I am sitting in the ashram’s computer room. It is a shady room with a ceiling fan that, like the one in my Realization room, is ramped up to turbo-speed. Given that most things in this country are in a state of perpetual breakdown, I can’t help but wonder how many times these things have just untwirled themselves from their casings and flung blades around the room.

Of course, this also being India, it seems every time I have that thought, there is yet another power outage and there are no fans at all. That reality is much, much worse…

You might guess that I especially wonder about annihilation-by-fan at night, once I’ve dragged my little bed into the center of the room so I can derive the fan’s full benefit.

Ah yes, the power of the imagination. It can go so many ways, non?

We are learning each day to gain control over this wily mind that gallops around, jumping fences and flinging itself into arenas of thought that are not necessarily to our benefit. There are two meditation sittings each day; 6 am and 6 pm. The morning meditation is followed by the asanas; poses designed to slow the mind and fully integrate it with the body.

At night, the process is reversed; we do the asanas for an hour and then sit for the following hour in the most beautiful 12-sided room. There is one candle at an altar, a large glowing crystal ball in the center of the room, all of it perfumed with incense wafted about by fans.

Yesterday’s excursion to the holy city of Rishikesh was a definite serenity-reality check. It is one thing to swan about with nothing but butterflies flitting on the hibiscus, jungle bird song and the lush greenery of the ashram. It is quite another to dive into the chaos of the city with monkeys diving from roofs and bridges, cows causing traffic jams while the pong of sewage lines your nasal passages during lunch. To walk past the sadhus (holy men) lined up in the dust, leaning against a broken down wall, begging tins in hand is to train yourself not to fall down and cry.

And yet. Somehow all this intensity is so beautiful too. The woman in a princess-pink sari with an enormous bundle of grasses on her head, the Christmas garland dangling from the handlebars of nearly every motorcycle, the scrubbed-up children in their school uniforms, hysterically-decorated Tata lorries and the large-eyed baby held by a mother dressed in colours more beautiful than any of the peacock feather fans offered for sale.

Our driver, Sonu, returned us in time to shower off the city’s sweat and dirt and get to the evening’s meditation.

I think I’ve become institutionalized. I feel no need to emerge again until we start the next leg of our journey next week.