Spiritual Journey

By Abby Wiseman [coordinating editor]

It’s a balmy evening in October 2010, and Alex Tegart is radiating with excitement because Swami Vivekananda, a teacher from the Agama yoga school in Thailand, is speaking at a small Vancouver yoga studio.

A large enough crowd gathers in front of the inconspicuous studio that the bartender from the pub next door pokes his head out to see what’s going on.

Inside the studio, it’s hot and crowded with hardly a place to sit. Tegart finds a spot in the front and automatically folds herself into a lotus pose, a kind of cross-legged position. A quick glance around is enough to gauge that the demographics of the room is 20-40 year-olds, eager to listen to the Swami speak about hot chocolate and blowjobs, and the philosophies around tantric yoga and sexuality.

The Swami comes out behind a curtained room and positions himself in a lotus pose on a cushion. He surveys the room, recognizing a few people, and then he speaks. His voice is loud and clear and definite. He doesn’t appear to be self-conscious in his bright orange Kurta Pyjamas, and he doesn’t stumble on his words or lose track of his thoughts. He doesn’t stop talking for three hours and all the while his eyes light up with sincere joy. Tegart is attentive, as if the three hours of sitting in a hot room and on hard floor doesn’t phase her. When he finishes speaking, she gets up and makes eye contact with the Swami, who looks on her with recognition and happiness, and they both do a little bow to each other.

Tegart was suppose to arrive at the Gaya train station during daylight hours, but like all things when travelling, that didn’t go quite as planned. Instead, she arrived at India’s most dangerous train station, where the murders and rapes are common, late at night.

It’s 2007 and she was foreign and female, which basically made her rickshaw meat. Switching into survivor mode, she knew she needed to get to Bodhgaya; she needed to get there alive or relatively undamaged, and she was only going to pay 70 Rupees.

Using her instincts she followed a man who made eye contact and offered her hundreds less than the others.

She rode the 13-kilometre trek from Gaya to Bodhgaya, a sacred pilgrimage sight in the Bihar State of Northeastern India, making peace with the fact that she might die enroute or kidnapped by her driver. Then dust gave way to a sea of red cloaked Tibetan monks and Tegart was delivered to the Bodhgaya meditation centre.

Seconds after arriving at the centres gates, she was greeted by the meditation teacher, who invited her to the Mahabodhi temple where the Bodhi tree resided; the tree under-which Buddha sat. Tegart joined the procession of monks and walked in a slow circle around the temple for an hour thinking to herself “this is crazy.”

In Mick Brown’s travel novel The Spiritual Tourist, he writes “the spiritual search, whatever that may mean- has become a dominant feature of late twentieth century life: a symptom of collective uncertainty, in an age when there are no longer jobs for life and the traditional institutions of church, family and community appear to be breaking down.”

This is illustrated in the Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel Eat, Pray, Love, which follows Gilbert’s journey to spiritual enlightenment from pizzerias in Rome, to an ashram in India, and then to a ninth-generation medicine-man in Bali. The book was a phenom; ordained by Oprah, adopted by disillusioned western women and characterised by Julia Roberts in a feature film.

It seems that the idea of spirituality through eastern philosophies has struck a chord with  North Americans and many have made the trek to the East to find that something, which is missing in their Western lives.

Tegart had finished two years journalism school when she felt the need for a mental break. She moved back to her home town of Golden, B.C. and worked. There the 22-year-old and her friend, armed with a Lonely Planet travel guide, decided to travel Thailand and decompress.

Avoiding the backpacker track, Tegart and her friend hung out in fishing villages where they were often the only foreigners, besides the men who frequented Thailand’s fervent sex-tourism industry.

Along the way Tegart learned about the Agama yoga school in Koh Phangan, an island off of the coast southeast Thailand. Intrigued, she continued to travel through Laos and Vietnam. When tension worsened between her and her travel-mate. Tegart packed her bags, hell-bent to get Koh Phangan.

Tegart made it to the school and coincidentally arrived on the first day of a month-long introductory course into yogic philosophies and practices such as Kundalini, Hatha and Tantra.

For four weeks Tegart did six hours of yoga per day, followed an intensive physical purification regiment that included a strict diet of brown rice for 10 days, tongue scraping, eye-washing, and the unusual method of throwing up a litre of water in the morning called Vamanadhouti.

“Doing six hours of yoga a day, you go through a spectrum of emotions,” said Tegart. “Your sitting and you can’t go anywhere. Your there with your feet over your head, and it’s just you and your head.”

The experience wasn’t all physical and she found the philosophical readings she explored connected with some of her pre-existing beliefs.

The Agama schools teachings are based on the basic yoga philosophy that everything in the universe is energy. People have pathways of energy running through them, which can be concentrated, stored and used for personal development. The outcome of this alignment and control of energy is to find ones identity or “true centre” as Agama’s website explains it.

These philosophies have become popular enough with North Americans that yoga retreats catering to westerners have popped up all across Thailand, offering spiritual enlightenment for 6,900 Baht, or C$244.

At the end of the four weeks Tegart felt purified, but not quite fulfilled. She was craving something more meditative than physical and since all the teachings came from India, she decided that’s where she needed to be.

The airport in Calcutta didn’t feel like an airport to Tegart, there wasn’t really security, the baggage carousels were from the ‘40s and taxi drivers aggressively vied for her business.

She aligned with two Italian women and made it to Sudder Street, which is the backpacker district, and as Tegart found out, the panhandler district.

In Calcutta,Tegart continued her yoga and meditation, but also devoted her time to the Mother Theresa Missionaries of Charity.

Thirty women would congregate in an open-air compound to wash soiled sheets in large basins. The compound was for women who were shunned from society. Many were victims of an Indian practice called wife burning.

“I felt that the volunteering is what kept me sane there,” said Tegart. “Otherwise, if I’m not with the people and hanging out and talking, I feel very disconnected from it. I feel like a tourist, like an observer.”

Tegart remembers Calcutta in colours and cows. Red, blues, greens, purples and the insanity of watching a sheep sacrificed in honour of Kali, the goddess of time; being pushed through temple thresholds by Brahmans who blessed her with a red dot on her forehead; burnt women and shitty sheets, but always vivid colours and cows. After two weeks, it was time to move on and made the journey to Bodhgaya; to the dodgy train station in Gaya and then to the Mahabodhi temple where she circled the temple with a procession of Buddhist monks.

She spent the first 10 days in Bodhgaya in silence at a Thai Buddhist Monestary. The first day of her meditation practice Tegart was met with two great challenges: (1) she had a parasite and was extremely ill. And (2) there was a holy man sitting behind her blowing his nose, chewing gum and listening to loud music with headphones; basically being the most annoying person on earth, which caused Tegart to question his holiness.

“He was there probably to help me with my practice,” said Tegart.

Tegart did two meditation retreats in a row and then made her way to Dharmsala in the Himalayas with a group, studying with the Dalai Lama.

She learned that groups of westerners would travel in packs from retreat to retreat in a sort of seekers bubble. After three months of meditation practice, she realised that this alternative community segregated from rest of the world, was not the path she wanted to take and it was time to re-enter the west.

“Oh my god would I love to do three hours of yoga a day, but living in the West and having a job and school, it’s just not reasonable,” Tegart said. Instead, she brings her practice to her daily life and tries to remember to be present and mindful in every moment.