Lighting the Lamp of Wisdom: A Week Inside a Yoga Ashram

Introduction

With practice, within a few days, a little glimpse will come, enough to give one encouragement and hope.

—SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

A week inside an ashram is like a peapod with seven peas in it. Each pea is round and perfect in itself, just like each day, but they still come from the same pod. There are seven chances to have the little glimpse promised by Swami Vivekananda. The daily ashram schedule has evolved over thousands of years. The schedule is designed to make it possible for you to be a yogi, even just for a day. That is enough to give you a real taste of the lifestyle and substance of that life. The symmetry of ending and beginning the day with meditation creates a frame and makes it easier to see the transformation that is happening. The seven peas turn into pearls all strung together by a thread of yoga. The ashram is the pod itself. It protects the peas so that they can focus on only one thing: growth.

The ashram is protection and nourishment. The first thing it protects you from is your lower self, not by telling you how terrible you are but by keeping your higher Self engaged all day in elevating situations. The ashram program has only one purpose: to open the way of a spiritual life. All you have to do is follow the schedule to see it work. The first obstacle the ashram overcomes is fear. This atmosphere of trust allows you to step outside your fortress and enjoy the world beyond the walls. Dropping the armor makes you feel light. Fear is one limiting factor that ashram life is designed to dissolve. Morning meditation paves the way for steady liberation throughout the day by enabling the mind to see itself at work. The two hours of asanas, or yoga postures, immediately following the meditation systematically bring the body into alliance with the breath. Asana class makes the body stronger and more flexible. You don’t have to be a swami to notice the immediate benefits from asanas and pranayama, breath control exercises. When you are hungry, delicious simple food is served. Eating at the ashram is part ritual feast and part social event. Either way, the food is prepared according to Ayurvedic guidelines, and it plays a leading role in the change that is taking place. The ashram offers a chance to simplify your complex relationship with food. The discipline of waiting until you have completed meditation and asanas before eating ensures that your hunger is real. Food is put in its proper place. Discipline is rewarded, and you gain a little glimpse.

Lest you become smug about how spiritual you have become with all the meditation and asanas, the ashram offers the perfect antidote: Karma Yoga. Karma Yoga is a no-brainer. At the minimum it offers you a chance to do something useful while digesting a healthy brunch. It’s a good idea to move around after you eat anyway, so why not do a few chores around the ashram and meet your fellow guests and ashramites? You can get to know your neighbors and see what it takes to hold a utopian community together. Karma Yoga balances the day and offers you a chance to give something back. Already, you have received a lot. There is nothing selfish about meditating and doing asanas. In fact, they break down selfishness. But Karma Yoga is a chance to do something that directly matters. This is where the ideals of yoga meet the necessities of the real world. Swami Sivananda’s far-flung influence is built on an edifice of selfless service by his disciple Swami Vishnu-Devananda. Now his disciples carry on the tradition. When you work with others at the ashram, you give service to a great enlightenment machine. When Swami Sivananda said Work is worship, he opened the door for a new understanding. The feeling of being connected is always there when you work for others without thought of reward. Still, you know that you are creating some good karma—just enough to give you another little glimpse.

When freedom comes at noon, we have already paid for it. This kind of freedom opens our eyes to the beauty that surrounds us. As human beings we are part of nature, but most of the time we never notice it. Now a whole morning has been spent knocking down walls—both interior and exterior, spiritual and physical, between us and nature. By now we are fairly defenseless and light as a dandelion seed, ready to be picked up by the wind and carried aloft. The sun is straight overhead. Onefourth of one day has passed. The baby pea is absorbing the maximum amount of nutrients from the pod. The ashram is nourishing our day to the fullest extent. Noon is a juicy-feeling time of day. Free time has just arrived. The discipline of the morning has begun to quiet the mind, but it has opened the senses and changed the nature of sensuality. The spiritual life is designed to refine our yearning for beauty by giving us finer pleasures. The process is inevitable. When I am walking up the hill to change for the sauna, and an Eastern bluebird flicks over my shoulder to join its flock in a budding oak, I chant, Zippety-dodah, zippety-ay. I just can’t help it.

In the sauna the sweat beads up, and those beads turn into rivulets in the heat. The room is the color of freshly troweled cement and has a touch of the odor of curing concrete. This is reassuring—something like the new-car smell. It smells sattwic, clean. I see the drips hit the floor and wonder how much toxin is really coming out. The muscles are sucking up the heat. The more relaxed I am, the more heat I can take—and the heat is way up there.

The second half of the day is like a mirror image of the first half. You do it all again in nearly reverse order: the second half of the day is more reflective; the first half was more expansive. Dinner is smaller than brunch and not as festive. As the day winds down you begin to notice that you are tired. The final meditation has a different flavor, tinged by the events of the day and the dinner you just ate. You hear a lot of growling stomachs at evening satsang, a group session of meditation, chanting, and yoga. It’s almost funny. When meditation ends, Jaya Ganesha begins. The twenty-minute chant settles the stomachs and raises the energy. In my experience, meditating after eating is harder, but chanting is easier. When the guard comes down the heart gets right in there and takes advantage. The feeling behind the chants sinks straight in and takes you with it. During the discussion of yoga philosophy, you might think about bed—not because it is boring but because you are tired. The absorption of Vedanta is an osmotic process at times. The day is not completely finished until you lose consciousness of it in sleep. When sleep takes over you never know what you will dream—but it doesn’t matter. What really matters is that sleep finishes making the pea in the pod. If you are lucky, sleep will take you for a magic ride. Like a plant you continue to grow in the night. Then the bell wakes you again, and you start working on the next day. Each day is a little bit different from the others but the days are more alike than different. When you have seven of them all lined up like peas in a pod, you have a week inside an ashram.

1

A Place for Grace

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

—JONI MITCHELL

The first day of the Yoga Teachers Training Course, we all lined up and took our turns at the microphone to answer a question. The question was Why are you here?

I wasn’t sure I knew what to say, even though I had traveled ten time zones to get there. So I waited until almost the end to see what others would say. The obvious answer was that we were there to become certified yoga instructors. There were more than eighty of us, and we had come to the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Dhanwantari Ashram in India’s southern state of Kerala from all over the world. We had come from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Croatia, Chile, Malaysia, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Lebanon, South Africa, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Thailand, and India. We were like the United Nations of yoga.

As usual with yoga, there were a lot more women than men—about two out of three. Our ages ranged from the early twenties to nearly seventy, but the average age was about thirty, maybe a little younger. It’s hard to tell with yogis because they often look younger than their real ages. We were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. On the surface we were all different, but our reasons for being here were not so different. No two people gave the same answer, but certain themes came up again and again. They boiled down to the fact that we all wanted to get in touch with our true nature. We wanted to get back to the Garden.

Not everyone expressed a desire to become a teacher. I’d guess that more than half ended up teaching. Wanting to teach sort of grew on you after you had tried it. Some already did teach; they wanted to dig deeper into the roots of yoga to become better teachers. Others wanted to perfect their postures; they couldn’t get enough yoga outside of an ashram to suit them. Some said yoga had given them peace of mind, and they wanted more of that. Others wanted to go deeper into meditation. Some wanted to lose weight, look better, and feel younger (vanity is a big motivator). Some wanted to quit chasing their tails and get out of the rat race. Others had heard that the course was tough and were looking for a challenge. They had adventurous spirits and just wanted to give it a go. In most of us an inner voice whispered, Follow your heart. When my turn came, I said I was there because I needed yoga. There were a few laughs, but the others knew what I was talking about. We all needed yoga. Yoga means union with your higher Self. Who doesn’t need that?

Cleaning Up Your Act

This was a lovely collection of people to begin with, and as the course went on it became even more so. The change was obvious on many levels. Yoga has the power to polish both the inner and the outer nature, and it shows. The mind becomes quieter, the eyes clearer. The skin and hair get glossier. The body becomes lighter and more flexible. The heart softens, and the intuition deepens. Looking back a year later on that wonderful month, I think that everyone got what she or he was looking for. Some got closer to their goals than others. That is not unusual—that’s life. I am very happy to say that I got more than I had expected. As corny as it sounds, the Teachers Training Course was the gift that keeps on giving. Now I teach one class a week at the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. I am rewarded by seeing those Manhattanites walk into class tense and frowning and then see them leave relaxed and smiling. It never fails. There is a saying that for every step you take toward God, God takes fifty steps toward you. This is true whether you believe in God or not. To go to an ashram is to take that step. Then watch out!

Some of the reasons why people came were spoken that day, and some were left unsaid. You tend to put the best face on things when you are talking to scores of people you hardly know. The sharing of ashram life opens people’s hearts. If you listen, you can learn a lot about them in a short time, especially if you are open yourself. There may be a broken heart from a love affair, or a marriage that has fallen apart. Sometimes there has been a death of someone near and dear. A drug or alcohol problem may make someone want to avoid certain people and places. Another person might have lost a job. Getting fired can be a shattering experience, but depending on the person’s responsibilities, it can create an opening to break away from a numbing routine.

Thanks to the phenomenal growth of yoga, ashrams are very trendy these days—and you will find a lot of trendy people, too. That is a good thing. It’s about time. Yoga may be thousands of years old, but suddenly it is an overnight success. The media portrays ashrams as expensive and exclusive enclaves where movie stars and rock musicians look absolutely fabulous in leotards, where the rich and famous drop in, work out, eat healthy food, go to bed early, say hello to God, and dry out if they need to get away from temptation. Ashrams often are seen as sanctuaries for seekers of sacred novelties or as halfway houses for rebellious youths trying to run away from the religion of their birth.

Roar Like Your Real Self

Going to an ashram is like going to work, but you are working on yourself. That is the important difference, other than the fact that you are not paid. You will pay off some karmic debts, but that is another matter. The job, instead of being outside of you, is you. Whatever you put in, you will get back; so there is no point in slacking off. You are the one who will enjoy the fruits of your labor. Yoga is a wonderfully efficient system, but it takes some time to get used to it. Maybe all this focus on the self sounds selfish to you. What about others? Don’t they matter? Of course they do.

Now is a good time to make an important distinction. You come to an ashram to work toward finding your eternal spiritual Self. The ashram is designed so that you can spend the whole day looking for something that you already have. That sounds strange, but it goes to the heart of ashram life, just as this vision of the Self with a capital S goes to the heart of yoga. This Self is sacred because it is the soul. In fact, this Self, or Atman, is one with God—our true nature. Yogis call this Self-realization Sat-chid-ananda: Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss Absolute.

A story told by yogis helps illustrate this Self-realization. A shepherd tending his flock heard a prowling lion and shot at it. The lion was a female and very pregnant. Startled by the shot, she was running away when the baby popped out. The sheep heard the cries of the baby and took it to live with them. They nursed it and taught it to eat grass and to bleat baa, baa, baa. The lion cub started learning the ways of sheep.

One day when the sheep were grazing, a big lion came. He was incensed to see a noble lion cub eating grass and bleating like a sheep. All the sheep were scared to death and ran away—all except for the young lion. The big lion was annoyed with the sheep-lion. He asked him why he was eating grass like sheep. Sheep-lion bleated,