For the last 17 hours we got to ride in these sweet first class seats

37 Hours by Bus and an Opportunity to Practice Patience

From Ecuador to Lima, Peru

Kate and I decided to take a bus to Lima, Peru on Tuesday night.

From Cuenca, Ecuador to Lima, Peru it should take around 22 hours, driving straight through. Unfortunately, no bus companies have a direct bus connecting these two cities.

First, we decided take the bus from Cuenca, Ecuador to Huaquillas, Ecuador. In Huaquillas, we would cross the border, get our passports stamped, and continue on our course by bus to Piura, Peru, which is about four hours south of the border. We bought bus tickets online to take us the rest of the way to Lima. If all went well, the travel time should have been 25-30 hours.

Why choose to bus for so long?

We had a few different reasons. The first was I wanted to write an in-depth article about the experience of crossing the border in Ecuador when traveling to Lima. I think many travelers take this route and the opportunity to help people by offering a strong guide would be beneficial to those people and to our site. Another reason we chose to take the bus was the opportunity to save about $120, which can now be allocated to another part of our trip. Traveling by bus gave us the opportunity to see the desert of Northern Peru — Rolling sand dunes are not something I get to see everyday. Lastly, after traveling in China, I found that long bus rides help me learn about and practice patience.

I recently read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. At one point in the poem, Siddhartha was having a conversation with a merchant. He had recently given up all of his worldly possessions and the merchant asks what Siddhartha can give to him. His response, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast. That is all.”

So while we were riding on three different buses on a trip that lasted just over 37 hours, I was thinking about the practice of patience and waiting. I have wanted to see Machu Picchu for years, but have known it would take a bit of patience to get there. I am learning that if I can develop this strong practice of patience, everything I need or want will eventually come. The bus ride proved to be no different. It seemed difficult and long at first, but after a while we were in a groove and it really was just another day.

“Practice and all is coming.”

1. It makes me feel great physically.

The more I do it, the better I feel. Even if I just do a short 30 minute routine every day, I can feel the difference in my body so much (and you better believe I can feel it when I skip yoga for a few days). I’m more flexible, stronger, physically grounded, have better balance and less back pain when yoga is part of my regular routine.

2. It makes me feel great mentally.

Seriously. You don’t have to be intensely spiritual about yoga for it to make a big impact on the way you think, process, and perceive. Regular yoga has made me considerably less self-conscious physically and just in general. I always feel happy right after practice, no matter how stressed out I may have been beforehand. I’m sure part of it is the endorphin production and physical release that comes with any strenuous activity, but I think for me the most important part is the kind of meditative state that I got into during yoga.

I am nothing if not a thinker, and this can sometimes work against me, making it almost impossible for me to shut off my mind and ipso facto my worries, anxieties, and stresses. However, when I am practicing yoga, I am forced to focus only on my body. When my mind begins to wander, I come back to my breath. This gives me a window of relief from the nagging “to do” list that seems always to linger in my mind off the mat.

3. I get more done.

When I have a lot to do in a day, it’s easy to tell myself that I’ll get more done if I skip yoga and use that tie to do something “more productive.” However, I am always so energized after a good practice that I get way more done with yoga as a part of my schedule. The amount of times that I have procrastinated all day, done yoga, then immediately tackled the dreaded project astounds me. Yoga clears out all your mental blockages, at least for a short time, and allows space for the new ideas and creativity needed to get things done.

4. I sleep better.

Yes, yoga energizes me and helps me to be productive, but it also puts me right to sleep! On days when I practice yoga (especially in the evening) I fall asleep as soon as I crawl into bed, almost without fail.

Click to read on at Elephant Journal — YOGA 

image via Google commons

“If you don’t plow the earth, it’s going to get so hard nothing grows in it. You just plow the earth of yourself. You just get moving. And even don’t ask exactly what’s going to happen. You allow yourself to move around, and then you will see the benefit.”     Rumi

What a beautiful use of soil as a metaphor!

The Sufi tradition in general, and Rumi in particular, excel at poetically unveiling the wisdom contained in the most mundane things.

In this case, Rumi calls our attention to something we normally don’t notice- the soil on which we walk, out of which our food emerges. Rumi’s words encourage us to examine what soil is and how it works, and thus remember many truths about inner processes.

At first, I jumped on the “movement” aspect of this quote. As I packed my bags and cleaned out the apartment a few weeks ago, I was questioning my desire to travel with Giulia and Gabriel. Hearing this reminded me that yes indeed, like the soil, I just need to keep things in motion and trust that benefits will emerge.

In the past, I’ve seen the benefits of motion for myself. Artists, scientists, and spiritual seekers find that the “soil of  the self” needs to be tilled for insight or creativity to emerge. As any farmer knows, the soil is literally burgeoning with creative potential that’s just waiting to break through in the right conditions. The same is true of the creative potential lying dormant in ourselves. If you remain in the same environment, surrounded by the same people year after year, it’s very possible that your mind and soul will become hardened without you even noticing.

So we set out from Montreal last week, and after three fuss-less airplane rides (Gabriel seems to be a born traveller), we arrived in my childhood home in Colorado. It’s nice for me to visit, but I know the soil of this town cannot indefinitely nurture me.

Prompted by a Rumi-like desire to move at the age of 18, I set forth from this place knowing that in order for my potential to flourish, I needed to move to other places and expose myself to new ideas. I couldn’t have possibly envisioned that 12 years later, I would be back here married to a Frenchwoman I met in India, carrying our baby born two months ago in Montreal.

True, there was some part of me that longed for this type of life to emerge. In many ways, I “tended the soil” and “planted the seeds” for this to emerge (learning French, saving money to travel in India, etc.). But there’s a part of me who feels the surprise a farmer would when, after having planted certain crops, he found other plants had taken root alongside the intended harvest.

There’s always an element of mystery as to the shape and composition of what exactly will emerge, whether in our lives or in a farmer’s field. We don’t always know what’s brewing just beneath the surface.

This is an important element about soil that I didn’t notice in my initial excitement.

As important as it is to work the soil and keep it moving, it’s also healthy to let a field rest from time to time (Jews even have a biblical commandment in Leviticus to give their land a “sabbatical year” every seven years!).

I have personally seen why many artistic and scientific breakthroughs have come while taking walks, resting in baths, or in dreams. Some of my most exciting “Eureka moments” have come when I’ve taken a break from my work and simply allow my mind to wonder. Sometimes ideas and images come back to inspire me long after I’ve been directly exposed to them; there’s no telling when a nugget of inspiration will bubble up.

Trying too hard to come up with a brilliant idea is like constantly turning up the soil: you might find some interesting morsels, but for the real potential to break forth, you have to stand back and wait.

I find that extremely difficult to do. There are periods when my creative output drops… and I get worried very quickly. There are periods when I’m unable to keep up my formal meditation practice, and I start getting down on myself for my lack of discipline.

The key is not to freak out when it seems like nothing is going on. Like the soil, cultivation of the mind, body, and soul requires a fine balance between activity and passivity.

There are times when we do need to break out the plow and stir things up. Perhaps more difficult is to cultivate the trust to simply step back and let the soil do its work.

Have you ever noticed how long people look at a painting in a museum or gallery? Surveys have clocked view times anywhere between 10 and 17 seconds. The Louvre estimated that visitors studied the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world, for an astoundingly low average of 15 seconds. Our increasingly online, instantaneous existence accounts for those numbers, obviously. Can we ever again find the patience to look at art as it was meant to be seen? A recent article by Harvard University art history professor Dr. Jennifer Roberts argues not only that art requires patience, but also that it can teach “the power of patience.” Where patience once stood for the helplessness of standing in line at the DMV, patience, in Roberts’ argument, can now stand for empowerment, a “time management” choice that can drive us to look not just at paintings, but at our whole lives.

Via Bob Duggan and Art Blog by Bob 

Image via Moma (Fernand Léger, The Three Musicians)

“In this modern world, everything is instant. No one has patience. Everyone wants to have [everything] as soon as possible. In yoga also it has become like that. Many places you go, they certify you in 15 days, one month. Always someone who’s coming to India, they think, “Oh, I’ll be here for one month, I should get a certificate that I’m studying here.” We get many phone calls. Last week also there were three phone calls, one from Delhi, one from England, another from America. Straight away they said “Oh, do you have teacher training.” Yoga is getting big but it is getting crazy also. It’s not that yoga is crazy. People are making it crazy. They’re not understanding the sense of yoga, the purity of yoga. A yoga teacher should always maintain the purity of the practice.

You know when I was a child, whenever I used to see a Chinese or a Japanese, I thought they knew Karate. We used to stay away from them because we thought they knew Karate. Because we had been to see ‘Enter the Dragon,’ the Bruce Lee movie. Then there was no television or anything, the only entertainment was to go to a theater and watch a movie. So, we watched that movie, and we thought every Chinese, Japanese knows martial arts. So he can beat us up, so stay away from them. And now [the] same thing has happened to yoga. Whoever looks like an Indian, if he is dressed in a saffron, or even a lungi (traditional South Indian dress), he becomes a yogī. Many yogīs are sprouting up everywhere. Why I’m saying this is, for a practitioner [of yoga] it is very important to choose your teacher. A teacher who can guide you properly. A teacher who knows, who has been practicing for many years, who has come from a lineage. That is very important.”

-R Sharath Jois (January 2012, Mysore Conference)