Dancing in the Bamboo Forest ~ a travel
memoir by Djahariah Mitra
We start out with the author in an
emotionally dark place in her life. She decides to go to India to
study, travel and find herself. I think many of us who study yoga
have that same urge; the urge to go to the birthplace of yoga, to
immerse ourselves in the culture and philosophy. Mitra does this with
a teacher training followed by travel, yoga teaching, dance training,
and building relationships with fellow travelers and native Indians
alike.
She shares her inner thoughts, her
attempts to find happiness, her everyday ups and downs with living in
uncertainty. She doesn't know how long she will stay in India, she
doesn't know if she will be able to get a job that will support her
to stay in India, she doesn't know if her health will hold out.
She struggles with finding contentment
in the uncertainty. This is what I recognized the most in my own life
journey: the practice of finding contentment in my discontentment.
Quite the kōan. I learned more about this in my teacher training
too. There it was defined as “limbic space” by one of my
professors. It's the idea that we need to become comfortable in our
discomfort, comfortable with not knowing, comfortable in the waiting.
In the book, Mitra has a very hard time with this and I think, so do
we all. It was hard for me to read, hard to stick with her
discomfort, but I thank her for being so candid and for sharing her
struggle.
Interspersed with her personal journey,
she shared some of her yoga understanding. I enjoyed her discussion
of yoga philosophy, especially the part about being called to a
spiritual life while still being a “regular” person, or as I've
sometimes heard it called, a householder. Again, this is a struggle I
understand. The essential question is, how do we give up everything
and remain in this life? There's no right answer but I wonder if part
of the struggle is in the phrasing “give up everything”? Perhaps
if we thought we were gaining, not giving up, there wouldn't be a
question.
And finally, as in other books I've
read where an American woman goes to India, there is the culture
shock to contend with. Women are 2nd class citizens, do
not have rights the way men do, are not allowed to go out by
themselves, travel by themselves, or wear less than 3 layers of
clothing on all parts of their body. The author did find places where
India is more modern, places where she could go out to coffee and
even meet with male friends but it was not encouraged by society. She
got questioned and shamed by her landlords for doing things like
having male guests for dinner. It just seems so archaic and unfair to
me. It's so hard to reconcile this part of Indian culture with the
mindful practices of yoga that also came out of this culture.
The dichotomy of Indian culture, the
blow-by-blow account of daily ups and downs, and the topic driven
writing style (vs. linear) sometimes made this book difficult for me
to read. When I could let go of my desire to know exactly where and
when the author was, and when I could let go of wanting India to be
as holy as I imagine it, the book was much more enjoyable to me. This
book is worth reading if you want to know more about yoga, Indian
culture, and if you want your own beliefs challenged as you read
about someone else's personal growth.