The big trip: Yoga in Nong Khai part 2: what happened

Enough philosophising.

So we arrived in Nong Khai after a relatively painless border crossing from Vientiane. We turned up at Mut Mee guesthouse which can only be described as a kind of parallel dimension. Set on the banks of the Mekong, the place boasts beautiful gardens, great rooms, a whole lot of mosquitos (and the occasional snake). Every room has a 'book' that you fill in as you go along, where you write down every meal you have and every drink you help yourself to. It's a very trusting system that doesn't seem to ever get misused... Mut Mee attracts the kind of good hearted, slightly hippie traveller types who wouldn't dream of cheating the place out of a beer. Not that it's that expensive anyway.

The people there are an eclectic bunch. Some of them are short term border jumpers, some of them are here to learn Yoga or Reiki, some of them are on big world trips, some of them are rich older gents who are basically retired and looking for somewhere to pass the time for a few months. There are many musicians, and the bar nearby has frequent open mic nights where people get up to play. Usually when we end up at guesthouses, we don't end up meeting a huge number of fellow travellers - most people are there to see the country and to meet the locals anyway. This place, being a kind of destination in itself, is the exception. Everyone is really happy to hang out with each other and everyone is genuinely really interesting.

Quick cast list. Pancho and Beatrix were our yoga instructors, but that is kind of doing them a disservice. They are 'yogis', embracing and living the full yogic lifestyle. This makes them great people to learn the full context of yoga from. They have the kind of commitment to teaching that means that they don't care if they go overtime and everyone is late for lunch - if they have something they need to teach, they will teach it. Pancho is a former professional musician and singer/songwriter. A good one too. He is also of the old school of Californian hippies of the 1960s, and a keen follower of modern physics. Beatrix is a yogi/reiki master/psychic/astrologer/artist. Probably many other things too. She sees auras. She can read your past lives. When she was 5, she already knew she wanted to be a yogi and an artist (I don't know about you but when I was 5 I wanted to be a giant Japanese robot that turns into a car). I can't really tell how old she is as she has a strange 'ageless' quality about her that comes of being in *perfect* health. Our class was 6 people, including Emmie and I. The others were Willie, Matthias, Gerda and Petra.

Outside of Yoga, there is a strong supporting cast as well. Firstly the locals: The Mut Mee owner, Julian, an Englishman who married a Thai and settled there, and his kids (one of whom plays a mean game of chess for a 14 year old), and Anton the British Italian who is a really great accordion player and runs the local bookshop/italian restaurant/internet cafe with his girlfriend.

Then there are the guests: Tony, the Oxford professor of English literature and retired private businessman - a slightly pervy gent who manages to flirt with everything that moves, (almost) always female. However, since he spreads his attentions so evenly and since he does it with such good humour and the charm that only someone who has studied poetry in great depth can muster, we love him for it. Then there is Vittorio, the Italian eccentric traveller, playing an instrument that is like a coconut with bits of metal stuck on it, he dances from table to table spreading happy vibes. Tomas, the young french guy with the blond dreadlocks... reiki student and traveller, he pines for the love of his life who has gone to Cambodia, and plans to buy a boat to sail down the Mekong by himself to follow her. And finally there is Duke (sometimes called 'The Duke'), an older professional guitarist from Montana who is a master of country style guitar licks, but plays a mean blues and rock and roll and can pull off some decent jazz as well. He is writing an instruction book on music, and gets up at 5am everyday to practice scales for an hour and a half. I played with him a few times, and he is definitely one of the best I've played with. Oh and he's also a really good guy. Best of all is that he thinks I'm good, which is a nice ego boost since I value his opinion and I was starting to think that I'd lost my chops.

A bit of free publicity here:

www.dukesharp.com

Back to the yoga - every day, we start at 7:00am and work until around 10:00am, then we do an afternoon session from 3pm to 6pm. As an option, we can join the meditation sessions from 6am-7am and from 2pm-3pm. Emmie did this a couple of times since she has prior training. I didn't, since I thought it best to learn the technique fresh at the 10 day vipassana retreat we have coming up later this month (it's also a little early in the morning :D). The course was 7 days, where we were gradually introduced into the asana routines, got an hour or two(or sometimes more when Pancho got excited about something) of theory, and then gradually added regular pranayama , first learning separation of the abdominal, chest and clavicular breath, then kapalabathi (yogic cleansing breath), alternate nostril breathing and then alternate nostril breathing with retention to work with different internal organs.

The theory was about things like mental, spiritual (as I understand it, your aura or the energy field around your body) and physical bodies and the interrelations between the 3, so we would discuss the physical nodes of the nervous systems and how they relate to the chakras and the psychological manifestations. For (simplistic) example, your bottom chakras are associated with reflex and instinct and indeed, the nerve signals for motor reflex have been shown to often not need to pass all the way up your spine. Not bad for a model several thousand years ago really.

Another thing that came up was the link between the physical and mental bodies. We store emotional trauma in our physical bodies and by asana practice we learn to release this. For example, fear is often stored in the abdominal muscles. I am a definite believer in this, for two reasons.

Firstly, it makes sense that when you have an emotional reaction you have a physical response, so your brain probably has a natural association of the physical response with the emotion. It's a bit like a Pavlovian response. So, working on your physical body means working on your mind.

Secondly I have some (second hand) experience of this. Having spent 10 days in her previous Vipassana experience, and having learned to clear her mind, Emmie found she was able to release old traumas and memories. When she came back and I felt her back (as you do when you don't see your wife for 10 days...), I found her back had *no* tension anywhere on it. This probably seems like a bit of an anticlimax to you as the reader, but that's because I'm pretty sure most of you have never felt a back with no tension. It actually feels a little weird since pretty much everyone has tension somewhere in their back.

So, physical-mental link... check. Physical-spiritual link... hmm, maybe. If our aura is electromagnetic and our spine and brain are constantly transmitting electrical signals then, well, I guess it's not impossible. Why not. Spiritual-mental link? No idea. But I guess if you accept the first two then you already have a mechanism for the third so again why not.

We were also introduced to candle gazing (I saw the indigo spot that represents the third eye while doing this, but I don't know if it was a kind of after image or a visualisation or something. Maybe I shouldn't overthink it...) and yogic eye exercises (apparently one of Beatrix's more recent very diligent students actually managed to stop wearing glasses with this one).

We also did a cyclic meditation exercise guided by Beatrix. In one moment during this, when we were told to visualise inhaling white light and letting it fill our bodies, I did feel my body radiating everywhere brightly except in my feet. I put it down to being in a hypnotic state and being suggestable. The next day when discussing with Beatrix what she observed she said that I 'know what my issue is'. When I gave her a blank look she explained that I have lost my connection to the earth. This was without me telling her about my vision of my aura not reaching my feet. Strange but true.

Apparently, it's a symptom of me being too much attuned to my upper chakras of inspiration, creativity etc. and not enough to my lower chakras of instinct etc. Apparently there is a common trend among every different group of students, for example in our group we all think too much, in subtly different ways. Another group she has had, it turned out, were all sexually abused in some way. Given that these were people that had never met each other, it is more than a little odd. She believes that the universe has a kind of direction that makes similar like-minded students gravitate to each other at the same time. I would like to believe this too.

After the yoga course finished, we did a Reiki treatment with Beatrix. You can read Emmie's story in her blog. In my case, I did have a lot of strange sensations. For example, when she put her hands around my head my third eye started vibrating like crazy. I also had a similar sensation to the cyclic meditation, with my upper body becoming insanely warm, but with the warmth terminating below my knees. And, as she was fixing my 'feet auras', I felt warmth returning to one foot and then the other. Visualisation? Hypnotic suggestability? Energetic connection to earth being fixed? Who knows. Doesn't really matter right now I've decided. If it's true and I don't know then I'm not ready to know it. If it's false then it doesn't matter anyway.

She finished by saying that I have a great mental potential that can do incredible things, and that I have the potential to be very psychically sensitive (and be, for example, a healer). However, I retreat my mind into a safe, narrow rational place because I have been subconsciously traumatised through past life experiences. Apparently I have been killed many times for my spiritual beliefs. Well, everyone wants to hear they are a Jedi. Do I believe it? Non-committal mmmeh. Too many people have past lives where they are a priestess or a king or something. Where are all the farmers and postmen? But I would say that if anyone is likely to be truly psychic then Beatrix is, so who knows...

It was sad to leave Nong Khai, but I have the feeling we'll be back there again. Maybe I'll learn to be a Reiki master or something. Or I'll just come back and jam in the bar.

There's always something cool to do in Nong Khai.

Sri

Our room