Look for the best to achieve success: Appreciative Inquiry & Yoga Business

The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education in Vancouver uses A.I.

Your yoga business is failing. You barely have enough clients to cover your costs, and you’re finding it difficult to survive in a competitive market. The usual strategy would be to examine what you are doing wrong. Perhaps you would look at a successful competitor and study what they are doing right and make changes to your business this way.

However, this process has limitations. Firstly, it involves castigating yourself and adopting a negative frame of mind by concentrating on faults. Secondly, what works for one person might not work for another; and thirdly, the best this tactic could deliver would be to make you as successful as your competitor, but not surpass them.

Appreciative Inquiry (A.I) addresses the shortcomings of traditional troubleshooting by focusing on what a business is doing right and building from there. It began as a form of action research in organizational development in the 70s at Case Western Reserve University, involving David Cooperrider, Suresh Srivasta, Frank Barret, John Carter and others.

The A.I. process can be broken down into four stages, according to The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry Sue Annis Hammond.

1. Choosing a topic and creating the questions.  For example, this could be ‘how to attract more clients’. Then you formulate questions to guide people to discover what has gone right in the past to find answers for what is needed in the future, e.g. you might ask your existing clients what they like about your teaching.
2. Inquiry This is interviews and dialogues to obtain answers to your questions. It could be in the form of focus groups, written questionnaires or a meeting.
3. Sharing the information. At first, the information you gather will be in an unorganized mass. However, you should be able to pick out some common threads of success.
4. Creating provocative propositions. In this stage you change knowledge into action by “talking and dreaming about what could be, based on what has already happened”. You ask ‘what if’ questions and then change them into positive statements as if the future has been realised. Hammond suggests testing the provocative propositions against four criteria:

• Is the statement provocative? Does it stretch, challenge, or innovate?
  This encourages creativity, nudging you in directions you have maybe never considered.
• Is it grounded in examples?
  Basing the proposition on past experience and facts stops it from being a far-fetched dream.
• Is it what you want? Will you defend it or get passionate about it?
  Your emotions greatly affect how successful a venture is.
• Is it stated in affirmative, bold terms and as though it were already happening?
  Making positive statements in the present tense sends messages to the subconscious, helping to turn them into reality.

A.I. might not be the only method a yoga business uses to improve. Certainly, glaring mistakes need to be addressed. However, I believe its value lies on its emphasis on creativity, finding new ways to make a business more successful, plus people are usually more effectively motivated by the positive rather than the negative.

A.I. can be summarised thus:

• What we ASK determines what we DISCOVER
• What we DISCOVER determines how we TALK
• What we TALK ABOUT determines how we DREAM
• How we DREAM determines what we DESIGN AND CREATE

And so to bed…. Sleep guru Dr Rubin Naiman at the Sivananda Ashram Bahamas

Sleep Dr — Rubin Naiman

Dr Rubin Naiman is man with a mission: he wants to elevate the status of sleep. He believes that for too long it has stood in the shadow of the waking state, only valued for its ability to make waking life better. “We have lost our deep regard for sleep,” he says and, as a result, we are in the midst of an insomnia epidemic, affecting half of all adults, and putting us at risks of all kinds of diseases.

Dr Naiman, clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine  and one of the leading authorities on sleep, looked as if he got enough of it himself at the Sivananda Ashram in the Bahamas, where I heard his talk. He had a laid-back, yet alert, manner and was in good shape for his age. (Judging by his snow-white hair, tales of hippy drug taking in the sixties and mention of grand-children — i’d put him in his 60s). In fact he boasts of a regular eight hours, and says that age shouldn’t be a barrier to good night’s rest.

Sleep & dream

Sleep is essential for two main reasons, Dr Naiman says. Firstly, in deep sleep,  HGH (human growth hormone — essential for rejuvenation and healing) is released. Secondly, in dream, emotional information is digested. Deep sleep and dream occur in 90 minute cycles, with the former mostly in the first part of the night, and the latter in the second. “Dreaming is considered to be not as important as sleep in our society, but when we are out of touch with our dreams, we lose our sense of volition”, he says. Depressed people, particularly those on medication, literally suffer from a loss of dreams. Also he says substances like cannabis and alcohol inhibit dreaming, even though at first they may make us feel sleepy.

What stops us sleeping?

People are not sleeping enough due to over consumption. “We take in more energy than we counter-balance with sleep,” Dr Naiman says. The three main sources of our excess energy are:

• too much food. “Especially too much high glycemic foods – we over-eat, but are undernourished”.
• too much light. If you were too look at the earth from space at night, you would see a mass of bright lights, he explains, quoting Al Gore’s exclamation that it seems as if the earth has a fever. And it doesn’t matter if your eyes are shut, Dr Naiman adds, light still trickles through the eyelids.
• too much information. We are consuming more information than ever in this age of the internet, and a lot of it junk information.

Also there’s a tendency for people think ‘I can and must control sleep,’ he says. This is importing day-time thinking into night-time. Instead you should “let go of control” and “surrender to sleep”.

Sleep remedies

Here are some suggestions from Dr Naiman for a good night’s sleep.

• Dim your lights in the evening. (He calls it dusk simulation). Use candlelight and low blue lights and definitely try to avoid flourescent lights.
• Exercise regularly (although not right before bed). You body needs to cool down to sleep, and working up a sweat earlier in the day helps you to do so.
• Make sure your setting is conducive to sleep. “I’ve seen too many bedrooms that look like living rooms,” he says. The room should be quiet (in terms of both noise and what’s in it) and cool, so that heat can escape your body, although it doesn’t matter how many blankets you have. He thinks electric alarms are a bad idea (electromagnetic frequencies are disturbing).
• Respect the rhythms of nature by keeping a relatively regular routine. Try and rise at dawn and get some light in the early morning.
• Rest before sleep. Rest is not the same as recreation, he counters, and you need to be doing activities that will help you let go of wakefulness. Ever the old hippie, he suggests yoga, prayer, and spiritual study.
• Breathing. The 4-7-8 breath aids relaxation, he says. You breathe through your nose  for four, hold your breath for seven, and then exhale through your mouth for eight, making a whoosing sound.
• Journalling. One way of letting go of your day is to write about it. Dr Naiman recommends writing about your day as if it were a dream, noting any symbols and themes.

Sleep & spirituality

Nyx (night) with her son Hypnos (sleep)

Eastern spiritual traditions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, have more respect for sleep than the Western world, according to Dr Naiman. “The scientific view is that in deep sleep we experience nothing. This is seen to be negative, but from the Eastern point of view, nothing is a positive thing.” This nothing, i.e. the ceasing of thought, is what we try to achieve in meditation. In fact, in meditation we can access the same states of awareness found in sleep, he says.

An interesting point that he puts forward is that the waking state and sleep are not mutually exclusive. “We’re always a bit asleep and a bit awake,” he says. “Sleep is an innate sense of peace and serenity. It’s always there, under our waking state. At night we surrender to it.”

Sanskrit, Sutras & Sleep Deprivation: Sivananda ATTC

The Class of 2013

The Sivananda ATTC (advanced teacher training course) is not the most practical of yoga courses in terms of teaching. Okay, so you learn how to do some of the more advanced asanas, but that’s about it. The rest of the time you are trying to embed the sanskrit alphabet in your brain (finding funny aide-memoires for all the characters), memorising raja yoga sanskrit terms, sketching diagrams of the different parts of a nerve for anatomy and physiology, getting up at 4.30 to do pranayama before satsang. (You were told not to teach or, in fact do, hardly any of the pranayamas away from the ashram — “we don’t want you raising the kundalini on your own!”).

But what it gives you is an experience. I did a class-room (or should I say yoga-studio-based) yoga foundation course ten years ago. (It was at Yoga Junction in London with Tara Fraser). The teaching was excellent, and it really deepened my knowledge of yoga. However, having to adhere to ashram regulations and being taught by Hindu monks for a month is very profound. In my experience, most yoga teachers cannot offer the spiritual instruction that the swamis can.

It’s a real event, leaving your life for a month and jetting off to an ashram, which is usually in a spectacular place: the snow covered mountains of Austria, the chalky sands and turquoise waters of the Bahamas, and the lush coconut and rubber trees of Kerala. The teaching courses are, for the most part, taught by swamis and brahamacharyas — people who have dedicated their lives to yoga, and usually there’s other visiting experts to give talks on topics such as nutrition, vedic astrology and yoga philosophy, or conduct Hindu rituals.

I never knew I could survive on so little sleep until I did the Sivananda ATTC. I went to bed around 10.30, fairly swiftly after satsang had finished, and got up at 4.15 for a shower and neti (nasal passage cleansing) before heading to the yoga platform at 4.45 to limber up before pranayama at 5.00. Pranayama, which lasted for an hour, started with Kaphalabhati (shining skull breath) and anuloma viloma (alternate nostril breathing). The latter was especially challenging, as it we ended up having to hold it for a count of 8:32:16. Then we did the more advanced pranayamas. Firstly the heating ones: surya bheda — breathing in through the right nostril; ujjayi – constricting the throat make an ‘ocean sound’; bhastrika, or bellows breath – short, sharp inhalations and exhalations. To cool down, we did sitkari – breathed in through the teeth. And finally, to get us prepared for meditation, we did bhramari, or bee breath – inhaling and exhaling making a bee sound.

At 6.00 was satsang, which was the usual 30 minutes meditation, followed by chanting and a talk or music. At 8.00 we had a (short) asana class, followed by anatomy and physiology, (which focussed a lot on the nervous system) at 9.00. Breakfast/lunch was at 10.00 and classes started again at midday with either raja yoga (studying Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras) or sanskrit. Study of Vedanta was at 2.30, then an hour later, a two hour asana class. Dinner was at 6.00, and the day ended with satsang again at 8.00. Any spare time I had was either spent doing karma yoga (45 minutes compulsory — I did laundry) or homework/revision. I had so little time to my self, that I had to postpone shaving my armpits and legs until my day off.

Ladies in Yellow and White: Graduation Night

Most yoga teaching course pass you if you just attend the required amount of hours. (During the ATTC, someone took the register at the start and end of every class). However, with Sivananda you also have to do a three-hour exam, and you need to get 50% in every section to pass. I don’t know for sure, but I believe about four of the people doing the ATTC failed. Being in the Bahamas is a big distraction — it’s too easy to spend time on the beach, or to head down to the spa/Starbucks in Atlantis. The people running the course were constantly having to discipline the class, usually for lateness or inappropriate clothing. (It’s not on to look sexy in an ashram — skin-tight leggings and low-cut tops are out).

Despite the name, the ATTC course is more about self-development rather than advancing your teaching. The Sivananda organisation is not really into you making money — yoga is more about seva: selfless service. I would like to do another course to improve my teaching; this time focussing more on anatomy and physiology directly relevant to the asanas as well as describing and adjusting poses in class. In the ATTC it’s the philosophy that’s important: getting good marks in the vedanta and raja yoga parts of exam is imperative, and after completing the course I can see why. Often in the Western world we isolate meditation and asana from their original context. In the eight limbs of raja yoga, asana is third and meditation seventh. Before embarking on them, in my understanding, you were supposed to work limbs one and two, your moral conduct: the yamas (don’ts) and niyamas (do’s). From my experience of Tibetan Buddhist meditation the same holds true: the lama would tell me that being compassionate is far more important than meditating every day, and Buddhists are supposed to adhere to the eightfold path. It’s an interesting point, which you rarely hear at most yoga and meditation classes: can you really make any progress in asana or meditation if you don’t address your ethical behaviour first?

The ATTC in the Bahamas costs around $2,400 for a tent and $3,290 for a dorm/tent hut. It’s good value as this is comparable to cost of studio-based course, but without the food and board.

You can always get what you want: Joe Dispenza at the Sivananda Ashram Bahamas

Dr Joe in the temple (thanks to Liz Tucker for photo)

“Turn to the person next to you and tell them, you’re a genius.” This is how Dr Joe Dispenza, chiropractor, neuroscientist and author of Evolve your Brain: the Science of Changing your Mind, begins his talk. His small stature, curly dark blond hair and black jeans and t-shirt give him a boyish air, but he says his children are in their twenties so he must be pushing 50. He’s also very energetic and able to talk effortlessly and compellingly about how you can change your life for well over an hour.

His listeners are enrapt. After all, don’t we all want to change our lives? Isn’t there something that we all really want? The audience Joe is addressing tonight is an unusual one. I’m in a Hindu temple at a Sivananda ashram in the Bahamas and it’s filled with students on yoga teaching courses. They’re mainly in their twenties and thirties and they sit cross-legged on the floor in regulation yellow t-shirt and baggy white trousers. In the front row are the teachers: swamis and celibates dressed from head-to-toe in either orange, yellow or white.

The nub of Joe’s talk is the basis for a thousand self-help books — i.e. your thoughts affect your reality and if you programme your mind to really believe that you have something, it can really happen. His philosophy fits in with yogic beliefs. Swami Sivananda says in Sure Ways for Success in Life and God Realisation (first published in 1936) “If the will is pure and strong, man gets the [desired] objects in the twinkling of an eye.” He then continues to give some fantastical examples of what can be achieved with will power:  “Nimbarka Acharya willed that the sun should not pass beyond the Nim tree that was in front of his house; it came to pass exactly.” In yogic philosophy, getting what we want is accomplished by strengthening the will through self-discipline, and the moral implications of what we think and want are always taken into consideration.

What makes Joe different from other speakers on the subject of manifestation is not only his charisma, but also as a scientist he is able to put a scientific spin on things Change is our minds making new connections, he says. He shows us a grainy black-and-white video of two neurons joining to form a new thought. “This,” he says, “ is change happening.”

So what stops us from changing? Joe believes that we “live by our subconscious mind,” and that we are “programmed to do the same things.” It takes considerable effort to alter this programming, especially as we can get addicted to emotions, even really bad ones, as they tell us who we really are, he explained.

How exactly can we bring about change? Joe says first you have to be clear what you want, and then teach your body how to live in that experience (the body is linked to subconscious mind.) It’s also important to give thanks as if you’ve already achieved your desires, he adds.

But does this actually work? Joe cites experiments where subjects were told to imagine themselves doing exercise and the results of their muscle growth were compared against a control group who didn’t do any visualization. The people who thought about exercise showed a 13.5% increase in strength, while with the control group there was no change. (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1591-mental-gymnastics-increase-bicep-strength.html)

I believe that there is truth to what Joe says, and the visualization technique is now commonly used in sports. But there must be limits to how much it can achieve. I’m sure most people have know someone who was really ill, stayed positive, mentally wished themselves to be better with all their might, but still succumbed. I also think it’s worth taking into consideration the moral consequences of your thoughts and desires, like the yogis advise and which so many self-help books skip over, wanting to appeal to our more materialistic side. After all, getting what you wanted is not the same as being happy.

South India Comes to the Caribbean: the Sivananda Ashram Bahamas

On the beach in front of the ashram, with Atlantis to the right.

This one of the oddest co-incidences in my life. Over ten years ago, I was a shipping journalist, specialising in the cruise industry. Every year, I would go to Miami for the cruise conference, spending all day traipsing round the stands in my Italian suit and all evening entertaining inebriated businessmen. One year, I was a given a free weekend cruise on a Carnival ship, stopping at Nassau. When the ship docked at the cruiseport on the island, I walked down the main street, lined with shops selling designer jewellery, Bob Marley memorabilia (apparently he was shot there), and t-shirts in the national colours of black, turquoise and canary yellow, oblivious to the fact that a minutes’s boat ride across the water to my left was the Sivananda ashram.

In January this year, I returned to Nassau (which, with Miami, are still the only places I’ve visited in both North and South America), but this time I was ferried across the water to the ashram on Paradise island by a monk (I knew he was one because he was all dressed in yellow). I was staying for five weeks for the advanced teacher training course.

The ashram is a complete incongruity in the Bahamas, whose natives for the most seem fiercely Christian and tourists robustly materialistic (just down the beach from the ashram are the dark pink towers of the Atlantis Resort, boasting the some of the most expensive hotel rooms in the world and a casino which featured in a James Bond movie). It’s a rather higglety-pigglety affair, with tents pitched among the lush tropical vegetation, rather amateurish murals of Indian gods and goddesses (well, I guess they are all painted by volunteers), and a large cracked slab of concrete in the centre. Apparently it used to be tennis court, as Swami Vishnudevananda, the founder of ashram and South Indian native, wanted to know what Western people liked to do on holiday. Someone told him “play tennis”; thus a court was build, but never used. The ashram itself is the result of a wealthy doctor bequeathing his beach-front property to the Sivananda organisation. The doctor’s former house faces the beach and is where the offices and some of the more monied guests stay. I stayed in an ‘Om’ hut, a small dormitory of two sets of bunk beds (I wasn’t going to drag a tent all the way from the UK). The bathroom was a busy building with just two showers. Yoga is practised on various platforms hidden among the foliage or jutting out onto the beach, and there’s a low-ceilinged temple, which was always packed to the rafters (the ashram is very popular in the high season, with teacher training courses starting every month).

Nawang Khechog, a Tibetan musician and one of the satsang guests.

The day begins and ends with satsang, which is usually half an hour of meditation, lots of chanting and a talk/performance. The ashram can get very good speakers or musicians to lead satsang. They pay their transport, give them a room for free, and they come to enjoy the same white sands and clear waters as the guest in the $250+ per night Atlantis resort. We had motivational speaker Joe Dispenza, sleep guru Rubin Naiman, gospel singers, Tibetan musicians, kirtan ensembles and a Sufi musician whose music I gyrated to behind the temple with a woman with the same spiritual name as me (Bhagavati).

Food is spooned out at 10.00 and 6.00, as is normal in a Sivananda ashram. I thought it was pretty good, considering it was all cooked by volunteers (but I have been vegetarian for over 20 years). If you get there on time, there’s lots of it. You get two yoga classes a day: at 8.00 and 4.00, and there’s usually a lecture in the afternoon as well. My one gripe is the extortionate prices charged by the shop.  Four dollars for eight t-bags! One dollar for a sanitary towel! (This particularly irked me as it’s not a luxury item). The plus side is the authenticity of the place. Everyone, except for some of the native housekeeping staff, is a volunteer. It’s run by Swamis and Brahmacharyas (I don’t know why, but a lot of them are Israeli). There’s a South India Vedic priest who will give you an astrological reading, and an ayurvedic doctor who will tell you your constitution and suggest dietary and lifestyle changes.

I’ve been to the Sivananda ashram in Kerala, and in a way the ashram in the Bahamas seems similar, due to the decor and vegetation. You would never to expect to find this South Indian enclave hidden among the leafy palms, within sight of the gleaming white hulls of the mega-cruiseships, lined up along the dock.

I paid $428 for four nights to stay in a four-bed dorm. This included a $29 per night vacation fee and 10% room tax.

Tibetan Sadhanas

Chenrezig painted by Sherab Palden Beru, a Samye Ling resident

I’ve been going to a Tibetan Buddhist temple on and off for about four years (in Florence and now in Bournemouth). The normal ‘drop-in’ sessions that I attend usually involve meditation, usually of the mindfulness type — i.e. focussing on the breath/body, an object (e.g. a flower) or a sound (e.g. singing bowl), and a talk on basic Buddhist philosophy. However, after I had been going for a while I became aware of the core Tibetan Buddhist practices, the sadhanas (spiritual paths). These are really what Tibetan Buddhism is about, and any serious Tibetan Buddhist practitioner will be regularly doing at least one sadhana.

A sadhana is basically the worship of a particular Tibetan deity, such as Green Tara (removal of obstacles), Medicine Buddha (healing) or Chenrezig (compassion). To be able to participate in the worship of the deity, you have to receive an empowerment from a lama. (I received an empowerment to do Green Tara from Gyana Vajra Rinpoche, the younger son of Sakya Trizin, head of the Sakya lineage – one of the main four schools of Tibetan Buddhism). At Kagyu Samye Ling, I was told that it was dangerous to practise these sadhana’s without such permission, and the only one that I could do without an empowerment was Chenrezig.

Om mani padme hung carved on the wall at Samye Ling

In my limited experience and describing very simply, the sadhana practices consist of chanting in Tibetan, including the mantra of the deity, visualising the deity and the deity’s mantra, and most powerfully of all, imagining yourself as the deity. This is interesting from the point of NLP which states that if you want to have a certain quality you must ‘act as if’ you have that quality. So if you want to be compassionate, why not imagine your self as the bodhisattva Chenrezig, the epitome of compassion?

During the 10 day course on Chenrezig that I did at Samye Ling, we were encouraged to really study a picture of Chenrezig, every little detail of him, so we could imagine him vividly in our minds. We also spent hours doing calligraphy, writing the om mani padme hung mantra (the mantra associated with Chenrezig) in our best Tibetan so that we could visualise it effectively.

Buddha outside Butter House at Samye Ling

At the moment I’m not entirely how much I will incorporate Chenrezig into my daily practice. Tibetan deities still seem rather exotic, and although I’ve felt a strong link to Tibetan Buddhism for a number of years, I’ve yet to feel that about a particular deity. I also feel that the Tibetan Buddhism is in conflict with some of the yoga practices I do, particularly my daily Hindu mantra recitation. However, when I had an interview with Lama Kating at Samye Ling, he said it was very important to do practices which cultivate compassion, particularly as most traditions don’t do this. Sivananda, I guess, would say you can cultivate compassion through ‘seva’ or selfless service, but I think there’s something to be said acting directly on the mind with compassion-based meditation.

Kagyu Samye Ling

Statue of Tara in the Medicine Garden

I spent Christmas and New Year at Kagyu Samye Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the west coast of Scotland near Lockerbie. It was very laid-back for a monastery. No six o’clock roll calls, compulsory meditation or lights out at 10. There weren’t even that many monks or nuns around (apparently most of them were on a four-year retreat – women on Holy Isle, men on Arran). You could pretty much come and go as you pleased, as long as you didn’t drink or indulge in any obvious sexual misconduct. There was even a cafe where you could sip lattes till 10 o’clock at night.

The monastery has an interesting history. It was originally a hunting lodge called Johnstone House and became the first Tibetan Buddhist centre in Europe in the 1960s. Initially, it was run by Tibetan refugees Akong Rinpoche  and the controversial and charismatic Chogyam Trungpa, both of whom were in their 20s. Chogyam Trungpa was famous as much for his clarity of teachings as he was for drinking and womanising. Apparently, during his residence at Samye Ling (1967-1970), there were wild parties and David Bowie and Leonard Cohen were visitors. However, when Trungpa left for America in 1970 (where he died of alcoholism in 1986), Akong cleaned the place up (I imagine him driving down to the tip with all Chogyam’s empties) and turned it properly into a monastery with his brother, Lama Yeshe, as abbot.

Today, as well as the lodge and other accommodation buildings, there’s a temple, butter lamp house, stupa, and various exotic golden statues looking rather incongruous in the damp Scottish landscape. (It was incredibly rainy the ten days I was there, a non-stop drizzle which resulted in a layer of moss, inches deep, on the trees).

Moss!

Samye Ling is good value: I paid £24 a night for a bunk bed in a six-person dorm (basic but warm) and all the food I could eat, plus a limitless supply of tea.  The food was excellent (mind you, I’ve been a vegetarian for 20 years and never once craved meat), with an ex-monk and trained chef in charge. Breakfast was porridge with various toppings, plus toast and fruit. Lunch was the main meal, with about 10 different dishes on offer: a couple of main protein dishes, as well as a variety of vegetables, salad and rice. Plus there was always a hearty pudding as insulation against the Caledonian chill. Dinner was soup.

While I was staying there, the day began at 6.00 with Tara prayers. I confess I never made this, instead clambering down from my top bunk at around 7.00 for breakfast. Silent meditation was from 8.00-9.00. After meditation, I would roll my yoga mat out in the small room at the back of the temple and do half an hour’s practice, as this was the only opportunity I got to burn off the calories accrued from eating a large helping of the sticky toffee pudding the day before. (Going for a walk was impossible: I’d get drenched in 10 minutes and the wind would sting my ears). From 9.45-12.30 (including breaks) I’d do a meditation course. From 12.30 to 3.00 was lunch and free time. From 3.00 to 4.15 was more meditation course, and from 5.00 to 6.00 was a guided meditation. At 6.00 we had soup (in strict Buddhist monasteries, there’s not supposed to be any eating after midday). 7.00-7.45 was Chenrezig prayers. (Chenrezig is the Tibetan god of compassion). At 7.45 we went out to the butter lamp house to light 1,000 lamps for world peace. I don’t know what it is exactly, maybe I have a bit of pyromaniac inside me, but lighting lots of tealights and chanting om mani padme hung was really fun. From 8.00 to 10.00 I’d sip tea on the big sofas in lounge in Johnstone House and chat to whomever happened to be hanging out there.

Buddhist river

Despite the relaxed atmosphere, everyone appeared to behave themselves and not break any of the five precepts. Some people were serious Buddhists, others not at all, just wanting to learn more about meditation or, as one woman told me, “go somewhere where I can get away from Christmas”. I felt rested and happy after my 10 days there, with new friends, a new knowledge of Tibetan tantra practices, and suitcase heavy with books and incense I couldn’t really afford.

Personally, I nearly always prefer to do yoga and meditation at an ashram or a monastery. They’re nearly always cheaper than a private establishment, and if you are going somewhere with a respected lineage (Sivananda or the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism), the teachers are normally top-notch. Plus, as they are all charities, run mainly by volunteers or monks and nuns who’ve taken vows of poverty, all the money you give them goes to keeping the establishment running or other good causes.