Spring Institute 2007 - India

Ok so today was my first day in Mysore, I was excited, but maybe not as excited as everyone else as I have been to India several times. The thing I had come here most for was to learn, I want to understand more about wellness and the Indian notion of it. Little did I know that in fact I would be learning quite a few other things on only the first day. Today started off with doctor Rao giving us a talk on the fact that there are only challenges, not problems, something that I did not pay as much attention to when he said it as I probably should have, maybe its just one of those things one has to learn for themselves. So anyways, we decided to go shopping after waiting on the computer man (to fix our internet) for almost 3 hours, but at around 3:50 we departed for K. R. Circle, a teeming hub of the city. This was my first experience on an auto-rickshaw and it was easier than I thought. Shopping was fun and so was seeing the sights of the city, but when it came time to go home, we had a problem, none of the rickshaw drivers could get us home because they didn’t know our directions. So after a failed attempt at getting the rickshaw drivers to get us home we started walking. Although time and time again it was tempting just to give up and let someone else solve the problem by calling Dr. Rao, we stuck with it and made it back to the center after a grueling hours walk. We made it though ourselves and we solved the challenge, and later we discovered that because of it we now know most of the city on our end.

Today Dr. Rao talked about the importance of preservation of things through continued use, a sort of if you don’t use it you loose it mentality. We got a personalized tour of the Mysore palace today, it was quite beautiful and I enjoyed the tour a lot although I felt bad about standing in front of the other visitors at the palace, especially since it was a group of white students from outside the country who were getting a preferred look at the people who we were blockings history. I eventually just had to shrug it off as there was nothing I could do about it and so I just tried to enjoy the palace. I was thinking today about how Dr. Rao’s words could apply outside of just the maintenance of old buildings into an everyday life model. I discovered that there was no place in which this model could not be applied. The idea that by using something you preserve it is true about knowledge, physical health, and spirituality. I was told once by a friend that the journey of spirituality is like canoeing upriver; if you don’t continue to paddle you flow away from your destination.