It hit just after lunch. I had the day off work yesterday, so we took the opportunity to go to Murari Caitanya and Sukadeva’s new restaurant, Gopals, over in Sherwood. The prasadam (food) there is wonderfully light and tasty. It’s very sattvic - clear and clean.

I had the main course (menu in Spanish) - a plate of rice, subji (”vegetable curry” in common parlance), kofta (deep fried vegetable nuggets), fresh garden salad, and a bowl of halava (sweet) with custard.

That was fine, until Murari Caitanya’s wife brought us out a generous helping of her wonderful apple pie, and Murari Caitanya Prabhu poured custard over it.

After that I felt that I’d overeaten, and Param and I both commented that now would be a good time to take a nap. About 10 minutes later it hit me like a train.

I don’t think the lunch was the cause - more the trigger - it probably had more to do with the two day intensive yoga workshop we just did on the weekend. One day of partner yoga / bodywork, and one day of Okido dynamic Zen Yoga. You can check out a video of Okido yoga here. It’s very dojo-influenced, and Dr Oki would challenge the Westerners to be more group conscious and the Asians to be more individualistic to encourage them to become conscious of their cultural conditioning.

The Okido yoga brought back a lot of memories of my Aikido training while in Grammar school, including a part of the Okido workshop where I was supposed to escape from two guys who were hanging off my arms (of course I did it!). I might look around for an Aikido dojo here in Brisbane to take Prahlad to (thanks Google - there’s one in Westend near the West End Yoga Studio, and it’s the same school that my earlier training was in - Yoshinkai). I did some more training in Peru, as there was a dojo a few minutes away from the temple. The late night training times didn’t do it for me though, and I haven’t done anything since I got back to Australia.

If two six-hour days weren’t enough, after the Sunday feast that night we had our Monday morning led practice class, two hours from 6 am. You’d think that Kate would give us a restorative class - but no, she poured it on like Murari Caitanya pouring custard onto apple pie. Asanas that I’ve seen but never tried, and some I’ve never even heard of.

If you saw the Yo-Gah! video that Madhava Ghosh pointed out a few weeks back, I was like Jerry during the sun salutation sequence. It was ridiculous.

Anway, it all came back on me that afternoon, and I crashed like an Al-Qaeda Airways 747. First of all I lay down in the driver’s seat in the car, reclined back. Then I crawled into the back while Param drove, and lay on the back seat. Then when we got home, I stayed in the car on the back seat for an hour and a half before I managed to stagger inside where I collapsed on the floor for another hour and a half.

I’ve got another 4 and a half weeks of this in this term, and another 54 weeks until we’ve completed the teacher training. It’s going to be interesting to see how I come out at the end of this.

In other news we found a place for our retreat. After going out to the Samford Valley and generally putting the word out to the universe that we needed a place, the Lord within the heart made the arrangements for a flyer for a Brahma Kumaris retreat to manifest at the restaurant with the address of the Theosophical Society’s retreat center at Springbrook, on the way out to the coast.

I shot them an email last night to find out the details of hiring the place out. We are so totally there.