Well hello hello…!! After a few days break from learning about Yoga, practising Yoga everyday and being a Yogi I’m now back in action with my next learning venture.
Firstly just to back track a little, it was a rather sad day saying goodbye to everyone the day after our Yoga course finished. Slowly but surely people started to leave and peel away to make their ways back home or to the next stop on their trip. A group of 5 of us left the following evening on what was a rather epic journey and experience not to be forgotten! We had to get from Goa to Rishikesh which is North West India near to Nepal and China. The trip was a tale of planes, trains and automobiles! It began with a rather squashed taxi trip to the airport, our flight left Goa at 23:40 and landed in Delhi at 1:40am. I didn’t quite make the take-off as I had fallen asleep before but woke up after an hour and a half. Once we landed at Delhi we stayed at the airport for a couple of hours as we were advised that there was not much to do or see at Old Delhi’s railway station….boy were they right about that!! Haha
We got to the train station around 4:30 which was an hour before our train departed…..the station was everything you can imagine and more….total chaos, people everywhere, things everywhere, animals, luggage stacked super high, interesting smells etc etc
Luckily we had booked 1st class, sleeper travel…..hahahahahahaha….it was probably the complete opposite of that or maybe my expectations were set too high. Nevertheless it was a great experience and something I will never forget in my life. Eventually after two more Tuk Tuk rides after the 8 hour train trip we made it to our next destination, Rishikesh, and had to find accommodation before being able to explore.
My first two days and nights were spent socialising and exploring the town which is a really nice place, pretty small, chaotic, on the Ganges river, a massive Yoga/Meditation/Ayurveda/Spiritual town – every second place is offering some sort of course, retreat or teacher training. It’s interesting as there is no meat or booze in the town at all. Supposedly no drugs either but the Reggae restaurant we went to the other night threw that theory out the window with the whole place pretty much hot boxed by the people smoking there!!
Anyway so I’m now on a weeks long course studying 3 different things. They are all related to Ayurveda which is an ancient Indian holistic way of treating and maintaining health and preventing possible health issues too. Their aim is to treat the root course rather than symptoms, so pretty much the opposite of how doctors in the West treat their patients. The classes are really nice and small too so you can get extra focus and fire in extra questions
One of the things Ayurveda focusses on is balance and that balance being our own bodies balance but also our balance with nature. There are 5 elements which primarily make up nature – air, sky/space, water, fire and earth. As humans we have been divided into 3 different types of ‘Doshas’ – Vata, Pitta and Kapha and these are each combinations of two the 5 elements. That is super high level and I’ll explain more later
I’m focusing on 3 different parts of Ayurveda – NUTRITION which is both theory and the practical part is cooking, MASSAGE once again theory and practical too and then MARMA which is similar to massage but focuses on your Marma points (energy/pressure) points in your body. It has similarities to reflexology and acupuncture…..same same but different
I’ll delve a little deeper into what it’s about in my next few posts but for now its back to the books to prepare for my classes tomorrow
Hope everyone is keeping super well