Squatters, Rice and OM, Oh My!

Namaste

View Photos (2) Image © 2006 Kristi Hemmer

As a writer, I have an amazing imagination and create wonderful stories with happy endings and beautiful things.  Sometimes reality bites. 

Enroute to my yoga center, we drove through Kathmandu Valley.  A place of nameless colors:  a palate of rice paddies, mustard fields and mountains.  The romantic mist cleared, and we pulled up to my yoga center.  I had been bitten.  The stone façade building looked like a prison, complete with a public shower, squatter toilets and a plywood board bed.

However, this retreat wasn't supposed to be about the glorious mud baths and divine facilities I had envisioned; it was about me.  Focusing on what is important to me, what should be important and balancing the two.  This was a test.

It was about self-discipline.  It was about detoxifying.  It was about focusing on what will make me better. 

Each day, we started with a 6am stroll through the villages where I experienced Nepali life like no where else and ended at 7pm with chants and songs.  Although it was physically challenging, it was also mentally challenging; I had many hours each day of solitude to think, write and be.  My yoga teacher noted that I wasn't very talkative.   I didn't want to talk.  I wanted to be. 

Yoga and mediation are hard work.  I am sore, stretched and twisted.  I am also better.  I am able to sit 20 minutes without moving and only my left leg falls asleep from sure pain-even though when I'm meditating I'm not supposed to feel that.  I have a book full of ideas and the focus to write it.  And I've discovered that showering naked under frigid spring-fed water without caring what any passerbyer sees or thinks is pretty liberating.     

I end this entry as we do in yoga, with a big OM.  (My yoga teacher says there are hundreds of meanings for OM-you choose which one works for you.)

Published on 12/22/06