6 ~ Havan, purification ritual.

December 11th.

I woke up on my birthday. Juanita wanted to take me out for breakfast at a nearby café. I wanted to lose myself alone, so that’s what I did at the end.

We got up early and went to a Yoga class at the Parmarth Niketan Ashram at 7 a.m. The streets of Rishi were quiet and calm at that hour of the morning. There was no one except for the cows and a few neighbors sweeping the ground of a village at dawn. In reality, what they were sweeping was part of the dirt road, because here, there are no sidewalks. Bent over, with their small one-meter-high straw brooms that forced them to bow their chests toward the earth. The way we should all live—grateful.

The Parmarth Niketan is the Ashram famous for the Aarti and its two Gurus. An Indian man with a prominent beard and a relatively young American woman, who one day came on vacation and, passing through Rishikesh, never left.

India is full of Ashrams. They are physical spaces with a communal perspective where people retreat to connect with their own spiritual practices: Yoga, meditation, study, selfless work, devotional practices. They are bubbles with different themes depending on the master who guides them and are oriented towards fostering a peaceful, simple life directed at introspection and spiritual growth.

At this Ashram, I was going to attend a retreat on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which is like the Bible of Yoga. The spiritual foundations that go far beyond the asanas (postures) and what we believe Yoga to be.

When Yoga arrived in the West, it transformed into a discipline of the body, sometimes even taught in gyms, but with little connection to its true philosophy and essence: the union of body-mind-spirit, but also the union of the individual being with divinity, the direction to achieve true liberation of the soul and the peace we all seek. It is a choice and a way of life, not just flexibility and contortionist positions as we misunderstand it. Yoga is much deeper than that. I was looking for exactly that—to understand a bit of the philosophy behind the decoration.

My trip to India had the premise of working on myself, answering some questions—many questions, actually. For that, I needed peace and mental clarity. Nothing more opposite than what I felt at that moment, so I felt that Yoga was the first step to stabilizing my mind and body, to start seeking balance.

The next step was to do a Vipassana, a 10-day retreat of meditation and silence in a Buddhist monastery, so these were the preparations for what was coming.

The Ashram was a large place with a hallway filled with Hindu gods and open-air water fountains. It ended with a stunning view of the mountains, with a sign that read, "Welcome to your home in the Himalayas."

It was full of gardens with meditation halls and lodging rooms for those on retreats. A public space filled with benches where people could sit and bask in the sun, inhabited by beings of all kinds: monks, pilgrims, tourists, and monkeys. Always monkeys, and sticks hidden in strategic places for self-defense. Or rather, for the locals who know how to use them for self-defense and to help others when they hear a desperate scream. Those of us who are not locals just run and scream for help.

The sculptures of Hindu gods in blue were everywhere, looking almost like cartoon drawings. And so, you’d see Shiva Nataraja dancing at the center, welcoming you to the Ashram.There was another gallery behind a glass wall where you could find them all together, side by side. Ganesha (the elephant god), Hanuman (the monkey god), Parvati, Vishnu, Krishna, and other even more ancient Hindu deities.

The energy there was deeply spiritual. There was a school for young monks who lived at the Ashram, walking around in their orange robes through the gardens, always ready to help. They played the same jokes and games as other kids their age, but dressed as monks, which made them seem more serious—until you caught them pulling some mischievous trick, which made it even more endearing.

I was told that after Yoga, there would be a fire ceremony—a ritual of purification and offering to Mother Nature. Fire and Pachamama. -Of course, I'm in.

It was a small open-air courtyard, framed by two giant trees, extremely old, with thick trunks and hanging vines. They radiated wisdom just by looking at them.Between them, the Ashram’s Guru sat in a meditative position, wearing his deep red robe, with a prominent beard and wild, afro-style hair.

Scattered around the space, several small fires burned within cement enclosures. Around each fire, a few people sat—mostly monks.Most of them were children, minimonks barely a meter tall. Sitting cross-legged, chanting mantras, their little eyes closed, hands in Namaste at their chests, smiling with a calmness I can't explain. Watching them filled my heart with love.

I let myself get lost in their gaze and the peace they unknowingly passed on to me. They couldn’t have been older than ten, but they looked like six. Their bodies were so small, yet their energy vibrated through the air with an incredible frequency.

I approached the courtyard timidly, and immediately, they signaled me toward a fire to sit.I knelt on a red wool carpet around the fire.

The mantras were beautiful.Everyone sang, swaying gently from side to side or in circular motions with their eyes closed.The fires, the trees, the scent of burning wood and seeds, the atmosphere, and the bald monk sitting next to me, who welcomed me with a perfect smile inside a massive mouth.

I felt like I belonged almost instantly.

Without knowing it, that ceremony would become part of every morning during my stay at the Ashram.

Havan is a sacred Hindu ceremony where offerings are made to the fire to purify the environment and the person performing it. It is a spiritual cleansing practice, accompanied by powerful mantras in Sanskrit throughout the duration of the ceremony.

Various elements are offered: medicinal herbs, seeds, wood, fruits. The minimonks would come, one by one, and place flower petals in our hands to decorate the edge of the fire pit. Each person took the colorful petals and carefully arranged them along the ceramic rim where they were sitting, moving slowly and meditatively, choosing each spot for the petals with the love and dedication the moment deserved.

Then they would return and fill our hands with seeds, which we had to carefully grasp between the middle finger and thumb, throwing them into the fire when a specific line of the prayer was spoken: "Swaha," reinforcing the offering to the gods. At that moment, we all chanted in unison. The mantras, the smoke, and the scents seeped into the soul.

The monk beside me guided me through the ceremony, teaching me what to do as it progressed. I simply opened my heart to the energy floating in the air and let it soak into me. I still couldn't believe I was experiencing this.

After repeating this ritual several times, the minimonks came back and filled our hands with rice, which we again threw into the fire. All the children bore colorful marks on their foreheads—some similar to red or yellow bindis, others with horizontal yellow lines covering their entire foreheads in honor of Shiva.

I approached one of them and asked him to mark mine. He pressed sacred ash from the fire onto my forehead—the fire of the Guru.

When the chants ended, the bald monk approached the large fire, where the master was. He placed his hands over the flames as if warming them, then passed them over his head as if caressing himself. He did this three times.

"It is a purification for the aura," he told me.I stepped forward, copied him, and let that fire purify me too.

How could you not feel more at peace after all that?

It is impossible to be here and not have something inside you stirred.

Being in India, it takes very little for everything to become mystical and spiritual, for you to start wanting to know what it all means, and before you realize it, you find yourself performing Hindu rituals that you don’t fully understand—but you feel that a certain magic hides within them.That promise of divinity that we perceive in those who practice it, in those who truly believe.

It’s tempting. You see their peace, and you want a little bit of that ecstasy. We don’t fully understand how it works or what it is, but we want a piece of that magic too.

"It’s not a magic trick," the monk told me. "It’s dedicating time to God. It’s the time I devote each day to spirituality and the purification of my soul."

The word God still feels strange to us. Many of us have become secular, rejecting the way religion has taken shape in our cultures—a stereotyped symbol of fables, crosses, and dogmas. But that is just a narrow, rigid, and mistaken way of understanding spirituality. In reality, God is something else. And over time, you realize that the concept of God can take different forms for each person—that it is not a fixed word but rather the expression of the purest and most supreme universal power that exists beyond all else. That force that interconnects us.

God, Universe, Energy, Christ, Ganga, or Shiva. It is the power and the meaning behind all of this, and the place we give to that almighty entity greater than ourselves in our lives.

Most of us come here searching for that: peace, faith, hope, connection—something beyond ourselves and anything that stems from those lines. It’s easy to believe when you’re here. The energy seeps into your pores, even if you are an atheist. It’s easy to feel something, unless you’re a limestone statue and you’ve come to India only to take photos of the Taj Mahal—which, by the way, is not a Hindu construction, and after its completion, they cut off the hands of all who worked on it so that nothing like it could ever be built again.

So don’t come to India just for the Taj Mahal…If you come to India, come for the spirituality. That is the best thing India has to offer.

The rest is pure chaos.