Maharashtra – Meandering Marbles

Arambol

I spent three weeks doing a 200-hour teacher training in Arambol, a small town in north Goa that was part of the hippie trail in the seventies. I was the oldest person in the training class by about 10 years and I must admit I shed many tears the first week. I wasn’t very good at the poses. My body wasn’t flexible. I felt like the stereotypical overweight American compared to all these young, tiny, bendy people. We had 2 hours of yoga in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon and in between were classes on anatomy, alignment, and philosophy. We got a full day off on Sunday and had a half day on Saturday. It was 90F almost every day and I would regularly have to stop mid-pose to wipe the sweat off my mat and my body so I wouldn’t slip.

However, I kept showing up to every class and I got better because I was regularly practicing yoga. It’s amazing how much body and mind can adjust to difficulty. I slowly made some friends and by the end of the training, another student was like “your Downward Dog is actually pretty good now” and I just grinned from ear to ear.

I’m not trying to become a yoga teacher, but I’m happy that I didn’t give up and kept doing the asanas even when I didn’t want to. Shout out to everyone who sent me text messages and encouraged me when I was feeling down. This may seem like a small thing, but I remember the first time I was in plank pose and I managed to bring my right foot up in line with my hands. I had never been able to do that before and I remember internally shouting with joy. I always had to scoot my foot forward because I didn’t have the flexibility. Yoga training allowed me to see my body gain strength and flexibility in real time. I’m thankful that I took this time to delve into something that was so out of my comfort zone. Growth can be so painful, but ultimately so good for the soul. I’m clearly a fan of Type II fun. 🙂

me & Gabi at the beach; Susanna, Pradnya, and me on the shala roof; roommate Mila and me

The training started and ended with ceremonies and Pradnya and I designed both of the mandalas that we gathered around. The rest of the students and staff were ripping the petals off all the flowers so we could fill in the outline. The training also offered a bunch of activities that were yoga-adjacent. In the heat, I was probably most excited for the ice bath experience in the middle of the day. Other folks struggled a bit more with the freezing water, but it felt a lot like jumping in alpine glacier lakes in the Sierras. Definitely cold, but tolerable.

beginning mandala, closing mandala, me in an ice bath in a barrel

Because of the heat, we had a lot of downtime in the middle of the day. I read quite a few novels while I was there, because even after a refreshingly cold shower, I didn’t want to do anything but hang out inside. I was perpetually washing my three yoga outfits since I would sweat through them every single practice. Our training was right at the beginning of monsoon season, so after big afternoon rain showers, the power would frequently go out for the rest of the night.

me in a sari at closing ceremony; Tina, Dheeraj, and Mila reading at a beachside restaurant when the lights went out, me in a ginormous banyan tree

We spent a lot of weekends at the nearby beaches of the Arabian Sea. There were always a lot of stares from Indian men, but we eventually found some spots that were a bit more isolated without as many onlookers. Pradnya taught me the Hindi word tharki which roughly translates to pervert. It sounds a lot like the English word turkey and it became an inside joke about yet another “Uncle Tharki” whenever men came over to try and take photos of us. India is hard travel for women. We did find a bunch of cool shells and lots of cuttlefish bones washed up on the sand.

sunset siliqua shell, Kentish plover, cuttlefish bone, Oriental garden lizard

One of the perks of the shala was the random wildlife living around us. There were a couple of lizards that joined us for our morning breathwork. Sometimes we stopped in the middle of practice to watch the pack of langur monkeys that came scampering over the roof. Darkness and rain brought out frogs that lived around the stairwell. There were also some lovely large spiders and grasshoppers always hanging about.

friends at the shala: Indian tree frog, pantropical huntsman spider, grasshopper, Malabar gray langur

Yashwantgad Fort

The yoga place did arrange one really fascinating trip just over the state border into Maharashtra. On the way there, we got pulled over by the police and our driver didn’t have his identification on him, so they had to offer him some Gandhis (Indian rupee bills all have Gandhi on them) so we could keep going.

We spent the morning at the beach, but eventually went on a tour of Yashwantgad Fort near the town of Redi. In my ignorance, I figured it was a Portuguese colonial fort, but, no, it was built in the early 1700’s by the ruling Marathas. At that time, the Maratha Empire (aka as the Confederacy) covered most of the territory of present-day India. However, there was a lot of fighting between local groups and this fort was built to shore up their defenses along the coast. Eventually the British, starting on the east coast, started chipping away at the edges of the territory and eventually took over almost everything.

The fort itself has a storied history with the Portuguese eventually claiming it and the Marathas fighting to get it back. Regardless, the fort is still stunning today. The Indian government has done a huge amount of reconstruction work and it is in beautiful shape. The best part are the huge trees growing in and around the fort making intricate abstract patterns. It reminded me a lot of Ta Prohm, a temple in Angkor Wat, that also has trees growing out of its roof. This was definitely one of my favorite places on the Indian part of my trip.