Spiritual Seeking

We originally came to Goa, India for three reasons. First, Goa has paradisaical beaches. Second, Goa is Christian and we wanted to attend a Christmas Mass in one of the famous white-washed cathedrals. Lastly, we wanting to take paragliding lessons. The beaches were beautiful but sunscreen is expensive, Christmas Mass was nice but only one night, and paragliding didn't work out too well on the sandy beaches of the Arabian Sea; the sand kept getting in our noses, eyes, mouths, and filling up the paraglider each time the wing went down, and after Kelsi got dragged across the beach one too many times, we flunked ourselves out of the course.

After all this, we purchased a train ticket out of Goa, but as it happened, we stumbled into so many interesting distractions that we cancelled the ticket and are still here. Mostly we have been taking interesting courses, and since India has more courses than any other place we have ever been, and we could just stay here learning forever...

The first course we took was an introductory course in Iyengar Hatha Yoga. The basic idea of Iyengar Hatha Yoga is to initiate awareness and wisdom through bodily movement. Iyengar Hatha Yoga is a famous school of Hatha Yoga that teaches a very structured and safe way of making the Yoga movements which appealed to us and (apparently) to the loads of Germans in our Yoga class who seemed to really like the precise instructions and structure of the Iyengar Hatha Yoga school. The picture above might give you a better idea of what a Hatha Yoga move looks like when performed by two beginning Yogi's.

In the US, what people think of when they hear the word "Yoga" is usually the bodily movements of Hatha Yoga, which many Americans use for exerice. In addition to the bodily movements of Hatha Yoga (also called "Asan Yoga", there are also various Yogic schools and philosophies which are also under the broad umbrella of "Yoga," which means "to join" body and mind/soul. The Yogic practices that might help an individual to initiate awareness, such as: breathing Yoga, acro Yoga, partners Yoga, laughing Yoga, dancing Yoga, sitting meditation Yoga, chanting Yoga, mantra Yoga, humanitarian service Yoga, scholastic Yoga, and many others.

Although some Yoga practitioners diminish Yoga's connection to the Hindu religion, the Yogic practices were developed by monks to assist with meditation, and many of these practices were recorded in Hindu religious texts called the "Vedas." In truth, though, many of the Yoga practices are non-religious and don't have many attendant religious accoutrements from their Hindu origins. Such is the case with Hatha Yoga. After our first week of Iyengar Hatha Yoga, we liked it so much that we moved into a bamboo hut inside the Yoga center and continued to take yoga lessons for a total of three weeks. As you can see from the following picture, our modest jungle hut even included a few choice pets! (We found this one in the corner by Rusty's toiletries bag.)

As we advanced along in our Hatha Yoga courses, we were moved from the beginner afternoon class to a morning class from 6:30 to 10:30 AM. With the entire day open, we decided to see what other courses we could find. A friend recommended that we take a look at a 13 day program called "The Twelve Inquiries," which is taught by a group called Great Freedom (later changed to "Balanced View." After attending several morning introduction classes, we decided to jump into the course. We won't say too much about it, although it was really interesting, and we recommend that you check it out at http://www.balancedview.org/.

We finished up our Great Freedom (Balanced View) course and our intensive Iyengar Hatha Yoga courses almost two weeks ago, and decided to move to a different town just down the beach so that we could study Ayurvedic Medicine. Ayurveda is basically traditional Indian medical science, and it is considered a sister study to Yoga. Below is a picture of the facility where we are studying Ayurveda. As usual, Kelsi is vying to be the top student in our class of two.