IT Gypsy Diaries

For many years I have wanted to do yoga, but I have never really gotten started due to lots of various reasons. I tried Bikram yoga in Malmö since Tugba practiced there and I liked it due to the challenge of practicing in 40 degrees centigrade. In the end it wasn’t really my kind of yoga and the challenge don’t bring you back day after day, you need something more.

Let me start by telling you about all those years back when I the first time thought about starting to do yoga. I was traveling around in South-east Asia, at this time I was at a place called Pulau Perhentian in Malaysia, relaxing away on the beautiful beach. During the days I was hanging out with some people, playing beach volley ball and talking.

One early morning I met this guy from this group and I casually asked what he was up doing this early. The conversation went something like this…. It’s ten years back so I don’t remember the exact phrases.
- I was out on those cliffs out there, he said pointing at a stony area sticking quite far out into the sea.
- What where you doing there? I said.
- Just climbing and sitting there thinking.
- You’re a climber? Are there any ropes and stuff there?
- No I just climb…

I had been over there, but without climbing, since the vertical cliffs were probably 10 meters high with a lot of shallow stones in the water just below. So a fall from there was like russian roulette with bad odds if you were alone like he was… So at this moment he had my attention

- What if you fall? I reacted like I think most people would have done in this situation.
- I don’t fall.
- How can you be so sure?
- Well, when I climb I never move a hand or a foot until I am 100% sure that I will not lose my grip.
That’s smart I thought As long as you are 100% sure your totally safe then…
- I feel like there is a field around me lifting me upwards, he continued and showed with his hands and body how this field helped him.
- Wow, that’s cool, I might have said, don’t remember…
Then he went on by saying that he got this mental confidence and strength from doing yoga for ten years. He practiced for an hour every morning, even now during his holiday. Since then I have now and then been thinking about starting to do yoga, and finally I got a golden opportunity.

Tugbas ‘requirement’ to go to India was that we find a yoga studio and go and practice there five times per week. I wasn’t so excited about practicing that much, but I really wanted to go to India so of course I said yes! At this time the meeting with this guy in Malaysia didn’t come up in my mind, yoga was for me only a physical exercise not one for the mind, but how wrong I was.

Anyways, we came to India, found our apartment and started searching for yoga places. There was a few to be found on the internet, fortunately one was not to far away from the place we lived. We called up to ask for the schedule of the classes, but no matter how much we asked we were told to just come after four o’clock whenever we felt like it… Ok, we thought, feeling like you feel when you can’t put the pieces together… The version of yoga that we were familiar with was based on classes. The classes started at certain times, there was a teacher in front of the class, that showed how everything was done and everyone did the same poses at the same time and during the same time.

It was mighty hard to find the yoga center the first time, but luckily we got help by a woman that instead of showing us the yoga invited us to her family’s house for tea and snacks. That is another story so I’ll leave it there for now. Finally she showed us the center and we met the yoga teacher Rajakrishna, an older man with a white beard dressed in orange clothes with friendly eyes and an extremely relaxed way of talking and moving around. We talked a bit and decided that we should come back tomorrow for our first class.

The first class was nothing like we had expected. We came there and he started asking us a lot of questions about how we felt, if we had any injuries and things like that. Finally we were about to start, so we waited for instructions, but none came. Instead he asked us to show how we usually warm up for the yoga that we did in Sweden. So we started and did what we knew from back home. After that he started showing us the poses, or asanas with the stress on the first letter like they call them here. He showed us in our pace and on our level. We were moving forward in a slow tempo, we had a lot of time.

After the first class I really felt that this was the kind of yoga that I wanted to do, in my own pace, no stress by others and practically a private teacher since we came a lot earlier than the others. Tugba wasn’t as sure, since she wanted the group energy that you get from people that practice together and do things in synchrony. We decided to come back the next day, and after the second or third class she felt the same way as I did. This way of doing yoga was much better than what we were used to. The weeks passed by and soon months.

Early on we had said that we’ll practice with Rajakrishna until January and then we’ll try another place, but by that time we really felt that this was as good as it gets and that there was no reason to go anywhere else. He is really an amazing person and without him these yoga classes would have been something completely different.

Each yoga session is ended with relaxation, pranayama (breathing exercises), meditation and finally a discussion with Rajakrishna. We usually talk about how the meditation have gone, how we have felt, what we have experienced and what we can do to improve it and become better. This end of the yoga sessions are the mind-side of yoga, and that is what I like the most about it and what I lacked the most in Sweden. In the west we have never learned that yoga is something more than a physical exercise, when the physical exercise is actually just a means to an end. The end is the meditation and for religious people the finding and becoming of God. Yes, you read it right! He explains that when you see God, you get infinite knowledge and wisdom, then you realize that you are one with God and then you actually become God. I am not religious so I make my own secular interpretations of the parts I find meaningful to me.

As I am writing this we only have one yoga class left before our flight will take us back home to Sweden. I never expected the yoga and the yoga teacher to be the thing that I will miss the most in India, but it already is even before actually leaving! The yoga started as something I had to do since I had promised Tugba, but it ended as the highlight of the day close to my heart!

[Show as slideshow]

We’ve been tensed all weekend about how to confront her. This is not a situation anyone wants to be in. We fought with what’s right and wrong, but we decided that we have to do it otherwise it wouldn’t feel good. I’m talking about our maid that we really liked a lot. To have a maid sounds like true luxury, and trust me in a lot of ways it is, but here it doesn’t cost much, everyone with a decent income can hire one.

The rumor spread pretty fast when we moved in so several people knocked on our door, an ironing man, maids, newspaper guy. Seetha was one of them, she knew English well, but at the time we already had another maid that came to us and cleaned three times a week. We grow tired of her quite fast, since she never came on time, which made us late for other things. I told her to be here at 1 o’clock, she nodded (in Indian style by shaking the head from side to side) and said yes yes yes…. but shows up at 2 o’clock. It goes on like this three times a week for a few weeks until we’re really tired of it. Even telling her that we will find a new maid if she keeps coming late didn’t help, so the last time she was late we paid and fired her! What a relief it was

We call Seetha and ask if she is still interested in working as a maid for us. She comes on time the next day and what a difference, a real pearl. She smiles, works hard, makes incredible food for us and explains every dish that she makes. Three times a week we eat a five course lunch which is even better than what we usually get in restaurants in town, the other days we can eat the left-overs. We were so happy with her that we wanted to help her after she told us that her husband was sick and couldn’t work. She had two children, one of them also had some problems. We paid her really well and always gave her something extra every time she was here.

A few weeks passed. Last Tuesday we took out money and put it in the “safety box”. On Wednesday when I was going to pay her I realized that some money was missing. I don’t think we would have found it out if we hadn’t taken out money the day before. The thing is we didn’t want to believe it, we liked her so much that we were ready to forget it. She was just desperate we thought. When she came on saturday I told Jonas I don’t care if she did it or not. We both didn’t until I caught her looking in my bag in the bedroom. I didn’t know what to do, she pretended to try my bag on and show it to me. My heart just broke down to pieces because a couple of minutes ago we were discussing how we can help her maybe a Christmas present We let her live without confronting her.

We worked in the weekend trying to forget what happened and what we have to do on Monday. It wasn’t easy to decide what to do, and how to do it. For us it wasn’t obvious to confront her, after all the money is worth much more for her than for us, but it wasn’t about money, it was about breaking the trust and how she could dare to do it while we were in the next room. Finally we decided that we have to confront her, fire her and force her to pay the money back. Like an Indian guy that we met in Malmö said “In India you shouldn’t think with your heart”, it easier said than done.

On Monday we prepared our iPhone with a sound recorder so we would get her confession on tape. She comes all bubbly and happy, how were we going to do it? We told her to sit down in the couch because we had something important to tell her. First she tried to pretend she didn’t understand what we were saying, trying to understand it as it had something with her salary to do. When we said the magic word police, she admitted stealing the money that was missing from Wednesday. We gave her two days to pay it back. Tomorrow morning is the day she agreed to come. It was the hardest thing to do for us, to see her crying, begging… We still don’t know what is right and what is not. Yes it’s unacceptable to use our trust to steal but she is really poor and isn’t the money creating more happiness with her than with us?