Sivananda Ashram – Day Five

Travel Day 978 – Sivananda Ashram, Kerala, INDIA

When I woke up at 5.20am again, I felt the same as I did yesterday evening and I knew that this was definitely my last day in the Sivananda Ashram…

Satsang with Sinrise by the Lake

Actually I had a really bad night, because I was so wound up after our stage performance yesterday that I just couldn’t go to sleep. First I talked to some other people and then I listened to music for a couple of hours, with the result that this morning I was not feeling rested at all and kind of itchy to pack up and get ready to move on. But since my idea was to leave on a 6am bus, it was too late to leave today and I had to stick it out for one more day…

It didn’t seem to be a big deal and I thought I would just try to make the best out of it, enjoy the company of my new-found friends and play some music together for the last time. But first we had our usual program, only that the 6am Satsang was actually a really nice silent walk for 30 minutes to another place by the lake to see the sun rise over the mountains while we were chanting our usual verses at the start of the day…

Karma Yoga at the Sivananda Ashram

Since the sunrise was really beautiful and revealing the normally hidden mountains in the background, I was quite happy that I had decided to still be here on this day. After our usual 7.30am chai, it was then back to the 8am yoga class. But in order to make the usually repeating yoga class a bit more exciting, we decided to rather join the intermediate class instead of the beginner’s one and it turned out to be a great, as well as challenging decision…

After the usual 10am brunch, we then had the 11am Karma Yoga and considering that it was my last day and we got yelled at already yesterday, I really wanted to make sure to participate this time. But as it turned out, the selfless service that the lady had for us was simply to squat down behind the temple and pick up little stones by hand to place them then one by one into a bucket. For my understanding Karma Yoga was supposed to be a task that helps other people and picking up little stones was nothing but a stupid task in my eyes. So I refused to do it and walked straight to the main office to do my check-out formalities…

After the checkout I felt all of a sudden as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I decided to skip the boring teaching at 2pm as well as the  repeating yoga at 3.30pm. Instead I rather got an exit pass and went down to the lake to have one last relaxing afternoon in the nice waters while doing some swimming…

Last swim at the Sivananda Lake

After dinner we then had out last little jamming music session on the roof until one of the three head characters of the ashram showed up and started yelling at us, because we were expected to join the evening Satsang on time. Funny enough but we were actually packing up and getting ready to go to the Satsang when he showed up, but after talking to us as rudely as he did, we definitely could not go anymore and so we rather walked off to pack our bags…

Half expecting that he would show up again and have us escorted out of the ashram, this definitely concluded our interesting experience at this place and I knew for sure that I would never go back to this rigid Sivananda Ashram…