Prashant's Tuesday Class

I continue to be baffled and amazed by Prashant Iyengar's teaching. Tonight's class was out of this world. We started out with abdominal work. We were doing Urdhva Prasarita Padasana (aka leg lifts) for what seemed like forever. (after class a friend told me she timed it and it was 30 minutes of leg lifting!) Each set of leg lifts was to be done using different breaths - lifting on an exhalation or inhalation. Then we moved on to Janusirsasana - ABOUT 30 REPETITIONS, interspersed with a dog pose here and there! Believe it - 30. We were doing Janusirsasana for nearly an hour. He instructed us to use all the different breaths in that pose too. And of course there was lots of discussion about Uddiyana Bandha. (google it) We ended the class with a long Sarvangasana with our heads wrapped. It was intense. His philosophy discussions during class are intense. He is intense. I am amazed by this man. My lousy words here cannot describe the magnitude and profundity of his teaching. After I leave here I look forward to exploring these ideas. It took nearly a year and a half after my last visit before I noticed a change in my practice. I think I will notice any changes more quickly this time because I feel much more open to what he is trying to say.  -Aaron

how do you say goodbye in Marathi?

As I'm writing this, Cait is in an airport shuttle with a number of Indians (including a babe in arms) on her way to the Mumbai airport. In about 30 hours she'll be home in Chicago. Is it really June 14 already? I'm super sad she's leaving, and that we only discovered last night that we both love the card game spit. Why had we been playing boring Skipbo all this time? She's a really fun roommate and a pretty terrific friend. Twice she's held my hand when I've been scared. And she's got the funniest voices and food songs of anyone I've ever met. I can't wait until our next adventure together!  -Sarah

rain rain here to stay

Some of you probably know that we picked a pretty weird time to come to India. All of the guidebooks (and most of the humans) I've consulted imply that we're crazy. The reason is that this is monsoon season. It usually starts raining in June and doesn't stop for four months. Well, like clockwork, the sky opened up on June 2!

At first it was pretty shocking and scary. It rained a lot! It rained so much that large amounts of water were flowing down the street, fast! It rained so much that some roads were flooded with over a foot of water. This all happened within about 2 hours!

One night last week, I left the yoga institute and found the streets in this condition. The routes I knew to get back to the flat were closed, and I walked through disgusting water up to my knees (just kidding, Mom!) trying to find my way home. Not my favorite day in Pune! Now I know my way around a little better, so hopefully that won't happen again.

I took these photos yesterday, looking out of my window. The building you see is the post office across the street. You can't see it in the picture, but it has an enormous orange tarp over it to protect it from the rains. It's hard to really capture the amount of rain, but I think you can see the water pooling in the streets.

On the plus side, the trees and plants are already getting greener. And it's really cooling off here. I think it's hotter in Bloomington right now than it is in Pune. And I can't think of a more perfect time than during a monsoon to curl up in your Indian flat with your milky, sugary tea and read a novel. I finished Jane Eyre, by the way. On to the next book...  -Sarah

Triangle Pose x 100

I swear we did triangle pose at least a hundred times today in class. I had two classes with Prashant today and he had us in and out of triangle pose so many times. The last one was a super long hold. I had to give myself a silent pep talk at some point. Its hard to stay focused because the mental/intellectual work he has doing is so fierce. In a nutshell he is every class telling all of us that our approah to yoga is all wrong. That we are actually not doing yoga - that we are only obsessed with learning new points and tricks. He has us doing some exploratory breath work in the standing poses. Doing some actions before, after, and during a "profound" exhalation. The breath work adds a whole new texture to the fabric of the pose.  -Aaron

Look at the cute baby lizard!

paan

First, let me say that I've not been keeping up with my blog duties, and for that I'm sorry. I've been too busy reading Jane Eyre, riding rickshaws, going to yoga class, and stuffing my face. You're going to read a little about that last thing now. By the way, the above picture is of Caitlin Ruth O'Connor, who's remarkably like me, in that she'll pretty much eat anything!
Aaron told me a little about paan after his last trip to India, and I read about it in my trusty guidebook. It's made of shredded betel nut, mitha masala (a mix of fennel seeds and other spices), and often chewing tobacco. It's all wrapped in a leaf, and chewed slowly (and not swallowed, if you've got the tobacco variety), and then spit on the ground.
Paan is sold by paan-wallahs from tiny stalls. You can tell it's a paan-wallah stall because there are usually a bunch of men standing around it spitting red stuff out of their mouths. Cait and I wanted to try the real deal, but when the paan-wallah pulled out a couple of betel tree leaves smothered in a weird red-brown paste, we wimped out and went for the sweet paan instead.
It's just like its more potent cousin except the tobacco is gone and seems to be replaced with a ridiculous amount of sugar in the form of a red syrup (think maraschino cherry juice). It's supposed to be a mouth refresher, but it kind of tasted like eating potpourri to me, and Cait said after that she felt like she just drank a bottle of perfume. But now we can check paan off our list!  -Sarah

First Classes

The instruction at RIMYI is truly out of this world. Tonight was a lively standing pose class with Geeta teaching and Raya demonstrating. We did only very basic poses and used zero props.. Even for the seated poses. The amount of detail in the teaching is really really astounding. Sometimes my brain gets over loaded with information and tired from concentrating so much that I notice myself wanting to space out. Grant it it is virtually impossible to space out - Geeta really knows how to keep us focused. At the end of class everyone started clapping and she had this super sweet smile on her face. It was great to see.

The rains have started. It is much much cooler and at night is very pleasant. The bad thing about the rains is that everything is all wet. Everything.  -Aaron