Letter from yoga camp

Seders are delightful. The communal ritual of reading the Haggadah with its prolongation and repetition of key elements, its enumerations, its foreign-language sing-song sing-alongs, its quaint childlike story with spelled-out morals—it's all great. So I was expecting to unequivocally embrace the four hours of daily satsang at the Sivananda Yoga Ranch in the Catskills. But it was like back-to-back seders twice a day, day after day, beginning with two hours at 6 in the morning and concluding with two hours ending at 9:30 in the evening, plus much chanting and meditating in between and at the two two-hour yoga classes (8 a.m. and 4 p.m.). Too much sitting, too much piety, too many instructions, and something in me just cannot chant "Hare Krishna"—just can't do it.

I went for four days of yoga camp because I felt embarrassed by my superficial grasp of yoga's roots, and Sivananda is considered, along with Integral Yoga, to be the truest practice of yoga in the U.S., the classical form with the deepest roots. I was almost able to make the leap and expose my uvula and chant if not Hare Krishna then Hare Rama or Govinda or whatever, but then I saw hung on the back of the altar along with photographs of Sivananda and Vishnu Devananda a portrait of Jesus Christ—sporting a tilak, the red dot of the Hindus. That shut me right up. And, too, the word "God" was uttered.

For me, this kind of ecumenicalism is not a good thing. In seeking out Sivananda, I was looking for something I could not find in my own culture—godless faith—so seeing the deity and saints of my culture sweetly folded into Sivananda's pantheon was alienating rather than ingratiating.

On the bright side, the asana classes were good and the food was lovely. I came home oozing curry from my pores and with laundry that stank like Calcutta. And driving back with my old friend A brought back memories of many other journeys we have shared in search of sacred bliss.