Becoming Vegetarian

So after the morning yoga yesterday, we had a yummy breakfast (porridge/oatmeal, muesli, fruit, bread & jam) and I baked in the sun at the pool deck. Later Gloria came and showed us some stuff she does as a trapeze artist. She has tied a long silk cloth to a tree branch about 5 or 6 metres high up. So some of us climbed up the silk and did some of the tricks she showed us, which was a lot of fun, but silk can also give you rope burn on the hands and feet!!!

Then we had lunch, which was raw food as usual, but Robert stunned us all by making a cold lasagna dish without pasta or meat. He cut the edges off a corgette to make it rectangular like a box and then sliced it into pieces that look like the flat pasta used in lasagna and used that as layering between a lot of other greens. Very nice!!!
For desert at supper time he made a base made from dates and hazelnut pieces and put that into the sun for a few hours to harden. He then blended bananas and avocadoes and poured melted chocolate into that while blending. He then poured that onto the base he made earlier and put that into the fridge to set: Voila, one healthy desert made without any butter or sugar. Tonight, we had a desert made with carrots, raisins, cashew nuts, mild and something that I think is like butter. Also extremely nice.
Other dishes we had for supper and lunch included red spinach with sweet potatoe... very good, cold coconut soup... it was more like juice to me, but I enjoyed it; and the usual other stuff like dhal, rice and other vegetables and lentils.
So you can see the food is extremely healthy and yes, vegetarian. This seems to be a big thing in the yoga community. I came across this at the Bikram studio as well. Apparently people smell differently depending on whether they eat meat or not. So that is one of the reasons why they don't eat meat and of course they say it is also better for animals :-) . I am not a big red meat eater, but I eat a lot of chicken and have never even considered becoming vegetarian, but I am abstaining from meat for the next few weeks definitely. Coming to India, I knew that there would not be lots of meat available, so I packed some biltong, but have decided to give that a miss for now. That will test my will power :-)

After lunch yesterday we said good-bye to Sally and Nick and saw them off. Then we sat around for a while talking about the Michael (not with Michael) and about Pattabhi Jois and his family tree, about students that have taken yoga back to the west since the 70's, the books they wrote etc. I have put some of these links on the blog on the right for you to visit if you are interested.

I spoke to Michael about his plans as they seemed to have changed from what was advertised on his website. I had planned my plans around that and had now become aware that Michael was going to be back in SA for a workshop in the beginning of March when I would still be in India. He confirmed that the plans had changed and that he would go directly to Mysuru for 2 weeks, instead of taking a weeks break and then going for 4 weeks to Mysuru (which also my plan). So then I phoned the shala in Mysuru and spoke to Saraswati, the daughter of PJ (that is what I shall call him respectfully from now on :-)), to confirm that there would be space. She asked me if I had written a letter and said it would be fine. I then borrowed a scooter and rode to Anjura (smaller than a village!) to a travel agent and booked myself on the same flight as Michael Gannon. So far, there are 5 of us going to Mysuru, which is Michael, 2 staff from Purple Valley, Mayra and Lori, Leena and myself.