Back at the guest house after dinner with my trekking friends, I can’t seem to get warm and shiver most of the night with a fever. Instead of catching my bus to Manali the next day, I stay in bed with a virus, completely exhausted and unable to get warm. I’m disappointed to give up on Manali, but there’s nothing to be done. So I move down the road to Bhagsu to the Sky Pie guest house where my yoga teacher training starts within the week. I visit a doctor and get antibiotics for the virus in my lungs.

I spend the week chatting to the staff and travelers at the guest house and wandering around Bhagsu. There are still parts of Indian culture that I find so interesting. Middle-aged men wrestle in the street like young boys, laughing and shouting. Their friends join in, putting each other in headlocks. People of the same gender walk along holding hands, including grown men. Most people I encounter are openly curious and stare unapologetically at other people, especially tourists.

My yoga teacher training program with Shiva Darshan Yoga starts at 7am on a Tuesday morning, and I meet the two other students. Riccarda from Germany is fun and laid-back and carries around a collapsible hula-hoop while backpacking through many countries over the past year and half. Rose grew up in Paris and now lives in Hong Kong, she laughs at everything and is also very driven. We’re all very different personalities but we get along well right away. The main instructor for the school, Shiva, begins the course with a puja ceremony to cleanse the energy in the yoga studio. We meet most of the five teachers from the course who will be teaching yoga, philosophy, anatomy and meditation.

Nights are chilly, usually around 5 to 8 degrees celsius, but there is plenty of sunshine during the day and we spend our break time in short sleeves and sunglasses. Philosophy and anatomy classes take place on a porch behind the guest house. We sit on our yoga mats leaning against a long wood block listening to Dr. Drinder, from an Ayurvedic clinic down the road, teach us about Eastern physiology including marmas (energy points of the body), chakras and constitutions. The porch backs into a cluster of buildings and often we are distracted by neighboring families chatting or singing, or clipping their nails. We can usually smell their lunch cooking, and we watch them sifting rice and hanging laundry. One of the buildings has a music studio where people can build a didgeridoo. We listen to the carving sounds or didges being tested with drum accompaniment. Two feral kittens live in a pile of leaves and branches near our outdoor classroom and we watch them playing or dozing in the sun with their eyes closed. Our philosophy teacher, Jadu Baba, tells us they’re meditating. One day their mom carries a dead mouse in her teeth for their lunch. Jadu Baba’s classes mainly cover the yogic lifestyle outlined in Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga.

The owner of Sky Pie, Anil, oversees construction work at the back of the property. A crew is building a structure for the family to live separate from the guest area. They are also working on a temporary cook shack for his son’s wedding this January. It will accommodate the cooking for more than 2,000 (two thousand!) guests expected. Each morning when my alarm sounds at 6:30 am, slightly after sunrise, I can already hear the mules walking back and forth from the street to the construction site with loads of stones and concrete in sacks draped across their backs, the bells around their necks clanging and hooves clomping. The work normally stops around 7pm, just after dark. Women in bright saris carry the stones and concrete in wide bowls on their heads to the place where the men bash it together. Work progresses slowly but steadily. One afternoon it sounds like thunder and we run to the window to watch some men roll a huge cement mixer on wheels to the site. Beside our lunch table there are young men in short sleeves using a grinder to cut metal poles with no safety goggles or gloves. “Indian way”, Shiva says.

Our schedule is Monday to Saturday, 7am to 7pm with breaks for meals:

7:00 – 8:30 – Pranayama (breathing exercises) and meditation with Shiva
8:30 – 10:00 – Hatha yoga with Shiva
10:00 – 11:00 – Breakfast
11:00 – 12:00 – Anatomy with Dr. Drinder
12:00 – 2:00 – Lunch
2:00 – 3:00 – Philosophy with Jadu Baba
3:00 – 4:00 – Adjustments with Shiva
4:00 – 5:45 – Ashtanga with Dev
6:00 – 7:00 – Meditation with Swami Ashok
7:00 – Dinner!

With 12 hours of structure every day, and the same strict diet of satvic food for every meal, we begin to feel restless and sometimes sneak away at break time to eat Bhagsu cake – a sweet dessert with a cookie crumble base, a layer of caramel and a layer of chocolate. Also available with peanut butter base, which of course is the best. We joke that it feels like we’re in reform school with the discipline required to stick to the course schedule. We giggle a lot during class at the strange sounds the cows make when they get annoyed by the noisy construction work. The effects of the Indian food on our digestive systems along with the exertion of yoga postures creates many other noises to giggle about during class as well.

Our yoga classes amount to 4 hours of yoga per day and it feels like a grueling physical and mental challenge to stay focused and positive. Shiva’s style of teaching is based on correct sequencing of postures and textbook body position more than encouraging personal development or feedback on teaching styles. The course becomes a good foundation of traditional yoga, which I find to be a struggle at times, but it’s a great introduction to the roots of yoga theory and practice. I have that class to thank for being able to do many new poses including halasana (plow); sirsasana (headstand); padmasana (full lotus); and parsva bakasana (side crow).

Meditation class with Swami Ashok is one of the highlights of the course. Ashok teaches Osho’s approach to meditating in a modern world where sitting in uncomfortable silence for hours is not practical. We practice Kundalini meditation, which is also called ecstatic dance meditation – it’s exactly how it sounds and it’s SUPER fun. Another interesting one is “No-Mind” or “Catharsis” meditation where we get to shout gibberish for an hour. One morning after No-Mind meditation Anil tell us the construction workers heard us “meditating” and thought we were insane.

Sunday is our only holiday so the three of us sleep late and spend all of our energy finding and eating really good food that breaks the satvic rules. One Sunday I meet a Tibetan friend in town and we walk around the Dalai Lama temple, a peaceful path through the trees strewn with prayer flags and prayer wheels. We chat about his family back in Tibet and how he came to India as a young boy hidden under blankets in the back of a family member’s car. He prefers to live in India as an adult, as he says there is much more freedom here compared to Tibet.

My birthday passes during the course, and Riccarda and Rose make it super special! They put candles in a couple of Bhagsu cakes and sing for me at breakfast break. There are two yoga students who often attend the drop-in classes at our studio so we spend time chatting to them before and after class – Nadav from Israel and Mukul who grew up in India and America. They join us for dinner on my birthday and we have a great evening in McLeod Ganj.

Towards the end of the course, each of us has the opportunity to teach a few classes to one another. It’s a great experience and feels natural for me to describe the positions and lead the class. As I set up to teach my first full Ashtanga class, a random guy shows up as a drop-in, so I get to teach a real student! It’s great to have an addition to the class to keep me motivated.

The last holiday Sunday before the end of the course, Shiva and Dev organize a trek for Riccarda, Rose and I, and Nadav joins as well. It feels amazing to be hiking around in nature after a month of staying in one building and visiting the city on our days off. We trek for hours to reach Guna Temple near the Dhauladhar Mountains. Many local people are spending the day here, and there is a large family having a picnic celebration with drumming and singing and dancing and they motion for us to join so we clap long. Many people pass by and give us handfuls of delicious warm halva. Other people hand out small cups of chai and savory cookies. It is a great wrap-up for the month!

Rose and Nadav leave for Rajasthan after the graduation ceremony and final puja to close the course. The following day Riccarda and I have tickets to Rishikesh to practice more yoga. We have time during the day before our night bus so we take a Tibetan momo cooking class. They are the best momos I’ve eaten so far!