I Went to Yoga Classes at a Hindu Yoga Ashram in Australia.

I was living alone in a caravan in Central Victoria, Australia.

A group of us went off once a week to a Hindu Ashram in the middle of nowhere for yoga nidra lessons.

And a very memorable time.

I was living in a caravan in Central Victoria.

A friend was a member of the nearby Rocklyn Yoga Ashram.

The ashram was located in a peaceful retreat centre in the heart of the Wombat Forest.

I’d already learned chakra yoga with Australia’s first full time yoga teacher.

Margrit Segesman taught me a form of yoga that I practiced daily for over 50 years.

There were 10 asanas or positions based on balancing the 7 major chakras.

I believe they kept me healthy and physically and mentally well for most of my life.

You should think about learning chakra yoga too.

No matter what your age.

I was 24.

Both yoga and chakra balancing are beneficial in so many ways.

And yoga is relaxing for starters.

Margrit Segesman’s interest in breathing and relaxation techniques branched into an interest in the expansion of consciousness, a subject she had discussed with Carl Jung when they met in the 1920s.

He suggested the study of yoga and yogic philosophy and reading The Science of Breath by Yogi Ramacharaka.

As well as studying philosophy, she developed her own progressive yoga relaxation technique that she later incorporated into her classes.

After spending time in Indian ashrams, she found her guru at Rishikesh on the Tibetan border and spent about five years living in a cave as an ascetic:

“For years I knew nothing else but meditation, raja yoga, hatha yoga, the intense practices of kriya and tantra, [and the] study of cosmology and evolution,” she later wrote.”

When she set up her school, she found Melbournians were keen to embrace yoga which was still considered to be very ‘new and exotic’ for Australia.

However, following a radio interview about her relaxation technique, Margrit was inundated with students and so took the step to full-time teaching.

When she embarked on her voyage from Switzerland in 1954, Margrit planned to travel to Sydney, but mistakenly stepped off the boat in Melbourne instead.

The Gita School of Yoga was Australia’s first full-time yoga school with its own permanent premises, offering classes each week day and night.

I remember having to step carefully along a narrow pebbled path to arrive at the front door – beginning class with a walking meditation.

A class then consisted of limbering, ten basic yoga asanas with many variations, breathing practices and relaxation.

On 22 September 1960 the Gita School of Yoga opened at 21 Alfred Place, Melbourne, which ran alongside St Paul’s Cathedral.

Soon after I was there as one of her early students.

Be well and healthy.

Neil

PS. Click here for the Rocklyn Yoga Ashram’s website.

Discover my new book of my real recent New Age adventures here in ‘Man Steps Off Planet’.

How Miracles Happen.

I was broke. For 5 years my home was a leaky old caravan parked outside its owner’s home at the end of a dead end street in Hepburn Springs in Victoria’s Central Highlands. I was at a loose end. I started to look into the fascinating stories of the Gold Rush in the area. I found a largely untold history of Swiss-Italian migrants who came out in the 1850s to try their luck on the goldfields. Many stayed on. Fresh pasta was still on the menu at many local restaurants. The local butcher still sold the real Italian bull-boar sausages. Many of the original typical rural Swiss or Italian farmhouses were still working farms, others lay in ruins. I wrote the story and it was published in the local newspaper. The owner of the General Store picked up my story and started a Swiss-Italian Festa with street marches, history displays, even a pasta sauce recipe competition. After 30 years it’s still an annual tourist event in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia. ‘Italy In The Aussie Bush’ is chapter 8 of 30 chapters in ‘Man Steps Off Planet’. We don’t need money to make miracles happen.

Read What I Did To Survive Loss.

Sheltered under tall eucalypts my home was a friend’s old caravan lazing outside the gate of their home at the end of the road in a small country town in the hills. Its condition and location were a metaphor for how things had worked out for me.

The roof leaked.

The water pump was broken.

The gas stove didn’t work.

Both tires were flat.

The whole thing felt like it might collapse in a heap at any moment. Yet this had become my home and within its thin walls was stored everything I owned.

The scents of nature – pine mixed with eucalypt and, on cooler days, the smoke of wood fires – drifted through on the gentle autumn breezes as if there were no walls at all.

The birds were my neighbors. Squawking galas. Screeching white cockatoos. Cawing crows. Gossiping magpies. And an occasional laughing kookaburra.

I could hear the endless rushing of water from the creek which had cut a deep gully beside the caravan. It was here along Doctor’s Gully some 150 years earlier that Swiss-Italian immigrants first struck gold.

Not so for me.

I’d stand on the footbridge outside my door and be mesmerized by the small waterfall and wonder how in hell I got here. As for the familiar world I knew, well, I’d had no choice but to leave it all behind me. I found myself in another world, a stranger where I didn’t belong.

Or so I thought.

I’d ‘escaped’ to the town of Hepburn Springs, a place of healing to the local aborigines in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia, to see if I could do the same.

I was still haunted by the memory of a year ago standing, stunned, on a city street in Melbourne in the fading autumn light. Following a three hour grilling on the ninth floor of the building right behind me, my freelance business of fifteen years and I had just been officially declared bankrupt.

My personal documents, passport, business files, banking records and cheque books, credit cards, pretty much everything that represented who I was, and who I might have been, I’d surrendered to the Official Receiver.

In that moment I had ceased to exist. I had been stripped of my identity and I was nobody. This was an emptiness I could never forget. I just stood there, in shock, watching people rushing off to their homes and families at the end of their day. I had neither. I really thought, in that moment, my life was over.

Bankrupt. It’s something that only happens to other people. But in the last hour or so, I’d become one.

There’s a Buddhist aphorism:

“You have come here to find what you already have.”

Anyone can replicate my solution to losing everything.

I’ve recorded the whole experience in detail in my book ‘Back to the Wall’. To read more or order your copy click here.

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