#7 Rishikesh

After travelling to 5 cities within 4 weeks, staying in Rishikesh for a long time was exactly what I needed.

For 5 weeks I called this place my 'home base', spending time wandering around and if course following teacher trainings and the yoga festival.

Rishikesh, or rather its upper district Tapovan, booms with Yoga and travellers dedicated to their yoga practice and trainings. In Rishikesh you cannot get alcohol or meat and it's something that deeply impacts its sphere, especially late at night.

At every corner you get invited to drop-in classes, or daily Satsangs, breathwork-circles, rebirth-meditation, dancing circles or sacret cacao-ceremonies. It is - I must say - very much directed at travellers. While Pushkar seems to be the spiritual place for Indians, Rishikesh is the spiritual place for everyone else.

But nonetheless, after the excitement of the first weeks traveling through India, staying in one place for longer and immersing myself in my yoga practice was exactly what I needed. Oh and what time it was! Dense with experience, feels and emotions.

Starting off with a 1 week yoga-festival with 5 yoga-sessions daily followed by 3 week burying myself in an Ashram to do another round of Asana practices, Pranayama, meditation and study of yoga philosophy (and completing 2 Teacher Trainings along the way). 3 full weeks where I immersed myself in the depth of my spiritual yoga practice.

This was also a time where I dealt with a lot of feels, positive and negative. Being able to immerse myself in a yoga practice for 4 full weeks, with nothing else but yoga and spending time with myself, was as wonderful as it was confronting. Or, as Pema Chödrön says "Things became very clear when you have nowhere to hide."

Even more important was it for me to take my time, working through all this emotions. Rishikesh was my last ‘planned’ step along the way, after that I didn’t know yet where I would go next. And I must say I really enjoyed it! At one point, however, things became too unbearable. Emotions piling up, after this long high of the teacher trainings and festival I felt down and lost, missing the refugee of a spiritual space to breathe.

Even though it is said you can do you spiritual praxis everywhere, something about the 6-person-dorm I stayed in made it impossible for me to follow up on the practice that I created during earlier weeks. Temperatures also slowly hit the 30 degree and higher mark, which made it difficult for me to even move during the day. On top of that I got a new tattoo (yaiii!!) which forced me to take more rest than usual, because I could feel my body working to heal and I wanted to give her the time.

Preparing again to leave Rishikesh came with its own set of emotions: on the one hand I was glad to finally get moving again and leave the heat behind me, but I also struggled to leave this ‘comfy homy base’ behind me.

But eventually I did. There is a fine line between ‘knowing when it is time to rest and remain still’ and ‘sensing when rest does not do you good anymore but just drags you deeper and deeper into a rut’. For me it definitely was the latter one.

So I booked another hostel, another night bus and set out on a new adventure: Dharamshala.