A long list of lessons

The Tibet Museum is often empty, or at the very least, mostly empty. Empty enough that the haunting soundtrack of the looped video in the first floor’s exhibits echoes through the whole museum—all roughly 4,000 square feet of its white-washed and stone-floored space. In just that few thousand square feet, the museum’s curators have attempted to say everything you can about Tibet’s history: Tibet before Chinese rule, the Chinese invasion, the Tibetan resistance, political prisoners’ experience, destruction of human rights in Tibet, “Sinicization”—the process of making Tibetans less Tibetan and more Chinese, how Tibetans escape now, and what the hopes are for the future. They’ve pulled together little pieces of evidence to indicate that Tibet was an autonomous country when the Chinese army marched onto the roof of the world in 1949. They had coin and paper currency, stamps, passports that had been marked with visas for countries all over the world. In a 1934 cover story, “Flags of the World,” Tibet’s flag featured on the cover. See, they say. We were a real country before we were just a part of China.

One of the few exhibits where artifacts extend beyond photos or video is that on the prisoners’ experience, which includes a blood-spattered shirt worn by a prisoner, a scarf worn to gray, handcuffs, an electric shock device, smoke bombs, knives, and hand-woven necklaces, scarves and bracelets, all done in a design to bring good luck.

People wander through, read over the posted information, look at photos of men, women and children walking through the snow to cross the Himalayas from Tibet to India, dolls in traditional dress, a few coins tarnished to illegible dark circles. The afternoon showing of “Undercover in Tibet,” a documentary that tries to answer why Tibetans risk everything to escape to India, draws a bit of a crowd, and then people filter out again.

It’s not that they’re not interested. It’s that they’re busy.

Dharamsala is a volunteer’s town. Posters and flyers and newsletters and pamphlets and people on the street take volunteers who come to stay for a week or a month or a few months. The Rogpa Café, which always smells of tantalizing pastries and freshly baked, homemade muesli, is staffed entirely by volunteers. An Australian and a Korean woman struggle through translations to sort out who plans to do the dishes, then sit for dinner together at the end of the bar.

Every week day, the Tibet Hope Center opens its doors, or rather, its courtyard, for English language speakers to volunteer an hour and a half to talk to English language learners in informal conversation classes. Monday, I walked into the Hope Center, gave its director and founder (and the man who generally runs the show from morning to night), Kunsang Tenzin, my name and said yes, I’d volunteer at the drop-in English classes. Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting with Choku, a Tibetan monk, and Shinee, a Mongolian accountant, holding the day’s prompt for discussions: freedom. We talk about its various expressions—Choku left Tibet so he could study Buddhism, so what he talked about is freedom of education and freedom of religion. Shinee says she sees freedom in everyday choices, your clothes, your job, your food, your whole lifestyle.

I’ve gone back to talk with Tibetans, and repeatedly with Shinee, about love, sources of happiness, and ways of nonviolence.

Shinee, who is learning English so she can move up from her job as an accountant to work in international finance in Mongolia, astounds me daily. Six months ago, she says, she could barely understand English and what she could speak in English left her partners in conversation saying only, “What? What? Repeat, please?”

Now, she can talk for most of the hour, barely faltering. The once she didn’t manage to nail her pronunciation of “lawyer” and we had to talk it through to figure out what she was trying to say, she covered her mouth in this apologetic embarrassment, as if after six months she should have the Oxford English Dictionary memorized. Actually, I’d give her another 12 months and she could have the dictionary down—but maybe Webster’s Collegiate, not the OED. She studies from breakfast until bed, which comes at 1am or 2am, memorizing 10 or 20 new words every day.

She’s given up Mongolian music and movies for music and movies in English, and searches lyrics for American songs on the Internet, and then transcribes them into a notebook. In four or five days, she’ll have a new song memorized and will be singing along with Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne, James Blunt, Timbaland, or Kelly Clarkson. She flipped through the notebook with me, reading off the song titles and looking to me to see if I know them. If I don’t immediately nod, and sometimes even if I do, she sings a few bars. We sang together, “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you tore it apart. This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special.” (Thank you, pop radio, for enabling me to have this experience.)

I’ve talked to a Tibetan artist whose family sent him, their only son, out of Tibet so he could study religious painting in India; to a woman who left Tibet when she was eight months pregnant. She was lucky enough to get a flight out with her husband; her sister, who is also here, walked for a month to get out of Tibet. I’ve talked to a man with stories from days in the Chinese army, and a man who says he’s not smart, can’t study Buddhism, but has the intricacies of passport and visa regulations between China, Nepal and Tibet memorized.

They all say they want to learn English because it will bring them more opportunities—for work, for studying, for travel.

It’s a quiet thing, an unobtrusive way of spending some time, hoping that you’re helping people out. Hoping that this little bit more of practice brings them a little closer to those opportunities they’re reaching for.

Volunteering for Contact, a Tibetan newsletter, was every bit as easy, though finding the editor was not. I looked for him in his office, only to be told he was at the café he manages. I went to the café, a charming nook of a place with an enthralling collection of books, only to be told he had run to the market. Not a problem in a place with bookshelves stocked like that. I was deep in a memoir of a daughter of Chinese immigrants when Lobsang returned. I said I was willing to volunteer some time copy editing the newsletter, and without so much as asking my experience or training, he set up a time to meet at his offices to work on the next edition.

I found him at his desk in an office frequented by a small flock of swallows. They sailed up and down the hallway outside his open door, then one or two would swoop in and perch on a pipe or the top of the door. He seemed entirely accustomed to them, able to ignore them completely, though they chirped so loudly I could barely hear him talking. I took a seat, and turned my attention to editing stories on the gatherings that recognized the anniversary of Uprising Day, when Tibetans fought back, and a monk who self-immolated in March.

It’s all part of the strange education this trip has been.

Tuesday evening, Learning and Ideas for Tibet, which is squeezed into a tiny, barely-marked basement room, hosted a former political prisoner. People squeezed in, sitting cross-legged on the floor, the knees of one person against the back of the next, to a room that quickly became too hot with body heat. A window was cracked, and the door left open, so when the translator, Dhundup, stood to relay the former prisoner’s story, he was silhouetted against the night sky, which occasionally flashed purple with broad streaks of lightning. Soepa, the former prisoner, talked of his home in Chamdo, a land of fruit and flowers he called one of the most beautiful places in Tibet. He was a monk there, studying Buddhism.

Soepa was imprisoned for five years for recognizing the Panchen Lama, who is meant to provide spiritual guidance for Tibet in tandem with the Dalai Lama. (The Panchen Lama has been missing since 1996 and Tibetans call him the world’s youngest political prisoner—he was about seven years old when he disappeared.)

He was carried from his home in eastern Tibet across all five prisons in Tibet to Drapchi Prison. What he withstood in prison, he said, you could not imagine. But he has never been the same, physically or psychologically, since then.

“Before I protested the Chinese government, I made up my mind, whether I’m going to be imprisoned or not, I’m going to protest the Chinese government because we need our freedom,” he said. “Whether my body is going to be kept by China, they cannot keep my mind.”

That decision and the mental training he received as a Buddhist, he said, were what kept him from succumbing to the attempts at “reforming” his mind while he was in prison.

After he was released, he said, he went home to Chamdo. But his mind had started to move, and it moved toward India. In 2002, he left Tibet illegally. He’s spent years recovering, he said, and now works with the Tibetan Political Prisoner’s Association.

Dhundup, the translator, thanked people for coming and listening, then he charged them with a task.

“You have to say to your friends, to your government, there is no peace in Tibet,” he said. “There is not enough food in Tibet. You have to say this to your friends and colleagues.”

And so I’m saying it to you.

Another kind of holy city

Rishikesh became a holy city because that valley has been used for spiritual retreats for thousands of years. The two bridges (which have subsequently dubbed their associated neighborhoods), Ram Jhula and Lakshman Jhula (“jhula” means “bridge”), are named for Ram and Lakshman, two heros of the Indian epic poem, the Ramayana. They spent 14 years in spiritual retreat near where the town of Rishikesh is now located, but in a timeframe so long ago it puts them and their story more in the proximity of Zeus. So Rishikesh itself isn’t holy land; but it’s holy now becaust it has been meditated in and prayed over for so many thousands of years.

McLeod-Ganj isn’t holy because the land itself is sacred. But it’s got the feeling of a holy place because here is where the Dalai Lama came to land after fleeing Tibet. It’s the southern edge of the Himalayas, as if he would go no farther than was absolutely necessary, but only the entirety of those mountains could provide an effective defense from China’s fingers. From town, just the tips of the lower Himalayas are visible. But that’s enough for this peak-starved wanderer.

Mountains. Mountains. Mountains. Mon dieu, it’s good to see mountains again. They’re still frosted in snow, and today wore caps of clouds. I looked up from town this morning, picked a ridge, and walked up the road, a path and finally bushwhacked to get to the top of it. From there, I could look down on villages scattered through the foothills, their rice terraces full green already. White flecks of sheep wandered the slopes. A rocky summit rose in front of me, couloirs thick with white but the faces otherwise scrubbed clean. It was heavenly.

Of course, getting here was hell. The overnight bus I’d bought a seat on was billed as “deluxe,” but the word I’d apply to it was closer to “dirty.” Decrepit would suffice, as well. The seats sat in a jumble of half-upright, half-down, half-reclined fully to their “semi-sleeper” state and it turned out that how you found it was likely the way it was going to stay. Mine was stuck in a half-reclined position neither conducive for sleeping nor convenient for sitting up right, and the cushion was so worn through the metal crossbar might just have been covered in a sheet of fabric. The windows could only be forcefully, gradually coaxed partway open to provide some relief from the heat since the air conditioning was non-existent and most of the fans broken, and they were partially shielded in curtains now so sun-bleached and coated in dirty they hold on only to a rumor of having once been some color other than gray.

But, on we went. By 1am, we were heading steeply uphill on a road whose every turn sent the bus passengers rocking from side to side. If the road was paved the whole way, which I doubt, it had itself been jostled to the point of bearing deep ruts and a perpetual stream of potholes. So the passengers bounded up and down as well.


I spent the night fidgeting against the bar in my back and the hard plastic seatback against my shins, half the time stretching out, then half curling into a ball, facing the window and feeling the night breeze on my face. I listened to music, an audiobook, and podcasts from The Moth and Risk!—anything to keep my brain distracted. Just before sunrise, too tired to do anything else, I fell asleep, despite the discomfort. We arrived in McLeod-Ganj (I’d booked a ticket to Dharamsala, but these are just details, right? They’re only a couple kilometers apart) at 9am, just three hours behind schedule, and I emerged with the right side of my clothes coated in grime from rubbing against the side of the bus all night.

This, ladies and gentlemen, will be the last time I fall for the lure of the overnight bus. It’ll be trains from here out, even if they’re cog rail (I’ve heard a rumor that the closest rail connection from here is just such a mechanical wonder).


At the crest of the ridge I hiked to today, I found a cluster of prayer flags and stone cairns. Some of the strings of flags were wrapped around bushes or trees, some bleached from so long in a bold, high altitude sun. Then string after string was tied in rows between trees at a flat, relatively clear space at the top, many of them still brightly colored. Fire rings below them were still stacked with charcoal. As the breeze picked up, they lifted in the wind. All of them flapping together in the wind blowing north, toward Tibet, made a sound like sighing. And the breeze, perhaps, carries that sound and all those wind-blown prayers over the hills and mountains and valleys to Tibet, to the thousands of Tibetans there, waiting for freedom.

Over the Rainbow

Hippies think they invented free love, but they were, at best, revivalists. Anthropologists have established that sexual monogamy developed about the time property ownership did, when it started to matter whose son that was because it determined who would inherit the farm. Cave men had no use for monogamy.


And so, at a Rainbow Gathering, an international conglomerate of free-loving, nature-hugging, communally eating neo-Hippies that cropped up last month on the banks of the Ganga, what I see are not so much pilgrims on a path to a new world. They’re more… historical revisionists, regressing to the way we lived 10,000 years ago and adding a strong dose of “speaking with intention.” It’s like a visit to the BC world, complete with a tribal chief, tribe mothers, hunters, warriors, and gatherers.

Sasha and I packed a few things and walked out of town like gypsies one afternoon, catching a ride in a half-full jeep just as far as the second waterfall (what a destination to give your driver). Then we walked down a road, down a streambed, and along a path beside the river until we came out at a beach spotted with tents, lean-tos, and bedrolls. It was late afternoon, and people were sprawled out in small groups around the beaches and on the boulders that form half the beach to the Ganga.

We changed, and took a dip in the river, washing off all those sins and guaranteeing centuries of human lifetimes in which to walk the slow road toward enlightenment. The dip, however, was a quick one; the waters are frigid.

As the sun went down, a huddle of women made salad in a vast tin bowl, tearing the leaves with their hands. Vegetables were chopped on a tin plate. Pasta boiled and salted, chickpeas cooked. They called “food circle” and people came in from the hillsides—men collecting firewood with only sarongs wrapped around their hips, or meditating on far boulders, or swimming in the shallow pool by the camp, and women from their other corners, their quiet conversations and clusters of guitar-jamming sessions. Everyone joined hands and sang—about family and unity, about being happy, about rising up, then “Thank you for the food. It’s healing, it’s healing, it’s healing me.”

Food was brought around and dished out to each outstretched tin bowl or cup, everyone’s fingers and utensils getting into everything. (I’d just been reading a book on infectious diseases—guess what was on my mind.) We ate, sitting in the sand, broke to wash dishes in the Ganga, then reassembled in small circles to play games, play guitars, play real-world conversations.

The guitars gave way and conversation silenced when a man brought out a didgeridoo and started to play it the way I imagine that instrument was meant to be played. It was the second didgeridoo of the night, and the first instrument at all to not get talked over or sung around. The circle formed to a full circle again, instead of a chain of small rings, and his audience sat spellbound as he pulsed out a sound like the heartbeat of humanity, raw and primeval, broken by percussive flair.

Sasha and I crept to our alcove while he was still playing, wrapped in our blankets and laid down under the stars and the scant branches of a bush, and fell asleep listening to that pulse.

Holy Holi

Holi celebrates Rama’s victory over… somebody, but it was a symbolic victory of good over evil, light over dark. And it’s celebrated now by smearing colorful powders on the faces of the people you meet. If this is a warm, consentual celebration, it’s a finger or three dipped in a bag of colored powder, a nice smear across the forehead and cheeks, a hug, and a “Happy Holi.” The good in the world triumphs again in the form of color, light and friendship.

But like Halloween and its evolution from whatever All Hallow’s Day signified to a night of costume-wearing and candy-hunting, Holi is kind of just about the paint. And the kids and young men, who have taken up this holiday with relish, have embellished that painted embrace with water balloons, squirt guns loaded with paint, even just jars of watered down paint. But good luck getting any of them to be good enough to stop spraying you now that you’re fully soaked and fully covered in paint.

I’d hoped to be safe at least getting to my yoga class at 8am—who would be playing with paint so early in the day? But the man who makes my morning chai was already bedecked in colors, and as I sat there sipping, other people would pass by and smear his face and hug him, wishing him a happy Holi.

“Will you play Holi?” he asked me. “Play” is exactly the right verb.

I made it nearly all the way to class before stumbling up on a group of kids, mid-paint war, their hands and faces covered in pink. They opened fire with hot pink, and I had to run, laughing, to get away, but was too late. David, one of my classmates, sent me back to the bathroom to scrub my neck again before laying down on a yoga mat, and I still dripped a bit of pink on it.

Through class, we could hear children shouting and screaming as they “played” Holi on the streets, running through the maze of tight corridors and narrow spaces between tall walls in that section of Ram Jhula, then out into the open fields and orchards. Music played. Even on the fourth floor of a building above and away, it was like you could feel the joviality of the day, and get infected by them and their happy play. Kamal, the yoga teacher, lost track of the limbs we were on more often than usual, and people tumbled out of asanas laughing.

At the end of class, when we were seated and had just finished our final oms, Kamal said, “OK, now everybody, laugh as loud as you can for two minutes.”

We’d just spent two hours doing what he said, so all right. We laughed. And then laughed at the way we were laughing, and then laughed because we were laughing, and then laughed some more.

It was just a warm-up to get us in a good mood. Sunil, who’s teaching a teacher training class with Kamal at the moment, was waiting outside with a tray of colors, and he smeared everyone’s faces as they left class, and the favor was promptly returned. Face smear. Hug. Ear smear. Hug. Hair dusting. Hug.

On neighboring rooftops, families were having their own celebrations, dumping buckets of paint one another. Boys were teaming up to make water balloons with a bucket of colored water and a straw—I’m still not sure how the physics works there.

After our private paint fight, I was marked and men would stop their motorbikes just to cover my face in another dose of paint and say, “Happy Holi.” Packs of men and boys roamed the streets, so I stayed beside David and John from my class, who could do little to deflect the attention drawn by a white woman in the streets on Holi. Just in the half hour it took for us to cross Ram Jhula, searching for a place to have breakfast (the restaurants and shops were, wisely, closed), my face disappeared under green, purple and blue powder.

By the time we did find that meal, at last, at the thali ashram, I could tip my head forward and watch powder fly out of my hair. Even wrinkling my forehead made for a snow of color.

In this condition, I sat down to eat. Indians would look at me and say “Happy Holi…” like, “Oh, my, did you get Holi’d…”

We headed to the Ganges to rinse some of it away, which, it turns out, is the thing to do on Holi. David and John stripped down and submerged themselves, David straightaway, in a slow-motion chatturanga—a reverse push-up—and John in this gradual easing, drifting routine into the cold water. Wading in up to my knees, I cupped my hands and set to scrubbing my face. Every splash of water came away brownish-purple, the muddle of all those colors. My hands filled with that stain, then rinsed clean.

An Indian mother came down with a flock of kids in tow, a young one whose hands stayed pink every after an hour of scrubbing and playing in the water, and a group of girls, mostly in their early teens. When the mother waded into the river, the water ran pink and purple around her. She washed her body and her hair, and rinsed her sari, then peeled its hopelessly stained pieces off, one by one throwing them into the Ganges, covering herself as she did with a peach sarong. Then the sarong was replaced with an orange sari, which was assembled over and around it right there on the riverbank.

The flock of girls chattered around her, washing their faces, hair and arms with a bar of soap and checking their progress with a mirror they had brought. I’d had no such help, and so had turned to David again, who had shaken his head and sent me back to work on my hairline and behind my ears.

The girls bent forward, dipping their hair into the water and dripping pink into the river, they rinsed and soaped and rinsed again, wrung their hair out like a skirt and then wrapped it into a bun at the front of their heads. Occasionally, one or two of them would float into the current, which will pick you up and sweep you away, then clamber out downstream and come rushing back, not hardly looking at the boys taking turns floating down that same stretch of river. The girls went between that play and the seriousness of studying their faces in the mirror for hours.


We sat watching them, dipping ourselves, and waiting for the afternoon hours to pass on. The paint war of Holi is supposed to end at 2pm, but I gave it until closer to 4pm before I braved the bazaar, which had been a squeeze of people earlier in the day, and the walk all the way back to my guest house.

My clothes, of course, were wrecked, and so was the bag I was carrying. Washing and soaking them overnight only lightened the stains without fully removing them. My shoulders and chest had run to that brown shade, making my skin look filthy. Green and purple had seeped into the built-in bra in my tank top, so I was stained even on skin that never saw the light of day. Over my back, what looked like a sunburn washed off. One ear was dark blue and the other pink, and my hair had green in the back and pink up front.

The streets were splattered with pink the morning after Holi. In yoga class, the girls who had light brown or blonde hair still have patches of pink, green, and purple in their hair. One of them leaned over just to let me know there was still a bit of pink in one ear.

Hungry in the stomach. Hungry in the mind. Hungry in the heart.

I cannot get enough Indian food. I cannot believe that two or four hours of yoga a day leaves me more hungry than climbing all day did, but there it is.

I mentioned this to another yoga student. A few days ago, her teacher opened the floor to questions at the end of class, she said, and one girl had mentioned that she’s really hungry after class. The teacher answered her with a question, “Are you hungry in the stomach? Or are you hungry in the heart? Or hungry in the mind?”

I’ve been hungry for curries, mostly. The hunt for the perfect Indian meal has had me ordering eggplant curry for breakfast… Not the best idea. I felt like was searching for that one perfect dish, that life-changing meal, that chance to sink my chapatti into something really extraordinary.

And yes, OK, I’ve had other kinds of hunger.

Yoga as westerners know it is just a physical workout. Advanced stretching. But yoga means far more than that in its traditional sense. The word itself means “union.” To be specific, “hatha” yoga represents the union of the “ha” and “tha” energies, the polarities of hot and cold, masculine and feminine, light and dark. These energies are said to spiral through channels that run up the spine, and when you practice yoga, you better allow them to flow from sacrum to skull. The more energy that can flow through your brain, the more energy available to focus on the divine when you meditate. At least, that’s my rudimentary understanding of these things.

Yoga is also, in a practical sense, a series of exercises that keep your back strong and your hips open so that you can sit cross-legged for hours to meditate and manage to think about something more meaningful than, “Damn, this is uncomfortable.”

But yoga and meditation isn’t the whole practice, either. The proper diet for the soul includes chanting and study of spiritual texts as well, according to the texts, like the Yoga Sutras, from which yoga was drawn.


So over the week or so after I arrived, I fished around for those experiences, attending arati, which is like Catholic evensong, and keeping an eye out for meditation classes, lectures, and satsangs, the equivalent of sermons. The arati at one ashram is more show than substance—and they know it. They’ve got the video cameras on hand to record it. At another, the chanting was this lackluster, out-of-rhythm musical chaos. Even when singing about victory for Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who conquers obstacles, they drug the thing into a dirge. There’s next to nothing in the way of meditation classes, unless you day a seven or 10-day retreat.

In between all this poster-reading and religious ceremony sampling, I was eating everything I could get my hands on, because the one thing I have successfully locked into is a good ashtanga class that kicks my butt for two hours every morning. Oh, and then if that weren’t enough, I go to the Sivananda class in the afternoon.

But even when I was full, I didn’t feel full. I still felt like I wanted something more. Something sweet.

I went to the numerous German bakeries up and down the street and stared at the counters and thought, “Maybe the lemon cake will do it…” And the lemon cake was glorious. But I found myself scraping through the napkin as if those last crumbs are going to satiate what I’m searching for. They didn’t.

When you visit a temple to meditate or to worship, you will often be offered prasad, food that has been blessed. You consume those blessings along with what you eat.

“Prasad is very important,” the monk who maintains the Sivananda Temple reminded me as he puttered around, gathering mine on a copyright page discarded by the Sivananda Publications League. He was closing the temple, so I was ushered outside to nibble through a handful of raisins, half a banana, and two cookies, and suck on a couple mango hard candies and even some fat grains of sugar. Prasad is always sweet, one of my teachers at the ashram in the Bahamas said during my teacher training, because the taste of the divine is sweet.

Satsang with Sri Prem Baba starts before my yoga class gets out, so I rush from far end of Ram Jhula to the other side of Lakshman Jhula, and slip in the door just after the singing ends and the lecture starts. Prem Baba, Brazilian by birth, wraps himself in beige robes and sits on a chair with beige curtains. His cloud of a beard has gone white, and his steel gray and white hair is slicked back from his face and lays in ringlets over his shoulders in that way only people of South American countries can seem to pull off. The effect is of these dark eyes floating above a cloud occasionally split by a toothy smile. He reads questions delivered to him from the crowd—more than a hundred people attend his daily satsangs—and answers the question in Portuguese, pausing for his translator.


His lessons are simple, and read a bit like the book of Proverbs.

“By giving, you receive.” “When it doubt, go meditate.” “Know where you are. You won’t get anywhere else by denying your feelings.” “A true anger is worth much more than a fake smile.” “All your fantasies for your future are connected to your stories from your past, but who are you without this past?” “Life is a mystery to be enjoyed with the heart. It’s not to be thought about with your intellect. It is to be felt.”

It’s tender food for the soul, and a comfortable sort of spirituality—just a few verses to guide your ship.

After he has talked for an hour or even an hour and a half, which feels more like 30 minutes, he concludes with, “OK?” Pause. “Let’s sing.” Then the room swells with the music of guitars, drums, a violin, an egg-shaker. People sing and dance in the back aisles. They line up to bring him gifts—flowers, garlands, fruit, letters, their mala (prayer beads) for him to finger and then hang around their necks.

Two afternoons a week, I also go to a satsang with the towering Swami Muktananda. He’s enormous, a tower of a man, and his voice resonates through his body like a call to action. When he makes himself laugh, and he often does, it’s a belly laugh. There’s a physical comedy to what he does, too. Just sitting there in his chair, he’ll roll his eyes or stomp his feet or gesticulate wildly.


His talks pull from Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism, talking about Moses more often than Vishnu. And he laces in contemporary culture and events as well. It was sitting on the floor in his satsang that I first heard of the earthquake in Japan. “Say an earthquake, 8.9 hits Japan and now there’s a tsunami headed for Tokyo. Yes. That just happened,” he said, but it sounded like a thought puzzle. I didn’t believe it was more than a hypothetical—earthquakes at 8.9 don’t actually happen, right?—until he began to dig more into it.

Satsang is like getting directions, Swami Muktananda says. I was where you are, and here’s how I got where I am. See if it works for you. Mostly, though, he says to meditate at the start of every day, find and hold onto that peace.

He’s not compromising about that. Ask a weird, abstract question—all he does is take questions from the crowd, in writing or in person—about something like “Why did we incarnate as animals first and now humans? And what is it that’s reincarnating?” and his response is, “Let’s not break our brain with that level of things.”

What you want to focus on, he says, is “I am.” You are the divine, a spark of God on earth. Go after realizing that with the intensity of a samurai. If a thought threatens to take you away from your focus on that truth, put your sword to it. And yes, he gestures and cries, “Aya!” as he chops that distraction away.

What he says is often just poetry: “Your life is a prayer upon the earth.”

I skip meals to get to these satsangs sometimes, but I never seem to come out of them hungry for anything.

And yet, I think these are often still just the trappings of spiritualism, not the spiritual pursuit itself. In many ways, the gifts, the clothing, the photos taken of and with Prem Baba, the blessings on your mala (I think Swami Muktananda would laugh if you thought your mala needed his blessings and say, “They’re just beads. What does it matter if I’ve touched them? They’ll still just be beads and the problem isn’t with your beads. It’s with your mind.”), even the handing over of your commitment to your spiritual path in writing—they’re all just part of the illusion that any actions on earth matter.

If you want peace, look within. If you want happiness, find it there.

Sing and dance, certainly. Listen and learn. Be coached. And then sit and be still. That is your real work and that is the real journey.

Then you will realize—not just know or understand, but realize—that it was not the Baba’s blessing, the white you wore, the smudge of ash on your forehead that mattered. It was within you, in an interior those things can never touch. And it will go with you, whether you are here or there.

The good people of Rishikesh

I’d heard horror stories before I left India about how difficult travel here is. Extraordinary, and extraordinarily challenging. People stare, grope, pickpocket, swindle you out of your money, soak up your time touring you around. And I saw a bit of that in Dehli, certainly. Our taxi driver tried to detour us to convince us to stay in a hotel where he’d get a commission for having dropped unwitting tourists off, and a rickshaw driver tried to pass off a 10 rupee bill so tattered it was barely recognizable. So yes, India can cheat you.

On the flight to India, the Indian man next to me saw me reading up on Uttarakhand in my guidebook.

“Are you going to Uttarakhand? I’m from there,” he said. I replied that yes, I was going there. He repeatedly asked if I was meeting with a group, going with a group, had a group of friends. No, no, no, I said. Alone.

“Oh, I would not do that,” he said, a horrified look on his face. He wrote down his cell phone number and his work phone number, saying to contact him if I had any trouble, and told me not to keep anything in my back pockets.

I started to explain that I knew women who have traveled in India alone and been fine. That I’d just traveled all over Thailand alone. He couldn’t hear it, and added his email address to my methods for contacting him.

But, I was sufficiently concerned. Was I crawling into a den of thieves with money dangling from my pockets?

It appears… so far (knock on wood), that this is not the case. The people here are incredibly friendly. I’m alternately greeted with “Hari om” or “Namaste” walking down the street—OK, half the time, that’s the replacement for “Can you spare any change?” but still. Children dance in front of my camera, calling, “Take my picture! Take my picture!”

I do and flip it around to show them. I love that moment of them smiling at their own image. Kids here break all the rules—they play with fire and they stay up late, they swim into foot traffic like sharks to pitch items for sale: “Buy a picture?” and they dance with strangers. They’ve got this remarkable spark to them, like they already know too well what it means to be human, how lucky it is to have a human life and how quickly it will pass.

There’s a certain degree of “Huh. Weird,” to some of this. I’ve had about a dozen people ask to have their picture taken with me, and that’s weird. Half the guys in an eight-man posse hiking a trail to the Shiva Temple had to have their photo taken with me. I was at a ghat, the stairs to the Ganges, writing and a man brought his daughter over to have her picture taken with me.


A man at a chai stall near the Shiva Temple, where we stopped for tea while waiting for the jeep to fill up so we could catch a ride back to town, walked his son over and held his son’s hand out and commanded his son, “Say hello.”

I shook his small, limp fingers and smiled at him while he stared at me. His brother curled into his shoulder and cried when I took their picture and he still looks a bit worried, like he’s not sure what the after effects of having touched a white girl will be. Aw, not so celebrity-esque.

But then there’s the oh, it all works out in the balance attitude. I’d stopped for an after-dinner apple samosa (let’s talk about things that are really going to aid enlightenment…) and chai with Patrick, and went to pay and had nothing but a 500 rupee note for a 30 rupee bill.

“Next time,” the clerk said. “Just pay next time. Maybe next year.”

“Next year? I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. I’ve seen him do this over and over again (I was back the next day to pay off my tab and then some…). He’s just not concerned about it.

I was sitting by the Ganges at dusk, watching the water turn iridescent as the night came on, and one of the tourist police officers came down to where I was sitting and asked, “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said. He warned me against staying down there in the dark alone, and walked with me for a while along the bank, until I was near the stairs to the road. He asked where I was from, and if I was doing yoga, and what kind. I said ashtanga, and he replied, “You can do ashtanga? Show me.”

“Right here? Right now?” I asked. We were on a sandy stretch, but it was getting a bit dark and I wasn’t really feeling like playing trick pony.

“You’ll just have to take my word for it that I can do it,” I said.

So yes, there’s a bit of misogyny. A man on the train laughed when I said I’d just finished a master’s degree, and when I got on the bus, the man charged the white man ahead of me double fare and me nothing because he just assumed I was with him.

And OK, so I did have an episode with a particularly persistent Indian man staying in the room across from mine. I don’t think I’d ever literally shut the door in the face of a man who was still talking to me, before that moment, but there it is. And still he pleaded at the door and then came around to the windows, calling “Please miss…” begging me to come outside to talk to him for five minutes. He went so far as to peer in my top shutters (I’d already closed the lower ones—my windows look onto a balcony anyone in my hotel can access). I cried, “No,” and slammed them shut, flipped off the lights, and used my ipod to light my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

I swear as I was lying in bed, I heard him say, “Good night, boo” from outside. How he picked up “boo,” I wouldn’t dare ask.

Street scenes

My laptop is full. Yes, full. No more memory. That's how many photos I've taken. So, time to share. And edit. Mon dieu...

Getting centered in Yoga Central

It only took a train that started from a station packed body to body with people, a bus that felt more like a carnival ride, and a jarring tuktuk to arrive at the circus of spiritual seekers that is Rishikesh: Yoga Capital of the World. The night I got here, the valley was ringing with chanting until midnight. There’s the city proper of Rishikesh, and then the spiritual corridor, shoved up the Ganges River valley north of the city, where the ashrams and yoga centers are concentrated. And that corridor is split into two: Lakshman (or Laxman) Jhula, the more backpacker-esque area, and Ram Jhula, where most of the ashrams are. The Ganges runs its own shade of blue-green and the river itself is mesmerizing. It’s difficult to not stare at it.

Not that we could see it in the dark. What we could see in the dark was a posse of people singing karaoke kirtan (Sanskrit chants) at a stage bedecked in pink and yellow Christmas lights. And a series of men at guesthouses that had no rooms available. I’d met a man on the train to Haridwar who was also headed to Rishikesh and searching for a place to stay for the night.

This little city straddling the Ganges is stamped with the signs of people searching for higher ground—temples, shrines, ashrams, the incense and prayer bead and other assorted accoutrements of the devout. The bookshops are predominantly spiritual texts. Street vendors hawk all the tools necessary to step your way up the ladder of enlightenment. Prayer beads and incense and books written by men in orange robes, some of whom must have started as those men I see in my walks along the Ganges, pacing its banks and staring into the water like they’re reading its surface, living in earth huts and shacks as close to the banks as the river’s regular flooding will allow, letting their hair and their beards go wild.

And yoga here is what trekking was in Chiang Mai; signs hung on every post and bare scrap of wall advertise for places to go, ways to practice, teachers to learn from, teacher training courses to take, retreats to attend, intensive courses to take, lectures to listen to. The city constantly rings with chanting and the much less enlightenment-encouraging blare of horns on jeeps and motorbikes. Forget Hindi, Urdu, English, whatever; the horn is the primary form of communication in India. Drivers honk to let pedestrians, cows, dogs, cats, and monkeys know they’re approaching, getting closer, passing, and have passed.

Patrick, who I met on the train, was here two years ago, and knew where to look and what to look for. We paced all over town the next day, and he pointed out everything from good yoga classes to the best place to get chocolate balls, told me the ashrams have filtered water and will let you fill your bottles for free, and gave the all clear on the street chai. Men stand at these little carts with a fire blazing and will bring the milk to a boil right in front of you. The chai is sweet and rich, sipped from little glasses, and the perfect prelude to a morning yoga practice. When the weather was cold and rainy those carts stayed open all day, as tightly squeezed together on the main street as Starbucks coffee shops are in Portland. Now that the weather has started to warm up, more of them have switched to juice, which is hand cranked through a juicer crushes sugar cane with lemon, mint and ginger.

I’m staying in a room at a guesthouse that happens to have a stunning view of the Ganges. I can lie in bed and watch the sun set over the water. And I have hot water. At least, from one of the taps. It pours into a bucket. The showerhead runs nothing but cold water. So the question now is, “Which would more greatly encourage spiritual enlightenment? Watching the sun set with my head on a pillow and bathing with hot water (even if it is from a bucket), or surrendering windows, outlets, and any hope of warm water and moving to the ashram at the far end of town that does occasionally have rooms open up?”

I splash myself off in the mornings, and then head to a studio that faces the Ganges for ashtanga yoga classes. The “sweet pain,” as the teacher calls it, I felt after the first couple classes is diminishing. For those two hours every morning, the noise of the traffic, the push and pull of people, and even, for a few moments, the chatter of my own brain vanishes. And that, I think, is the real point.

India, oh, India

Everything about India blurred together for most of the 24 hours, with just a few images crystalizing. I arrived at almost midnight, collected bags, paired up with another woman headed into town and split a taxi. She’d even invited me to take the second twin bed in her room at the guesthouse she’d booked. Having had visions of wandering the streets of downtown Dehli, homeless and contemplating sleeping in the train station, I said yes.

The taxi ride from the airport was a blur—or maybe that was the streak of the red lights we blew through because those, apparently, are optional. Even after midnight, the city is busy constructing itself. Dump trucks moved along in trios, marching like soldiers toward progress. Rows of rickshaws were stacked together like grocery carts. Fires burned in sheet metal shelters. The nicer places look like Anasazi cliff dwellings, stacked, cement squares with ladders to access them on the outside. The alley to the guest house Victoria had booked was narrow and dark, with a stream of water running down the center. We ducked under a metal gate and walked down a hallway to a door with a sign on it that read “No room.” But they know her—Victoria has volunteered with Tibetan refugees in India for six years, and stays at this guest house in the Tibetan corner of Dehli every time she passes through town—and, literally, had a key with her name on it.

The neighborhood was buzzing before I was out of bed, the sounds an overlay of American music, Tibetan drumming, which has a metal ring, people shouting, and men spitting. Oh yeah, you can hear spitting from the second floor.

My first glimpse of Dehli by daylight was from the rooftop of our guesthouse. The neighboring rooftops were strung with Tibetan prayer flags, some of them wind-flapped to rags, their colors gone and only traces of the black dye of their inscribed prayers.

It’s quite cold, and I hugged into my morning coffee at a table beside monks and friends of monks. The restaurant looks out on the Yamuna River, silver to match the gray morning sky, and a row of small garden plots and riverside shacks. Women in saris topped with long shawls attend to their business walk among the shacks, and children play in empty garden plots. The occasional cow strolled through.

I’ve got nothing in the way of cold-weather clothes, so we went out scouting the markets, but they’ve got little in the way of cold-weather clothes either. The hawkers work ceaselessly. They try to call you into sari shops as if the words coming out of their mouths will be the first you’ve heard of the possibility of buying a sari. As if you didn’t see the mannequins in window after window draped in fabrics so heavily jeweled they could drag an ordinary Indian woman to the ground. A man selling USB sticks approached Victoria and me, and seemed to think that our “No, I don’t need that,” was just our fierce bargaining technique. As he followed us down the street, the cost of 32GB of memory dropped from 1,000 rupees to 250 rupees (it’s about 45 rupees to 1 USD), at which point he declared that was his last, best price. When we laughed and shook our heads, he vanished.

The press of people is constant. Try to slow down or stop without stepping far enough to the side—shoving yourself into a doorway or into an alley—and they will push right through you. Stand at a counter without knowing what you want to order and they’ll do the same. And yes, they stare like they’ve never seen a white person before, which is impossible because there are literally busloads of them moving around the city.

We were searching for a thick pashmina for me, something to wrap around my shoulders to stay warm, but had no luck. My only purchase was a couple of Indian sweets, one flavored vaguely of nutmeg and the other trying for, I think, lime and chocolate, topped with a layer of thin silver flake.

And after all that, I did my buying in Majnu-ka-Tilla, the Tibetan area, where I found a thick, yak’s wool shawl (No, Mom, my nose isn’t cold anymore), and spun my first prayer wheel. Each spin sends thousands of rounds of “Om Mani Padme Hum” toward the heavens, invoking the blessings of Chenrezig, embodiment of compassion.