On Yoga:
The yoga class we all take here was a little unexpected, but in a good way. Every Monday and Wednesday we're carted off to the Ananda Ashram (ICYER) for bharatanatyam (classical Indian dance) and Hatha/Gitananda yoga. Dance is a separate post, but let's talk yoga. The Ashram is gorgeous. It's this airy-open building complex with like four courtyards and puppies and flowers and and and an ocean next to it! If you have not done yoga to the sound of water flopping onto a beach, you have not lived m'dear. Our little hut we use is on the second floor (it's really more like on top of the roof of the first floor - if that makes sense) in the hut that the people who actually live at the ashram use as a pranayama hut. Our class is in the afternoon, so it's just too hot to be out on the roof like the 6-month-course-actual-ashram people do every morning (at 5:30 am - oof). Anyway, the hut is made of woven palm leaves and mercifully blocks the south India sun a bit. The only downside to this hit is that some times lizards will fall out of the roof and onto your head while you're trying to deep breath. Happened the first day of class to my friend Kati. About half of our class drags our destroyed-post-dance bodies up there and we all sit quietly (/chatter like crazy sometimes... Shh) on our woven mats. Oh, also, this hut smells amazing because our teacher always has some incense going before we all get up there. Random fact that y'all probably don't care about, but I'd like to remember. When our teacher, Aishwariya comes up, we all stand up and give her a little namaste and then she has us for real sit quietly and start to turn our focus inwards, and every class she'll do this lovely little Sanskrit opening chant, which I have not learned yet. Then we'll move onto the jattis. Oh the jattis! These are a slight departure from previous yoga classes I've attended. In the ones in the US, jattis are always treated as a brief sort of warm up. Which, I mean, they are, but here we spend a really decent chunk of class time on them. Jattis are usually fun and/or hilarious (bringing my foot to my ear and then stretching it out again is a favorite - repeat lots). The focus at our ashram is on pranayama, kriyas and jattis far, far more than it is on asanas. Pranayama -breathing exercises; kriyas - actions or sounds done to free up the flow of prana (energy) in the body and release stress; jattis - little actions to loosen up the joints, but not focused on the breath like kriyas are. I probably explained that very poorly (sorry, Aishwariya!), but they might be some of those things that have to be shown and not written about. At least at this point in my yoga experience. Anyway, after jattis we usually do a kriya or two and the move onto the surya namaskars (sun salutations!). There is a whole starting-up-traditional process thing before surya namaskars, though, that I quite like, but won't describe because I just tried to and erased it because it sounded terribly dull. Anyway, we'll do three, six or nine surya namaskars, and then do the ritual thing to get out of it. THEN, with probably half an hour left of class we'll do maybe two or three asanas and more kriyas. Then.. Sivasana! Hurrah! Sivasana is corpse pose. Sivasana is also, for all of you non-yoga-ers, the best thing ever. It's laying flat on your back with your heels together, but you relax every muscle in your body.and you stay like that for like 10-15 minutes. Wonderful. So yeah, that's how a typical class goes. I really really like that this yoga course has been the exact flipside of most of the US classes. It's so nice kind of getting the full picture of what traditional yoga is about. Plus, it's hard. Breathing right is hard. Hah. I want to put pictures in this post, but my laptop is currently out of commission. I'll try to post some pics of the ashram when I get to a computer.