Inside Outside Upside-Down

This is the first of what could potentially be a series of really strange posts, because I am doing really strange things in a really strange place.

I'm at Yasodhara Ashram on the shores of Kootenay Lake, British Columbia. I've signed on for a three-month course called the Yoga Development Course (YDC). This is something I've been wanting and planning to do for myself this winter for the last three years, ever since I was exposed to the teachings of the ashram's founder, Swami Sivananda Radha, at their outreach centre in Vancouver. I almost didn't make it, but I am here now, hopefully for the full three months of the course.

So what is so strange about this place and the things I am doing here?

Before I made the journey (it is easier to get to China from my hometown than it is to get here, by the way - I haven't felt this far from home since my first night in Shanghai almost 9 years ago), I was told by a wise wizard that "the energy in this area is really intense." I'd also heard from past YDC participants who I know in Vancouver that the energy at the ashram, specifically, was, again, "intense" and that "strange things" happen here. And indeed, strange things started happening as soon as I arrived. Twenty minutes after arriving, actually!

The first strange thing happened at lunch time in the dining room. Yay, after my epic 24-hour journey, I was here in time for lunch! All meals (delicious whole foods, mainly veg, organic, and local) are served buffet-style and we are all free to help ourselves. I didn't mean to dish myself up so much food, but by the time I had added a bit of this, a bit of that, and ooh there's that too? Some of that! And oh my, some of this one as well... can't pass up my opportunity for a muffin!... and brought my plate to a table where I could sit and eat the bounty, the table had turned into a toadstool and all the people had become little elves in red caps with carrots for noses.

Just kidding!

Ok, the strange thing that really happened was that as I began to eat, I briefly worried about whether I'd have trouble finishing it, and thought to myself: "I'm going to have to stop taking so much food on my plate, and then I won't have to worry about how I will get it all in." Those who know my gluttonous nature will find this thought strange indeed, but even stranger was what then happened to my thought... it spontaneously opened into another dimension!

What am I talking about? Ok, you know when you see a line painted on the wall of a building in the distance, but then you take a couple of steps forward, and it turns out that the line was actually the thin edge of a freestanding three-dimensional object not attached to the building at all? And that your depth perception just hadn't picked it up because it was foreshortened in your line of sight? Or when you take mushrooms and the moss under your feet suddenly has all this extra depth to it, and you realize that patterning was really there all along? Well the same thing happened spontaneously to my thought. It expanded outward into wider dimensions of my life: "I'm going to have to stop taking on so much, and then I won't have to worry about how I will get it all in."

Ping! Wow, could my gluttonous appetite really be the same thing as my constant "hunger" for more, more, more? My habit of taking on ridiculous amounts of plans and activities, having too much "on my plate" and then wearing myself thin trying desperately to get them all in? Pong pong pong! And that was just after being here for twenty minutes!

It happens constantly with everything. Another example is that a couple of days later, when the cold I'd caught from Seb finally kicked in, I didn't go to hatha class and kept sleeping instead. When I woke up I felt awful. Ugh, I really need to stay alone today, said my body, and so I didn't go to my other class either. Later, I learned that the assignment for that day revolved around "being with yourself" and that my classmates had been pondering the questions, "What do you do when you need to be with yourself? How do you know when you need to be with yourself? How do you create a space for being with yourself?" Ha, ha, ha... I don't! I just go and go until I get sick! Often I am not calibrated with enough precision-engineered sensitivity to detect a need to be alone, unless of course the symptoms are bold and in-my-face (literally, in-my-sinues, making it physically uncomfortable to talk to people). Just like that very day! Mere coincidence, or Coincidence?

It's like I'm living in a hall of mirrors inside my head and body and heart. Everywhere I look, reality is so vivid and jumping out at me. Oh, and did I say there are no drugs here of any kind (except coffee which I'm staying away from so far)? So I'm not high or anything. The river running under the bridge, formed of melting snow, was happening because my rigid, overintellectualizing side (symbolized by the hard, cold, frozen snow) has to "melt" and make room for my body-heart-feeling side (symbolized by the flowing water of emotions) to express its true nature in my life (what could be truer than obeying gravity and flowing downhill into Kootenay Lake... just like the stone rolling down THIS VERY HILL after me in the dream I had three years ago before even seeing this hill with the mouse who said to me, "Can't you just accept that god exists?").

The wise wizard was right... I'm just going to give up and talk like a trippy hippie myself now. The energy here is so intense, man!