Ashram life

In October 2009, I had the wonderful experience of getting my yoga teacher training at a special place in India called the “Yoga Vidya Gurukul Ashram”. An ashram is defined as a place of spiritual learning. For me it was a community of like-minded people who lived, breathed and thought about yoga all day, every day. Because there are no distractions from outside (no internet, no cellphones, no fast food, no new fashions or television), it was very easy to just fall into the yoga way of life and truly relax.

A typical day in the ashram would look like this:

5 am: Wake-up time
We would wake up before the sun, awoken by a hand-rung bell that echoed through the valleys. For the first hour of the day, we had to keep a rule of silence. You wake up, splash water on your face, smile at your roommates and slowly make your way down the hill to the dining area. Here we could get a cup of warm herbal tea, and some people used this time to write in their dairies.

5:45 am: Mantra chanting
After waking up properly with the help of the herbal tea, we would make our way to the yoga hall and sit in the meditative posture, cross-legged on the floor. Then we would learn and chant mantras in Sanskrit. My favorite mantra is the Gayatri Mantra, and it goes like this:
“OM BUHR, BHUVA, SWAHA
OM TAT SAVITUR VARENYAM
BHARGO DEVASYA DHEEMAHI
DHIYO YONAHA PRACHODAYAT”

6 am: Yoga practice (asana and pranayama)
During the morning sessions, we slowly woke up our bodies by doing 14 Sun Salutations. After that, we learned new poses and postures. We always ended off the class with a new breathing technique, bandha (muscle lock in the body) or mudra (hand position used in meditation).

8 am: Karma yoga
As opposed to yoga exercise, karma yoga is basically one hour of cleaning or helping out around the ashram. Karma yoga is seva – selfless service. For this hour, everyone helped by washing floors, peeling vegetables in the kitchen, working in the garden, painting walls, fixing broken things, making teaching materials for local schools, washing dishes… Anything that needed to be done. The purpose of karma yoga is to teach us a way of living where we live for other people, not ourselves. How can you help those around you today?