Day 471: Yoga Vidya

heeeeeeee

(Tuesday 6th August)

So not only is it a yoga centre with my name on it, it’s a Sivananda-based yoga centre, so the mantras we sang this morning were all familiar. The food is clean and vegetarian (vegan in some cases). The halls are decked with tea urns serving all kinds of tasty (caffeine-free) tea.

I’ve been wanting to detox in preparation for my next fast. Looks like this has come just at the right time. No black tea, no coffee (I have now had a few cups of coffee since December last year – I think that was it, though. They weren’t good enough to warrant the discomfort they brought with them). I’ve had a stinking detox headache all day, or that’s what I’ve labelled it as, anyway. So tomorrow, perhaps that means that it will have worked itself through.

silent garden

This place is huge – a veritable complex. You can walk for ages. It looks like maybe it

used to be a hospital. There are nurses’ call buttons in the rooms, so maybe a hospital or an old people’s home. A massive one, if it was that. There are spas and massage therapists and jyotisha readers and thermal baths. There’s also more food than I think could possibly be needed, so tomorrow, perhaps I’ll skip lunch to go to the thermal bath, or just for a walk. It’s good, healthy, clean food but fuck me, there’s a lot of it and it being good doesn’t help with not overeating. Better get used to it, though. I’m about to undertake a long stretch of hotel eating… let’s get the ‘walk away from the buffet’ habit ingrained.

this is our Actual Room

Weirdly, I haven’t done any Actual Yoga today, despite being in a centre. I’ve done meditation and mantras. Tomorrow, an hour of pranayama will slot itself onto the front of this. For now, I think my bed is calling me pretty loud, but you never know… perhaps a sun salutation or two would do me some good, or some less rousing postures.

I’m in a course full of lovely, playful, international people. We have Slovaks, Germans, French people, an Argentinian, Italians and Brits. There’s lots of helpful exchanging. I’m speaking more French than I am German but it’s good to be here and to be expected to use other languages, and to play. Playing’s great. Let’s do some more.