Happy New Year

(Some photos with people from the meditation/yoga retreat at Sivananda Ashram, including myself on the left, Mami (pronounced "Mommy") from Japan, Om from India and Harri from South Africa)....

Happy New Year! I'm still hanging out in Rishikesh, the little town on the Ganges in north India. I guess I haven't written in a while, partly because not too much has happened. The main thing is that I participated in a weeklong yoga and meditation retreat at one of the ashrams here, that I accidentally stumbled upon right before it started. When I arrived in Rishikesh, a week or so before Christmas, I was keeping my ears open for anything that might be happening for Christmas. I ended up asking someone, I forget exactly who, that said they thought something was happening at the Sivananda Ashram, which I didn't know anything about. It's just across the river from where I was staying at the time, so I walked over there to find out what exactly was going on. They said there was something happening on Christmas Eve, but that I should talk to the person in charge of it for more details. So, to make a long story short, in the process of enquiring I found out that the X-mas Eve celebration, which was open to anyone, was the unnofficial beginning of a retreat, starting officially on Christmas Day, that included meditation, yoga, lectures and satsangs (Hindu chanting, etc.) that was geared towards Westerners, so everything would be in English.

I thought about it for a couple of days and then the day before it began, I went up to see if there was still room to join. They said there was, so I decided to go for it, despite the fact that the morning meditation began at 5 am. But I figured it would do me good to get a little more acquainted with the early morning, since I tend to sleep until 9 or 10. It included room and board at the ashram (and was all very reasonably priced, fortunately), so I moved up there on Dec. 24th in the afternoon. I ended up rooming with one of the few Indians who was participating (a businessman from Mumbai, who spoke good English and told me he'd done another retreat there in the summer, that was more for Indians and drew 2,000 people from all over India). There were about 60 people altogether at the one I attended, from all over the world, I think every continent was represented (other than Antarctica, obviously). Although it was a fairly full schedule, the afternoons were left open to do what you wanted, and they weren't cracking the whip about showing up to everything. So a couple of times, after going to early meditation and yoga and then breakfast, I just went back to bed for the rest of the morning and missed a few things to catch up on sleep. But otherwise it was nice to change my routine a bit, as well as to meet lots of other folks, after traveling solo for the past couple of months. And it was a great mix of activities, with several different people leading yoga classes twice a day, some of whom were people attending the retreat, and lectures given by a number of different swamis associated with the ashram. And given that it started on Christmas Day in India with people from all over the world there, it was open to all different viewpoints and so wasn't too rigid about the philosophy, although it was also clear that the man who'd started the ashram, Swami Sivananda (who died in the 1960s) was held in high regard. This morning was the final meeting for the retreat, but I'm staying there again tonight. Then tomorrow I'll have to look around for another hotel room back on the other side of the river, since I plan to stay in Rishikesh a little longer. I was hoping to get my old room back, which was both cheap and I liked pretty well, but they're full up because there's some other big conference or retreat or something going on around here that involves several thousand people. By the way, in case anyone's curious, the website for the organization associated with the ashram is http://www.divinelifesociety.org.

So, from here I'll be heading north up into the hills a bit to get a little more of a taste of winter and of the mountains around here (aka the Himalaya). But I'm in no big hurry, since I've still got almost 3 months left in India. So I'll just see when I'm truly ready for the 6-hour bus ride on a windy mountain road, to the first destination of Uttarkashi, and sufficiently prepared both mentally and physically for a bit more cold. There were several people at the retreat who had been up in the area I'm headed for, some of them just a few weeks ago, and they all said it was gorgeous, but that it was going to be pretty darn cold about now, and also you don't have the food selection in the restaurants that you have here in Rishikesh, since it's not as popular with Western tourists. By the sounds of it, the only reason that it isn't more popular is simply because it's a section of the Himalaya that gets overlooked by other areas of north India to the west, and then Nepal to the east. But otherwise, it has some of the tallest peaks in the world and is supposed to be pretty spectacular. My exploring options will be limited obviously being the middle of winter, but it sounds like there's still places where you can go now that will at least give some pretty good views of the higher peaks. And basically, as soon as I get too cold, I'll just hop on a bus south, most likely coming back to Rishikesh again before heading for some other spots around India.