When Canadians hear the word Buckley’s, the first thing that normally comes to their mind is “that sh!@ is awful” and then it is followed by “but it works!”. There was a Buckley’s ad campaign years ago that poked fun at their own disgusting formula that tasted like mouldy socks dipped in steaming hot garbage (see video link). Louisa and I have spent the last month, yes a month, doing Yoga Teacher Training (TTC) in an Ashram in Vietnam with Sivananda Yoga. Our experience was just like Buckley’s – it was awfully hard, but it worked!
We had zero expectations coming into our first Ashram community. We knew we would be doing a lot of yoga, meditation and not sleeping very much. These are all true, however, some of you are probably thinking – how amazing is that, all you do is eat, sleep, yoga and meditate? It is going to be very hard to describe our experience in words as Ashram life has to be practiced first hand –here are a few stories to give you a better understanding:
As you can see, Yoga training and Ashrams aren’t for everyone. We didn’t know what to expect arriving 30 days ago and we sure don’t know what expect moving forward. What we do know however, is that this experience has had, and will continue to have, an influential positive impact in our lives. We will leave you with one yogi quote to sum the Ashram’s secret to life – “health is wealth, peace of mind is happiness, yoga shows the way”.
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| Meditating by the pond |
- Morning bell – for those of you who have ever lived with Louisa (Gigi, 2na, Toma, Anne, Sawatzky’s, etc), you all know how much she loves mornings. Every day at 5:30 am our great German mate, Jonas, would ring the wake up bell. The bell was an ear piercing mini-gong that would make you want to cry that sleep time was over. It took about 2 weeks to get used to the early rising. Louisa not only stopped spitting venom at me in the morning, she was the one waking ME up!!
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| The Scorpion |
- Yoga addiction – since we were at the Ashram for the TTC, we actually had to do yoga daily – 4 hours a day to be exact. Yoga originally was our way to "keep fit and have fun" – however, it turned into an intense experience that drug addicts would compare to pure heroin. Our new drug of choice is yoga – if we miss one day, we are jonesing for our next fix like Anthony Kiedis did "Under the Bridge".
- Yogic diet – the schedule for food at the Ashram is similar to that of jail – 2 meals a day in reward for not shanking fellow inmates. Brunch was served at 10:00 am (remember, we woke up at 5:30 am), and dinner at 6:00 pm. However, instead of gruel, we were served delicious, amazing and diversified vegetarian meals that could resemble Jamie Oliver`s, had he been born in Asia.
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| Enjoying the view of the lotus pond! |
- Satsang – the term ‘Satsang’ literally means “company of the wise”. Out of our 16 hour daily schedule, the first 2 hours of the morning and the last 2 hours of the evening were reserved for Satsang – a combination of daily meditation and philosophical lectures or readings on all of life’s problems (stress, illness, anger, etc.). At first, Louisa and I thought we would not enjoy Satsang as it cut into our sleep time. However, just like our yoga, we are itching for our daily dose of this medicine as well. Our “company of the wise” went from 70 fellow students, down to 2, however, Louisa is still practicing Satsang with me and her inspirational speeches would put Dr. Phil out of business.
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If you’re interested in hearing more about what we learned, we’re happy to share.
Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti
