Winter Winds of Reykjavik

It’s late at night in Reykjavik and, once again, I am in the experience of lingering jetlag.  So far, every night I awake at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and am awake for many hours.  Tonight I sit in the dark in my cozy little room and listen to the wind outside.  It is a wet, cold wind that I am told is more common to a Reykjavik autumn than winter.  The students in the teacher training tell me that the winter in this part of Iceland is once again mild as it has been for the past several years.  This damp wind gusts and surges through the trees throughout the neighborhood.  It’s a comforting sound and sensation for me.  In northern New Mexico, the spring winds are dry, strong, dusty, and incredibly intense.  They shake the house from the south and are deeply irritating for me.   It’s not a simple irritation.  It really goes deep into my being.   These winds are why I find spring to be my least favorite season in New Mexico, even with the promise of green and renewal.  But this damp, gusty, swirling Reykjavik-ian wind brings me great comfort.

My throat is a little scratchy and I could be getting a little sick, probably directly because of that damp, cold wind.  I am very cautious about this.  I had been foregoing wrapping my neck with a scarf, even though I’ve been carrying one around.  Now when I go outside, the scarf is cozily around my throat.  I have been drinking water and Icelandic moss tea, taking homeopathics, and resting — even as I sit here in my jetlagged awakeness.  We will have group sadhana (daily meditation) at the yoga center tomorrow morning.  I am prayerful that I will attend but my priority will be to rest, particularly given that I am awake now. Here is the website for the yoga center, by the way http://www.andartak.is

We have one more day of the three days of teacher training.  We are definitely on track with what I have intended to cover.  The topics are sound & mantra and mind & meditation, which interweave very very nicely.  I simply love being in Iceland.  I love the feel and the easy pace and lovely, smiling hearts of the people.   I love working with these wonderful students as we collectively work with the material and draw forth our own experiences to make the topics palpable and taste-able.  We are having great fun and getting to new places of awareness and understanding.  I always learn so much when I teach.  I am deeply grateful.

Relating the pronunciation of the mantras of Kundalini Yoga to Icelandic equivalents is fascinating and a valuable means of figuring it all out.   I can see, in a new way, how the language of Gurmukhi is quite simple, really.  We often say that when Guru Amar Das designed the written script in the 15th century, he did it in such a way to be particularly simple and accessible so that anyone could learn it and have access to the wisdom of the words.  I can see more clearly that, in Gurmukhi, what you see is what you get.  When you know the rules and learn the alphabet, you can figure it out, read it and pronounce it reasonably well.  Learning to speak just a little bit of Icelandic has helped me to understand this much more deeply.  Icelandic is beautiful and fascinating and rich … and quite complex.  From a pronunciation standpoint, what you see is often NOT what you get.  For example, ‘yes’ in Icelandic is  Já but it is pronounced e-yow.  And sometimes they say Já on the inhale rather than the exhale in a sort of hushed whisper.  After being here for a few days, I can hear this whispered hush more readily in the patter of Icelandic around me. 

It’s time for sleep, or at least a non-computer sort of rest.  The winter wind continues to sigh and blow outside.  The wind of language and hushed e-yows and the sensation mantras moving through my throat sigh and blow within me.

Blessings

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