Om Shantih

This is my closing post for this blog. Below is my essay for the Dale family, who sponsored my trip to India, as well as some pictures of my life back at Princeton.

I know that nobody really checks this blog anymore, but this experience meant a lot to me and will be something I will never forget. I’m glad there’s a way to relive it again 20 years down the line.

Hari Om Tat Sat,

Andy

———

As I sit here in the dim light of Murray-Dodge Café reflecting on my experience over the last summer, I can scarcely believe that I am back at Princeton as a junior, immersed again in the rapidity and fullness of the intellectual challenges and extracurricular business that define my life at the University. Just a month ago, I sat in the similarly sparse light of the ashram’s yoga hall, seated before an endless expanse of Indian countryside, meditating to the rhythm of my teachers’ sacrosanct chants.

Here in the café, Green Day’s Time of Your Life is playing softly in the midnight background: “Take the photographs and still frames in your mind, and hang them on a shelf of good health and good time.” It’s likely impossible to distill the contents of the photojournal blog I kept religiously over the summer into a few pages, but I’ll try to highlight the key portions of my journey.

A complete foreigner to India with no knowledge of the country’s local customs or the Hindi language, I arrived in Mumbai during the last week of June. Even as my studies have imparted me some basic understanding of Indian society, no academic coursework can substitute the immediacy of cultural immersion.

I met Mumbai in the middle of monsoon season. The streets seemed perpetually congested with naked children, goats, women carrying large loads on their heads, oxen, and auto-rickshaws all fighting for dry land and right of way. Walking through the city’s slums, I witnessed heart-rending inequality: political corruption and insufficient infrastructure has produced a city largely plagued by homelessness and overcrowding.

Here I was, a foreigner going to India to learn about yoga – and there they were, amputee beggars struggling to make a living off of people like me. What right did I have to be in a country I had absolutely no knowledge about? What made me presume that I would be privy to the secrets of their culture? As I traveled through India via third-class sleeper train, I began to understand the answers to these questions. I was accosted by an angry transvestite insisting that I should pay him for sexual favors.

As I fought him off with my black-and-orange Princeton umbrella, a boy sleeping on the seat above me began to chuckle at the strange sight. As I befriended the boy and began to have a conversation with him by way of Post-It notes (Shaihendra could write but not speak English), I discovered that someone like me is a rare sight in India – that an Asian-American traveling sleeper class was both unprecedented and hilarious. I couldn’t speak his language, and he couldn’t speak mine – but humanity transcends cultural barriers, and I will never forget that encounter.

Upon arriving in the holy city near the ashram, Nasik, I traveled to various temples and holy sites rumored to be blessed by the Hindu Gods. As I wandered the gats where Gandhi’s bones were dissolved and caves with mysterious Buddhas smiling at me knowingly, I began to understand that the purpose of my journey was to refresh my understanding of the world by acquainting myself with a reality entirely different from my own.

Everywhere, I found a people who seemed to be unabashedly content – often in spite of their living conditions. One woman, whose job it was to carry feces from the cow shed to the fertilize the naked land, seemed immensely satisfied with her vocation. And I was worrying about not pursuing an internship at Goldman Sachs.

The bulk of my seven weeks was spent at an ashram in Trimbak, in the middle of nowhere bordered on all sides by mountains and pattyfields. There, I met some of the most incredible people I’ve come across from places as far as Nepal and Portugal – gathered to study the millennia-old sciences of Yoga and Ayurveda from their source, learning from teachers who have dedicated their whole lives to proliferating physiological and spiritual bases for understanding and preserving these key pieces of India’s cultural heritage.

We would wake each day into the freezing 5AM morning. Outside, the lights from the city of Trimbak would flicker faintly in the distance while all else lay cast in shadow. As we warmed our bodies with soya based herbal teas, the dawn would uncurl the black fingers of night, unveiling the warmth of a new day. We would start with mantra (chanting), meditation, and a two-hour asana (physical postures) session in the morning — followed by breakfast and two theory lectures on yoga and anatomy divided by a 30 minute yoga nidra. After lunch, we would perform karma yoga (service for the ashram and the nearby village) — and then return for another 2 hour asana class followed by dinner and bhajans (songs).

There is too much information to go into much detail about the yoga program, but suffice it to say that this was not your garden variety body-sculpting exercise. Instead, our teachers taught yoga as a holistic system of living, intended to be studied as a science of personal evolution. By perfecting and healing the body, the practice of yoga increases the flexibility of the mind, allowing the practitioner to access a greater level of consciousness – a freedom from material attachment.

We are too easily confounded in our daily lives by sorrow about past mistakes, anxieties about future challenges, and the insatiability of our present desires. By studying yoga in the tradition of the ancients, the body-mind complex is purified to the extent that we become intimately aware of our strengths, weaknesses, ambitions, and needs – such that we are able to evolve and realize our potential more fully.

It was not an easy process, this mental shift away from material attachment and towards soulful contentment. All my life, I’ve been forced to believe that success is governed by markers of material success, framing my value as a human being in terms of grades, paychecks, and accolades. The intense practices we underwent opened emotional channels that had been muted for too long. Fears, worries, and doubts that I once believed successfully suppressed rose to challenge my peace.

 As I looked deeply within myself, I realized that my life at Princeton, while intermittently philanthropic, was heavily dedicated to the advancement of my own goals. I never thought myself capable of escaping that customary level of egoism, much less of trying to instruct others on how to do the same.

But through the program, I not only learned about how to take care of myself but also how to teach the same techniques to others. Yoga literally reshapes cognitive processes, developing a greater spirit of humility coupled with confidence and gratitude. By the end of the course, I learned over 300 meditative and postural techniques, conducted 4 full asana sessions, and graduated from the program at the top of my class with a teacher’s certificate recognized by the Indian government.

At the beginning of the summer, I expected to travel to India to study a tradition I am deeply passionate about. At its end, the tradition has studied me – and has imparted me an understanding of humanity and life I would never have encountered otherwise. Here back at Princeton, I am now leading a free class at Whitman College on Saturday afternoons. My teachers have charged me with the responsibility to share this gift with others, and it is my duty to rearticulate what I have learned to as many interested students as possible.

The Green Day song is playing again: “It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right. I hope you had the time of your life.” Indeed, the last summer has been filled with surprising revelations. The greatest of these is the realization that the potential for accomplishing the impossible is within all of us – and that I have done in one summer what others will not their whole lives: I have discovered a way of living that is valuable to me and found the conviction to live by it without doubt, without regret, without fear.