9~ Yogic meeting

December 15

I started going to meditate with the monk. The place was very local and hidden on a dirt road overlooking the Ganga. It makes me a little uneasy, but something in me wants to keep going.

I knock on the door, and he lets me in. It’s very strange—his face reminds me too much of my dad. It surprises me and, at the same time, distracts me. With every moment, I find more similarities: his laugh, his beard, the gap between his teeth. In these moments of uncertainty, this brings me peace, makes me feel like I’m in the right place. Coincidence or synchronicity?

I step into his room. He is sitting on the floor with his legs crossed. It’s 8 a.m. He tells me he has prepared Chai and a biscuit for me and points to a little spot on the floor over the red carpet: a metal plate covered by another metal plate. The Chai is still hot.

At this point, I hate both -Chai and being in India-, and the water issue is still a priority and a problem.

As you already know, in India, you have to be careful with many things, but the most important one is water—and everything that involves water or is washed with water, which is basically everything. Say goodbye to salads, my friend, and welcome well-cooked Indian food: stews and curries with rice, lentils, chickpeas, and whatever else you can think of.

I had arrived in India with a bit of paranoia, like everyone else. About the water, the bacteria, the hygiene—basically everything. So I was still carrying my hand sanitizer everywhere, trying to touch as little as possible. Looks like my mom did a great job instilling chaos and destruction.

They say you need a month to get used to India. I was on day four. Even so, my soul cannot conceive rejecting the monk’s gesture, so I drink the Chai and eat the biscuit, responding with gratitude and courtesy while internally entrusting myself to all the saints.

The little house is very humble, still under construction. Inside, several monks live in different rooms. The view is beautiful, but we shut ourselves in his room. The room is simple and small. The floor is covered with a red carpet and has only a mattress on the floor, some orange blankets like his robe, several black-and-white pictures of his Gurus, and others of his gods in bright colors, as is typical here in India. The door of the room opened directly to the outside. He asks me to leave the door slightly open so some air can come in.

He tells me we should go slowly – Step by step – and asks me how I meditate. I give him an answer inspired by Eat, Pray, Love, my favorite movie.

"Smiling with the liver," I answer, "and feeling that my whole body smiles fully. That every cell in my body vibrates, moves from side to side, generating energy and light, and smiles, happy and at peace." A bit cheesy, I know, but I love what that set of movements makes me feel. I love my meditation, but of course, it’s impossible not to laugh internally while giving that answer to a monk in his orange robe, looking at me seriously with an inquisitive expression. It doesn’t sound very professional.

He looks at me without saying anything. He doesn’t laugh either.I feel like he likes me, and hat gives me the confidence to be myself. The truth is, I’ve tried all kinds of meditations, but this is the one I like the most and truly feel. It genuinely gives me peace and happiness. It’s incredible how your emotions can change just by smiling. Psychology and science prove it, but it doesn’t matter—it still sounds pretty hippie, I know.

He doesn’t say anything, but I feel like my long, explanation-filled answers are starting to make him uncomfortable. We start meditating.He tells me to forget he’s there and imagine I’m alone. That’s easy for me.

I imagine myself in the middle of the mountains, at the top of Kunjapuri Temple, seeing everything. The clouds are below me, and I am sitting just like I am now, in a meditative posture. He makes me bring energy to my third eye and then falls silent. He asks me to visualize a god and place him in the middle of my forehead. I choose the image of Shiva, his blue body sitting cross-legged, hands in chin mudra.

We meditate together in silence for a long time. He says I need to meet his brother, who speaks Spanish, and that I should come back at sunset for another meditation. That we are taking it slowly, that he will teach me little things.

I return in the afternoon and meet his brother. His "brother" was not his blood brother but a way of referring to his fellow monk and spiritual brother—of course, it took me a while to make that connection. He was an older man, about 70 years old, bald, with a pointed black beard, also dressed in orange like most monks here in India.He spoke Spanish with an Indian accent, but surprisingly clearly. He was about to have breakfast: a plate of puffed rice seasoned with spices. He told the young man who cooked to bring me one as well. Once again, I couldn’t refuse, so I risked my life for courtesy.

He asks me where I’m from. He tells me he has been to Argentina, that he has a school in the town Palermo Soho, and pulls out a yoga manual in Spanish. That is gold here! He also tells me he knows Daisy May Queen, an Argentine radio host who had a very famous radio show in the ’90s: The top 40 ṕrincipals—literally, if my childhood had a soundtrack, it was that. I was 10 years old, while my mom killed time in her sports classes, I listened to The rebel by La Renga on my freshly bought Discman from Paraguay, at full volume, singing along, wanting to set schools on fire and jump into a mosh pit.

Which I would eventually do. Not the school part—just the mosh pit.

Before coming to Rishikesh, a friend had told me that Daisy May Queen had moved here. That she had left everything behind and decided to completely change her lifestyle. And now the monk wants to introduce me to her!

"How did you get to Argentina?" I asked. Being able to speak Spanish was a blessing.

"A girl who was studying yoga took me there some time ago to help her mother, and later I started teaching at a school in Palermo. I lived there for a year and learned Spanish. I liked it a lot."

By this point, I was freaking out, overflowing with coincidences. I’m in Rishikesh, I randomly walked into an unfinished little house, guided only by curiosity, a place no one knows exists, where three old yogis live, and it turns out one of them speaks Spanish, lived in Palermo Soho -my fathers's place-, and knows Daisy May Queen. Wow. I’m amazed by the precision and clarity with which the universe weaves connections.

The monk starts asking me about my routine and giving me instructions.

"The first thing you need to change if you want to do yoga is your food. This is your work; you are the master. You can’t meditate if the night before you ate shit."—These weren’t his exact words, but that was the concept he was illustrating. Then he started talking to me about Sattvic food—the “harmonious” diet, vegetarian, high in fiber, and low in fats.

"The mind needs to stay focused. The food we eat influences us—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Sattvic means essence. It is fresh food, made with love, without preservatives, processed ingredients, or additives. According to Ayurveda, ancient Indian medicine, these are foods that bring balance, purity, and clarity to our mind and body. They come directly from Mother Earth, and we preserve them as they are, in the purest and most natural state possible. They give us balance, calm our minds, and provide creativity and lightness, helping us stay as pure as possible so that our essence can manifest.

The rest of the food takes that away from us, stresses us, and fills us with dead energy." (1)

"Everything we eat affects our body. We must be conscious of that. It’s fundamental for our health, for meditation, for yoga—for everything. And it is our responsibility, our own discipline.

Yoga is more than just exercises. You don’t need to go to a yoga school or do thousands of asanas every day. It’s enough to do the ones you need, according to your life, your weak points, your body, and your energy—with the highest level of awareness possible. A few asanas every morning are enough. This prepares you for meditation.

Meditation is more than just not thinking and emptying the mind. I will teach you how to meditate."

He goes into his little room and comes back with a yoga booklet in Spanish, with an address in Plaza Serrano, Argentina.I laugh internally. Causalities.

I ask if I can read it outside and sit on a huge rock in front of the river. The place was beautiful, and being able to read something in my own language while in India was something to truly appreciate.

I keep moving, chasing the sun over the greenish river and the mountains.

That was the first moment I felt peace since arriving in India.

The monk started talking to me about not shaving my body hair, about wetting my genitals with water every morning to refresh my chakras, about daily cold-water baths from the knees down to maintain balance, then from the elbows to the hands, as well as the armpits and the back of the neck. He talked about the daily nasal cleansing ritual—pouring water through one nostril using a special plastic spouted container and letting it flow out through the other nostril—about washing my open eyes underwater, and about other purification rituals.

I looked at him in silence, wondering how I was supposed to do all that, considering that in India, water was still almost deadly for me.I didn’t brush my teeth with bottled water like many tourists do here, but running tap water through my nose? That was a lot. The mental images of these procedures felt a bit complex and difficult to adopt.

He spoke to me about avoiding alcohol and disciplining my behavior.

"Come on… but when you go to a party, you have one glass of wine!" I said, laughing ironically at my own joke, hoping for some complicity. Of course, I didn’t find it.

He just looked at me and replied, "Alcohol, never."

By this point, sitting in this place, talking to a yogi in an orange skirt, I was taking everything seriously.I panicked a little. It was hard to imagine doing all of that every morning—and even harder to imagine never drinking alcohol again in my life. That wasn’t realistic at all.

I had always been the kind of person who, when eating out, only knew how to order a cold beer.I had water at home, and I hated all kinds of tea. So, his words started to give me a bit of preemptive frustration.

I walked back to the hostel with a hint of resignation. As soon as I left his house, I ran into the young yogi who ran a Pranayama space next door.He, too, was dressed in an orange robe.He was sitting on a chair in the middle of the open field.

It was the same guy who had asked me for 700 Indian rupees for a yoga class and had made me feel scammed.

He asked me what the mate- the argentinian tea- I was carrying was, and we started talking about spirituality—as always happens. His English was clear. I could actually understand what he was saying. That was huge.

I told him that I had quit my old life, that I had come with just a one-way ticket, and that I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do after this. That India felt like a turning point for me—I could feel it.I explained that I needed to answer a lot of my own questions and find balance with myself again, because I felt lost in the fog of my mind.

"Surrender," he said—"Surrender."Once again, that word reached my ears.

Balance and surrender—the two words that had come to me from my father in a conversation I had with his soul.

"The only thing we can do is jump—just jump—because we don’t know what’s beyond. We have to trust. There’s no other way.

That’s why it’s important to find a Guru you trust blindly—without asking why, how, or for what—just trust.The Guru arrives when the student is ready, neither before nor after.That’s why schools are a lie. You can’t teach yoga in general to fifty people at once. Secrets can’t be revealed to just anyone.

Each student has a limit to what they’re capable of learning and a specific moment in that learning process.And the teacher only teaches what the student is ready to receive—little by little, at their own time. Little by little..." he repeated, breaking the words apart, as if he knew the speed of my thoughts.

"The mind understands with time. It’s a process. But then…You become a king. A King of Kings.

And the mundane no longer affects you."

It was my fourth day. I was still processing being here. My sensitivity was overflowing, desperately searching for some kind of clue to help me figure out where to start. Almost the same as the last two months, but now with the added weight of being alone in India, without anyone knowing, trying to find deep answers in a city overrun with tourists and fake yoga vendors. Finding yourself here seemed like a far more complicated challenge than it first appeared.

I listened to him carefully, trying to understand.I had a very real objective tied to a need for survival, so I was really trying to understand what he was saying.When you’re lost, any word from a yogi in robes, standing in the middle of a mystical city by a sacred river, suddenly seems full of promise.

I looked at him.

I started thinking about my life, about what I love, about what I do to have a good time.I thought about my addiction to an ice-cold beer at any hour, always welcome. About a barbecue with friends and a good Fernet con Cola. About how much I love going out dancing, dropping it to the floor, and coming back home exhausted when the club is about to close. About music, the night, rock and roll, sex. About how a good dose of partying lights me up, along with the cigarettes and drinks that come with it all.I don’t know how to go to a restaurant and order a drink without alcohol after noon.I hate tea.I love making shallow jokes and mocking deep conversations with friends.I get bored by the discipline of a structured life.I let my instincts guide me as if there were no tomorrow and easily forget my responsibilities when something catches my interest.

While all of this rushed into my mind—at once, as usual—I kept listening to him…

Tears started falling, as I recognized that part of me that loves those stupid, mundane, meaningless pleasures.

The same ones that help me forget that sometimes, I simply can’t find meaning at all.

Do I love them? Or do they own me?

It doesn’t make much of a difference when you’re trying to control them.

I’m like a wild rabbit, hopping around, living in the moment, mocking everything—and impossible to tame.

But maybe the only thing I was really mocking was myself because that wasn’t completely who I was either. It was just another fragment, another mask, a few perfectly placed defense mechanisms.

I look at him with a desperate expression, squatting next to a cow in the middle of the open field.

I tell him that I don’t know if I’m willing to give up all the pleasures of life, to leave everything behind and become a yogi—I was really taking it seriously. What he was saying truly made sense to me.

"You have to be willing to lose many things to gain others. It takes effort, and you have to jump," he repeats once again. He reminds me of my psychologist, but with a mystical and spiritual style—not any less sharp or painful because of it.

I place my things on the ground and sit beside him with resignation and vulnerability. It was worth listening to him for a while.I offer him some mate while I pet the little cow near us. I was already feeling at ease.

At this point in my life, I was beginning to realize that this whole world is a farce, that we are just playing, entertained, sedated in an unreal reality—one that is certainly a damn illusion meant to distract us from what truly matters. Like a children's game.T hat we get lost and obsessed with meaningless things, complicating our lives, chasing false promises that lead us to unhappiness, running on a hamster wheel that never ends. That we rarely manage to escape from that perfectly controlled circle, and when we do, we panic and are condemned by society, pointed at with the accusatory finger of madness for stepping off the path. And most importantly—perhaps the most concerning of all—we condemn ourselves. For feeling that what we do has no meaning, just because it doesn’t fit into the capitalist and productivity-driven standards we were taught. And then we feel guilt, and the strangeness of what the hell are we doing with our lives?

A part of me truly felt, deep down, that I had to leave everything behind and take another path drastically—yes, always this dramatic—but the thought of becoming a yogi and giving everything up scared me a little. "I don’t know if I want to give up all pleasures (oh, how I enjoy pleasure!). "I could if I wanted to, but I don’t know if I want to…

I tell him this, and I cry. I was really considering it. I was truly at that level of desperation.

I think of my mother and the relationships I would have to sacrifice to follow this path. I can see the truth in his words, and that affects me.

"I don’t know if I’m ready to leave normal life and become a yogi or a sadhu—a monk."Nobody was asking me to, but like I said, my mind moves fast.

He tells me that there’s no need to be so drastic, that there are yogis who allow themselves to eat meat or have relationships, that the point is about setting one’s own boundaries and knowing when to say yes and when to say no. That, in any case, "it is beautiful to walk the paths of the masters, even if just for a moment, even if just for the sake of walking."

I like him. I thank him for his teachings. He tells me he is not a master, that he hasn’t reached that level yet, that "this is just sharing." So I thank him for sharing.

That night, I return to the monk’s house for another meditation, as he had asked me to. It scared me a little, but I took the risk.

"Whatever you do, don’t stop meditating. That gives you power. Friends and people come and go, but your personal power will always be with you.We live in this world, but we belong to another. We owe ourselves to the spiritual world, don’t lose sight of that. We must detach from this world, not let ourselves be bound by material things. That is our challenge and our commitment to our soul. That is the reason we come into this life."

Beautiful. I wanted to hug him, but of course, I didn’t even attempt it. We said goodbye. I told him I wanted to leave a donation, and he pointed to a corner where he had his small shrine with his Guru, candles, and incense. I folded some rupees and left them there.I greeted him and left.

"We live in this world, but we belong to another," I repeated to myself as I watched the cows curled up, resting on the sand.

I realized that this journey was going to be long, and this was just the beginning.

1. They are recognized as The Three Gunas: Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas, and they are essential qualities of the universe. We can find them in everything that exists and in everything that makes us who we are—in our daily lives as well.

   Sattva (purity) is the vital energy that wakes us up every morning, the one that keeps us aware. Rajas (action) is the energy of movement, change, and activity.

   Tamas (inertia) embodies stability, but it can very easily make us feel tired and heavy, leading to immobility, confusion, and stagnation.

   By understanding this, we can see that each energy has a role in maintaining balance within our body and mind. Without Tamas, there is no rest; without Rajas, there is no activity; and without Sattva, there is no awareness. Each of these energies is essential for every individual, and the magic lies in knowing them and learning how to balance them to create harmony in our lives.
   

   These energies are universal, and we can find them in everything—including food. This means that we can use food as a tool to achieve the states we seek and need.
   

   Sattvic Food: The Yogic Diet. Is essential for yogis. It fosters a clear and harmonious mind, natural balance, conscious spirituality, and a pure, simple, and healthy life.Sattvic foods include fresh produce, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, and dairy products, among others. They promote healthy emotions, compassion, austerity, and simplicity.

   
   

   Rajasic Food: Energy & Agitation

   Rajasic food triggers activity and restlessness. According to Ayurveda, it increases passions and, as a result, also fuels anger, anxiety, chaos, and emotional instability. These are spicy, salty, and acidic foods—stimulating, "tempting," and addictive, such as coffee, tea, alcohol, onions, and garlic, among others.They make our minds more agitated and more prone to temptation.

   
   

   Tamasic Food: Darkness & Confusion

   These include fried, processed, frozen, and reheated foods, as well as meat, cheese, eggs, and alcohol, among others. Consumed in excess, they lead to heaviness, mental fog, and drowsiness. They contribute to depression and may cause various health issues.

   Perhaps the key is to explore this ancient yet simple wisdom and learn how and when to combine these energies based on our unique constitution and doshas (our Ayurvedic body type). By doing so, we can create more balance and awareness in our lives. Understanding that the food we consume not only affects our body but also influences our mind—which, in the end, are one and the same—is one of the greatest tools for self-knowledge and deep connection with ourselves. ♡
   

   I invite you to read more about Ayurveda, Doshas, and the importance of mindful and balanced eating. ↩︎

   ________________________________________ Thank you for wanting to expand your consciousness.

   Sign: The Universe