A cardboard pill box torn open by the side of the road. Not just opened from one of the ends. Ripped. As though hurriedly. I was walking fast. Past the name that caught my eye. I stopped. Reversed. Yes, literally. I retraced my steps … backwards. Curiosity mixed with disbelief. I had to make sure my aging eyes weren’t tricking me.
I stopped again. Leaned in. I felt my eyes squinting; my head tilting to make sure I wasn’t missing or adding any letters to make it less offensive.
UNWANTED the untorn part of the box proclaimed.
Unwanted what? It wasn’t clear. Until the small print came into focus. I can’t help but wonder sometimes if I really do need those reading glasses.
Emergency contraception pill. Was it discarded here in person I wondered … or dumped as part of a bigger load of refuse as is the case all over India. Sad but true.
Was it rape, I wondered. Or drunken lovers acting in passion. A broken condom perhaps?
I walked on. Plagued. Unwanted playing over in my head. Knowing I was one of those conceptions that should have been snuffed out. 
A gender emergency.
Had she known, I too would have been left roadside … a ripped allopathic remedy for my unwanted c*nt.
Shrinking to fit. Pulling away. Not being too big, too loud, too bright, too magical. Never saying how I felt or asking for what I wanted.
Unwanted, I learned to turn that against myself. Until I didn’t.
Triggers are important activators— like a burner that gets unwittingly turned up … until BOOM! … something has to give … and then settle. And then the slow burn of realisation takes over and everything makes sense again.

There are no ready-made laws and no ultimate physical laws pertaining to our bodies. There are only entrenched behavioural habits and there is a freedom within ourselves that enables us to rise to a higher form of life. Evolution, in my opinion, is a loosening of the hold onto one’s beliefs because no belief, good or bad, is healthy since it creates a calcification of mind in one’s defence of said belief.

Satprem, a student of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo and the Mother from Auroville, writes:
‘After breaking through all those evolutionary layers, you suddenly emerge, in the depths of the body, into something where the old laws of the world no longer have power. And you realize that their power was nothing but a huge collective suggestion –and an old habit. But just a habit! There are no “laws”; there are only fossilized habits. And the whole process is to break through those habits. (…) But that state has to come to a point when it’s experienced spontaneously and naturally by the body, which means freeing it of all its conditioning. Then you emerge into something fantastic. But really fantastic! Although I suppose that the first gliding of a bird in the air also was fantastic. Yet there was a moment when an old reptile took off and became a bird.’

Living temporarily in Bir Billing, the Paragliding World Cup venue in the foothills of the Himalaya in Himachal Pradesh, I am reminded every moment of flight as every moment is speckled with the view of dozens of kites (the nylon and the feathered) drifting through the sky with a backdrop of snow streaked peaks.

When looking up terms for paragliding, I am affirmed in my decision to cancel my booking (four times over the past year!) when given this meaning of paraglider in English:
A paraglider died after hitting a crag and plummeting to the ground.

Perhaps evolution will be guided by extreme sports and anti-gravity pursuits but my entrenched behaviour pattern is inclined to stay grounded for now.

Avatar comes from the Sanskrit word avatāra meaning descent. Within Hinduism, it means a manifestation of a deity in bodily form on earth, such as a divine teacher. For those who don’t practice Hinduism, it technically means ‘an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea’.

I feel edgy doing a water only fast for my first few days at Kopan Monastery outside of Kathmandu. I can’t settle. Not permitted to leave the campus to go hiking, exploring and visiting pilgrimage sites, my brain begins the sabotage that tells me I am starving and at risk of dying … ridiculously only 12 hours without food. My ego shouts from its lofty position and decrees my body feed; dopamine receptors left lacking through adverse childhood trauma send my body into shutdown when I don’t comply. My brain, the tyrant that overcompensates to keep me alive and functioning, can forget sometimes that my body’s acquiescence also makes me sick.

I often think I have a food addiction. But it’s not so much an addiction to food as it is a filling of my mouth … with dopamine hits and the satisfaction of distraction. It’s not the substance that creates the addict but the feeling beyond, to which the substance offers a gateway. Sucking on a cigarette is often the only way the smoker gets to take that deep breath. Shovelling food is an urgency to fill an emotional void. Drinking alcohol in excess offers a fast track to spirit. Many people override the warning signs of disease with supplements and medicines whilst still continuing with the lifestyle choices that are making them ill … to avoid the pain of abstinence. Any addiction is, simply put, a manifestation of resistance in reaction to self-generated suffering.

Born into this world in a body weighing a mere several kilograms, we are fed on mother’s milk (not me) and then on (hopefully) nutritious foods that grow our physical forms until we are adults. So, when we eat a beetroot or an avocado or the flesh of a coconut—a recognisable food source—the body has this phenomenal capability to transmute whatever we ingest into building blocks of growth, expansion, regeneration and elimination; engineering the energy to continuously develop human cells and healing cells as old ones die off and are expelled through the colon and anus.

The membranes of the physical body have the intelligence to open and close, discerning what belongs and what doesn’t. But what about the consumption of emotional and spiritual substances? They too are entering the being on different levels and they don’t have a colon or anus for expulsion of what isn’t recognised or needed for human functioning. Instead they linger, where they create either the ballast for the psyche or they fuck it up, get confused and begin its stealthy erosion. Unable to integrate or eliminate, ‘energetic’ toxins attach to physical cells in the body … transform the cells of the body … become the cells of the body. The immune system launches an offensive against this threat. And the body devours itself.

We become what we practice, what we consume; we are the sum of those we hang out with. Whether physical consumption, thoughts or actions, the law of cause and effect is like the law of gravity … not paid much attention, yet working fulltime all the same. Karma is taking whatever you say, think, or act upon in this present moment, and ultimately living it out in a future moment.

This incredible human alchemical vessel—this avatar—we have been gifted for this earth incarnation has all the systems in place to solve what needs to be solved. Abusing it with addictions and distractions, avoidance and abstractions, is like putting a roof on a house with walls made of rubble.

If you want to build your house correctly, remember this:
What you fill your mouth with becomes part of your stomach becomes part of your body.
What you fill your nostrils with becomes part of your lungs becomes part of your body.
What you fill your thoughts with becomes part of your mind becomes part of your body.
What you fill your love with becomes part of your heart becomes part of your body.

A man walks past. Casually punches me in the chest. I turn, indignant. He walks on. Already drowning under 30kg of luggage with sweat dripping off my face and down my legs to soak my socks, I am at tipping point. This violation tips me. In moments of rage, the brain forgets all burdens; adrenaline comes online to support survival. I chase him down and ram my bag into his backside. People stare, no one cares. Frenetic, fighting, pushing, no sense. Jaded.

India can breathe life into my soul … can welcome me with Namaste and Pooja … just as readily as spit me out and crack my ribs. She has been sanctity and sanity for over two decades; the bejewelled lover whose arms I have fallen into over and over, who held me through divorce trauma and abuse. This seductive kohl-eyed lover has restored my heart, and broken it again … and then pieced it all back together again. I have arrived a rag doll with button eyes dangling by threads and hair pulled out and I always leave stitched up. Sometimes it happens the other way around.

When married to a narcissist after years of narcissistic abuse from my mother, it’s understandable that my perspective of love and lovers has been tainted. In calm Buddhist Nepal I missed the edginess of India; the dopamine of a sadistic lover. When life was so hard, India’s harshness felt normal. And then something shifted with how I felt towards my soulmate human love. It takes experiencing something that is truly loving to realise my patterns of comfort are also patterns of danger and dysfunction. I recognised that love needn’t be so hard; it can be simple and gentle and come with contentment that I have often erroneously equated with boredom.

After Nepal, I had to reacquaint myself with this love of mine… India pulled me back in for a ‘kyk weer’ (look again). And, after returning to my own gentle heart and self love, I have recognised that dopamine can come from self care rather than self harm. Unlike my human soulmate, who no longer speaks to me, India doesn’t ignore or reject or even diminish. I know she will always be there for me—and never let me fall—and I know I won’t resist returning … and even falling … again.

For now, however, we have decided to break up. Not acrimoniously in the way my human relationships have ended. We have chosen to still remain friends. With benefits. I choose gentle now as I return to South Africa briefly to reconnect with a more accepting love. And when I leave again I will move on a new path offered up from a place untainted by the past and unfettered by the future. Today I am present.

White silk and jasper is draped around my neck. Reverence. Grace. Gratitude. Words empty of significance without the felt sense of them. Pooja chanting. Karma yoga and hands raised. Air thick with incense-saturated humidity. Everything melds and blurs. Nine months is a moment and an eternity. Everything is impermanent. Each moment a miracle.

Meditation is the bridge; practice, its gateway. On the cushion, I write entire books in my head. Off the cushion, I am self deprecating. Because, in meditation, I wasn’t actually meditating and outside meditation I haven’t written the books. I sigh and gaze out the window at the sparrows making sheet music with the electricity cables. The thoughts don’t stop; I allow them to be. The musky smell of goat drifts through the open window; flares the nostrils. I hold the tension between the two realities, waiting for Jung’s third to arise. Sensory overload is also just a state of the mind.

People often say they can’t meditate. They say they can’t get rid of their thoughts, erroneously thinking that this is the goal. When we come to the cushion, there’s nothing new that comes up but, sitting for a determined length of time in stillness and silence, there’s no longer an ability to distract ourselves from everything that has been there all along: thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions; there is no longer all the other stuff to distract from the business of the mental, physical and emotional bodies. You have to quite literally sit and brew. 

I visit hole-in-the-wall shops lined corner-to-corner and ceiling-to-floor with scented oils and perfumes. I use every centimetre of hand and wrist. Saturated, I smell like a stick of incense. Flammable. Travelling anoints me in the microbiome of everyone and everything I engage with. I am no longer who I was on arrival here … I am no longer who I was on entering the perfume shop. As names and meetings drift away, it is only the essence of people and places that remains.

The word sacrifice means to make sacred. Fifteen years ago meditation was my salvation; the primary intervention that sobered me up from alcohol and sugar abuse, and from a marriage that was doing more harm than the copious self medicating. Whatever I steep myself in colours my life and I manifest that with which I resonate. There is no right or wrong in the meditation practice, only right or wrong in the choices I make … so, in making better sacrifices, my gradual awakening continues to take me on a trajectory of synchronicity, symbology and sanctitude.

Peacocks and elephants boast human heads and vice versa; deities have multiple limbs holding tools to slay samsara; demon masks and protruding tongues; every detailed inch of temple grounds and gompas shout for attention. Monasteries and sacred travel sites usurp status from spas and beach resorts; meditation retreats and wellness courses become the shrines of my prostration.

I know people who judge harshly the symbology of religions that are not their own; they experience the images as scary—sometimes even evil. What people rarely acknowledge, however, is that every single image, advert, billboard is a symbol … every sound, smell, touch and taste. Greater than the sum of their letters, words are symbols too; every one a spell. 

The screeching wheels of a bus draw my scattered attention as it careens around the u-bend, ‘Oh god save me’ emblazoned across its front. Bombarded by imagery daily, symbology can either bolster or erode the psyche. Choose carefully what shrine of exposure you show up at because observation, both conscious and subliminal, feeds interpretation. And absorption that occurs without filters hitches to and adopts dysfunctions always there in the personal, archetypal and symbolic, albeit not recognised. Practice discernment of all that enters consciousness.

Be mindful; be aware; be present. 
And then start again … start again … start again.
One breath at a time.
We become what we practice.