15~ Living in an Ashram. Part 3: Small Changes.

December 23

Breakfast was also Indian food, of course. For lunch and dinner, we always, always ate the same thing. The vegetables and the flavor of the soup varied, but there was always a kind of thali: chapati and white rice, always cooked vegetables, sometimes dhal (lentil soup) or another stew—also vegetarian, of course. Everything was vegetarian and healthy, yogic, and sattvic food.

Sometimes I wondered how my body, my recurrent anemia, and my constant physical exhaustion would survive on a diet based solely on rice. It was just a thought; there wasn’t much room to question it.

Breakfast was my most anticipated moment of the day: there was toast that reminded you it was, indeed, breakfast time. Never had a bit of toasted flour made me so happy as it did during those mornings.

They also often served something similar to yellow rice called Poha, which is flattened, huskless rice sautéed with peanuts and spices. I soon grew to love it, and it became my favorite Indian dish.

If we were lucky—which was rare—we would get rice pudding for dessert, and that was like touching heaven with our hands.

When reality becomes monotonous, mealtime becomes important. As the days passed, Indian dishes became more pleasant and flavorful—except for the rice and chapati, which never stopped being rice and chapati.

Little by little, we began to appreciate the small things. Sometimes the cooks would bring us an Indian sweet, which was nothing more than unrefined jaggery in a sticky cube. We would practically applaud them in gratitude. They also gave us fruit—pineapple and papaya—reminding us that fresh food existed. And there was always chai, Indian tea with milk, ginger, and spices. The same chai I had hated when I arrived was now the most delicious part of my day, and little by little, I began to love it more.

Bit by bit, I was becoming more Indian every day.

During breakfast, we sometimes chatted with Indu, who told us what it was like to live in an Ashram. She also shared natural recipes to strengthen our hair, like almost all Indians seem to have. Gulnara and Elke had decided to take a vow of silence for a few days. I had already been quiet, living very much in my own world, so I didn't need more vows or impositions—from myself or others. So, most days, we ate in silence and treated it as another opportunity for introspection.

Slowly, I became softer and started to enjoy the peace of where I was. My body adapted to the rhythms of the Ashram, and my mind began to understand—and accept—why I was there.

After breakfast, I would go alone to the banks of the Ganga. If I was lucky and there weren’t too many people around to interrupt me, I could meditate. I was sitting in front of a river they say is sacred, so I tried to absorb any dose of peace that came my way. Anything is welcome when you feel desperate, and that's how I felt.

So, slowly, my morning routine became sitting by the Ganga to see if any of that magic the Indians believe in would seep into my body by osmosis. And I always asked for the same thing: Peace, peace, peace, please—I need to find some peace.

The daily chanting sessions were becoming increasingly monotonous and complicated. The nun grew stricter each day, correcting us as if we genuinely aspired to become professional chanters—if that’s even a thing.

"Ma’am, please, look at us! We’ve been sitting here on the floor for two hours with aching knees. We don’t know how to position ourselves anymore to ease the discomfort, and yet we’re still trying to chant in Sanskrit—words we don’t even understand. Please, be kinder!"-my overwhelmed and impatient inner voice would say to itself. When you’re alone, traveling solo, and maintaining silence for a long time, you start having conversations with yourself—and sometimes, they’re the most amusing ones.

Meanwhile, I kept trying to grasp the spiritual significance of these two-hour chanting sessions every morning, with all their detail and precision.

"Don’t think too much, just keep going," I told myself constantly—but the nun wasn’t helping. She made us repeat the same phrase over and over until we got it exactly right. One by one. She wouldn’t let us off the hook until we pronounced it perfectly—like a high school oral exam, but dressed in white and sitting in a meditation posture. Sometimes, she had us repeat the same word six or seven times until we got it right, until our tone reached the point of—"Come on, lady, enough already!" There were moments when we couldn’t even figure out what mistake we were making. It was just a bunch of consonants!

Some days were better than others. Sometimes, fatigue and boredom won. I felt like I was doing just fine, but most of the time, Mata Ji would conclude with: "Not bad… keep practicing, you’ll improve."

I had been practicing for hours—what more did she want? My blood?

By the fourth day, she asked us to memorize the entire page, in the correct tones, without looking at the paper. We were truly becoming professional chanters.

Elke had been studying chanting for a long time and was also learning Sanskrit. I had no idea to what end, but she even had an online teacher. She was amazing at it and encouraged me to take it more seriously. I knew I’d never use this skill again in my life, and I didn’t quite understand its practical purpose—but the nun was testing me like a teenager in school, so what else could I do?

I found her enthusiasm and stubbornness to teach us endearing. Most of the time, making her smile and giving her the importance she deserved simply made me happy.

Gradually, I began to surprise her with my good memory and perseverance—though not with my voice. Slowly, she warmed up to me, and I warmed up to her.

By the fifth day, I had almost emerged from the intense state of confusion with which I had arrived at the Ashram. I even started helping her prepare the tea she offered us during our five-minute break. Tulsi tea was her favorite—a simple yet revered basil tea beloved by Indians, not just for its taste but also for its spiritual properties and health benefits.

To me, that tea was awful—honestly. My preferred way of honoring basil was in a caprese salad, italian style. She loaded it with honey and lemon—excessively sweet. It tasted dreadful to me, but after we became friends, it somehow seemed more palatable. As the days passed, that cloying tea began to feel like a comforting gesture, like a grandmother’s caress, like the feeling of being home—and I needed that feeling so much.

Like the fox and the Little Prince, we were taming each other—Mata Ji, the Ashram, and me.

The chants we repeated every morning were the Sutras of Patañjali, where the most important lines and the essence of yogic philosophy were summarized: how to master the mind, all the obstacles we encounter when trying to do so, and how to overcome them. Everything is there. It’s pure gold. Gold in Sanskrit.

In other words, if you could memorize those lines and then associate each Sanskrit word with its meaning in English (and in my case, Spanish), you would have an easy way to remember the tricks and tools for enlightenment—at least when it comes to the theoretical part, which is no small thing. As the days went by, I found myself humming the phrases while brushing my teeth as if they were a catchy pop song.

The chants and the sounds we produced were also vibrations and, like mantras, they calmed our minds and gave us a certain focus and concentration. Words in a very ancient language, with sacred meanings and healing powers on a physical, spiritual, and energetic level—and you could feel it. After two hours of chanting, we would leave completely sedated. We walked very slowly through the Ashram gardens, as if floating in the air.

Sometimes we would sit in a corner to soak up a bit of the beautiful sun shining before us, which simply felt more beautiful at that moment because we were calmer, more aligned, and could appreciate it differently—with a mind free of so much turbulence.Those turbulences that, in daily life, make us overlook simple things like the sun and breathing.

In the philosophy class, we tried to understand what each of the Sutras meant. This was the part that motivated me the most throughout the retreat and, to be honest, the real reason I had signed up. But, obviously, these were difficult concepts to grasp, and to make it even more challenging, everything was in English. This meant my mind had to work twice as hard for another two hours. At times, I felt that if someone looked at me, they would see smoke coming out of my head, along with my furrowed brow as if I were in a Mandarin Chinese class.

The woman from the U.S. wouldn’t stop asking questions that leaned toward scientific explanations and the materiality of what Mata Ji was saying. Of course, many things sounded too mystical and hippie for our Western minds, which tried to fit all that knowledge into a box that could prove reality.

Maybe I would have asked many more questions myself if the language had helped me, but sometimes I could only take quick notes to process later with more calmness.

With all this, I barely had any free time. The level of commitment was high—at least, that’s how I took it. Meanwhile, many of my classmates would go shopping at the street stalls and come back dressed like Hindus. They got Ayurvedic massages and went to typical Indian restaurants.

–More Indian food? Isn’t the Thali we eat every day enough for you?

Some of them only had ten days to enjoy the pleasures of India. I was staying for an indefinite period, so I had time to do—and not do—any of those things they were doing. I would sit in the courtyards to read in the sun, fight with the monkeys for my dignity, and sometimes walk along the Ganga. I chatted with the kids who wanted to sell me poojas and made new friends.

A few days before Christmas, I gifted myself a Kashmir pashmina. At times, I felt like I was in Home Alone when his entire family is enjoying the holidays together while he’s lost and alone in a strange country. That was me—except, in my case, it was by "choice" and with a few more years on me. Sometimes the loneliness was too heavy. Other times, it felt liberating.

Every day after the philosophy class, at 5:30 in the afternoon, I would be at Aarti—the fire ceremony and Kirtan on the banks of Ganga Ma.Since we were doing the retreat at the same Ashram, we had a privileged spot on the stairs, right next to the musicians and the harmonium. We could watch the sunset fall slowly and sit next to the monks without having to queue or fight for a place like the rest of the mortals. The monks would see us arrive and let us through to the VIP section.

One day, I made friends with an Indian boy on the street and brought him in with me to enjoy the "privileges." The monks looked at him with a face that said, "You’re not a tourist—you’re not getting in."

–He’s with me, I said, nightclub-style (LOL)—and with the characteristic Indian head wobble, which you never quite know whether it means “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t know,” they let us through.

Having privileges when there’s a lack of them feels difficult and uncomfortable, even if it’s just being able to sit a few meters closer to the Guru on a staircase. As if that weren’t already enough around here.

Later, the boy—who was actually almost a teenager—fell in love with me and started coming to the Ashram to find me every afternoon, but that’s another story from the book: "What Not to Do to Confuse an Indian Man in Seconds."

We always sat in the same spot—on the left side of the stairs next to the musicians—to be close to the tabla and the harmonium (as if they didn’t sound loud enough already). Those beautiful Indian instruments that are never missing from a Kirtan.

Gulnara, Elke, and I started becoming closer friends. We shared similar concerns, and we were all looking for something by being there. Elke wanted to be a mother, but I think the idea of being a single mother in Germany haunted her a little. She also wanted to open an Ashram and teach yoga. Gulnara was Russian, so she was a bit tougher with emotions. She never really told me what she was searching for, but it was probably discipline, truth, and a more spiritual life than the one the world of economics—where she worked—was giving her. And yet, on her last day in India, she cried.

No one leaves India the same way they arrived—at least, not the lucky ones. 

As the days went by, I became a bit more flexible and less unbearable than when I had first arrived. I think my ego was slowly shrinking—maybe thanks to the seemingly meaningless chanting, who knows—but little by little, a calmer smile appeared on my face, my steps became slower, and even my body language began to change. I bowed my head more, I listened more—or rather, I "listened"—and I even spoke a little more slowly, breathing. For those who know me, just that alone could be classified as a pure miracle given how fast I talk and how little I usually enunciate.

I had stepped a few meters outside my own bubble of chaos and instability and allowed myself to be embraced by the air of the Ashram and the warmth of the sun on the benches in the mornings.I enjoyed talking to people, listening to their stories, drinking chai, and sometimes treating myself to the rice pudding with lemon from the Ashram’s cafeteria, served in a tiny clay pot. My chaos didn’t disappear, but I was able to push it aside for a while to live in the moment. There would be time later to resolve whatever was disturbing me; for now, I just sent love to all the things that felt unbearable and offered them to the Ganga, as I had been told to do.

I went religiously to Aarti every afternoon. I always arrived in time for the Kirtan. I would sit down, close my eyes, and clap along with the music.

The monks had a very particular clapping style. It wasn’t ordinary clapping. After spending so many afternoons there, I was able to identify it. First, they clapped once with their palms together, then they rubbed their hands—up, down, and up again—as if they were trying to create fire from within. Maybe they were. Then, with the calmness of someone who truly enjoys what they’re doing, they clapped once more and began the sequence again.

Their fingers brushed and intertwined with each movement. There was no rush. It was a moment of self-care, a gesture of giving love to oneself. Maybe that’s how all the energy that filled the air during Aarti was generated.

I started copying them—I didn’t have much else to do—and I realized that it also calmed me down. So, between chanting, music, and fire-clapping, I watched the sun set over Ganga Ma every afternoon. If magic exists, it’s in India—there’s no doubt about that—and I was seeing it with my own eyes every single day.

After the Kirtan, the Gurus would speak.I f the American Guru was present, she spoke in English with her distinctive accent. If the Indian Guru spoke, it was only in Hindi. They always began by expressing gratitude and talking about the importance of Mother Nature and Mother Ganga, of course. They raised awareness about protecting the river, the earth, our Pachamama, and the incredible Himalayas that we could see in the distance.

A few years earlier, the Indian Guru Swami Chidanand Saraswati—or Muniji, as they called him—had launched a major project to clean the waters of Ganga. Everyone knows that the Ganges River is world-famous for its high levels of pollution, but at the height of Rishikesh, it is still pure and green. They often gave miniature trees as gifts to important figures invited to the ceremony, as a symbol of their environmental projects and green vision.

Then, they talked about spirituality.

Near the end of Aarti came the moment of fire and the poojas. We all approached the sacred water, dipped our feet in, sprinkled our heads three times, and purified ourselves. It was the cherry on top of the ceremony. Sometimes we even drank the sacred water from the Ganga—as if we were Hindus. By this point, we drank the water and performed the rituals almost like they did. Faith and mysticism are contagious, and India makes you believe that anything is possible.

Little by little, you begin to realize that many things are possible—if you believe they are. So, in just three weeks, I went from rubbing alcohol gel on my hands ten times a day to drinking water from the Ganga. Almost like a miracle.

Aarti wasn’t a mandatory activity, but we never missed it. Some days, I thought it would be better to do something else—write, rest, go eat a good pizza at the Italian restaurant I had found on Google, or just do anything different. But, at the last moment, every time I passed by, my soul was drawn to it like a magnet. I knew that just being there would change my energy, so I couldn’t resist. It had become a wholesome routine.

–The same thing again this evening, Pinky? I’m in India, Brain. What else can I do…?

And that’s how I spent three weeks in the Ashram—which felt like a whole lifetime.