Yoga Journey

I hadn't been in Dharamsala, India, more than two days before I started dreaming about where to go next. While the rain overflowed the sewers, and wet cows bunched under the eaves of the bakery next door, I sat with the other travelers around the wood stove at the Green Restaurant, eating dense slabs of Tibetan bread and butter, drinking mug after mug of ginger lemon tea, and discussing the options. Kullu, Manali, Gangotri, Kathmandu--the names, repeated like mantras, hung shimmering in the smoky air, conjuring visions (as the word "Dharamsala" had just a week before) of mystery and magic.

I was four months into a six-month trip around India, researching ashrams, monasteries, and pilgrimage sites for a guidebook. In the planning stage, the trip had sounded glamorous: an unending stream of spiritual peak experiences. It even sounded like that in my postcards home: "Dear Friends--This morning I sat with a thousand maroon-robed monks and nuns in the Tsuglagkhang Temple, sipping Tibetan butter tea and listening to the Dalai Lama speak about enlightenment."

But reality was much different. I was writing those postcards in an unmade bed, surrounded by a litter of earplugs, crumpled receipts, unwashed underwear, and squashed acidophilus capsules scattered from a ruptured ziplock bag. It had been raining hard for four days; the mountain peaks were erased by clouds, and my soaked Kashmiri shawl perfumed my mildewed room with the smell of wet sheep. My hands were so cold, I could hardly hold my pen. To keep warm, I was wearing most of the clothes I brought with me: long underwear, three pairs of socks, khadi shirt, cotton Punjabi suit, wool sweater, and a neon-pink ski cap I had bought the day before at Stitches of Tibet.

That morning, I overslept and missed the sunrise long-life puja for His Holiness because I had stayed up past midnight, snuggled up to a hot-water bottle and a second-hand copy of Rudyard Kipling's "Kim," eating a Cadbury's dark-chocolate bar and reading about someone else's spiritual adventures in India.

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