Tag: #yogaretreat

So my suitcase is packed and I have had my last dinner at Hinterland village (sweet corn soup and mushroom masala), my last yoga philosophy class and my last special old people’s yoga session. The next two days will be spent mainly travelling with a little final retail therapy. This time next week I will be back at work. Renewed, refreshed and reinvigorated.

Let’s not get downheartened though. Today’s meditation was the best yet – I was mainly deeply asleep for most of it, woke up a few times, but then drifted straight back. Not sure if I was breathing heavily but I felt incredibly calm afterwards. I have had a full body massage – the steam cupboard was out of order – but my skin feels amazing. Swami our yoga teacher has enlightened me in the meaning of yoga and has suggested some further research.

We went on a nature walk around the village today – shown round by the father of one of the lovely waiters. He showed us numerous plants and trees – all which had been planted by Unni and each with a purpose – shrubs which provide fresh air, peace lilies, Ayurvedic plants which help with all different types of medicine. He pulled leaves off bushes and scrunched them up for us to smell, he picked fresh ‘peanuts’ off a tree for us to taste, and showed us the rubber trees where the sap was being collected and turned into rubber mats.

The fig trees were very different – with the figs growing in bunches around the lower part of the trunk.

Have met some great people while staying here – it seems everyone is on their path and it was lovely to walk alongside them for a few days. A lovely Australian couple left today – they spent some time yesterday planning the next part of their trip and I was slightly (ok, very) envious. They are heading to Sri Lanka for a couple of weeks…

A woman who is a similar age arrived on the same day as me and we have had many laughs – we both feel like we might have met in another life and it has been great to have a kindred spirit. The other guests are mostly in their 20s and 30s, from Switzerland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Italy…a great bunch of people.

One of the funniest and maybe weirdest things was learning about the different cleansing processes. The first one we tried was an eye wash. We were all given two eye baths full of fresh water and then were shown how to put them over our eyes and roll our eyes around to give them a good clean. I clearly wasn’t paying attention. I put the eye baths over my eyes and all the water just poured out all over me. Everyone else was busy swooshing their eyes and I stood there soaked through with dirty eyes. I couldn’t stop laughing. The next step was Jal Neti, a form of nasal cleansing (squeamish people look away now). You make up a warm saline solution and put it in a special teapot and then lean forward, tilt your head 45 degrees and pour the saline solution in one nostril and, hey presto, the water comes out the other nostril! Husband couldn’t believe it when I told him. I can’t wait to get home and show him my new trick. It is really good if you have a blocked nose, or suffer from dust allergies! The next option was even weirder and I didn’t try it…but it involves putting a rubber tube up one nostril and pulling it out through the mouth. It was pretty gross.

From there, it went further into the realms of filling your body with water and vomiting it out to stuffing a tea towel down your throat, making it a little wet and then I don’t know what as I was too stunned to take it all in. I understand that it’s all fine and part of a process – but I am happy with my eye bath (now mastered) and my neti pot.

This is a great place and I would like to come back – maybe with some friends and even a brother. I am not sure I will write again before I get home, but thanks for reading my sabbatical blogs – from Spain, Tokyo and India. It has been a blast.

Adiós, Sayonara and पुनर्दर्शनाय!

Another full day of yoga – 6.30-8.30, 11-12.30, 17.00-19.30. We also squeezed in a trip on the backwaters in a lovely boat, and the all-important ice-cream stop which resulted in the purchase of a tub of pistachio ice-cream which I shared with just one other person…so delicious!

But I digress. Am inspired to write about the last session of yoga which was for about 15 minutes just before dinner.  It was a practice of eye yoga, or Trataka. It helps to cleanse your eyes and improves your eyesight. So I was already signing my name on the dotted line having worn glasses since I was 5. Jaish (sp) explained how the practice would work before we started and described how we would be staring at a candle towards the end of the practice without blinking, and our eyes might fill with water but we should not blink and we should let the tears roll down. I was intrigued.

The first stage was to look up and look down about six times then run your palms together until they were hot and cup them over your eyes without touching the eyes. This was repeated with a look to the left and right about six times, palm rubbing then cupping. Then we had to look diagonally top right bottom left six times, rub our palms and then cup with intermittent pressure and breathing. The same for the opposite diagonal. Then for the last eye exercise, we had to do a complete circle of looking, rub our palms together, cup our eyes and apply constant pressure while breathing deeply. Are you keeping up?

Then we gently had to look down and slowly lift our gaze to the candle and stare at the flame for about 40 seconds without blinking. Will power was needed. My will power was in deep savanasa from the previous session. And as soon as someone says “Don’t blink” it just makes you want to blink even more. I tried so hard but failed within about 6 seconds. And then I was blinking like mad until I regained control and was able to focus on the flame for the last few seconds, as a single tear dropped down my cheek. More palm rubbing and breathing, and we had to slowly lift our gaze to the black spot at the centre of the flame. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really see the centre of the flame, but there was dark patch that I could focus on. Again I tried to stop blinking and lasted a little longer, but once the water started to well up my instinct was to blink loads. More palm rubbing and cupping over our eyes. The final look was to see the whole of the flame including the sparkly bits around it –  I was impressed I could see the sparkly bits but was blinking so hard that I wasn’t sure I could see much else. At the final palm rubbing and cupping, we had to apply pressure, inhale deeply and then making a humming sound as we breathed out. It was at this point I lost my composure. My focus was then intensely on not laughing. But as I said, when you know you shouldn’t do something, the urge to do it is even greater. I concealed it (I think) with a slight cough. (It brought to mind a famous evening which mum had asked us to attend at her church to celebrate Trafalgar night. Us being me, Nick, Jo and our kids. It has gone down in the history books as one of the funniest evenings – we all got hysterical and were shaking with laughter but trying not to show it. We weren’t invited back the following year.)

*As we walked out at the end of the class, I was interested to know if anyone else had welled up with tears. My small sample suggested it was 50/50 – so the title of this blog is misleading, hence the asterisk.  Another woman on the course also said she had thought that if anyone had walked in on us, sitting in a circle, in the dark, around a table with a candle on it, hands cupped over our eyes and humming, they might have thought it was slightly weird. But it was really enjoyable and I am glad I tried it. Oddly, only my right eye watered….what does it mean?

So another lovely day in Kerala. I can’t believe I only have one week left before I go back to work. It has gone so fast. I have been so lucky. I have started dreaming about colleagues in odd circumstances, so maybe my brain is already gearing up for the grand return. But I still have four days in India so here are some pictures of the fishing nets I took while on the boat. (I just realised they all look the same, but can you spot six differences?)

Oh, and by the way, I put my glasses on after the yoga and could see perfectly!

So haven’t written daily as the days don’t really have anything to distinguish them. It’s a 6am rattatat and a cup of herb tea, followed by 2 hours of yoga, then breakfast. Then a massage or maybe some yoga philosophy followed by tea. Then lunch and maybe meditation. Then another cup of tea and then yoga for 2 hours. Then more tea. Then dinner followed by tea. Then lights out.

I have managed to do a headstand (!) and can sit for five minutes with my legs crossed without feeling (too much) pain. I had a consultation with the Ayurvedic doctor and we talked about cricket mostly. I forgot to mention my twitchy eye and my failing memory – I think I got nervous as it felt a bit like waiting in line to see the school nit doctor. Nearly everyone else has been given some sort of potion to drink or rub in…I feel like I should make something up next time he comes so I can have a potion. Not sure there is anything for failing memory though and my twitchy eye seems to have stopped. I had to stay back after meditation class today with another guest who is the same age (we could have mothered most of the people here) and we had a session on how aches and pains at our age were the result of some serious harm we had done to ourselves earlier in life. I have taken on most of the philosophy but I am not so sure I followed that line of reasoning. I don’t have so many aches and pains so maybe they are to come later…

Worryingly, I have read two of the three books I brought on holiday and I still have a week of holiday left. There is a library in the ‘Room of Requirement’ but I haven’t seen anything that jumps out at me – lots of yoga books so I could learn even more about yoga.

I did have a full body massage today which was fab. I even got to have the yellow and red smears on my forehead and neck. The masseuse was very good – it was quite oily and the head hole smelt a bit of spaghetti bolognaise – but it was really relaxing. I opted for the ‘steam’ afterwards so was taken into a curtained cubicle in which there was a cupboard with a round hole in the top. The front section opened and the masseuse gestured for me to sit on the wooden shelf inside. She closed the door and I was sitting up with just my head sticking out. She put a towel round my neck and said “5 minutes”, and walked off. I then started to feel steam coming from somewhere around my knees and it gradually got more and more intense. I suddenly felt a bit anxious that I would be forgotten and would shrivel up – there didn’t seem to be an emergency button or anyway to get my arms out… but then my new yoga meditation skills came to the rescue and I calmed down and started to enjoy it. However, I was mightily pleased when the masseuse appeared through the curtain and released me from the steam chamber.

Tonight, I also was allowed to visit the kitchen. The food has been outstanding – all vegetarian and with some Ayurvedic properties (wrong word but I hope you know what I mean). I met Chef who was busy making cauliflower masala and I asked him to show me round his spice cupboard. He was a local lad and had been working there for 7 years. There were two ladies prepping the carrots and cabbage for the coleslaw. In another room I met the guy in charge of the stores who was weighing garlic! Never seen that before so I had to take a photo…

There were loads of vegetables from the garden – including some monster ladies’ fingers, some snake gourds, something that looked like sugar cane but wasn’t and some green chillies.

On Friday we get to leave the village and head to a nearby temple where there is a big festival – details are sketchy but it should be good.  Tomorrow is another day of yoga, tea and meditation. Time is running out and I’ll be back at the coalface before long….

Here’s a picture of one of the three yoga cats at the resort.

And here is Emma the emu, and, of course, the turkeys ????

After a second day of eating and shopping in Delhi – and spending some magical time with Debs, Somak and the gorgeous little monster, and boy did we eat! We had the most delicious lunch which really kept us full all afternoon and evening…and for me, that’s hard.

I had to leave at 3.30am to get my flight to Kochi – so had a couple of hours kip, took a taxi to Terminal 1D (after much discussion – it was a little confusing as there are two terminals and I think they thought I was going ‘back to America’). I mooched around the bustling airport (all the shops were open despite it being silly o’clock) and then boarded the correct flight to Kochi. Slept a little and was picked up by a lovely taxi driver, who suggested we stopped for breakfast on the way to Hinterland village, my home for the next 10 days. He even lent me some rupees to buy breakfast! It was a masala dhosa and then he could obviously see I was a bit of a foodie (as I whipped out my phone to take a photo) and so he orders me a vada (no photo as it was so delicious I just ate it immediately) – a sort of savoury doughnut…

An hour later we drew up at the yoga resort to a lovely warm welcome and a cup of tea. Within half an hour I was lying in shavanasa in the yoga studio which is outside and overlooks a lake and was being lead into a deep relaxation. It was just the right thing – I felt so relaxed after it but also widely awake. Lunch of vegetable curry and a beetroot dish and then a short rest followed by a head, back and shoulder ayervurdic massage. I mean, this is heaven, right?

A few of the other guests and I went on a walk around the local area – my hair was like an oil slick but what with the humidity and face-sweating, I don’t think it was a good look but I felt fab. We were invited in to an amazing house which was full of art and artists – they had a cast of Jesus with eyes that followed you, an amazing painting of the Pentecost and numerous other artworks – the whole family were artists – from grandpa to granddaughter and all points in-between.

A lovely warm shower and a good hair wash, supper and bed. The rain is pouring down but it’s quite comforting to hear it on the roof. The resort has a friendly emu, two very friendly cats and some turkeys… can’t wait until the 6am wake-up herb tea call, followed by two hours of yoga. Time, please stand still!