A Yogini's Guide to India

Welcome, so today I have the privilege of sitting with my dear friend Ushi Gipson and Ushi and I met over 10 years ago in Ojai at Lulu Bandhas where we were both teaching and practicing yoga and for the last eight years she's been living in Varanasi, India and we all miss her so much but she comes back to visit us so thank you for being here. Thank you Alana. Yeah, she works with women in India outside of Varanasi in the villages and she also leads pilgrimages to India and about three years ago I had the opportunity to visit her in her home in India and to join her on a pilgrimage so I'm so grateful that she's here today and one of the questions I want to explore is how does the Western woman even approach or travel to India? Thanks Alana, it's an honor to be here with you, I'm so grateful. Women traveling to India is a big, big question and in the last few years with the press this has become a big topic of concern for women is how do I travel to India safely?

Just in brief I would say that you need to be strong as a goddess and really cultivate your skills and cultivate your skills of boundary setting and fierceness. You'll notice on the streets of India that women are very clear about their boundaries and if they're approached they often are very stern to those approaching them. So setting boundaries is really key. In these clips we've talked a bit about Namaste and saying Namaste and setting boundaries and the physical contact between people because in India there is a whole different set of rules than there are here in the West. You don't embrace people upon meeting them or even with someone that you know, you're very clear about your personal boundaries and so keeping that clear as a woman alone and also being very clear when someone treats you in an inappropriate way will help keep you safe.

I also really, really stress the fact that you shouldn't take risks. As a woman don't go out after eight o'clock at night or eight thirty, you know. There are places in India where it's a bit more casual and relaxed and there are a lot of Westerners there in Mysore or in Goa or in Rishikesh. You have people who've come with this joint purpose of practicing yoga and learning together and so there is a bit of a more relaxed atmosphere there. But in general, in India, I would say just listen to your intuition, avoid taking risks and just really stay grounded.

Can you give us an example in your experience of when you set a boundary? Yes. Gosh, there's so many examples, so many examples. The first time that I went back to India to start my business of working with women, I was completely alone and this was a huge, huge adventure for me on so many levels and the setting of boundaries was something that I was unaccustomed to. I was used to being kind and just being very open and this is something that can be dangerous because you can be very easily taken advantage of and I think that it's very important to learn that you also are supported by the society.

So in one case in particular, I was on the street and as I had started to understand the Hindi language, I heard a man say something very inappropriate about me as I passed him and the moment that I heard it, I turned around and I shouted at him and I said, no, you do not speak about me this way and the moment that I raised my voice, I was totally aware of how the people that were there and present were right behind me in support of me. So don't be afraid to use your voice and be fierce, fierce like a goddess. Now there can be something thrilling about traveling alone, thrilling or terrifying. What would your advice be, traveling alone versus traveling as a group and how is that different based on what you've experienced in seeing leading groups? Leading groups, I would say the first big thing is to surrender to your leader.

It's really hard to not want to insert what you think it should be or how you think it should be and there is an adjustment period for the first few days of how people find their rhythm of how to be with these others that probably they don't know how to travel together in this new place and how to enjoy their time and also take the space that they need because in a group setting you have a lot of sharing and sometimes you listen a lot to what someone else's experience is and you don't have enough space to really drop into what yours is. Can you talk about upon arriving to India, in my experience there's layers of seeing. If you saw everything at once it might be completely overwhelming. So what have you observed when you bring people to India in your own experience about these layers of seeing things? Oh gosh, well this is something I absolutely love about India and it's something I emphasize to my guests and to my friends which is to really start to drop in and become more and more sensitive of these layers.

In the West we're so used to taking many things at face value and just assuming that that's the way it is but there is this term Maya, the illusion and you move through a set of illusions in India of what is real, what is not real, what is no longer real and then what becomes beautiful, what is painful and it's these layers of what you're ready to be revealed to you, what you're ready for. This includes what you're ready for, seeing in yourself. So the layers and this observation in India is an incredible opportunity of dropping in to a new type of practice, witnessing yourself as you move through and you observe and you see these layers and you'll notice things as you drop in that you didn't every day you'll notice something new that you didn't the day before maybe it's a woman camped on the side of the road with her children or a chai walla who has this steaming humongous pot of chai or it might be a fruit seller selling the most beautiful papayas you've ever seen. So I've talked a bit about charting in the clips that we've shared and I think that charting this experience so that you can also really track your layers of seeing is just really important. Now with India there's such a juxtaposition, you have life and you have death right beside each other or sometimes you know just you're not sure what is life and what is it but it's right there together and you've used the word melting pot.

And so when confronted with death and poverty and filth and trash and you know how does one in your experience when you're feeling overwhelmed or you're confronted by something that's uncomfortable it brings something up for you what are some tools or ways to ground and center when one feels like triggered by what they encounter? I think that death is probably the biggest difficult kind of thing that people from the West face when they get to India because death is lived so much in the open in India. I'll never forget hosting a group on a boat down the Ganges and as we crossed under the Kashi Station Bridge which is this huge train bridge there's an area where they drop a lot of bodies into the Ganges of people who can't afford to be cremated and as we were coming this way in the boat we were slowly drifting so that people could experience this. There was a boat that had launched off from the Ganges shore of Varanasi into the middle of the river and it had a body that was swathed in white cloth on it and I could just feel the intensity of the group as to like wow that's a dead body and then with just the most incredible exquisite beauty everybody was experiencing this body. I said hey everybody look to the left and from the opposite bank a boat had lodged with a wedding couple who was on their way across the Ganges to take the blessing of the temple that was there and there was a bride fully dressed in red and gold in her groom looking very proud and just this juxtaposition of death and life just passing each other like this in that moment was right there in front of our face.

I think that this dropping in to just allowing yourself to see and really there's a practice of witnessing that happens where you have to reground yourself so pausing where you are, taking a long exhale, straightening your back and straightening your spine so you feel strong from your feet to your crown and then observing what's happening and allowing your heart to feel, allowing your belly to feel and your head to guide you so but this is just one of the greatest gifts that India can give us which is this experience of life and death and I feel that to see it in this way and to be when you arrive and your heart is open and you're set up to absorb the experience and witness yourself because the self-witnessing is actually much more difficult than seeing a corpse or seeing poverty or seeing fear or any of the things that you see I think when you start to witness your own emotions that want to come up that's what's scary and that's where you also need the most grounding. I just remember when we were together in the chaos of the rickshaws and you know just being out on the gots when we would sit down for tea we would drink chai or sit down for a meal it was like oh just taking a moment to rest inside and savoring those sweet moments of rest and finding that ease within the chaos of everything through the breath it became such a practice. That's why I tell everybody give yourself lots of time for everything and you'll notice in India as Westerners we're so used to rushing from here to there and that was one of my biggest lessons was when I would get to my work at the center it was quite a journey from the city and everybody at first would say sit down have chai and I would just want to dive right into work and if you do things that way in India you burn out so fast you will have no energy left for really taking it in so drop in, drink chai, have a lassi, allow yourself to have a breakfast that lasts two hours in a place that's nice and just to really give yourself time in between because in India I think one of the biggest lessons is what needs to get done will get done and what doesn't need to get done wasn't meant to happen. Yeah so not forcing the river. Not forcing the river.

Yeah. So can you talk a bit more about the art of surrendering when in India whether you're traveling or whatever you're doing there just the art of what you found in your experience of just surrendering to. Well I can speak from my experience of hosting about 100 people at this point that I often find that the people that have the hardest time surrendering are the ones that have traveled the most and I find this really interesting and really challenging because people that have never traveled anywhere they don't have a set of expectations about what things will be like or how they will be hosted or how it will even be when they're there because they don't have much experience with that and they have an easier time surrendering because they haven't had to be strong in that way. So in India you'll really get an opportunity to notice your strengths to witness them and also to just be so flexible because everything takes much longer to get done in India and any of the movements that you make especially as a solo traveler onto a train or out of a hotel onto a train you'll notice that there are situations where you have to really argue and then there are situations where things will be effortless. So just to really be flexible with yourself that's the hugest teaching just to allow the space for it.

Can you share with us a moment when you surrendered or when you had the opportunity to surrender? So many. Or maybe a time when you were like swimming upstream and all of a sudden it was like okay. Wow well all the time every day. Yeah I remember one day I came from my work at the center where I work with the women and I had an extremely harrowing kind of day on getting back.

It was about 115 degrees with like 85 percent humidity and I'd walked by the time I reached my first auto rickshaw ride I'd walked about a mile in that heat uphill. When I got into my first rickshaw ride there was a man sitting next to me and I ended up having to be squished to one side in a rickshaw full of men and as I was on my way back into the city the man in a very casual way trying to pretend like it was an accident put his hand on my leg and so immediately I brushed his hand away and said you know what are you doing in Hindi and how dare you touch me and immediately the the driver stopped the auto and said what happened what happened and told this man to behave and the man got out. So after that you know I was shaking from having set my boundary. When I got back to the crossing where I was needing to take a cycle rickshaw there was a huge procession happening of a holy person who was on their way to take the blessing of the Ganges and offer darshan you know blessings to their to their followers and it was just a mob scene which meant that again I was going to have to walk uphill and it just made my journey so much so much longer and so I approached probably the only cycle rickshaw rider in that area who was a young man and I'll never forget his face because when I when I asked him how much he quoted me probably what was like five times the running price the actual price and as a woman living alone in Varanasi setting my boundaries if I pay in a cycle rickshaw rider that price once that means that I'll have to pay it all the time because then all the guys will know and they'll they'll ask me for it so he kind of sneeringly quoted this price to me so I started shouting at him you know in the midst of this like huge procession and they're like horns and drums and everything and I'm screaming my lungs out to this guy telling scolding him for for trying to take advantage of me in the situation because I'm a woman who's vulnerable and he just keeps looking at me with this smirk and I just remember shouting at him and saying you know I'm gonna go tell the police and everything and and him looking at me and just continually continuing to smirk at me and then I realized in that moment God just give it up sister like you don't need to prove it in this moment just walk in the procession so as I walked in the procession up this hill again uphill there was this group of devotees in front of me and they just kept turning around and saying to me oh madam boats under hey I've votes under hey telling me I'm so beautiful and all this stuff and I was thinking this is the last moment that I feel beautiful I've got the scout on my face I've been taken advantage of twice and in that moment it was just absolute surrender just surrender to the obstacles and allow yourself to just be and you'll be rewarded with generosity you know and love you know they gave me prasad and we walked up this hill together and when I got to where I needed to turn I said namaste and we went on our merry way I'm wondering as so as a Western woman as a visitor as a pilgrim can you speak of like the importance of self-care and self-responsibility as a way of staying safe and healthy and enjoying your time there in India well self-care is key to enjoying your time and but there will be times when it will be hard you know if you get sick while you're in India you really get challenged with how can I take care of myself best in this situation and it's the same as it is anywhere ask for help drop into what you need and ask for help you know I found in my years in India when it came to care for myself I've never been taken advantage of in any way and people are so generous and loving but you know your self-care is your responsibility so packing the tools of things that you need to help you feel supported to help keep you healthy and that's why that's why we have this set of clips is to really share what what works in our experience so this mantra of asking for help and yeah yeah and I think traveling to somewhere so far away in a different culture it it's hard to ask it's hard to ask for help anywhere but especially in somewhere so new and especially when there are there are things in the world that will tell you that India has a bad reputation for being taken advantage of so in the set of clips we talk about places where it's not appropriate to ask for help which is say the train station or who to ask when in the most appropriate way so that you aren't taken advantage of so with eight years of experience living in India can you share with us some of the maybe highlights or some of the mystical moments that come to your mind or your heart gosh well there are so many but I think that you know the reason why like why pilgrimage to India and really what I could share from my experience is the mysticism and the way that ritual is practiced in India within the traditions you can experience that they're like nowhere else and it I think in the West we have less experience with this surrender to God and so in India you really get an opportunity to witness this divine surrendering which is so exquisite and ecstatic you know we put this energy into different things in the West but in India the moment that you leave your shoes at the at the doorway to the temple and you enter you're in ecstasy with God and it and you're offering fragrant flowers and gifts and taking away sweet sweet blessed food from that experience so I think that this is the greatest gift so to show up and we've talked a lot about surrender and the layers of seeing but just to to really go with this intention of how do I offer myself to the divine and and without expecting something back so I think this is this is the greatest beauty greatest teaching and as your friend there's something about the intensity of India that meets you yeah I think I think that there was something that I it came up for me a couple years ago and it was so clear which was living in the West and having an artist's imagination and I didn't feel like the world was meeting me so much and I didn't I didn't experience that meeting point until I went to India where there were the colors and the sense and all the experiences for me to really witness and it and it catalyzed a new type of yoga for me and a new type of dropping in and I'd always been really really vata and really energized and practice really intense yoga until I got to India where I was really able to drop down into my core and amidst the chaos and most people that I've met don't have they haven't experienced that are able to drop into that point in a place like India without guidance and so doing it alone for the first time you know to start a business I mean there was just a huge capacity building that happened for me at that point and I think that's why I'm able to host people and also drop in with them when when they're very challenged in situations by what they're faced so I just I feel that India meets my my inner landscape in the way that I need to be met thank you so much for being with us today I'm so grateful to have you honored to be here namaste namaste thank you