It has been a busy fall with little time to think about or add to this blog. Regular posts, though, are on the horizon for January at the latest. In the meantime, here is one of the highlights of the fall.

Barrie Risman and I taught a fall retreat, Embracing the Divine, at Centre Tara in the Eastern Townships outside of Montreal. It is a lovely center and we had a great weekend of yoga, meditation, food and beautiful views of the fall foliage. Oscar Grossman made a video to commemorate the weekend. Enjoy.

Barrie and I are currently planning future retreats at Centre Tara. Stay tuned for more details.

Unbelievably, our time in India is drawing to a close. The end is definitely in sight. I have two more classes at the Institute and then we leave on Saturday afternoon for the airport in Mumbai, on to Newark and finally landing in Montreal on Sunday morning. So, this will be the last blog entry from India. I will write early next week with some post-experience reflections and then the blog will morph and reappear with a slightly different focus. I am not exactly sure what that will look like so I will keep you posted!

I want to thank everyone for reading and responding to this blog. It has been an interesting experience to document the time here and even more to send out my thoughts into the Universe in such a free way. Not so like me! So, I have appreciated the comments, the enthusiasm and the thoughtfulness with which you all have responded. I have not felt very far away from Canada as a result. Thank you!

To switch gears, the highlight of the last couple of days was my unusual ride. I have been on the lookout for elephants and, while we have heard rumors of elephants in Pune and we even saw one on the other side of the road from our rickshaw, I have not gotten closer. I have had a secret desire for an elephant ride and actually convinced Oscar and Naana, our rickshaw driver, to head out on an elephant search one afternoon but to no avail.

And then, on Tuesday as I was coming home from our last (hopefully) shopping foray, there was a camel and owner coming out of our street. Literally, my rickshaw was pulling in and the camel was coming out. So, in lieu of an elephant, I got a camel ride. I have heard that camels are not so friendly – and they are in my opinion definitely not as cute as elephants – but this one was very well mannered. She kneeled so I could mount and dismount and walked slowly and even gracefully up and back the street. She (or he) even had bells around her knees! That seemed exotically appropriate. And, just in case, you don’t believe it, here are the pictures to prove it. Now I am ready for the trek across the Sahara. :)

At the Institute, things are shifting as well. Classes have gotten smaller. People have already headed home and the new batch of students have not yet arrived. This is a relief as we don’t fight for spots as we did earlier this month. Geeta, Mr. Iyengar’s daughter, is still not teaching and it appears that she may not teach much more at the Institute. Rumor says that she will focus on occasional international conferences. It has been good to see the new generation of teachers coming up though the ranks and being given opportunity to teach. It is not so much Mr. Iyengar’s children and their contemporaries but rather the following generation that are exciting to see.

This week, the main focus of the classes is pranayama (breathing) and so while I find breathwork very challenging, it is in a very different way than the asana practice. Two hours of different breathing techniques and some restorative poses is a mental challenge in attention and concentration. I find it harder to concentrate in the classes now and I feel how full my brain is. I am ready to have the time to process the learning and work without the guidance of the teacher. However, one of the saddest things about leaving India is the absence of time for the yoga practice. I have loved having time to dedicate to the practice and the focus on it. During other holidays, I often plan to practice more intensely but things like lying on the beach interfere. Here, there have been fewer of those kinds of distractions. It has also been rewarding to be with a group of other yogis equally focused and dedicated. The presence of the other students has enriched the learning environment at the Institute, and at times made it bearable. Their presence and dedication has influenced mine in only positive ways. So, I leave thinking of coming back.

So, we are off to pick up the last minute things, jam them into my already full suitcase, finish up the classes and head out. :) See you on the other side of the world!

P.S. Here are a couple of photos that didn’t make it into earlier posts. Enjoy!

Ironically, after my last couple of posts about classes at the Institute, I had two of the best classes so far. Friday night and Saturday morning were both backbend-focused and great! The teacher Friday night was a young man, with a solid understanding of the poses, a clear focus for the class and just generally a great teacher. He is obviously a true disciple of Mr. Iyengar and perhaps, as a non-family member, he has a bit more freedom to teach in his own voice. He was observant, clear and even funny.  Saturday morning was with another young woman, a different one than usual. She may be another granddaughter, I am not sure, and while Mr. Iyengar was in the background giving instructions, the class was more fluid, focused and maybe even at moments, fun.  We did drop-backs from Sirsasana – many times (like 6-8) but it was more effortless than the work earlier in the week. Saturday morning’s class reminded me the difference the teacher’s attitude can make in the students’ experience of the class — and yes, probably this student’s attitude was different, too! Either way, it was good to have these experiences to counter-balance the classes earlier that week.

Following the Saturday morning class, Oscar and I headed out of town to play tourist. Our destination, the Ellora caves, was a 5-hour drive from Pune. The drive, though, was definitely part of the great experience. We drove through a mostly flat, agricultural area to the hills where the caves are located. The farms we passed were mostly small, family operations where the land was worked by the families (women in brightly coloured saris and children working in the fields), plowed by teams of oxen (I only saw 2 tractors and one was almost the same age as my father’s which is an antique) and cows and goats peppered the landscape. In villages, women in fabulous saris carried silver containers stacked on their heads. Beautiful!

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that I am seeing India in a very privileged way. I am driving around the countryside in an air-conditioned car, with a driver, staying in nice enough hotels, eating in recommended restaurants and visiting major tourist sites. I am romanticizing what I am seeing and the interpretations and impressions are coloured with that lens. That said, the poverty of the cities and that I see daily in Pune, seems mitigated in the countryside. There was poverty, for sure, the farms are small, I am sure the families barely survive, but even in the villages we passed there was colour, aliveness, warmth.

Oscar and I valiantly attempted to capture this in photographs. However, we were observing all this through the windows of our speeding, swerving, speeding, shifting, and, did I mention, speeding car. The driver was definitely on a mission to get us to Ellora and then back again. On the way back, I asked him to stop so I could run back and take a picture of the nomadic group camped out in a field with camels (yes, camels!) grazing in front of their tents. We snapped some shots of the ox teams and eventually the driver got the hint and slowed down so we have a token shot, I think. At the end of the trip, I left my camera in the rental car and we are hopefully getting it back today (Tuesday). So, we have not had a chance to check out those photos.

Ellora is a series of cave temples carved out of hills with a small village outside the cave site. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. We stayed at a hotel facing the caves overnight on Saturday. At dinner, the restaurant’s night manager offered to guide us around the caves the next morning. He suggested an early start, as tourists arrive early and the place fills up quickly. Oscar and I met him before 7am on Sunday morning and walked up the caves.

The caves are spread out over a 2.5km area and are divided into three sections. Each section represents one of the three major religions in the area at the time of their construction, which started with the Buddhist caves in 500 – 700 CE. There are 12 Buddhists temples, 16 Hindu and 6 Jain ones. All were carved out of the hillside from the top down and it is estimated that it took 10 generations of workers over 200 years to complete. These caves are truly amazing. We started with the Jain ones, then the Hindu and finished with the Buddhist group reversing the order of construction. With our guide, we walked up the mountain to an even earlier section that included pools of water for swimming where yogis practiced asana and meditated, In the Hindu section, Oscar and I pranamed to the Shiva Lignam (stone representing the Universal) while Hindu tourists there chanted OM Namah Shiyaya, and we chanted OM with a guide in the Buddhist music hall as the echoes reverberated around us. It is hard to capture in words the experience and even the pictures don’t capture the scale, the workmanship and the devotion behind the images. It was a truly extraordinary morning.

Through this, Oscar and I experienced our 15min of fame. For some reason, we fascinated the Indian tourists. We were 2 of only about 6-8 Western tourists there and we were stopped often for pictures. Sometimes one person would ask to have a picture with us and then the entire rest of the group would gather round for the photo. When we met the same groups in later temples, they would often shout out our names. My name is particularly easy for the Indian people because it sounds like an Indian name. Here are some examples of the photos. Oscar would show the groups the photos on his digital camera, which was a bit hit. It was embarrassing and hilarious.

At Ellora, we saw our first monkeys of the trip. There were the friendlier black-faced ones and the more aggressive, baboon-like red-faced ones. They are taking the place of cow pictures for this entry J We also saw green parrots in the trees and heard peacocks in the distance. Our guide startled Oscar by grabbing him to point out a small cobra on the side of the path. Scary! Luckily, that was the only snake we saw.

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