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Mysore Experiences

Pilgrimage to yoga's heartland With yoga trendier than it's ever been, it's easy to find all of its trappings in the warm comfort of local, incense-infused studios. But true devotees travel back to the source, to India, where students flock from all over the world to practise the downward dog in its cultural and spiritual birthplace
CLAIRE HOCHACHKA
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

02/05/2003
The Globe and Mail

MYSORE, INDIA -- 'Do your practice, all is coming."
The teacher of my yoga teacher is an 87-year-old man who lives and teaches in Mysore, India. His name is Pattabhi Jois and this is one of his favourite phrases. I heard it long before I actually met him.

And what does it actually mean? Do your yoga practice every day, and you'll end up with whatever you want. At least, that's my interpretation. I decided to travel to India to find out for sure. There are more reasons to travel to India than there are languages, ethnicities and deities on the subcontinent. But yoga is one with a very particular flavour. In many ways, it is a pilgrimage to the heartland of yoga, a search for tradition, structure, a call for authenticity in an increasingly superficial world.

The yoga trend in the West heated up several years ago, when celebrities such as Madonna, Sting and Christy Turlington caught on, propelling the practice into the mainstream. Today, yoga centres are springing up like tulips in spring and yoga teachers are a dime a dozen. Kate Spade has a line of yoga-inspired apparel and you can buy a sticky mat from designer Mark Jacobs. Teaching methods are mutating at rapid speed to cater to the demands of a voracious clientele by incorporating things such as music, heat, Hindu icons and abdominal moves borrowed from the aerobics world.

With all this going on in the West, there is arguably no need to travel thousands of miles to study yoga in the East. Unless, perhaps, you practise Ashtanga, a rigorous style of yoga characterized by vinyasa,a continuous, flowing series of asanas (or postures) linked by the rhythm of breath. Ashtanga is a strenuous, sweaty, two-hour affair, conducted in the wee hours of the morning. Most students practise six days a week.

Ashtanga stands apart from other forms of yoga in three regards. First, it is taught in a highly traditional manner whereby each student learns one asana at a time over the course of many months, many years. Second, its roots run deep. The practice was handed down through a long lineage of teachers over thousands of years to Pattabhi Jois, who brought it to the modern world. He has been teaching in the same minimal room in Mysore, a small city in south central India, for 65 years. And third, Ashtanga involves pilgrimage. To study with Pattabhi Jois in Mysore -- where the absence of job, family and social distractions allow students to focus strictly on their yoga practice -- is an integral part of an Ashtanga student's evolution, and often represents their degree of dedication to the practice.

Westerners have long travelled to India seeking enlightenment through the Buddhist and Hindu practices of yoga and meditation. The hippie trail of the '60s and '70s, which led people like members of the Beatles and Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass, in search of spiritual instruction in the form of a guru, played a significant role in the history of yoga pilgrimage.

But India has always been a lure for pilgrims of all sorts. Hindus move between festivals and seasons to pray to various gods and gain spiritual merit. Buddhists the world over journey to India to walk the Lotus Circuit, following in the footsteps of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. Muslims from all over the subcontinent flock to the shrine of a Sufi saint in Ajmer, Rajasthan. From outer space, India must appear as one large undulation of humanity, and I'm about to jump into the flow.

I arrive in Mysore at 5:30 a.m. by overnight bus from the west coast. The 12-hour journey had begun wonderfully. I had stocked up on cashew nuts and spicy snacks called chat and sang snippets of a Hindu chant I was learning out the window of the bus, into the wind. Outside, the jungle rushed by, unbroken except by small patches of festive lights and the distant whine of music from nearby villages. I was in bliss, until my stomach began to churn. By 2 a.m., I knew I had eaten something off.

Bumping along the rough highway, fighting waves of nausea, I thought about my yoga practice back in New York. The yoga school is a warm expanse of polished hardwood bound by carved hardwood pillars imported from India. The room glows with oil lamps from a Ganesh altar and swims in wafts of incense.

"What am I doing here?" I asked myself, "when I have an excellent teacher, a vibrant community and most of the Hindu trappings I could ever want back home?"

After two years of maintaining a daily 6 a.m. practice, Ashtanga had rearranged my body, increased my ability to focus tenfold and caused things such as alcohol, caffeine and even unsavory people to fall out of my life, as naturally as ripe fruit dropping from a tree.

It's all about going to the source, I remind myself, breathing the scent of India that rushes in through the bus window. Hardship is just part of the pilgrimage experience, and my practice won't evolve without it.

The first Western student arrived in Mysore in the mid-1960s. He was a Belgian who met a swami in Mumbai who had studied with Pattabhi Jois. A decade later, there began a trickle of foreign students to Mysore.

Today, that trickle has grown into a torrent. At any given time, there are 50 to 100 students in Mysore and a community of support to those coming from abroad. Most live in apartments near the yoga school, or houses shared with families. Through a friend from New York, I learned about a professor of botany who has an apartment for rent in a spacious university neighbourhood. The apartment is like a treehouse: Palm fronds and fruit trees grow with abundance outside every window.

The first day of practice, I rise before dawn to the sound of a young cow lowing heartily nearby. The streets are cool and quiet as I roll by on a heavy, old, green pedal bike. Men in dhotis walk down the street rubbing their eyes. Women in crisp shalwar khameez, traditional dresses over baggy pants,delicately ride mopeds. The sun hangs just above the horizon, casting everything in orange light.

At the railway tracks, there are about 20 vehicles waiting, ranging from bicycles to rickshaws to Tata Sumos (India's answer to the SUV). But mostly it's scooters and cows. I wheel my bike to the front of the crowd in time to see a yellow steam engine come into view. I wonder how long this is going to take. I don't want to be late for practice, or I'll lose my spot in line.

Pattabhi Jois's school works on a queue system whereby the most senior and advanced students, and those who have been in Mysore the longest, get to practise first, at 4:30 a.m. This is a highly coveted position, made even more valuable by the fact that the room only holds 12 people. I have been warned that the wait outside the yoga room could be as long as an hour and a half.

As I sit on the steps outside the room, waiting my turn, I can see the others inside, only a few centimetres between them, with their elastic hamstrings, rubber-band backs and intense focus. Everyone concentrates on their own practice, moving at their own speed. The room is surprisingly small and dark.

I glimpse Pattabhi Jois, in a pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts and his Brahmin string, sitting on a stool in the corner, occasionally nodding off. When he rouses and stands up, I see a stocky man with twinkling eyes. As he moves around the room, assisting his students with his grandson, Sharath, I hear laughter. Despite his strict and traditional teaching method, Pattabhi Jois is also renowned for giggling with his students during practice. The nervousness I've been feeling begins to evaporate.

After an hour in line, I take a spot in the room. The scent of jasmine, from the flowers students offer to Pattabhi Jois, meets my nostrils. As I begin my first sun salutations, riding an upwelling of anticipation, I realize that it's true what the other students say: The energy in the room is almost overwhelming. I flow through my practice like butter, light and limber.

Sipping thick, sweet chai prepared by the professor's housekeeper in my treehouse apartment after practice one day, I notice that I'm starting to recognize the sounds that make up the oral tapestry of my world in Mysore. I hear the calls of the vendors making their rounds through the neighbourhood -- voices without faces, as the foliage obstructs my view of the street.

One with a particularly strident voice calls out "idli-li-li-li-errr." I wonder if he's selling idli, fermented rice moulded into little disks, which people eat with coconut chutney and a tomato-and chili-based sauce called sambar.

Most students quickly realize that it's best to eat the local food that has evolved to match the environment and pace of life in this region of India. The diet here is simple and clean, and so too is the way of life. I seem to have fallen into a different pace where simple acts, such as sipping a cup of chai, washing my hair from a bucket of cold water and bicycling to the yoga school in the morning, have become rituals to be savoured, like asanas off the mat.

By studying Ashtanga in India, I can focus my practice in its specific cultural and spiritual context. I travel about freely, exploring peripheral disciplines such as Sanskrit, music and meditation; I ride scooters to remote village temples; spend time with swamis and sadhus. As a pilgrim and stranger in this culture, I float outside of obligations: My sole responsibility is to study the science of yoga.

I collect some mangoes and bananas from the kitchen and wander out onto the back deck. The weather is delightful in the youth of the monsoon season. Mornings are bright and warm, afternoons characterized by dramatic plunging thunderheads and rain showers. I set the fruit down and go back inside to get a knife. When I come out again, a large monkey is sitting among my fruit with his teeth sunk deep into a mango.

"Hey!" I shriek and stamp the ground with my foot. The monkey growls at me and continues eating. Panicked at the sight of his large incisors, I run back into my flat to grab a broom. Despite the relaxed pace in this South Indian paradise, I am realizing that survival is a universal concern. When I return with my weapon, the monkey is gone, but he has taken with him the largest, ripest mango.

I have been studying in Mysore for about a month when I have a conversation with Pattabhi Jois regarding the purpose of Ashtanga: "Cleaning the body of poisons and controlling the mind, to see the soul looking," he says. "There will come a flash. You see your soul. Soul is God. After that, you see God everywhere."

The beauty of Ashtanga is that the many physical benefits of the practice are simply side effects. The real benefit is something that goes much deeper, and each person comes to it on their own. But it requires difficult and often painful work to reap that benefit.

Back when Pattabhi Jois started practising Ashtanga, as a child of 12, and even up until recently in India, yoga was considered the obscure pastime of religious fanatics. In his steady devotion to the practice, Pattabhi Jois went steadily against social expectations. But through the course of his commitment, he has become successful by any standard. He has attracted students from all over the world, and now travels to teach internationally. He has not only bestowed the gift of Ashtanga upon India, but also upon the rest of the world.

When I ask Pattabhi Jois when this flash came to him, at what age, in what stage of his practice, he responds, "Many lifetimes coming." It has not happened to him yet.

Suddenly, Pattabhi Jois is not only my esteemed asana teacher, but also an honest and totally human man. When I bend to touch his feet after practice, as all the students do as a sign of respect, I bend with a deep sincerity borne of my time spent in Mysore. Pattabhi Jois is a living example of his favourite phrase: "Do your practice, all is coming."