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It is Sunday, a day off here at the Ghosh school. We have no classes and the school is closed, so the halls are quiet and we have full use of the rooms for the whole day. What a treat!
We delay our morning class until 8am, and I lead the group through the Intermediate series. We practice in the room that Muktamala refers to as “my grandfather’s room.” “He used to sit here and teach the students,” she says, pointing to one corner of the room. In the afternoon we go to the east side of town to a shopping center to pick up some necessities: more bath tissue, kleenex, some food and water. A slow and relaxing day.
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I am up again in the wee hours. I arise about 3:30am and go into the men’s room to practice. I begin with several exercises for breathing, the neck and shoulders, followed by warming up the torso, hips, legs and feet. Only then do I proceed to do some postures.
There is a separation here between “therapeutic exercises” and “asanas (yoga postures)”. Most of what we have learned so far in our training has been the therapeutic exercises, designed for very specific benefit to the physical body and the systems of the body. We began to discuss yoga postures yesterday, but they have a slightly different intention as far as I can tell. I have yet to tease that out. During my practice this morning I am struck by the conflict between intuition and discipline. It is one thing to begin practice and follow the urging of the body and mind, doing exercises and postures that are calling out to be done next. My practice this morning is like that. It is very different from having a plan for practice or a set series of exercises to do regardless of how you feel or what your body may be asking for that day. I think there is value in both. The trick as always is to find the balance and get the most benefit from both sides. We begin our training today with discussion of diseases, causes and symptoms. The second session covers several seated postures and mudras, and we begin to cover pranayama (breathing) exercises. At lunch Jeff tells us about a study they sponsored that found some evidence that pranayama and chanting increase the production of nerve growth hormone. Amazing. I take a nap between the afternoon and evening training sessions. It is the middle of the night in Wisconsin and I sleep very deeply. I wake up to go to class and am not sure what day it is. Is it morning already? We discuss more diseases and the chakras related to several postures. Muktamala rattles off posture names in Sanskrit or Bengali, and it is good for my mind to keep up. She may call a pose any of several different names in 3 different languages, and we have to know what she’s talking about. It is 2am in Calcutta. I have been up for the last two hours because my body is still on Wisconsin time, halfway around the world. Once I realized that sleep would evade me, I arose and bathed. I went into the large practice room where the women practice (it is full of pictures of advanced yoga postures) and practiced pranayama (breath control). How wonderful to practice in the middle of the night when the whole house is still. There is no rush, no pressure. Just patience, peace and stillness. Now I have moved to the men’s room, where the walls are covered in pictures of bodybuilders, extreme acts (pressing a spear with the eye, eating a cobra) and contortionism. The men will arrive at 6am sharp.
The 9 of us meet on the rooftop terrace of the Ghosh school at 6am to practice together. We do the 26, Jeff leads. It is hot and humid, so we all sweat significantly. A wonderful way to begin the day. Jerome, Ida and I set out on foot toward the college district in search of a very specific juice stand. We realize too late that most shops in Calcutta don’t open until 10 or 11am, and it is only 8:30. So no juice for us this morning. We go to a coffee shop for sweet coffee and buttered toast, but even the coffee shop doesn’t open until 9am. How strange. Our practical training this morning begins with asanas. Up to this point we have only learned therapeutic exercises. Asanas are something different. We cover several standing postures and several done lying on the floor. I especially love the many variations of Cobra Pose (Bhujangasana) and Wind Removing Pose (Pavanamuktasana). So many different ways to do these positions, all with slightly different purpose. This is why I am here! The evening session is a lengthy discussion of the benefits, contraindications and muscular usage of many asanas. I have already filled an entire notebook, and we’ve only been here for 3 days. This evening we go to Nilmoni Das’s place to visit his son Swampan. We met him months ago when we were here - a sweet and generous man. We take him a copy of Bose’s 84 Yoga Asanas and a poster of the asanas. He is kind and complimentary. We don’t stay long. Tomorrow will be a big day. Three training sessions. Being as jet lagged as we are, everyone is awake at 3 or 4am. Many of us get up to practice some yoga before the regulars arrive at 6am. Once they arrive, the locals practice their prescriptions in the large rooms which are separated by men and women. I practice with the men for awhile, working on some neck and shoulder exercises that Muktamala taught us yesterday. I’m not sure if it is my newness, my height or my white skin that draws the stares. After awhile I retire to a more private place to practice nauli and some breathing exercises. Ideally I would be comfortable practicing in front of so many strangers, but I feel far more at ease in private.
To practice, the men strip down to their undershirts and boxer shorts. It is no wonder that they separate men and women. I am not sure what the women wear, but this is nothing like the spandex-clad, group-led, quiet and focused yoga classes we have in the States. The men chat and are distracted. They check their phones and futz about, occasionally doing their exercises. It is more like a men’s club locker room than anything I would think of as a yoga studio. Strangely, I have yet to see anyone practice a yoga “asana.” Everyone is doing simpler, therapeutic exercises. I think that these exercises precede the practice of asana, but I am not sure. I hope to learn that in the coming weeks. Training this morning finishes the practical instruction of the pelvic exercises and moves on to almost 20 exercises done on the back. We write down descriptions and explanations of each exercise before trying it ourselves. For the second day in a row, we go across the main road to a little convenience store that has bottled water, sparkling water and soda. It is a little luxury to drink a cool sparkling water. It feels like home in the mouth and the stomach. Conversation lingers after both breakfast and lunch. We discuss the benefits of practicing at different levels of heat. Jeff and Mardy have a non-profit organization that sponsors studies about yoga. They are just finishing one about the benefits of practicing the 26 at different temperatures. Jeff talks extensively about nitric oxide, arterial expansion and glucose metabolism. I find it very interesting, glad that someone is doing this work. After lunch we discuss teaching with a set script, traveling and sticking to the “house rules” of each studio, students who wear earplugs and many other things. I am exhausted by the evening training session, so I go to bed immediately afterward, skipping dinner. The travel wasn’t as difficult as I remembered. Perhaps it is because we knew what to expect from the food, the flight times, the airports and taxis. Perhaps it is because we traveled the entire way with fellow yogis Jeff and Mardy. We arrived at the Calcutta airport at 2am local time and, through some small miracle, the taxi brought us directly here to the Ghosh school. Calcutta taxis have a way of getting “lost” on their way to even the simplest of destinations, partly because the city is so old, complex and poorly marked.
Jeff, Mardy, Ida and I arrived at the Ghosh school at about 4am. None of us could sleep, so Jeff and I stayed up talking with Jerome, who had arrived a few days prior. At about 5:30am, the three of us set out on a small walking excursion around the neighborhood, exploring alleyways, local landmarks, and the preparations for the upcoming Durga Puja celebration. The smells of Calcutta are unmistakable and impossible to forget. A combination of cooking, garbage, incense, excrement, smog and decay. In our first class with Muktamala, we covered many exercises for breathing, shoulders and neck. Then we began discussing the pelvis. Our evening session was a long discussion about the benefits and contra-indications for several postures, also an in-depth exploration of a couple diseases. The rest of the day was spent settling in to our accommodations here at the Ghosh house and resting. The jet lag and long day of travel create a unique form of exhaustion. The body gets hot, the mind gets fuzzy. The only cure is sleep and time. So I am trying to rest. There are 9 of us here from the US. Jeff and Mardy are from Austin, Jerome from DC, two women from New Orleans and two women from LA. Tomorrow we fly for 22 hours to Calcutta, India. We will spend 5 weeks there studying at Ghosh's Yoga College of India, led by Muktamala Mitra, Bishnu Ghosh's granddaughter.
I am completely open to what we may learn. I have almost no expectations, other than to soak in the atmosphere of living in the Ghosh house and practicing in the rooms where BC Ghosh, Buddha Bose, Gouri Shankar and Bikram Choudhury practiced. I plan to use much of my free time to continue and expand my pranayama practice, something that has brought me great comfort, joy and peace over the past few years. I feel ready to take it to the next level, and what better place to do that than India? (Admittedly, the air is not so good there.) I also plan to write about the experience here in my online journal. I am starting a new "Category" on the right column called "Ghosh Study In India."
I am not
the culmination of my accomplishments or the sum of my fears. I am not the memories of my disappointments or heartaches. I am not my habits, patterns knowledge or work ethic. I am not even my mind or my own perception of who I am. Remove it all until there is nothing left to hold on to. There I am. The highest honor we can offer our teachers
Is not to preach what they preach Or to turn their lessons into dogma To be slavishly followed. The highest honor we can offer our teachers Is to think for ourselves; To be critical, to be discerning And to be progressive in thought and action. There are a few movements that we can not or do not do in most yoga practices. Pushups and pull-ups are among them. These two exercises strengthen some major muscles of the body that are otherwise neglected by yoga postures.
PUSHUPS "What about Chaturanga?" you may ask? Chaturanga is a pushup-like motion that is intentionally done with the arms close to the body. The hands are low and the elbows close to the torso. This is done to prepare us for Upward Facing Dog posture, where we straighten the arms to bend the spine backward and stretch the chest, belly and hips. Chaturanga is great for setting up Upward Facing Dog, but it is hard on the arms and elbows. It purposely bypasses the chest muscles so that we may bend the spine backward in Upward Facing Dog. The triceps and elbows are not designed to move the weight of the body, especially not repetitively. The chest muscles, on the other hand, are large and powerful, made for moving large loads. We can strengthen the chest muscles by doing pushups, with the elbows widened away from the torso, the hands a little wider than the shoulders. PULL-UPS Two other important muscles that get neglected in most yoga postures are the biceps and the latissimus dorsi. The biceps are the muscles that bend the arms at the elbows, so it is difficult to use body weight to develop them. (Far easier is to develop the triceps that straighten the arms. These are activated every time we use the arms to hold our body weight off the floor.) Pull-ups strengthen the biceps, lifting the body weight by bending the arms. The latissimus dorsi are huge muscles that attach our arms to the lower back. It is thought that this is useful for hanging and swinging, a remnant of our descending from apes. The "lats" are powerful muscles that get very little exercise unless we hang from our arms. Pull-ups are great for that. I like to approach the physical body with some logic and science. I've never been one to practice yoga as-is just because of 'tradition'. Pushups and pull-ups are two non-yoga exercises that allow us to develop large, important muscle groups that are otherwise neglected. This leads to even development of the body. |
This journal honors my ongoing experience with the practice, study and teaching of yoga.
My FavoritesPopular Posts1) Sridaiva Yoga: Good Intention But Imbalanced
2) Understanding Chair Posture 2) Why I Don't Use Sanskrit or Say Namaste 3) The Meaningless Drudgery of Physical Yoga 5) Beyond Bikram: Why This Is a Great Time For Ghosh Yoga Categories
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