If you have trouble sleeping.... (and other pieces of wisdom)

Every morning of my yoga course began with pranayama.  The theory goes something like this – energy, prana, flows throughout our bodies all of the time.  Learning to control the energy, pranayama, is one way of quieting the mind towards the ultimate goal: becoming free of the mind.  The easiest way for us to do this is to manipulate our breath and so each day we undertook a series of exercises towards this end.

Brahmari is one of these exercises.  To do it, you exhale and emit a high pitched hum while covering your eyes and plugging your ears.  Apparently it is excellent if you are having trouble sleeping.  A skeptic at heart, I was bemused by an image of attempting this while in the company of an unsuspecting roommate and wondered if the basis of the theory was transference of sleeplessness.  I kept my comments to myself and kept up the daily practice, but as you can imagine, I did not take it to heart.

This week, after a heated conversation with my rogue gym back in Canada, I lay wide awake in my room, watching the lights of the guesthouse across the stairs flicker and cast shadows against the cold concrete walls.  Not once did bhramari come to my mind.  Instead, I eventually fell into a fitful sleep, amid vows to write a scathing letter.

The next morning at pranayama, my teacher, Vijay, who has a tendency to lapse into winding explanations and side stores, started to talk about bhramari.  I listened to him with good-humoured fascination, wondering what digression would overtake his train of thought.  He started by talking about the pitch of our humming, mentioning something about sounding like a male bee on an inhale and female bee on an exhale.  Contemplating this absurdity, I almost missed the valuable part.  Vijay said that when doing this practice, it is good to chant the name of your god over and over at the same time.  Illustrating one of his best qualities, his lack of dogma, he followed this comment with ‘If you don’t believe in god, repeat ‘for every problem, there is a solution’.  For every problem, there is a solution.  Humming or not, I know repeating this after my argument would have lulled me to sleep much faster than the dancing shadows.

If you are listening and open to it, wisdom like Vijay’s is abundant.  Now that my teacher training is finished, I am taking advantage of the many learning opportunities here in McLeod Ganj.  Each of he last four mornings I have climbed the steep hill into neighbouring Dharmkot to take an excellent Iyengar yoga course at the Himalayan Yoga Institute.  Each morning, in what I am beginning to suspect is typical guru fashion, the founder of the centre, Sharat, comes in and offers us some advice.  Yesterday he said ‘it is important to follow technique so that you can get to your ultimate destination: freedom’.  And then, with a smile, he left.  In our specific cases, he meant ground your feet and stretch your toes so that you do the pose right, and if you do the pose right, you can move towards the point of doing it in the first place.  Extrapolating from this idea, might go something like this: be mindful because paying attention to the subtleties of your actions can expand your experience of them.

Continuing to challenge my perceptions, foot alignment in the morning led to energy alignment in the afternoon.  Friends of mine have done levels of Reiki, or energy healing, with a man who owns a crystal shop five minutes from my guesthouse.  Encouraged by their rave reviews and the spirit of experimentation I lay down on a green cushion in a room lined with rows of pashminas.  The afternoon heat was amplified by the cramped dimensions of the room and the chaotic noise from the street below, as vacationers and taxis honked insults at each other on roads never meant for cars.  When Jakob began by placing his hands on my back, I felt smothered by yet another source of heat and wondered just how long an hour could feel.  Turns out not that long, as about three minutes later I fell asleep.  Bewildered that an hour had passed, I asked Jakob what I should have been feeling.  His response went something like this: ‘Reiki heals the energy imbalances in your body by removing blockages.  Everyone experiences this differently and you’ll be able to tell because you will feel different over the coming days’.  In other words, he pressed his hands on me for an hour, without a specific ailment to address or anticipated outcome.  Still, his price of ‘pay what you feel’ was hard to argue with, and didn’t Vijay say that for every problem there is a solution? Surely that applies to unknown ones?  He assured me ‘if it works, you will be back’.

That was just yesterday.  And I did feel different afterwards, eating lunch without the crutches of a novel, notebook or computer – watching people arrive and leave, select knitwear being stitched by Tibetan grandmas and children dance around an ice cream vendor.  It wasn’t the watching so much as the fact that my mind was clear – no worries about what I hadn’t done or needed to do, just quiet.  Afterwards, as I wrote emails and met with friends, I tried to hold onto that.  I awoke this morning still feeling light.  It might have been the Reiki, or the 30 minutes of back bends I did in my morning yoga class or something else entirely, but does it matter?  Remarking on theories about the tension that the body stores and my curiosity about why my hips are so tight, a friend of mine said something similar – why does it matter why it’s there? Just release it and move on.

So today I tried to do exactly that.  Willing the feeling to continue, I climbed the 200 stairs to the main road, ate a small breakfast and went up the hill to Dharmkot once more.  Demonstrating how to engage our shoulders in a pose, my teacher, Leo, said, ‘Read what you want, study under as many teachers as you need, but the important thing is to experience what you are learning.  Then you will know what is true for you.’  Well said, Leo, well said.  Let’s see what that is.