Dear friends and loved ones,

Monday December 4 was World Group Meditation (WGM). For those who do not know of this: every full moon day, at different times a day so as to cover the world’s time zones, Swami Veda sits in meditation with whoever would like to sit with him. So his disciples and students but also people who don’t know him but are interested in meditation sit at the same time. Group meditation is more powerful than sitting alone, particularly when you are sitting with an advanced meditator. It can be done sitting at the same place but you can also decide on a common time and sit at different places.

I am so conditioned by WGM being in the evening (at 20.00 or 21.00) that I missed the first one (November 5), because here in it is at 7 in the morning. I went to morning meditation (5 to 6) and then back to my cottage to work. I noticed my concentration was high and I got a lot done… I decided to make up by sitting at one of the other time zone times. So at 17.30 I sat at the Shiva Linga (which I described in an earlier letter). Though already November, there were still lots of mosquitoes and 17.30 is clearly their active time. But I was determined to sit, and I held for almost three quarters of an hour (on a chair, I could not sit that long on the floor yet then). Then I admitted defeat; my mind was becoming increasingly kshiptam, ‘thrown about’, which is much worse than vikshiptam, ‘distracted from your object of meditation’. I retired to my cottage where I completed the last 15 minutes. I felt quite content about my effort, but shortly afterwards learnt it was nothing...

There's a Chilean staying at the ashram who, for six years now, has been living under a Tibetan Buddhist master somewhere up in the mountains. He is in silence most of the time, but on Swami Veda’s request he broke his silence one night to talk to us about Tibetan Buddhism. Through our questions, his talk focused on the 3 year retreat he had started off with. I thought I was doing a fairly serious practice, but his description makes this ashram sound like a holiday camp. In the first approximately 18 months, you get up at 2 in the morning and chant mantras until 7. Breakfast, then chant till 12. Lunch, then chant again + other practices till dinner, at 19.00. Evening is for study. Luckily, the next 18 months are more leisurely. Then you only get up at 4 in the morning...

Fairly at the beginning part of the retreat, there are 100.000 prostrations to be done in a limited period of time, complete with visualization and mantra. You gradually build up capacity, and towards the end he would do 2.500 to 3.500 per day. I am not tempted by such a ‘severe’ retreat, but I deeply admire the focus it takes and that it creates / strengthens. Also, I think partly as a result of these practices, he has this warm smile and you feel a very gentle, quiet kind of inner purpose. One of the people you meet and instantly feel comfortable with, whose presence gives a sense of joy.

Of a different nature, but equally fascinating: we had a dancer from staying here for some time. Towards the end of her stay, she gave a talk on ‘cosmic dance’ as well as a number of dancing classes. It was wonderful. She does a kind of fusion of modern dance, jazz, classical Indian, traditional Japanese and she enumerated numerous other inspirations and styles she had practiced in depth. She taught us a tiny bit of it, explaining the yantras (geometrical forms) created in space by the dance, the upward, downward and outward energy flows, the grounding, the air… Unfortunately she could only give three classes before leaving (one of which I missed because it was announced late and I did not know about it in time), but she will be back and said we would continue. She uses dance for healing, working with severely depressed people, with handicapped people, etc., with apparently wonderful results.

I think I mentioned in my last letter that I was making fruit and vegetable juices. It seemed to do me good, but then it became colder and these cold juices just did not seem like the right thing anymore. I stopped making them, and within a few days had bronchitis... So I was in a dilemma, until I had the brilliant idea of mixing in some hot water. With this improvement, I am happily juicing again, and feeling better then I have for a long time. Also, for the bronchitis, I took someone's advice and started using the heater at night. Just for a few nights. The bronchitis went away, though I still have a lingering cough.

For a few days I have had a 'juicing partner' which has been very good on more than one account. Like: very good company; saved me from the 'who eats alone eats in sin'; and last but not least: it stepped up my hygiene. I have been careless, even reckless, having all this raw stuff without peeling or disinfecting. You really should not in (like Africa). Luckily he is more intelligent (and / or perhaps has a more sensitive stomach), which set me back on track (though I will have to keep it up now he’s not juicing with me anymore. It is more work, and I am not yet so transformed that there is no more laziness in the old bones).

This hygiene thing, plus other remarks he made (like: “It’s not cold here”), triggered something completely different in my mind. Have you ever heard of thermal auto regulation? I think that is the word but I may be wrong. I’m referring to the capacity of the human body to adjust to changes in temperature. It's a faculty most of us have lost through the use of central heating etc. Just before coming to I read about it (again), and thought I might give it a shot while staying at the ashram. Because, miraculous human body: you loose this capacity through lifelong pampering of the body, but can get it back in three months! So here I was, decided not to use my heater all winter long, but ‘forgetting’ that at the first occasion that seemed valid... I was in fact already (i) wearing my long woolen underwear - though it was really not all that cold yet -, (ii) using my eider sleeping bag with polar specification, and I had (iii) even been SLEEPING with the heater on! The only thing I could still add when the real cold weather starts was thermal underwear inside the polar sleeping bag.

My recklessness concerning amoebas and other beasties suddenly seemed very incongruous with my terror of being cold. I have faith in my body system being strong enough to endure things that have made better men and women than me really ill, but I protect myself at the first hint of cold, as if a little chilliness is sure to be the end of me. As if my body were completely unable to get over that. So, I pondered on that, and a mental shift occurred. Next day, which luckily was relatively warm (I think the Gods were helping me), I just wore my cottons. Not the woolen underwear. Not the fleece sweater & fleece jacket. Not my woolen meditation shawl. And I found out what the sturdy ones among you have always known: it is actually very nice, quite invigorating to feel a little cold and observe how your body responds, quite accurately.

So basically, what I found out is that it was not the cold that was bothering me, but my mind that at the first whiff off possible chilliness in the air would say: 'o, this is suffering, this is pain, it is cold, we HATE that, quick, do something about it'. Now, since this shift, if it is cold, my mind says: 'o it's cold', without putting on a label of pleasant or unpleasant. And I am actually enjoying it most of the time! So I use less layers of clothes, and feel better. Morning meditation I just sat in my cottons, with my meditation blanket at hand but not using it. Again, the real cold has not started yet so don’t think I am heroic. I just walked over to the Gurukulam building at the other side of the ashram, where someone has a thermometer outside his room (wearing a jacket), and saw it is 14/15 degrees Celsius, 60 Fahrenheit (at 7 in the morning).

Obviously, this is not a battle I have won once and for all. But I am aware now that when I perceive cold I tend to contract, physically and mentally. I always thought the contraction was an adequate response as the muscle tension would help warm the body. But I find notice that if I choose to relax and open up, I actually feel less cold and my body seems to react better, creating more inner heat and feeling invigorated. So, I am very pleased about this.

I am also pleased about my sitting. This morning I sat for a little over one hour, without shifting the position of my legs. I did the same a few days ago, but I am still a long shot from being able to that at any time. So, I am becoming more ambitious. Now I do not just want to sit for one hour (more still than I am doing now, because I do shift my pelvis once or twice in a sitting), preferably on a low seat (I now use two blankets that I fold so that the height of my seat is close on 20 cm.). The new ambition is to sit for an hour, absolutely still, in a proper siddhasana, which is a cross legged position in which the soul of the left foot rests against the inside of the right thigh, the right foot crosses over, soul against the left thigh, toes tucked in downward. Then you draw the toes of the left foot up between the calve and the thigh of the right leg, so that they become visible. That is the sitting posture that is most recommended for meditation in this tradition, and it is more stable than the one I do, which starts the same (soul of the left foot against the right thigh) but then with the right leg simply lying somewhere in front of the left leg.

I am also pleased about my sankalpa shakti – willpower – to moderate my food intake, and, by consequence, loosing weight. If the scales I stood on yesterday are correct, I lost 7 kilo’s in six weeks. 10 kilos in six months seems feasible… And I am convinced that I am still taking in more food than I really need, but I won’t cut down further. I normally have juice twice a day (and a lot of vegetables and fruits go into one glass of juice), and three meals a day. For breakfast there is always fruit, usually bananas or papaya. Sometimes it is all I have, because there is also ‘chai’ (black tea prepared with milk, but black tea is not good for me), piping hot milk (which I am not having right now because of my cough), bread (and plenty of toasters around) with salted butter and often a wheat based porridge kind of thing (both of which I cannot eat because I do not digest wheat well). But sometimes the porridge is rice based, which I have, and sometimes there are absolutely delicious, lightly curried very dark chick peas, and sometimes there is a yellow rice dish with vegetables and nuts in it that is served with yoghurt, really very good. And once we had a pancake kind of thing made of dal which was absolutely divine….

Lunch is rice, dal (beans or lentils), curried vegetables (you can have non spiced vegetables instead), usually a raita (a yoghurt preparation, often with cucumber in it) and raw vegetables (carrot – which is often quite red here, cucumber, and a white root the shape of a carrot but with a very different flavour, slightly bitter, I do not know what it is called. Sometimes beetroot.) Then there is chapatti of course, pancake shaped non risen bread. As I said in a former letter, the food is really excellent, so I started by putting on weight. It took some sankalpa shakti to reverse this trend, and it still does. Food is so good I am often tempted to go for second helpings.

Dinner is a light meal. There is always a soup, curried vegetables, chapatti, fruit (a delicious small round brownish thing called Chiku, or apple, or mandarin. Apples are not so very good here), and hot milk which I try not to take in the evening because it is mucus forming.

For lunch and dinner there is ‘food service’: we take turns serving the food (and cleaning up the dining hall afterwards). This is VERY nice to do, but it has the disadvantage that you do not control how much you get on your plate. It is said that what fits into your two cupped hands is sufficient food. I take this to be per meal, and it obviously does not hold if you are doing heavy labor, but for our modern day sedentary life probably once a day what fits into your cupped hands would suffice! We use stainless steel partitioned plates, and there are lots of little bowls you can take if you for the more soupy dishes. I usually have rice and the raw vegetables served directly on the plate, and dal, vegetables and raita into 3 little bowls.

I was choosing the smallest bowls, and thought I was doing quite well on the two cupped hands thing. Then one day it was cold and I took the dal into my cupped hands, and found that this one bowl by itself it filled them. Hmmmm. So in fact, every meal I was having three to four times the amount that fits into my cupped hands, on top of the juices I was having twice a day… Plus sometimes going back for second helpings. No wonder I was putting on weight. So I decided to try to bring back the quantity per meal to something closer to the contents of my two cupped hands (on top of the juices). Not easy. You can say you just want a little bit, most people will just fill up your bowl. So I went to the market and bought the sweetest little serving bowls you can imagine: 2 small ones and one really cute baby one. The two bigger ones together probably fill two cupped hands, so for lunch I still get a bit of an overdose, but I am eating less than half of what I was eating before, and feeling good.

Gosh, there is so much I still want to write about. It will have to wait for a new letter (or perhaps it will just fade away), because for now it is ENOUGH (I hope not TOO MUCH…). Know that I am doing well, and that I love you all,


Dear friends and loved ones,

Monday December 4 was World Group Meditation (WGM). For those who do not know of this: every full moon day, at different times a day so as to cover the world’s time zones, Swami Veda sits in meditation with whoever would like to sit with him. So his disciples and students but also people who don’t know him but are interested in meditation sit at the same time. Group meditation is more powerful than sitting alone, particularly when you are sitting with an advanced meditator. It can be done sitting at the same place but you can also decide on a common time and sit at different places.

I am so conditioned by WGM being in the evening (at 20.00 or 21.00) that I missed the first one (November 5), because here in India it is at 7 in the morning. I went to morning meditation (5 to 6) and then back to my cottage to work. I noticed my concentration was high and I got a lot done… I decided to make up by sitting at one of the other time zone times. So at 17.30 I sat at the Shiva Linga (which I described in an earlier letter). Though already November, there were still lots of mosquitoes and 17.30 is clearly their active time. But I was determined to sit, and I held for almost three quarters of an hour (on a chair, I could not sit that long on the floor yet then). Then I admitted defeat; my mind was becoming increasingly kshiptam, ‘thrown about’, which is much worse than vikshiptam, ‘distracted from your object of meditation’. I retired to my cottage where I completed the last 15 minutes. I felt quite content about my effort, but shortly afterwards learnt it was nothing...

There's a Chilean staying at the ashram who, for six years now, has been living under a Tibetan Buddhist master somewhere up in the mountains. He is in silence most of the time, but on Swami Veda’s request he broke his silence one night to talk to us about Tibetan Buddhism. Through our questions, his talk focused on the 3 year retreat he had started off with. I thought I was doing a fairly serious practice, but his description makes this ashram sound like a holiday camp. In the first approximately 18 months, you get up at 2 in the morning and chant mantras until 7. Breakfast, then chant till 12. Lunch, then chant again + other practices till dinner, at 19.00. Evening is for study. Luckily, the next 18 months are more leisurely. Then you only get up at 4 in the morning...

Fairly at the beginning part of the retreat, there are 100.000 prostrations to be done in a limited period of time, complete with visualization and mantra. You gradually build up capacity, and towards the end he would do 2.500 to 3.500 per day. I am not tempted by such a ‘severe’ retreat, but I deeply admire the focus it takes and that it creates / strengthens. Also, I think partly as a result of these practices, he has this warm smile and you feel a very gentle, quiet kind of inner purpose. One of the people you meet and instantly feel comfortable with, whose presence gives a sense of joy.

Of a different nature, but equally fascinating: we had a dancer from Italy staying here for some time. Towards the end of her stay, she gave a talk on ‘cosmic dance’ as well as a number of dancing classes. It was wonderful. She does a kind of fusion of modern dance, jazz, classical Indian, traditional Japanese and she enumerated numerous other inspirations and styles she had practiced in depth. She taught us a tiny bit of it, explaining the yantras (geometrical forms) created in space by the dance, the upward, downward and outward energy flows, the grounding, the air… Unfortunately she could only give three classes before leaving (one of which I missed because it was announced late and I did not know about it in time), but she will be back and said we would continue. She uses dance for healing, working with severely depressed people, with handicapped people, etc., with apparently wonderful results.

I think I mentioned in my last letter that I was making fruit and vegetable juices. It seemed to do me good, but then it became colder and these cold juices just did not seem like the right thing anymore. I stopped making them, and within a few days had bronchitis... So I was in a dilemma, until I had the brilliant idea of mixing in some hot water. With this improvement, I am happily juicing again, and feeling better then I have for a long time. Also, for the bronchitis, I took someone's advice and started using the heater at night. Just for a few nights. The bronchitis went away, though I still have a lingering cough.

For a few days I have had a 'juicing partner' which has been very good on more than one account. Like: very good company; saved me from the 'who eats alone eats in sin'; and last but not least: it stepped up my hygiene. I have been careless, even reckless, having all this raw stuff without peeling or disinfecting. You really should not in India (like Africa). Luckily he is more intelligent (and / or perhaps has a more sensitive stomach), which set me back on track (though I will have to keep it up now he’s not juicing with me anymore. It is more work, and I am not yet so transformed that there is no more laziness in the old bones).

This hygiene thing, plus other remarks he made (like: “It’s not cold here”), triggered something completely different in my mind. Have you ever heard of thermal auto regulation? I think that is the word but I may be wrong. I’m referring to the capacity of the human body to adjust to changes in temperature. It's a faculty most of us have lost through the use of central heating etc. Just before coming to India I read about it (again), and thought I might give it a shot while staying at the ashram. Because, miraculous human body: you loose this capacity through lifelong pampering of the body, but can get it back in three months! So here I was, decided not to use my heater all winter long, but ‘forgetting’ that at the first occasion that seemed valid... I was in fact already (i) wearing my long woolen underwear - though it was really not all that cold yet -, (ii) using my eider sleeping bag with polar specification, and I had (iii) even been SLEEPING with the heater on! The only thing I could still add when the real cold weather starts was thermal underwear inside the polar sleeping bag.

My recklessness concerning amoebas and other beasties suddenly seemed very incongruous with my terror of being cold. I have faith in my body system being strong enough to endure things that have made better men and women than me really ill, but I protect myself at the first hint of cold, as if a little chilliness is sure to be the end of me. As if my body were completely unable to get over that. So, I pondered on that, and a mental shift occurred. Next day, which luckily was relatively warm (I think the Gods were helping me), I just wore my cottons. Not the woolen underwear. Not the fleece sweater & fleece jacket. Not my woolen meditation shawl. And I found out what the sturdy ones among you have always known: it is actually very nice, quite invigorating to feel a little cold and observe how your body responds, quite accurately.

So basically, what I found out is that it was not the cold that was bothering me, but my mind that at the first whiff off possible chilliness in the air would say: 'o, this is suffering, this is pain, it is cold, we HATE that, quick, do something about it'. Now, since this shift, if it is cold, my mind says: 'o it's cold', without putting on a label of pleasant or unpleasant. And I am actually enjoying it most of the time! So I use less layers of clothes, and feel better. Morning meditation I just sat in my cottons, with my meditation blanket at hand but not using it. Again, the real cold has not started yet so don’t think I am heroic. I just walked over to the Gurukulam building at the other side of the ashram, where someone has a thermometer outside his room (wearing a jacket), and saw it is 14/15 degrees Celsius, 60 Fahrenheit (at 7 in the morning).

Obviously, this is not a battle I have won once and for all. But I am aware now that when I perceive cold I tend to contract, physically and mentally. I always thought the contraction was an adequate response as the muscle tension would help warm the body. But I find notice that if I choose to relax and open up, I actually feel less cold and my body seems to react better, creating more inner heat and feeling invigorated. So, I am very pleased about this.

I am also pleased about my sitting. This morning I sat for a little over one hour, without shifting the position of my legs. I did the same a few days ago, but I am still a long shot from being able to that at any time. So, I am becoming more ambitious. Now I do not just want to sit for one hour (more still than I am doing now, because I do shift my pelvis once or twice in a sitting), preferably on a low seat (I now use two blankets that I fold so that the height of my seat is close on 20 cm.). The new ambition is to sit for an hour, absolutely still, in a proper siddhasana, which is a cross legged position in which the soul of the left foot rests against the inside of the right thigh, the right foot crosses over, soul against the left thigh, toes tucked in downward. Then you draw the toes of the left foot up between the calve and the thigh of the right leg, so that they become visible. That is the sitting posture that is most recommended for meditation in this tradition, and it is more stable than the one I do, which starts the same (soul of the left foot against the right thigh) but then with the right leg simply lying somewhere in front of the left leg.

I am also pleased about my sankalpa shakti – willpower – to moderate my food intake, and, by consequence, loosing weight. If the scales I stood on yesterday are correct, I lost 7 kilo’s in six weeks. 10 kilos in six months seems feasible… And I am convinced that I am still taking in more food than I really need, but I won’t cut down further. I normally have juice twice a day (and a lot of vegetables and fruits go into one glass of juice), and three meals a day. For breakfast there is always fruit, usually bananas or papaya. Sometimes it is all I have, because there is also ‘chai’ (black tea prepared with milk, but black tea is not good for me), piping hot milk (which I am not having right now because of my cough), bread (and plenty of toasters around) with salted butter and often a wheat based porridge kind of thing (both of which I cannot eat because I do not digest wheat well). But sometimes the porridge is rice based, which I have, and sometimes there are absolutely delicious, lightly curried very dark chick peas, and sometimes there is a yellow rice dish with vegetables and nuts in it that is served with yoghurt, really very good. And once we had a pancake kind of thing made of dal which was absolutely divine….

Lunch is rice, dal (beans or lentils), curried vegetables (you can have non spiced vegetables instead), usually a raita (a yoghurt preparation, often with cucumber in it) and raw vegetables (carrot – which is often quite red here, cucumber, and a white root the shape of a carrot but with a very different flavour, slightly bitter, I do not know what it is called. Sometimes beetroot.) Then there is chapatti of course, pancake shaped non risen bread. As I said in a former letter, the food is really excellent, so I started by putting on weight. It took some sankalpa shakti to reverse this trend, and it still does. Food is so good I am often tempted to go for second helpings.

Dinner is a light meal. There is always a soup, curried vegetables, chapatti, fruit (a delicious small round brownish thing called Chiku, or apple, or mandarin. Apples are not so very good here), and hot milk which I try not to take in the evening because it is mucus forming.

For lunch and dinner there is ‘food service’: we take turns serving the food (and cleaning up the dining hall afterwards). This is VERY nice to do, but it has the disadvantage that you do not control how much you get on your plate. It is said that what fits into your two cupped hands is sufficient food. I take this to be per meal, and it obviously does not hold if you are doing heavy labor, but for our modern day sedentary life probably once a day what fits into your cupped hands would suffice! We use stainless steel partitioned plates, and there are lots of little bowls you can take if you for the more soupy dishes. I usually have rice and the raw vegetables served directly on the plate, and dal, vegetables and raita into 3 little bowls.

I was choosing the smallest bowls, and thought I was doing quite well on the two cupped hands thing. Then one day it was cold and I took the dal into my cupped hands, and found that this one bowl by itself it filled them. Hmmmm. So in fact, every meal I was having three to four times the amount that fits into my cupped hands, on top of the juices I was having twice a day… Plus sometimes going back for second helpings. No wonder I was putting on weight. So I decided to try to bring back the quantity per meal to something closer to the contents of my two cupped hands (on top of the juices). Not easy. You can say you just want a little bit, most people will just fill up your bowl. So I went to the market and bought the sweetest little serving bowls you can imagine: 2 small ones and one really cute baby one. The two bigger ones together probably fill two cupped hands, so for lunch I still get a bit of an overdose, but I am eating less than half of what I was eating before, and feeling good.

Gosh, there is so much I still want to write about. It will have to wait for a new letter (or perhaps it will just fade away), because for now it is ENOUGH (I hope not TOO MUCH…). Know that I am doing well, and that I love you all,

Sonia