COLD!

Today was my second day of yoga, and for some reason all day my attention has been fading in and out. I keep drifting into idle thoughts, or just zoning out altogether. Maybe it's because of the cold that the whole house seems to have caught--Tais and Ama-la aren't feeling great either. Amchi-la said it's a combination of the winter chill and the seasonal change; nothing to do but drink tea and keep as stable a body temperature as possible. Given that we go through winter in the morning, summer at noon, and winter again in the evening, that isn't so easy. Meanwhile, I spent the morning with Tenzin plodding along with Tibetan language, since the resistance to studying has caught up with me now that we're getting into combining the grammatical and the colloquial. I don't know if I was right in assuming I could handle studying two languages at once; we'll see next week.

While the challenge of studying language has steadily increased, studying with Amchi-la is consistently intense. There are unfathomable depths to the theory of the five elements/three humors. Now that we've passed the basic history, there are sets of numbers of various things to memorize and comprehend, already even more than in the neuropsychology class I took with Dr. Kluger. Examples: 5 conditions for conception, 5 elements in the sperm/egg at conception, 7 bodily constituents, 3 excrements, 3 methods of addressing imbalance, 4 factors leading to disturbance, 6 tastes, 3 post-digestive tastes. And then related to the 3 nagis, defects, dokshas, or principal energies--wind, bile, and phlegm (also known as lung, tiba, peken or air, fire, earth)--there are other sets. There are 5 types of each principal energy, 8 potencies or qualities, 20 characteristics (6 for wind, 7 for bile, 7 for phlegm), and 17 secondary characteristics; there are 7 bodily types based on these combinations. And this is just a fraction of what we've gone through so far, in...four lessons. Not including any of the various scholars' theories on each set, and a million other things, including discussions of death, bardo states, rebirth, karma, global warming, and a great many details of the menstrual cycle, conception, and fetal development according to the elements and dokshas.

Aside from that I'm exploring the beginning of practicing Ashtanga Hatha yoga (the other branch of Ashtanga is Kundalini yoga...which is the only kind I've been exposed to before). Hatha is basically the physical, though it's not just asanas; it doesn't directly work with energy channels or chakras. Which is fine with me--I have enough madness going on to worry about spiritual supersensitivity right now. Rupesh, the instructor, is wonderful. He's very perceptive, he can gauge effort and attention precisely, and he's easygoing without being easy on me. He said that the cold I seem to be developing (including cough and fever) are partly because of the cold and the pollution, but also partly because of the yoga; it brings out the toxins in the body and will probably continue to do so in this way for a couple of days. I'm not turned off by the idea, but I really hope the weather will warm up soon; I hate being a slave to the temperature.