How I stopped racing and conquered my nose tubes

SHITTIM, Israel – We got to the Desert Ashram at dusk. The first yoga session at the dome — a breezy tent overlooking tan, rippled hills — had already started. I noticed an open area on the far side of the dome, and plopped down on my new purple yoga mat.

For most of the ride to the Negev ashram, traveling in a friend’s pickup truck, my three girlfriends and I talked politics, grooming habits, and boys. My eyes followed the dusty horizon as I wondered about Israelis’ love for yoga. “They’re not exactly the calmest people I’ve ever met,” I said, chuckling to myself, “but maybe that’s exactly what they’re after.”

I was getting more nervous the closer we got to the ashram. I hadn’t so much as stretched a muscle in months, and my knowledge of yoga consisted of a few classes in college during which I’d aptly fallen asleep — and that’s almost a decade ago. Images of falling during a downward dog pose whirled vividly in my head. I was praying that I was going to be able to sit in the back of the class, so no one could watch me awkwardly putter through the moves.

I pictured girls, lean and lithe, gracefully stretching their limbs. And then it hit me. “Oh god. There are gonna be so many hot girls in tight yoga pants at this thing,” I said to myself, looking down at my less-than-sexy attire, which suddenly seemed more like a frumpy middle school gym class outfit. “Whatever. I’m more of a Lena Dunham type of gal anyway,” I said, trying to console myself.

But now, inside the desert dome, a soft wind tickled my back. It was quiet. My skepticism started to fade. Tel Aviv felt like a different planet, a lifetime away.

Shelley Diamond, our sagacious yoga teacher from Tel Aviv, told us to focus on our breathing, to practice pranayama (the “extension of the life force” or breath in Sanskrit).

“Breathing? Awesome. This I can handle,” I thought.

Shelley nurtured our eclectic group of 15, who had come for Laura Shaz’s springtime renewal yoga retreat. We were novices and agile figures, expats and Israelis, an energetic and loving senior citizen couple, and a mother-daughter/father-son pair.

Over the weekend in April, we meditated and perfected our sun salutations, and practiced yoga nidra (“yogi sleep,” a state experienced during meditations). We also learned about rare kriyas (ancient body cleansing rituals) from our esteemed guru from India, Swadesh Sharma, who was in Israel on his first trip outside his native country.

I pictured the ashram as a massive Free Love fest, but actually, they were more into hugging… long, deep hugs — and not a one-handed ‘what’s up, brother’ type of hug but a ‘breathe your essence into my soul’ kind that would last several minutes

A few of us came for the picturesque solitude of the desert, others came to take a break and do something good for themselves, but we were in it together — embarking on our inward journeys and retreating into our bodies, the temples that house our souls.

“Just focus on your breathing,” Shelley told us. “Take the air in from the bottom of your toes – elongate – and let go of your thoughts. Just breathe.” I felt as if she was speaking specifically to me.

“You begin your life with an inhale,” she added, “and you die with one last breath, through an exhale. Breathing is the basis of our lives, and it is central to our practice of yoga.”

“That’s a beautiful image,” I mused, as my body morphed into a dead weight on the ground. I felt as though I were floating. The dome was silent and peaceful, just a bunch of strangers, breathing.

The ashram — in the land of Israel

Over the course of the retreat, I found myself contemplating Israelis’ obsession with yoga and all-things-India. Perhaps yoga’s universal tenets give them a feeling of inclusivity, one they can’t connect to in Orthodox Judaism or are missing in secular life. Or maybe it’s the outer chaos of Israeli society that makes us crave these spaces of tranquility. In a country filled with wars and extremes, the desert ashram was juxtaposed like a riddle of serenity and ease.

The ashram (a “spiritual hermitage”) is a green, desert oasis with a shanti vibe. It was like India with a dash of kibbutz sprinkled on top. Remote and undisturbed, it was the kind of place you could unwind. The food was delicious — vegetarian and healthy – and the small nooks were lush.

‘We’re living in a bubble by choice. We call the outside world Babylon’

We were joined by elderly couples who came to camp for a weekend, students from Jerusalem and Beersheba, and participants of a tantra (ancient Hindu ritual meditation) workshop, a group that spent 10 days focusing on their “inner energies.” They did vocal exercises that entailed yelling, not always with words, but sometimes, extremely loudly, about sex and release. Other times they sat in silence. Intriguing.

The people who lived at the ashram were friendly and joyful; they included visitors staying for a few months, and a few who had been here for a lot longer. It’s the kind of place people come back to and spend a few months at, an Israeli guy living at the ashram told me. “We’re living in a bubble by choice. We call the outside world Babylon,” he said.

A large chunk of the regulars were part of the ashram’s WOMP/work-meditation program, meaning they engage in communal life and divide up chores, like on a kibbutz, and take part in workshops at the ashram, as part of their spiritual journey. Some of them seemed broken, as if they’d come to pick up the pieces and reassemble their lives.

I had pictured the ashram as a massive Free Love fest, but actually, they were more into hugging. The ashramers often greeted each other with long, deep hugs — and not a one-handed “what’s up, brother” type of hug but a “breathe your essence into my soul” kind that would last several minutes.

I engaged in one such hug during the weekend, and could not keep still or stop talking during what felt like an eternity (it lasted about 90 seconds). My hugging partner, a tall man I had met just moments before, was enrolled in the tantra workshop. I wondered if he was trying to feel my energy. While I fidgeted, he kept tucking my head into his neck, as if he could feel my anxiety creeping up. “Shhh,” he’d whisper, patting the back of my head like a mother to her child. He enveloped me. In a bizarre way, our exchange was imprinted in my mind as one of the weekend’s most poignant memories.

Yoga as an enabler — of peace

According to Laura, the down-to-earth yoga teacher who organized the workshop, yoga is more than a set of poses. She likes to teach her students about the traditional aspects of yoga, which are based on ancient texts and philosophies, as well as the exercises.

“It could be powerful if Israelis and Palestinians practice yoga together and calm their minds,” she said. “They can find the sweetness that yoga does to the heart, and how it unifies, as the word ‘yoga’ literally means.”

An American-Israeli who works as a facilitator with Israeli and Palestinian youth and lives in Jaffa, Laura said yoga is an excellent avenue for bringing people together and building bridges. Yet, while yoga’s become very popular in Israel, it isn’t as known or practiced in Palestinian society – something she’s working on changing via mixed groups and Israeli-Arab and Palestinian friends. As an enabler of change, Laura explained, yoga can bring different people together in a common setting of mindfulness.

“Yoga’s a way of life,” she added. “It’s a mental state, and it’s about finding balance and happiness. It’s as mental as it is physical.”

There are eight components of ashtanga (“eight-limbed” in Sanskrit) yoga. It’s a modern form of classical Indian yoga and it comprises hatha, vinyasa, and other popular forms of yoga. Exported to the West in the first half of the 20^th century through the teachings of K. Pattabhi Jois, ashtanga yoga is all about synchronizing breathing with asanas (“poses”). It’s based on the eight steps laid out in the “Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,” the definitive text on yoga that dates back to the 2nd century BCE.

The goal of yoga practice is to quiet one’s mind – reaching a supreme state of consciousness, at which point the mind and body return to its purest form, which is described as bliss. The beautiful thing about working through the asanas is reaching the zen-like moment of rest at the end. The practice of yoga becomes a physical act of poetry — a metaphor for the cycle of life — where the ultimate act is death.

We listened to Laura, Swadesh, and Shelley describe the spiritual components of yoga. I was hungry for their wisdom. Later, we chanted a Sanskrit mantra during our evening meditation — OM Lokaha Samasta Sukino Bhavanti, “may all living creatures be happy” — until the words became a part of me. 

Neti pots and nasal flossing

After waking up with the sun, Swadesh, our shy, unassuming Yogacharya invited us to use a neti pot to flush out our nasal passages. (Based on ayurvedic techniques, it’s a small pot filled with lightly salted water that you insert in one nostril; aided by the force of gravity, the liquid rushes out the other side of your nose.)

Laura met Swadesh, her guru and source of inspiration, at a yoga teacher’s course in India last year. One of India’s former boxing champions, Swadesh recently lived in a cave in the Himalayas for two and a half years with other gurus. For one of those years, he lived naked and alone. Villagers brought him meals every few days; they left plates at the entrance to his cave, but never came in.

“It was tough,” he explained. Longing for conversation made it difficult at the beginning, but he got used to it.

Swadesh, a master of kriyas (the cleansing exercises) and mudras (ritual gestures, often used with pranayamas, the breathing exercises), has studied at six of India’s top yoga institutions and invented a kriya device to get rid of toxins in the mouth, throat, and stomach. He later showed us a few stomach cleansing kriyas that detoxify your digestive system — noninvasive techniques in which you “roll” and activate your intestines using your muscles and deep breathing — as we oohed and aahed.

Swadesh had also learned rarely performed kriyas, such as internal penis and anus cleansing, which yogis do to go deeper into their meditation. He said the advanced kriyas can be dangerous, and that some people have died from them, but that a yogi seeking a higher level of meditation (“samadhi”) needs to be cleaner and more pure.

For example, there are yogis who cut the underside of their tongues in order to master khechri mudra – in which they lift their tongue like a loop and use it to touch the top of their mouth, after which they no longer need to eat or drink, and live for over a hundred years. According to one of the yoga sutras (“philosophy”), “if you put the tongue in the hollow of the throat, it causes the cessation of hunger.” Swadesh intends to become a master of khechri mudra as he goes deeper into his practice of yoga. If so, he’d be one of only a few yogis in the world who can do it.

A true guru, Swadesh could make made thousand-year-old esoteric concepts and practices seem attainable and of this world. With his contagious calmness and stability, he coaxed us into testing our limits.

It was 6:30 am in the middle of the desert — long before I’d like to be awake on most days — and my new friends and I were collectively cleaning out our sinuses with running saltwater.

“Nothing strange going on here,” I giggled to myself.

Next, when Swadesh had us stick small, bendy tubes up our noses and then out through our mouths (think flossing, but for your nose) to clean out years of build up that’s stuck there, I had a personal victory, of sorts.

Swadesh practiced with us, and when it was my turn, I kept telling him I couldn’t. “I can’t, I really can’t. I can’t do it,” I repeated. It didn’t so much hurt as it felt uncomfortable, and plus, it’s scary when there’s something prodding into your nasal cavity.

“Be calm, Michal. Just be patient. You can do it. Be still,” Swadesh said, over and over, as I squirmed. A few moments later, he managed to put the tube through my nose, and I pulled it forward through my lips from the back of my mouth. I “flossed,” so to speak, and then pulled it out. I didn’t really feel any different, but it was liberating. I rocked it. It seemed simple and clear: It was my fear of the unknown and my preconceived image of what my body could (and couldn’t) do that had made the feat seem impossible. With the help of Swadesh, my cheerleader, I had conquered the nose tubes.

I thought about Samantha Chen, a young English woman who came on the retreat for a weekend to calm herself before her wedding, who told me yoga’s all about “where your mind goes.” It’s true. Great yogis say there’s a way of practicing yoga in which your body and your mind come together, not as though they’re in a race, but as if they’re striving toward harmony.

At the end of our last session, as she cautioned us not to push ourselves too far (because that’s when injuries happen), Shelley compared yoga to a journey.

“We often strive for goals, and obsess over them. And when you conquer it, you say, ‘That was it? That’s all that was?’, and start racing toward a new goal that again seems impossible and makes you feel inadequate,” she said, soothingly, as we sprawled out on our mats. “It never ends, because there’s always something bigger and better. You’re where you’re meant to be right now. So be still, listen to your body. Maybe it’ll tell you something.”

I let Shelley’s voice pass over me as I focused on the simple rhythm of my breathing. I wasn’t racing. In fact, I quite liked where I was.