack of exhausting me, a lot of times it had me ready for a more power related workout following.

This is likely the type of yoga I will (and have been) continue practicing daily to keep up with practicing. It is a bit harder to teach, as it requires a bit more dedication and teaching the sequence took us about ten days of daily class. Not really something you can teach a beginner, and much less likely to appeal to someone who would be a more casual yoga practictioner.

Relax Your Forehead

Here is where the issue with my body being trained for powerful work after intensive cardio or stretching comes in. Following Ashtanga, we had relaxation or meditation. The same teacher as pranayama, his voice was one of the most soothing things I have ever encountered. Regardless, my body is always ready to work, and when it’s primed to go, relaxing is not an option. Sometimes I could full on meditate for about fifty minutes before becoming restless, but if I was already hyped up from Ashtanga, I would spend the entire hour restless.

My ability to enter a meditative state is pretty good, but staying in one is pretty weak. This is pretty common for me, as I don’t tend to rest. A normal person gets seven to nine hours of sleep, and during that gets one to two hours of deep sleep. As a reference, I get four to six hours of sleep a night, and get three to four hours a deeps sleep during that. I am all about efficiency, and that stands true with resting as well. When I shut it down, I shut it all the way down, but not for long. This is something I will work on, but I think going back to harder exercises will remove some of my restless, so I will play it by ear.

The course covered different meditation techniques, including things like staring into the flame of a candle, and different relaxation techniques, like relaxation. A really interesting class and something I would like more experiencing leading, and I think it was helpful to experience.

The Cast

In past posts, I only mentioned someone outside of Ryan and myself if their introduction is pertinent to a particular story. With this situation, I think at least a short introduction is necessary just to cover the different personality types. I was the only guy in the course, which growing up with all sisters prepared me for. There were seven other students in the two hundred hour course with me and one girl finishing up her final week from the previous course. There were also five other girls completing their three hundred hour course, as well as a translator for them as most of them were Russian and spoke little English. There were five teachers and some other people working at the ashram.

My classmates consisted of girls from Russia (the one completing her final week), two from Taiwan, one from Germany, one from Ireland, two from Brazil, and one from Chile. The other group consisted of four Russians and another Chilean, with the Russian translator being from Ukraine. Most of my time not speaking English was spent speaking Russian and Spanish, so I was happy to have that knowledge going in. Each of them came from different backgrounds, professions and varying levels of yoga experience, from current teacher to limited experience. On top of this, I was the youngest person in the course by a good margin. I was a bit worried about my lack of flexibility and being the only guy, but they all immediately felt like family and it was a joy learning all of these things with them.

I will go into a bit more detail with the teachers, as their unique personalities brought something different to the table, which I think allowed me to construct what I think my desired teaching style will be if I ever pick up teaching yoga. We had to teach a one hour class for our certification, so I already practiced this a bit, but experiencing the different classes daily let me experience different teaching types to pick and choose the parts I liked best.

The Hatha teacher, who also taught Adjustment and Alignments, was very intelligent and straight to the point. A lot of his instruction came off as a bit harsh as a result, but the information was always spot on with no time wasted. From him, I learned a ton of techniques for working on flexibility issues, as well as what to look for when adjusting myself and others.

The Pranayama teacher, who also led meditation and relaxation, was a class favorite. The energy in every interaction with him was always pure joy, regardless of the situation. Even when he taught us the uncomfortable shatkriyas, he was coaching mental strength to people and brought such a positive attitude. As was mentioned before, his voice and manner of speaking was extremely soothing. For my required meditation in my class, I definitely stole is speaking style and cadence, which the other classmates said worked alongside confidence to make the experience very calming.

The Anatomy teacher, also taught Philosophy and was the director of the school, was wildly intelligent and had an insane confidence in teaching any information. We had less personal time with him, but the knowledge he taught us formed the backbone of the other teachings.

Our Ashtanga teacher likely did the most in forming my teaching style, as his strict following of tradition as well as pinpoint accuracy in his means of communicating adjustments and alignments made everything so simple. As every inhale and exhale has a corresponding movement in Ashtanga, there is limited time to give or receive information , so every word must be chosen careful. This combined with his confident way of speaking allowed you to follow his voice and let your body follow along almost unconsciously. An admirable skill in a teacher of anything, especially something as intricate as moving the human body in odd positions for over an hour.

The Mantra teacher taught me the use of mantras as a focusing technique amongst other things, while pointing out their usefulness. They also allow you to introduce the class to following instruction and bonding together before any asanas are performed. Prior to this class, I usually stayed silent during mantras, but hearing an entire class perform a mantra is a pretty amazing thing.

There were many other people in the ashram, including the people from the other course, but I think two of them deserve a special mention. Mukesh was mentioned in the previous post as he was the one who picked me up on a scooter and drove me back to the ashram at night when I arrived. He handled seemingly everything at the ashram. He led pre meal mantras, he handled our payments and any forms we needed, he fixed any issues we had. All around, he was delightful and helped whenever we needed it. The other person was Vidarth, the son of the director and mantra teacher. He was two and a half, spoke some Russian, Hindi and English, and generally brought joy to all of us. I have missed my neices and nephews since I have been gone, but this was the first time I had any extended time to hang out with kids. He sang mantras with us, flirted with the girls and was generally just a funny kid.

Becoming My Polar Opposite

Regularly throughout the course, other classmates would expound on how calm I was, and how they hoped to approach situations with my level of calmness. This isn’t me bragging, this is to point out how different my life was last month. No one who knows me would describe me as calm. I am all fire, usually competitive and on the move.

Beyond this, I am an avid meat eater. As of this writing, it has been thirty two days without meat for me. I plan to eat meat when I get to Europe, but said I would stay vegetarian for my stay in India. The first couple of days I felt tired and weak, but this was also likely from the significant decrease in protein, fat and overall calories. The sattvic style meals mostly consist of vegetables, broth and chapati. Occasionally, there are lentils and chickpeas but the amount of protein and fat was definitely not what my body was used to. Once I rectified this difference with desserts and the occasional dish outside of the ashram, I felt a bit better. I still noticed a significant decrease in size, although only a slight decrease in actual weight, but this could also be due to lack of blood in my muscles from not working out and not having any creatine in my system. Either way, it has been fine, although the focus has been more on carbohydrates with protein being harder to get. I miss the texture of meat and can’t wait to get back to it, but it allowed me to try some dishes I likely would have never tried.

Rishikesh as a city is known as one of the holiest cities in India and the birthplace of Yoga. The holy river Ganges runs through the city and the area near where I took my course was literally filled with yoga, ayurveda and similar things. There were no other options, there was no meat sold anywhere, no books to buy outside of these topics, no alcohol. Living in Rishikesh almost forced you to live this lifestyle. I think the lack of choice made the reality easier to stomach.

Realistically, I sucked at keeping my focus purely to the practice. I spent eight hours a day meditating, doing yoga and learning similar topics. Never in my life have I had to study for things, my brain excels at holding information. Instead of studying the material we learned every day, I spent my minimal free time learning German, practicing web development, watching movies and reading books. So standard Sam stuff. I also spent some of the time practicing volleyball on the roof by myself, because I took our ball from Thailand, which helped keep me from being restless and helped me work on some stuff I learned from my olympic friends. Only so much can be changed at once I guess.

After the initial weakness from diet change, everything flowed pretty easily. With temperatures topping out at over one hundred and my general disdain for routine, there was a bit in the middle where I dreaded going to the lectures. A day or two where I spent sick in my room gave me a necessary break. Beyond this, the entire experience was amazing and allowed me to clear some things out of my head. It also allowed me to make some decisions that have been mildly haunting me about my future, as I couldn’t reconcile what I actually want and what I think I should do. Meditation definitely has its place in the busy mind.

All Work And No Play

On our full days off, we had one scheduled excursion. The first one was a mountain sunrise “hike”. I was pumped, I woke up at 4:30am excited to hike. What we really did was take a truck over an hour around the horrible, winding roads to a big staircase leading to a temple to view the sunset. A beautiful view, but not the hiking I was looking forward to. The second one was a Ganga Aarti performance. A nightly sunset ritual with mantra chanting and people moving varying sizes of handles set ablaze. Concluded with the standard blessing and forehead painting, this was a nice experience to see something more traditional on the river. The third excursion was rafting down the Ganges. I love rafting, and in the heat, the ice cold Ganges was perfect. Most of the girls had never been rafting, and the stronger rapids led to all of them screaming at the top of their lungs. This trip also included some jumps off of rocks into the water, which is always a fun way to increase your heart rate. The final excursion was an hour hike to a sacred cave which housed a Baba, a man whose life was entirely dedicated to meditation. He meditated in the cave for twelve years. After meeting him, we were brought into the cave. After the initial opening, we were asked to go further into the cave, which was a smaller opening used for meditation. One of the girls didn’t want to enter due to claustrophobia, and I wasn’t able to enter due to being too big for the narrow pathway leading to the second room. We meditated in the initial room with the Baba while the others meditated inside. Overall, each one exposed us to something new in Rishikesh.

Outside of the excursions, we made many trips into town for dinner, dessert and to check out the shopping options. I found some new dishes that I will likely be ordering from Indian restaurants and desserts I will be making for events. I also got asked to play volleyball by some locals, which was a fun experience. The net was in the middle of a dirt field, and although some of the locals were good, they all insisted playing opposite me, so most of it was spent playing three versus eight or nine. They were also all hard court players, which isn’t exactly my favorite style of volleyball. Otherwise, I was hiding in my room or hanging out with my classmates.

The Holy City

Rishikesh was my first real exposure to India besides the ride from Delhi. There are a lot of similarities to Southeast Asia but tons of differences. The city is mostly silent, besides cars and scooters laying on their horns for almost no reason. Scooters and cars ride in both directions on the almost single lane roads. Trucks are filled to the brim with humans and drive with almost no logic. People ride scooters across bridges and down walkways that are too narrow for two people, yet they will lay on the horn behind you as you are blocked by another scooter or a cow. Patience is key here.

Cows are sacred in India, and thus they pretty much do as they please. They block narrow walkways and lay in the middle of the street. The go to the bathroom wherever and whenever they want. Occasionally, an entire horde will block an area and you just have to sneak past them. They are nice enough though, so we pet them and fed them our flower necklaces every once in a while. They are absolutely everywhere in the city though.

Most of the month, Rishikesh was above forty degrees Celsius (over one hundred Fahrenheit), so sweating was constant. This made it almost impossible to have the energy to do anything outside of yoga. Luckily, the holy Ganges River was only about a ten minute walk and stays between ten and fifteen degrees Celsius ( fifty to sixty degrees Fahrenheit) and we headed there whenever we got the chance. The extreme temperature change gave us a chance to cool off, as well as time to work on some meditative breathing to be able to enter the water. Trips to the river also included locals approaching you to take selfies or facetime their friends video of you, with or without asking permission. Overall, a saving grace in the brutal heat.

Other than that, the city is mostly yoga schools, ayurveda clinics, merchandise shops or cafes. Your options are limited on what to do outside of the yogic lifestyle, so we usually opted to just hang out in cafes or walk around. The girls spent a lot more time shopping than me, because I have no patience for this. There are some things I will miss about the peaceful city, but I was ready for a change when I left.

The Culmination

Our course came to an end with each of us having to teach a course. My course consisted of a beginning and ending mantra, five minutes of pranayama, one hours of asanas followed by ten minutes of guided meditation. It was interesting to see how everyone turned the same information into completely different classes. We also had to take a short multiple choice test on the information we learned, which we all passed.

Our final day concluded with a ceremony where each of us got to talk about our experience, followed by the teachers telling us about their experience teaching us and then each of us getting our certificates. Following getting our certificates, we all ventured to cool off in the Ganges.

Now, with another certification, my soul is a little less aflame, I am a certified yoga teacher, and back to living out of a backpack. Before leaving Rishikesh, I visited the famous Beatles Ashram and then made my way to Dharamshala, home of the Dalai Lama, but that’s for the next post. As usual, let me know if there’s anything else you want me to expound on or especially bored you. Until next time, Namaste.