Today morning, instead of going to the Tushita Meditation Centre for my morning meditation, I tagged along with our guest house neighbours to a Pranayama session. The venue was Jagriti Dome, a fancy structure shaped like an igloo with an uncomfortably short tunnel for a toilet.
A month ago, Ania and I attended a “Sound Healing” here. Sound Healing is when you are in a room, maybe lying down, and the healer plays lots of fancy sounds: Tibetan singing bowls, some chanting, bird sounds, and so on. The session was pleasant, but Ania went to the next one, and I chose not to go.
A girl from France, B1, who used to come for meditation with us, was a sound healer. She told me once that it was a delicate matter. The dark energies that people wanted to be healed of flowed through her back into the universe, and if she weren’t careful, it would affect her a lot unless she did a healing and purification ritual for herself.
In addition to being a sound teacher, a DJ, a saleswoman in France for things like scarves and singing bowls, and a very passionate COVID conspiracy theorist. “If you have the vaccine, they just have to turn on a switch, and they can control your mind”, she told us.
I was thinking of this when I sat down to meditate. Maybe the energies from the Sound Healing were still in me. The host told us that today and tomorrow were part of the “Festival of Love”, a celebration of World Yoga Day on June 21. Today after Pranayama, there would be a Satsang about Kashmiri Shaivism, then a chakra alignment and something-something-Light session, and finally an Ecstatic Kirtan. The Satsang would be led by a very peaceful-looking man in his 60s from the US. He had spent most of his life studying Kashmiri Shaivism in Kashmir and had a nice glow about his face. So I decided before we started meditating that I would stay to listen to him speak.
The Pranayama was nice. It was a bunch of things I already do/did in some combination: alternate nostril breathing with holds, Kapalabhati, Bastrika, some chanting, and the bandhas. There was also some handwaving, both literal along with our own hands and metaphorical with the concept of Pranayama. The teacher was clearly quite experienced, and I enjoyed the session a lot.
I’ve attended a few yoga classes here, and it always strikes me as odd that the yoga and the meditation sessions are separate (though I’m sure there is some school here that does both together, also). One teacher (“all the other schools here have no idea what they are doing. Only I can teach properly”) was texting and talking on the phone while teaching us. Another made yoga a workout, an idea I can’t get behind.
Another time, while eating a peaceful dinner with my wife, a yoga teacher sneakily started talking to us before we noticed. He advertised his yoga school, decades of teaching experience, illustrious guru lineage, and so on. All this and not a single question was asked of us other than our name. “Mine is a humble yoga shala, I just want to teach what was taught to me without any expectation”, he said.
I did like one teacher a lot. She was peaceful, helped with the poses, and had a calm energy. But then, some yoga politics happened, and she quit her school, so that was that.
Back to today: after the pranayama, Peaceful Uncle started the Satsang. Kashmiri Shaivism is a school that encompasses all other schools. Long ago, the Samkhya philosophy in Hinduism enumerated 25 elements of existence to explain reality and its illusion. Kashmiri Shaivism adds 11 more to this list, extending the philosophy for the reason that wasn’t immediately clear to me after listening to him for all of twenty minutes. PU was reading out his guru’s interpretation of one of the Sutras and it was quite interesting, but also a little too intellectual. “Reality and Illusion are not different. Illusion is a part of reality”, that kind of stuff.
Soon, people started asking questions, and I got bored. The questions seemed only half genuine to me. It was like they wanted to know something but also to show that they wanted to know something profound. I have a mild suspicion that this judgement reflects my biases, but who knows.
I left the Satsang early even though Peaceful Uncle was lovely. I didn’t feel the energy because maybe, as I’ve said in my post about Vipassana, mine is an experiential rather than an analytical path. One hour is too quick to judge, but also too long to stay if you don’t feel like staying.
A friend, V, had called to ask for some help moving her luggage. V is an Ashtanga Yoga teacher, a swift walker, and Kannada speaker. Best of all, she always laughs at my jokes. Or maybe at me. It doesn’t matter, I like it. She and her boyfriend B were our neighbours when we first got to Dharamkot.
B left Dharamkot a few weeks back, and now V was leaving too. “I’m going back to my husband in Goa”, she said. “Oh. Does he know about B?” I asked naively. “Of course!” she said. “They’re friends; we’re polyamorous. Nothing other than complete honesty will cut it for us.”
“Cool,” I said and thought.
B is a musician; he played a palm-sized piano that he called a calculator. I became a fan of his style the first time I heard him: quirky, ambient, cool, sometimes sad, but with a happy background. Just like him, and just like me. Because of his regular walks in random directions, I also got to learn of new trails to run on.
As I think of B, I also think of J, a cheerful guy from Bombay. J hopes to change the world and have fun while doing it. He is also an incredible musician. He asks the audience for words and then composes songs (like half-rap, half-song) on the spot. I was sceptical about this concept till I heard him speak, now I’m a convert. Unbelievable to me, he uses big words and still sounds genuine. He also walks barefoot everywhere for some reason.
Another musician type that walks barefoot is A. A is from Assam and has been travelling and living the hippie life for more than four years. For me, he is the truest hippie here, always generous with his time and smile. While playing his didgeridoo or the Cajon, he’s always paying attention to what the other musicians are doing and never has a problem letting them take the spotlight. I told him I liked this about him once. “Yeah, man,” he said in his deep, slow voice. “I am a drum circle organiser at rainbow gatherings, so this is what I believe”.
I am writing this post sitting in Sarang cafe in McLeodGanj. I come here every Saturday to write these posts. It’s a lovely cafe with a Korean theme. I sit at a table in the corner of the cafe, watching locals, monks, and tourists eat sushi and pizza as the hours pass by. Ania is in her painting class less than 50 metres away. After she finishes, we will go for dinner with her friend, an Indian lady from Delhi, N, in her 50s, who’s also learning Thangka painting. N is an abstract artist and finds it impossible to find value in staying within the rules of Thangka: the exact opposite of Ania, who sees the depth and detail of the constraints as wondrous.
After dinner, we may watch some live music. Yesterday, we watched a performance by a guitarist from Goa and a vocalist from Iran. It was beautiful, but the best part for me was hearing the Iranian accent again. It took me back to my time in Iran and all the kindness I received there. I wanted to meet her after the performance, give her a gift and say something cool like, “This is for all the kindness the Iranian people showed me”. But I was a fan, and she was a celebrity with many fans, so I went back to my room and slept peacefully.
My mind is going off in all sorts of random directions. Dharamkot has a unique energy2; hopefully, you get a sense of some of that energy in this post.
May the nice free energy flow through you also.
All names have been abbreviated to random letters.
I know I haven’t talked about locals at all in this post. It will have to be saved for another day!
Unique energy of random thoughts 😜
Sounds really cool. Interesting life. But why no pictures?