Vedic Knowledge

Instead of our usual 6am meditation session, today we mediated on the move – We went for a silent walk through the back roads of the St. Laurent Mountains within which the ashram is situated. It was very peaceful 20 minute walk through nature. We’ve been told that nature is a natural (pun intended) rejuvenator of the body, mind and spirit. We broke the silence with our usual 30 minutes of chanting – “Jai Ganesha Jai Ganesha” – and prayers. Our teacher gave us a few words of wisdom – “The mind is like a monkey, drunk and bitten by a scorpion.” Apparently he thinks I’m a good singer - he casually asked me if I was a classical singer…uhmmmm, yeah right….but I think he just hadn’t heard anyone pronounce the Sanskrit properly in many many years.

We had our first lesson on how to teach a yoga class. I am not one to give anyone boasts of compliments until they prove themselves to be consistent, but I have to say, this organization is exactly that – organized, succinct, thorough and really good at what they do. Incorporated in the curriculum is “how to teach beginner’s class #1-8” and by practicing on each other we are really gaining a lot of confidence, not to mention I am learning so many things about teaching itself. It was very exciting for us all since it is the main reason most of us are here. And our instructors is awesome. He strikes the perfect balance between authoritative, humorous, compassionate, encouraging and stern. In fact I’m learning a lot about leadership from him.

In our main lecture class we discussed the basic philosophy behind yoga and really Hinduism – the concept of Brahman, Atman, Maya, Uphadis, Gunas, etc. And though I’ve grown up with these concepts, learning them in a succinct and systematic way has helped to put the philosophy in perspective and reinforce my beliefs. The philosophy is very appealing to me personally, especially in its intellectual and logical approach to “religion” or belief.

We ended the day with a guest lecture on Vedic Mathematics. Examples include the following:

Equation 35 x 35 56 x 54
Step 1: Multiply Last Digits 5*5 = 25 6*4 = 24
Step 2: Add one to the first 3+1 = 4 *3 = 12 5+1 = 6 * 5 = 30
digit, then multiply
Answer 1225 3024

While it was really interesting, I quickly realized that basically we were being shown shortcuts to doing long multiplication that is much more efficient than the way we currently have been taught to calculate them, but what was so intriguing about the lecture was to find out that this knowledge (i) has been around since before the Vedas were written and (ii) research is only now being done on the full system of vedic mathematics.