Yoga Report

I am very excited to get to the yoga ashram and already before the plane have even left the airport I have learned some valuable lessons in patience and how to react to the unknown. With a smile on your face and politeness you can get very far and this is something I will try to have with me all the way trough this journey ! May I be humble even in situations where I feel nervous and scared.

After several days of trying to call Bihar School of Yoga, BSY, in Rikhia I feel that  my patience is very well tested at this point in time and I have not even arrived in India yet. My rational intellectual westernised mind wants the latest IT solutions all the time. First of all they have decided to not use e-mail, a technology that has been standardised since 1982 . What is the reason for this ? OK yesterday I sent a fax or rather I tried to send a fax to the Bihar School of Yoga head quarter. The lady in the Secretary position for all the courses kindly said that the fax will arrive next week due to the fax arriving at another place. Next week ? I have already arrived at the ashram by next week. Then she told me she could do nothing about helping me to deliver this information to the right person since the course is with another institution. The problem when I call the right institution is that usually there is nobody picking up the phone. If somebody answers the line it can be broken  in a matter of seconds or minutes without warning and then I am stuck with not getting through again. English is not my first language and using the Spelling alphabet takes time over a bad line and I am usually in the middle of  stating who I am and I have not even got to the subject when the line is broken.  Please, Internet was built to sustain a nuclear war so please let me send an e-mail !  At the same time it could be like a quest to teach me how to trust my gut feeling and have trust in the fact that there are a lot of friendly and helpfull people in India and me with all my consumer products is a spoiled brat. I have the possibility to buy vaccination most Indians can not afford and I can travel in first class on the train. I want to turn this around and also think about what I can offer on my journey. I should take every opportunity to pay a bit extra for something that feels great in the heart and will help the rest of the world to have the luxury I have been born into. Maybe I can give some of my knowledge about IT to them ? Or at least I would like to to do that. The luxury of IT makes it possible for me to practice yoga several hours every day and spend just a few minutes on fixing a lot of tasks that used to be time consuming in the past. I rather sit in lotus position than stand in line at the post office to pay my bills.

I was very suprised in a good way that Satyananda himself is writing a blog , Satyananda’s Blog

My advice for somebody who want to travel to the BSY centre would  be to plan at least some months ahead if you live on another continent like I do.  Write them a letter in ordinary mail, and make a copy of this,  including the following information:

• your arrival time at the course centre and your departure time (check out with train schedules at the Indian Railway homepage to make sure there is a train going at the weekday you want to travel. Information on train traveling in India. For the 3 week yoga teaching course they want you to be at the course centre at noon the day before the official start date)
• which course you apply for and which dates it will take place and at what location
• all kinds of contact information to you like e-mail, telephone and an ordinary post address
• specific questions you want to have answered regarding what to bring etc. in your return mail

In general make sure to get down all the information you would think is hard to deliver on a telephone line with the above restrictions. Include an envelope for the answers with your full address and with enough stamps to pay for the journey back to you. At the same time fax them the same information to the fax numbers given and not the ones saying both fax/telephone. Then after aprox  3 weeks, the time taken for a normal letter to arrive is pretty long and easy to forget,  call them.  Remember this is probably another time zone from where you live so please try to match their office hours. The office hours at the rikhia office is between 10:00-16:00 for example and will be between 5:30 – 11:30 in Denmark. use time and date if you are lazy like me to find out what the time is right now in Delhi.  Check that your information have arrived and if you have a confirmation on the course ? The confirmation it self will take some days when your mail/fax have arrived so estimate for this.

Before I even contacted Bihar School of Yoga the first time I considered using a service like Your Man in India
to contact them. Now with some experience of outsourcing to India I think I made the right decision to avoid it. That would have added more confusion and more delay probably. If you already have a well established contact in India you can probably send them the application letter as an e-mail and ask them to print it out and send it to BSY.  To get a contact person/assistant who is reliable with an outsourcing company like Your Man in India or Brickwork India will take weeks if you are a new customer or at least that is my experience and then you have the additional waiting time on e-mails from them once you are a customer.

I hope you got some valuable information out of this post and my intention with this post was to show you how it works from my experience so that you can avoid the pitfalls and have a really pleasant travel to the extremely beautiful country that is India. I will get back with more information after my course is over and if it is even half as a good as the incredible books they have published in this place I am well pleased.