Tiara in Transit

– Do not publicly announce that you are a meat eater and that you love to eat meat. This will NOT win you friends in an Ashram.

– While anyone’s looking, do not flick ants and insects off your yoga matt, injuring or killing them in the process.

– Do not recommend chemical industrial strength insect repellant and joke that nothing survives in your room.

I wont lie, my first day in the ashram was very difficult. It wasn’t the chanting in Sanskrit for an hour every morning and evening that I didn’t understand, or that my yoga teacher seemed to pick on me fixing basic positions that I thought I had excelled in years ago, or the fact that whenever I tried to meditate I thought of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because the universal mantra ‘Om’ reminded me of Umpa Lumpa’s (pronounced ‘Oompa loompa’s’). In fact, I would visualise the Umpa Lumpa’s chanting ‘Om namah Shivaya’ the same way they would rhyme and dance the lessons in the original movie every time competing children were sent home.

I asked my teacher, an Israeli devotee what the last part meant.

T – ‘When I try to meditate, I end up thinking strange, weird thoughts and images that I would never normally think off, ever. It’s really messed up.’

Israeli teacher, probably thinking that I was having thoughts of murder and mayhem, started with –‘Sometimes we have bad thoughts and it doesn’t mean we’re bad people..’

T, cutting him off – ‘..But what does it mean if thoughts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory keep appearing in my meditation?’

Israeli teacher –‘ That’s a children’s movie?(smiling) Sometimes we have irrelevant thoughts and we shouldn’t be forceful with them, or think that they represent us. They are just thoughts to be observed and then let go’

T – ‘Oh good.. I was worried it meant something.’ (like I was stupid?)

That first night I went to bed exhausted, with an early exit strategy, confident that I wasn’t going to last the 14 days.