Archive for the ‘india’ Tag
Review: Teacher Training Course in Rikhia Peeth , India
Filed under: ashram, review, yoga | Tags: ashram, india, satyananda, teacher training
Comments (2) 
One of the students showing more advanced practices that he learnt elsewhere. photo: Michael Howden
Bihar School of Yoga offers an intense 3 weeks workshop for people interested in teaching yoga. To be honest it felt more like a pilgrimage than participating in a course. For 11 years I practised yoga with the help of books containing teaching from Satyananda and I had teachers in Sweden and Denmark who got their teaching directly or indirectly from Satyananda. I had a strong urge to see this man with my own eyes. What really struck me is how different this place is from the ashrams in Sweden. We sit on the floor when we eat, we are surrounded by people from the village when we sing kirtans, we participate in serving food to kids from the village. The school in India is so closely connected to the surrounding. The singing and seminars in the evening is open to anyone and having kids climbing on you when you sit in a meditation pose was a new experience to me. Kids are spontaneous and seeing them dance classical Indian themes on the stage was such a joy. Some of the women on our course were teaching Computer Science and English to the kids from the surrounding area. One evening a young girl told the story of how life was in this area before the yoga school came. My heart melted when I heard about how people used to live for days without food in this area and now they got
Almost every evening we sang together. Here children from the village are performing a classical Indian Dance. photo: Michael Howden
education through the yoga school and they can make a living on the crafts they learned when working for the yoga school. People from the village came into the school during my stay and they worked hard with different tasks in the gardens etc.
I learned from this course that yoga is very closely related to helping your fellow man in every way you can.
I got the chance to talk to Swami Satsangi and Swami Satyananda himself gave a lecture/speech for us one day. Satsangi made the strongest impression on me with her speech about how greed is something we have to accept within ourselves since it is the reason why we are alive. Acceptance and awareness seems to be the keywords in this tradition.
I have to admit that I had a flu during this course which I should have gone to a doctor with much earlier. The climate itself is very different from where I grew up and yoga is not a cure for everything I have to point out. The hygiene in the ashram is very good and I drank the tap water all the way through the course and off course my stomach was unbalanced once in a while and I ate tablets daily to keep the bacteria in shape in the stomach. On the negative side I am not a big fan of polished rice and we got this daily and usually 2-3 times a day.
During the course the very colourfull "holi" festival took place all over India and even inside the ashram people threw colour on each other this day. Photo : Michael Howden
I recommend this course to people who have been practicing yoga for many years and feel the urge to take the next step and begin teaching. I started teaching myself in a small scale straight after the course and I feel this is an important turning point in my life. You get the essentials for teaching on a beginners level and you get to lead 4 lectures in the course.
What i realise now 1,5 months after the course is that an essential part of the yoga teaching course is missing. The missing link is your own Sadhana. I notice a big difference in my own life when I do my schedule consisting of The Plough, the Bridge, the Headstand etc. After 3 weeks of neck movements, shoulder joint rotations etc. I felt a big urge to go back to my own sadhana which there was no space and time for in Rikhia Peeth. When I started to teach in a small scale I realised that when I spend 2 hours preparing a lecture and then 45 minutes on giving the lecture I felt happy that I made it but also very drained from creativity and energy in the evening. The balance between your own practice and your teaching is important and as they say in the aeroplanes ”if you are in a plane together with a small child you first put on the oxygen to yourself in case of an emergency” . You are of no help to others if you are in bad shape !
In the beginning of the course I did my own practice/sadhana in my room and this was not a good place to do asanas I quickly realised. I was lucky enough to have my own room, most people where 2 persons in this space, but even then there was very little space for doing headstand for example. Then the addition of people talking to late in the night and slamming doors etc.
Another thing which irritated me a bit was that there are no requirements for participating on this course. Some people had only done asana and pranayama for a few month and there was no real exam as such. Sure you get a certificate that you are a yoga teacher after this course but it is no way a guarantee that you have a deep knowledge of Yoga. I find this a bit strange since most serious yoga teacher courses with the Satyananda School in Europe run for 2-3 years where you have regular stays in an Ashram. The reason for this is maybe that there already exist a lot of university programs on yoga in India in case you want to go in depth with the asanas and the pranayama.
When i read the books by Satyananda on hatha yoga i got the impression that the Bihar School of Yoga is not connected to a specific religion but this is something I have to reconsider. On the course we read from the Bhagavad Gita and other scriptures and we used mantras. My personal view is that you can find knowledge and wisdom in the Qur’an, the Bible and Norse mythology as well. I am bit fed up with the Superstition around Sanskrit. I say superstition because there is no conclusive evidence that the vibrations from talking sanskrit is really doing anything. Sure it is fine with me if we had at least sung something in English when the course is said to be conducted in English. As the course is now it feels like it is mostly catering towards Indian people.
In general I found it really hard to get knowledge around this course and the price was 4 times more when I actually arrived on site compared to what was said on telephone. I pay 4 times more because i am not an Indian ! This is a problem for several reasons since you have to bring cash to the ashram and it is quite complicated and time consuming to get a permision to go to a cash machine.
I try to write this review as critical as possible and i have to add that I met a lot of wonderful people on this course and there were a lot of fun !
Books I really recommend for the serious sadhaka are Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha , Prana Pranayama Prana Vidya, Kundalini Tantra, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya
yoga teacher training in Rikhia peeth , India – Part 1
Filed under: ashram, diary, meditation, review, Uncategorized, yoga | Tags: ashram, india, satyananda, teacher training, yoga
Leave a Comment alternative title: amazing weight loss method made me loose 8 kilos in 4 weeks
I arrive in Delhi and thought I was going to be prepared since this is my second visit. Imediately I have a taxi driver grabbing my arm and trying to sell me a ride. I offer some advice to a doctor student from Kenya who is in Delhi for his first time and we decide to share a prepaid taxi. I remember thinking ” what am I doing here ?” during the intense and totally unsafe ride into town. Now I remember Indian traffic. Honking , honking and then some more honking. I decide to scout the New Delhi train station to see how it is organised. I am really close to fall for a scam at my arrival and I dodge it by taking aim at a military guy in uniform and insisting on talking with him. In the tourist office I talk to a guy from United States and I am so happy having another westerner to talk to right now. We decide to have lunch together and decide to go to a place called The banana Leaf. almost every Indian person who wants to talk to us on the street is offering us help on finding the tourist office. From Lonely Planet I know this is a common scam to get you to visit a travel agent where “the street seller” get commission. An Indian guy gets really confused when I offer to show him the nearest tourist office 
the information boards is not updating in the train station and I have to walk around quite a bit with my big back pack to get on the right train. Well on board I am so happy that I bough a first class ticket and I really enjoy the silence and polite atmosphere. The train journey is smooth and one of the passengers which I talked to the previous day starts to do yoga in the morning. I think he does it to show me since he yesterday referred to himself as a master of yoga.
I arrive in Deoghar and the athmosphere is different here and people are not so aggresive in selling you things. Several times I notice that they do not even take any extra money because you are a westerner. But a thing that makes it a bit more complicated is that very few people know a little bit of english and I am the only westerner werever I go. The whole lesson in trust is completed when I arrive at the ashram and there is no sign in English. I have arrived at the right place and everybody is friendly. I arrive early and a man named “Pragia” is showing me my room. He is from Denmark and have been in the ashram for 8 years. The room is basic and clean. there are blankets and pillows availible so bringing a sleeping bag was not really nescessary.
IT efficiency contradicts spiritual awakening ?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ashram, Bihar, BSY, e-mail, india, IT, outsourcing, satyananda, yoga
Comments (1) 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.
Review: The North of India and my sprint for enlightment
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1998, ashram, himalaya, india, review, sivananda, yoga, yogi
Comments (1) I had been doing some evening courses with the Scandinavian School of Yoga and I had been fed the western view on yoga. What struck me in India was the strong colours, the smell in the air and the poverty that was so obvious. In all this poverty people were smiling in a friendly way and yoga seemed to be so many different things. I felt like a little ant and I was scared by all the people who tried to get me to stop in the streets and with the lonely planet in my hand I wanted to get to my target and reach enlightenment. Like every swede I wanted the train to be on time and I wanted the toilets to be clean.
My plan was to get to yoga niketan ashram and stay there for a while. Once there the place reminded me more of a prison camp with guards by the entrance and strict discipline all the way through. This was what I thought yoga should be. I struggled with my body and I was wet like from a shower after each session. One day we had ants and a lot of small animals in the bathroom and a women came from the managers house with what looked like an old DDT spraycan . After a little while all the small insects were dead and we did not dare to enter the room that day. For a reason I cannot describe with logic I was not happy with this place and from some other yoga practitioners we heard about a place called sivananda yoga kutir and we decided to give it a try.
The guy who greeted us in an informal and relaxed way at sivananda yoga kutir was the swami and he had a friendly sparkle in his eyes. It felt more like visiting a friend than being in a ashram. We really enjoyed the daily asanas and the walks in the countryside. The singing in the evening were spontaneous and a boy from the village was singing as loud as he could and I felt encouraged to sing and started to like it more and more. I felt like I could be myself in this place and I was really tempted to stay longer when the day to depart to Sweden came closer.
meditation at yoga kutir
Sivananda Kutir, Himalayas
At an early age I got interested in Buddhism and the prince who left his kingdom in the search for truth. How can I apply this story to my own life ? to be able to sit I took up the study of yoga. Is there a contradiction between yoga and science ? Sure we can get a theoretical understanding through books, but without the experience we are stuck. Why is it so hard to practice non-violence when the mosquito is landing on my neck ?
