Starting a German Website and more Travelling in Germany

I reached Germany in April 2004 with my leg in a brace, my suitcase rolling behind me and plans on my mind for the places that I would visit in the next months. With my torn ligament I would obviously not be able to give yoga workshops and lessons and I had told this to my organizers in different towns. Whatever physical workshops they had scheduled had to be turned into lectures of cancelled. I would give lectures and individual sessions but no yoga on this trip.

My first station was Dusseldorf. I stayed once more with someone whom I had never met before. While I was in India, the German woman who had offered to organize my program in Cologne, had also suggested other people to do the same in their home towns. This is how I came to this man, one of her students. He welcomed me heartily and I was happy to start working again.

With my German contacts increasing and me getting used to the world of the internet a bit more, I decided that it would be good to have a website in German as well. My brothers had created the English website already while I had still been in the cave. It had been maintained by someone in Vrindavan and then we slowly learned a little bit how to update it ourselves. I had some texts in German as well, because we had made a flyer before and some people had written down their experiences of the individual sessions with me. So while I was in Dusseldorf, my host helped me to book a German domain and within the next months we started our German web presence.

The internet was however still a very small part of my life. I checked emails daily but did not spend more time online than necessary. I also always had people around with whom I could talk, who were interested in a conversation and with whom I enjoyed getting to know more about their culture and telling of mine.

I am not fully sure what my next stop after Dusseldorf was. I travelled around Germany and I know that I went to Cologne to meet the woman who had been in touch over mail. She had organized a flat in which I could live for a short time and where I could also give me individual sessions while I was in Cologne.

I also came to Mainz, where I stayed with the Indian family who had a restaurant there. This was a town in which I had now been several times and it felt very familiar and nice to be there. I met many people whom I already knew and they told me how they had been. I heard a lot of stories of people who really felt better after coming to me and I was happy that I had been able to help them. One of these people was the woman who had told me of her wish to have a child. She had actually called me when I had been in Australia to give me happy news: she was expecting a child! When I was now in Mainz, I also met her and she was very advanced in her pregnancy. Seeing her and her husband so happy was just wonderful.

In this trip I also travelled up to Berlin. A man in whose yoga center in Frankfurt I had given lectures before and who had come to India to visit us at the Ashram had moved to Berlin and had invited me there. For the first time in the German capital, I enjoyed being in this city, too, even though I had the impression that it was not as clean as other cities that I had seen. It may have only been that part of the town I had been to but that was my impression.

The people that I met in each of these stations however were lovely. I met lots of new people and had great experiences in making new connections.