See Calendar of Events for full 2008 schedule of retreats.

For more details please contact

Sarah Dykins retreats@himalayaninstitute.org.uk

CHIGWELL MAY 2008

The Himalayan Institute in London is very small by comparison to the vast organisation in US which produces the excellent magazine Yoga + Joyful Living. But the advantage of being small is that when it comes to the annual week long retreat at Domus Mariae convent in Chigwell at the end of May each year, it is more or less the same 45 people who come each year, so it feels like a kind of international family reunion. International, because only about half of the people are from England and the rest of us are sprinklings from Scotland, Wales, Holland, Belgium, Finland, France, Norway, Iran, Poland and USA. And family because, although I may not remember every name and life circumstance, there is that comfortable familiarity of being together with those you have laughed and cried with and a strong air of acceptance:
Saha nau bhunaktu as we chant in the prayers that begin the day.

So I am faced with an almost Arjuna type dilemma in sitting down to write: Do I share the secret of how enjoyable and helpful the week is? (I want to shout it from the roof tops and let everyone know how joyful life can be with the help of meditation and asana and yamas and niyamas) Or do I keep it quiet so the small cosy feel can stay that way?

We are so lucky to have Rolf Sovik coming over from USA to lead the retreat and his wife, Mary-Gail. Each year is different, yet the same, and totally inspiring. When I came home this year one of my students said he had never seen me looking so happy, so whether that was purely the glow of the retreat or whether I was just feeling happy to be alive, I’m not sure. My 20 year old car with 230,000 miles on the clock had just waited until I had finished driving 25 miles at 70 mph with other cars behind me and the bolt had sheered on the track which leads to my house so I wasn’t going fast when the suspension went and everything under the bonnet landed on the road with a terminal thud.

We start the day at 6am with prayer chanting and meditation and an asana class till breakfast at 8am. There can’t be a better way to start a day and I always do it at home but at home my mind is usually in a hurry. Under Rolf’s kapha-comforting instruction both body and mind slow down and just do the practice.

This year we studied the Bhagavad Gita in the slot between 9.15am and tea break at 10.45 and in the evenings. My mind wrestled with the seeming impossibility of ever having a detached, calm, peaceful sattvic response to anything so full as I am of rajas: I am doing all the time – teaching, taking the dog for a walk, gardening, cooking, doing things for the kids, cleaning, shopping – I rarely sit down unless full of tamas, exhausted, heavy, tired. But I know the retreat had an effect. At Euston station on the way home to Scotland, when I missed my train by two minutes, and the one an hour later (which wasn’t anyway stopping at Lockerbie was cancelled due to “a fatality on the line”),and the one an hour after that was three quarters of an hour late leaving and did have a fully stocked buffet car but “no one qualified” to serve tea and sandwiches, I genuinely had no preference whether I was on one train or the other, or whether I had tea or not, or whether I got home in four hours or eight hours. Could that possibly have been my first ever sattvic response to anything!!! (Which I have just spoilt by getting excited about the prospect!)

In the late mornings we had a period of meditation, building on the practice we started last year at this time of day and free to get up and leave when we liked. Each day we focussed on a different aspect of meditation.

Lunch and dinner were exercises in brahmacharya, self-restraint, which I fear I failed owing to the extreme temptation of delicious three course vegetarian meals, heavy on comfort foods like soups and rice pudding and crumbles and custard and strawberries and cream and the caring loving touch of baskets of chocolates on the stairway corners left by the nuns who were obviously nurturing our svadisthana chakras by encouraging us to taste the sweetness of life.

In the free time after lunch it was good to go and walk in the nearby park and ancient woodland – amazingly peaceful considering Chigwell is within the M25 boundary – and challenging for those with no sense of direction to find the way out again. One day Krishna in the guise of Catriona distracted Catherine and I on our way back by standing contemplating on the corner where we should have turned, so we missed the path back and went deeper into uncharted territory of brambles. I was carrying on anyway fighting through the brambles sure it would get us back eventually and Catherine had to persuade me to turn back and take the easy well trodden path which worked. Just like life, I thought, you learn to know yourself better when you meditate. What did Swami Rama say? Meditation gives you something nothing else can give you: it introduces you to yourself.

At 4pm we split into two groups having Sanskrit lessons with John for one hour and asana with Rolf for the other hour. John Howell is the principal of the Himalayan Institute in Ealing and tackled us with typical flair and perseverance.

John and Ania at the bookstall

After finding Sanskrit so challenging last year I had bought Isobel Glover’s home learning course on Sanskrit. I am sorry to say it hadn’t been looked at for a very long time and I didn’t get beyond the fourth exercise working on my own, but I was surprised how much must have gone in. I managed to remember at least how to use the alphabet sheets to find the translation for the first four Sutras and to write my name in Sanskrit. This was satisfying, even if, when Rolf was giving us eye exercises during the last asana session and he asked us to write the letters kha and cha with our eyes, I couldn’t begin to remember what they looked like!

Days finished as they had started with prayers and meditation. Long satisfying days.
I am looking forward to next year’s renewal.

With grateful thanks to Jackie Le Broq for this account