:: b o r d e r : h o p p i n g :: writing : articles : Rewire My Soul

i n t r o
p h o t o g r a p h y
w r i t i n g
v e n u e s
b l o g
a r t i s t s
o u t r o
a f f i l i a t e s

Rewire My Soul

by Elaine Tassy | 2009

My college friend Cassandra, an Albuquerque artist, traveled to a Native American reservation about fifteen years ago to research an art project. When she got back she described her bliss while sitting on a hill under a tree with an elder. As she got up to leave he'd said to her, "You're leaving me, my child?" Getting love from one of the reservation's most honored members moved her.

I was on a mission to have a similarly moving experience during a month-long trip to India, only mine would have an Eastern, body-mind cleansing, spiritual theme. I thought I'd happen upon yoga classes with poses I'd never tried, temples with Zen meditators, Ayurvedic masseuses whose hands would rock my world.

I found a month-long volunteer soap-making project posted on Idealist.org. It said a women's non-profit organization needed someone to help village women create a money-earning soap-making micro-business. I'd never made soap, but I used to make candles sold in gift stores, and the principles are similar — melt the base substance of soap or wax, add fragrance and dye and pour it into a mold until it hardens. Before I left I bought a soap-making book and some supplies, and I planned to embellish the recipes with Indian dyes, herbs and oils.

Something struck me as suspicious as I planned the trip. Questions I e-mailed the non-profit's director — what to pack, what facilities I'd work with, where I'd stay — got this answer: "Just come to India and enjoy your experience." After a two-day flight I arrived in the city of Chennai, with streets clogged with cars, bikes, motorcycles, bulls, auto-rickshaws and buses. A few days later I rode to the village with the director and a volunteer lawyer he arranged for me to stay with.

The few hundred residents of the village lived close to the roadside in small rectangular huts with dirt floors and banana and coconut leaf walls. One elderly woman was squatting down to weave tree branches into rectangular panels that later became the sides of their homes — she remained in this squat most of the time I was there. The women looked like figures in Gauguin paintings — dark, smooth skin, long wavy hair. The only language spoken there was Tamil. The women giggled and stared at me with penetrating eyes, holding their babies while their unclothed toddlers gawked at me. No one told them I was coming, so as not to create false hopes in case it didn't work out.

During that visit, the executive director had come to interview three candidates for the job of bilingual coordinator — a worker who'd also serve as a translator between the village residents and me. But none of the three applicants showed up. Meanwhile, the organization was erecting a building where the soap-making was supposed to happen, but it wasn't complete. Electricians were still powering the building, and the bedroom I was supposed to use was piled with random stacks of beds and clumps of other furniture. On the exterior walkway near the door were steaming damp piles of goat shit.

I realized, standing in the shade of a tropical leaf, this project wasn't going to happen. "You can just spend the rest of your time in the city," the executive director said. Chennai was scary, loud, overcrowded and overwhelming — the wrong environment for the spiritual reorganization I wanted to get out of my trip. So over the next few days, to the displeasure of the executive director, I detached myself from my volunteer duties and took a three-hour bus ride south to a place called Auroville, where I thought I'd begin my plan for spiritual growth. Auroville promoted itself on its website as "an experiment in diversity" — an international village where people from all over the world live in peace, free of religion and societal impositions. I imagined hippyish potheads, nude beaches, free love and all sorts of mystical fireside conversations, but Auroville was a disjointed, massive area, with friction crackling between the foreigners running things and the dark-skinned local Indians doing construction work, waiting tables or driving auto-rickshaws at the behest of those promoting the Auroville concept. The Aurovillian expats didn't seem to bond much with each other, either.

I also noticed that nothing — no vibes, no signage, no points of reference — made Auroville visible to someone not already part of the community, and this was done on purpose — the website stated that Auroville was not designed for tourists.

One of Auroville's main bragging tools was the Matrimandir, a massive nearly-finished gold dome with a meditation hall inside. I envisioned opening the door and joining dozens of people sitting in lotus position, getting a deeper meditation experience than I'd have alone. But before I could go near the dome I had to sit through a 20-minute DVD on its history, held inside a building near Auroville's visitor's center. Only then did a surly security guard issue me a written pass allowing me onto the half-mile walking path to the dome. Once I arrived, a guard reviewed my pass and let me onto the land the dome occupies.

That's where the visit ended. I could look at the dome from the outside, but could I saunter inside for a session of meditation? No chance. A New Delhi woman I met on the path told me about the steps she was told she'd have to take to get inside: Day one of the entrance process had to be devoted to watching the DVD and walking to the exterior of the dome. The next day, you made an appointment to meet with a Matrimandir staffer between nine and ten in the morning to discuss the possibility of entrance. If the staffer approved, based on unexplained criteria, you could go inside, but not until the next day between four and five in the afternoon.

I decided not to bother. The same day I gave up on the dome, I saw fliers for yoga classes at Auroville's main visitor information center. When I asked how to get to the classes, a gray-haired woman with a French accent gave me lengthy directions even she wasn't convinced were useful. "I hope you find it . . ." she said.

I asked her if paths in Auroville — with a circumference of 25 miles — had street signs.

"Signs?" She paused, as if thinking about it for the first time. "No, you won't find those here." I rode my rented moped according to her directions and wound up on a dead end. I abandoned trying to make order out of the maze of Auroville's directionless paths.

A few days later I visited the beach on the Bay of Bengal, a half-hour walk from my guesthouse. En route I passed a building wedged between stores selling sandals, soaps and clothes with a sign for a yoga class. A gray-haired man rushed to the door and answered my buzz immediately, like a sprite. His name, he said, was 7. Dressed all in white, he was hunched in the upper back, but his face was surprisingly wrinkle-free. He mentioned that he was once an engineer but lost interest. His studio was a room maybe 10 feet square in his narrow apartment. I asked how many students he taught in his classes. "One, maybe two," he said. Then I asked him what poses he taught, and he handed me a piece of laminated paper from an altar in the studio with sketches of a woman in a dozen poses like Downward Dog, Warrior I, and Shoulder Stand — all basic postures that pop up in nearly every yoga class I've ever taken.

When I stopped asking questions, 7 treated the silence as a marketing opportunity. He asked me to print my name and contact information on a paper napkin, even after I told him my guesthouse didn't have a phone. He told me to tell my friends to come back often.

Across the street from 7's place was another shop with a standing placard listing a range of massage and beauty treatments. When I opened the door, I stepped right into the space where a woman was in the middle of massaging a client. I tried to back out without breaking the mood, but the masseuse diverted her attention from her client and started a sales pitch from across the room, her fingers still dug into her client's shoulders. Deciding to keep looking, I rang the bell of another house a few blocks closer to the beach that had a sign advertising massages. A chubby and disheveled man came to the door in boxer shorts and a t-shirt; his wife followed in a saggy housecoat. They looked like they'd just gotten up from their bed. Never mind.

Meanwhile, I'd made a friend in Auroville whose housemate was a masseuse. In her halting, lilting and creative English, she told me that she was able to massage a partially paralyzed man into mobility. This sounded promising. We set up an appointment for an Ayurvedic massage in her living room.

"Take out your clothes," she commanded as soon as I arrived. There was no chance of changing in private and no sheets on the massage table. As she began, I could tell she was coming from a sincere place — about a quarter of her strokes, particularly those on my arms and back, were ones I'd never felt before and I liked them — but there were other differences between the massage she gave me and the ones I've had before, and they weren't necessarily pluses. At one point she turned me by the neck and jammed my nose into the massage table. Also, this massage included a thorough, unannounced breast rub, as well as a lot of finger work in the area near my butt-cheeks not usually associated with massages.

After a week of trying to track down some kind of spiritual sandwich I could bite into, I began to run out of things to do in Auroville. The New Delhi woman I'd met at the meditation dome suggested a place that fit the spiritual theme I was still trying to force onto my trip: The Art of Living, an ashram in Bangalore I could get to by overnight bus from Chennai. When I called the ashram to get more information, the man who answered the phone didn't know the cost for a night. He also said the ashram offered yoga and meditation classes, and he said that a human resources person matched visitors with optional volunteer jobs appropriate to their skills that they could do when no classes were going on — otherwise they could walk the grounds and relax. Guests were from everywhere, he claimed, including a few there that day from Argentina.

Late at night, I went to the crowded Chennai bus station for my overnight ride to Bangalore. At least a hundred people were lounging on the bus terminal floor eating food they'd brought along, which gave the dirty bus terminal a weird urban picnic atmosphere. A sign near the restrooms told travelers to relieve themselves in the free public toilets, not on the platforms. I was able to sleep a little on the bus, which arrived in Bangalore at 4 a.m. From there I took three local buses into the dark night.

It was getting light outside as I walked down a winding driveway to the ashram, which consisted of several new-looking buildings set back from the noise and traffic of the street. It was so early that the welcome center wasn't open, but something else was going on: about three hundred people were sitting on the floor in the meditation hall chanting. I took off my shoes and found a seat in the back. It was hard to stay awake as the group worked their way through a chant that lasted over sixty minutes. They knew the whole thing by heart. I felt a surge of excitement each time voices slowed down enough to lull me into believing it was over, only to discover they had verses and verses to go.

When the chanting ended, I went to the welcome center and asked an attendant the cost of a room — a basic question no one seemed willing to admit they knew the answer to. Finally, a desk clerk said the price was about the equivalent of two dollars a night for Indians, and fifty dollars for two nights for anyone with an American passport. Just to give the place a fair shot, I asked him if I could see a room. The slender young man in a salwar kameeze hiked several steps ahead of me for about a quarter mile to a dormitory with three narrow twin beds spread a few feet apart. There were no single rooms.

There were also no volunteer opportunities that matched skills to tasks, and the work choices ranged from chopping vegetables to cleaning up in the kitchen. Also, I found out that the ashram didn't offer yoga classes that involved poses. Its definition of yoga was doing breathing exercises and chanting in Sanskrit. The Art of Living ashram's yoga session, it seemed, was the multiple-hour chanting jam I sat through earlier that morning. Silent meditation classes? None.

Somehow I felt emotionally ejected from the ashram, so after lunch I hiked back up the driveway to the bus station. I felt the wind at my back at the start of a many-hour bus ride back to Chennai.

After regrouping from the Bangalore trip, I asked the volunteer lawyer who let me stay with her between excursions where she thought I should visit next and she suggested Mamallapuram, a fishing village less than two hours away by bus. Travelers from all over the world came to enjoy cheap restaurants and beaches in walking distance of budget-friendly hotels and guest houses. On every street there were gift shops filled with inexpensive silver jewelry, wall hangings and rugs. The area was also famous for its carved rock sculptures.

I planned to spend the last five days of my trip there, and to make up for lost time I wanted to hit someplace spiritual on day one. On my first night a man gave me a business card promoting a yoga studio near my guesthouse. I was sure this would be a class with fresh poses I'd talk about when I got home. The next morning I arrived a few minutes late to find the slender young yoga instructor washing his face, brushing his teeth, gargling and hocking loogies into a sink right in the studio. A woman from Germany showed up and she and I made up that day's 90-minute Sivananda style class. The routine of a dozen poses is so standardized that a Sivananda class in India would be identical to a Sivananda yoga class anywhere else, except for minor variations from one teacher to the next. I'd taken Sivananda classes before and found them relaxing, but none of the poses were new to my practice. So a day or two later, I went to a studio above a restaurant for a class I saw advertised on a wall sign outside a restaurant. It started at nine in the morning. At five after nine the next day I went upstairs to the loft and found it empty. With that, my hunt came to an abrupt end. In the remaining days I didn't do or seek any yoga or meditation and instead I bought chocolate chip cookies and bananas and sat at a hotel pool reading books from a used bookstore. At night I hung out with new acquaintances and ate delicious prawn masala and vegetable coconut curry meals.

I realized I wasn't going to find a yoga class, meditation session or massage that would rewire my soul. There was a message hidden inside my seemingly fruitless nirvana-quest: I could have practiced yoga, gotten massages or meditated anywhere. But if I hadn't gone to India with so many idealistic hopes, I never would have figured this out, and the discovery was the signature experience I could share with friends, the sort of moving and soul-healing adventure my friend Cassandra had on the Native American reservation.