I´ve been pretty busy since my last post, but hopefully I´ll be able to fire off two or three posts today to get caught up with everything. The first is the story of my first experience in a yoga class. I think it´s probably safe to assume that it wasn´t the same type of yoga that is so popular in Texas.
So there I was last Tuesday night meeting a group of the other volunteers at a bus stop in one of Cusco´s suburbs. Earlier that day, one of the program directors, Kaela, invited anyone who was interested in stopping in on a yoga class that she goes to a few times a week to meet at the Magesterio bus stop at 6:00. Quite a few of us thought it sounded interesting, and having never tried yoga, I figured South America was as good of place as anywhere to try something new.
After the group of around eight of us met up, we walked a short distance up the hill from the bus stop and entered a house. Once in the house it took all of a half second to realize that this wasn´t going to be Uptown Dallas-Lululemon Brigade style yoga. This was guru yoga, and I was about to spend an hour and a half having a very new experience.
From the entrance, you could hear the people in the next room already chanting. We put our bags down and quietly slipped down the stairs into the room where the class was. At the front of the room was a man dressed in all white and probably in his 50s. The room was dimmly lit, and the air smelled like incense. I took my place at an empty mat in the front of the room, as the class began to move into some exercises.
The first 15 minutes or so was one of the most difficult 15 minutes of keeping a straight face that I have had in a long time. Our guru (I don´t know if he actually is considered a guru amongst the spiritual yoga group, but he looked the part to me) spoke instructions in Spanish, and seeing as how my Spanish vocabularly is focused more on everyday communication and less on how to narrate an introspective spiritual quest, I had no idea what he was saying. I would open my eyes to see what everyone else was doing, and that´s when I just about lost it. Everyone in the class was sitting indian style, gyrating their upper bodies in circles with their eyes closed and their hands on their knees.
Finally, after that first 15 minutes or so, I settled down and was able to take the whole thing a little more seriously. Once the various gyrating exercises were finished, we moved into the actual exercise. I´ve got to hand it to the people who do yoga on a regular basis. It just about kicked my butt. The exercises last for probably 30 minutes before we went back to resting a little bit.
The next stage was mediation. For about the next 45 minutes, our guru led us in mediation, softly saying a whole lot of things that I didn´t understand. I imagine they were positive words, though. Next, we all laid on our backs underneath blankets on our yoga mats, closed our eyes, and listened to the teacher softly talk. This lasted awhile, and I began to get pretty tired. The volunteer on the mat next to mine said she heard me start snoring at some point.
For the grand finale, we were asked to sit back up indian style, and open the folders that were sitting next to everyone. The guru turned on some chanting on his iPod, and for the next 10 minutes we chanted a single verse written in some language from South Central Asia repeatedly. Right when we had repeated whatever we were saying to the point that I about had it memorized, the guru turned off the iPod, and with that my spiritual journey ended.
The whole experience varied from hilarity to interesting new experience to just strange over the course of that hour and a half. As odd as I felt though, I´m glad I tried it even if it turned out to be a one time thing. After all, who wouldn´t want to say they tried yoga for the first time in some guru´s basement in the middle of the Andes...
Scott
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