Author: Well Worth Being

I have a passion for holistic health and non-prescriptive self development. I believe in an integrated patient-centred approach to personal transformation and will take each individual on a journey to their unique place of innate health using a variety of modalities including Craniosacral Therapy, Integral Coaching, TIME Meditation, Transformational Yoga, nutrition education and personal psychology. I am also a qualified Mountain Guide which I can combine with other therapies on guided trails. Our bodies are the vessels of our current existence and have an innate intelligence that we simply have to get in touch with in order to live well. Each body has its own stories; my job is to listen – to hear its stories as clearly as possible – and to respond effectively. Through bodywork and coaching sessions and I can re-establish the dialogue between your body and its inherent health and guide you to the best version of you that you can be.

Twenty Nine: Triangle of Trans-mutation

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Winnie the Pooh astutely observed that ‘when you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen’. Big Boots have most definitely been required. A Heffalump has haunted me.

The shape of my wandering and wondering through the forests of narrative has recently taken on the shape of a triangle—the Drama Triangle. I have found myself writing instead of ruminating since the latter can transmute this shape of things into something more akin to the Bermuda Triangle, an anomaly that I at times over the past four months have welcomed either to swallow me up or devour the cause of my catastrophising.

As I walk on the path, I become the path. I engage with the obstacles as well as the open road; I connect with the clouds as well as the sunshine. The world moves through me as I move across the world. I have no way of knowing what alchemy is working as I am walking. Travel is a way to gain perspective and stories are a snapshot that both clarify that perspective and also dissolves it completely. For the manifestation of non-duality is birthed from duality. So I surrender in trust to the aspects of both deep joy and intense struggle because to find unity it is essential to first find separation—to know the component parts before re-viewing it all as one.

I don’t travel to find myself or to create myself; I travel to meet myself … exactly where I’m at … until I become exactly who I am.

Bar the enlightened ones in caves and ashrams, everyone finds a corner of the Drama Triangle at some point in their lives. And often shapes don’t fit. Often we don’t fit. Stuff happens. Accidents happen. People happen. Puzzle shapes break and pictures change. Often, despite best intentions, a part of life fragmented by unskilled behaviour retains a crooked connector. It metastasises. The unresolved is known to show up again in a different format, gathering momentum as it travels. Because everything repeats itself … until it doesn’t. We attract the things we judge until we no longer judge the things we attract. A psychological circular error.

I once had an issue when people said, “whatever triggers you is an aspect of the other that you have inside you”. “All very well,” I would quip, “unless the person is a psychopath”. I now understand that even the psychopath is just a mutant emotional cell gone awry—a part that still finds resonance. Not all cancers are physical. There are emotional and spiritual tumours too, and there are people who show up as that manifest mutation in life. 

“Treat everyone like the Buddha,” an old adage goes, “but keep one hand on your wallet.”

Four months of my gap year nomading have been fraught with catastrophic drama and the abusive behaviour of a mentally unstable squatter who held my home hostage in Cape Town. She represented the tumour—a growth that came from an unprocessed part of my psyche … an element of myself that forced me to introspect. The cascading psychological healing crisis uncovered the underlying cancer: Shame … Threat … Injustice. Losing sight of my my wallet along with my sovereignty provided the tension required to force me through the portal of home as soul. And I finally understood: if I don’t feel my home is good enough then I don’t feel I am good enough.

Mutations ride shotgun on healthy cells preventing them from functioning to full effect and drawing attention from leucocytes that erroneously charge forth to target and destroy these haywire elements, causing massive collateral damage to their inherently healthy host cells. Photographs from the home front displayed a soul in crisis; a war zone that was fighting its way out of the four walls that couldn’t contain her rage … highlighting all those damaged parts. Not me or mine but also me and mine. Both/And.

“Compassion and humility may be among the most treasured of human virtues, but they are not useful in conflict. … Virtue is to be valued in proper context; only a sword will do in battle. … Training will still help you work out your fears, inhibitions and anxieties. In the case of conflict, no one, not even a veteran, is ever sure that they will come out alive from a confrontation. But they resolve to go in there and give themselves a fighting chance. This in itself is a triumph over evil.”

When you fight the cancer, you fight yourself; it’s not something foreign … the body knows it. She was only there because she is a mutant part of me, making me accountable to some degree. There is a real reckoning here; one that required a fully holistic approach. I couldn’t change the shitty situation. I couldn’t resist it or escape it. I could choose only to be with it and in it. I had to see this accident of this person as an opportunity to break patterns of a past haunted by abuse and to look at transmuting violation into loving kindness. Because when these things don’t change, I have only myself to change.

According to Buddhist Psychology, to seek revenge against someone who has harmed for no apparent reason is like punching the wall and expecting her to hurt. It’s no different to just silently hate them. To forgive, they say, is better but not ideal. Give victory to the enemy, this Buddhist practice entreats. When I read this line, I had to get the old me into a headlock and talk her off the ledge. Who I have become had to offer her assistance in her plight … had to allow her to win her one-sided war with me. Why? Because she wasn’t fighting me. She was fighting all the unseen, unvalidated parts of herself and she was looking to the aspects of me that represented those parts of herself and her life to reflect her drama and make her right. It wasn’t about me. And I didn’t have to step into her triangle to make her valid. Whatever we mirror for others, we become ourselves.

The worm breaks apart and grows into two separate and complete creatures. Exhausted and confused, all the I can’t, I can’ts gradually broke into the I can. One part of me engaged in divinations, ritual offerings and traditional healers whilst the other part engaged in the nail-biting legal thriller starring the best eviction lawyer in Cape Town. Discernment is seeing truth and acting with wisdom. Recovery sometimes means fighting and sometimes it resides in surrender; naturopathy and allopathy both find a place in healing.

“And, if you knew back then what you know now?” folk back home are curious to know, “would you still have let her in; would you have flown back earlier as intended?” The answer is always “No!”  Because, despite the potential PTSD she stimulated in my system, this accident of a person was the exact reason I needed to be here. This too was a portal to amateur and reactive past actions that took me to the funeral pyre of my karma.

I will soon return to my Phoenix home … to a new manifestation of a me … where I will live in the ashes, live life differently, and rise again … and again … and again.

Interlude: A Letter from my deathbed

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Darling Penelope

It’s 2038 and I am lying on a daybed overlooking the Ganges.
Waiting to die. 
They say it’s close now. I am ready.
The mosquito net breathes in the breeze and the smell of the monsoon rain carries over from the east bank. Seductive. Like death. Elusive. Waiting. Just out of reach.
I know you will be happy to receive this letter to reassure you that you found your way. Not only found your way, but that your way found you in your beloved India and that our body will soon be shrouded in sheaths of saffron and laid on stacks of wood from trees not unlike the ones we were so sure were used as stakes to burn us down.
This is your calling.
The witchy part of you is what gets you here. Like the phoenix you rise from the ashes to be burnt voluntarily on another pyre. 
Don’t let it go.
Use the fire of past life burnings to light your passage. You’re on your way. Fire is your name.
Fourteen more years I know is longer than you wanted to prolong a life of survival … but it’s short enough to die of a life well lived.
Fully love where you are.
Fully love WHO you are.
Because who you are now is exactly where you are meant to be; and what you do now is exactly how you get to me.
And me is pretty fabulous.
Life gets easier and you find love … the love you didn’t find from another, you find in yourself and in your work and in your community and from your faith. It pours towards you and comes from you and surrounds you. It becomes you.
I became a nun and shaved my head before I lost my mind.
That’s a joke. You’re not going to go mad, but you will be madly happy. 
It’s a beautiful tough life you choose for us and the worst is now over.
Have courage to live without fear.
Have courage to lead without shame.
Have courage to love without pain.
Suffering doesn’t go away; you just get sussed enough to give it the middle finger of fierce compassion.
This is your alchemy. This is your gift.
Use it. Live it. Love it.
Be the love you seek. I am waiting … behind the shroud that beckons.
Don’t be afraid.
I am here. You are here. We are here.

With abundant blessings and joy.

Your Peaceful Warrior Self,
Yogini ChaitAgni 

(From a memoir writing course with Dawn Garish of Life Righting)

Twenty Eight: The Map is not the Territory

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Life is the proverbial puzzle and we are its multi-sided pieces that connect to, resonate with and disclose aspects of other people in a multitude of ways to their corresponding shapes, places and experiences. 

I have alwasys resided in the facets of life that evoke an inner ache for something … anything … beyond the ordinary. I ache for the strange and unusual schisms and chasms; the cracks and fractured pieces … the shards of glass that rupture and refract the aspects of my self. I ache to break. And the way I piece myself back together again, in ways that challenge the promised prettiness of the picture on the box, is through travel.

But travel doesn’t necessarily involve movement; it often involves staying still and allowing the movement to travel around me and through me. Travel isn’t necessarily going to distant lands; it often involves staying at home and allowing my inner maps to guide me on adventures never before imagined. Entire galaxies can be explored by going nowhere and simply exposing my labyrinthine networks to whatever wants to show up for me. This time, however, has been—and still is—my most epic escapade; an excavation of my inner being so radical that my return will reveal little left of the person I was when I departed.

My journeys are neither comfortable nor easy but they are both fantastical and foundational. Travel forces me to let go of both the known and the knowing as my brain and body map the safe spaces. It forces me to learn how to plot each step, breath and feeling as I walk the physical landscapes of my new territory and navigate strange and wondrous shortcuts through forests, over rivers and around hills. Finding shortcuts, however, isn’t about shortening or quickening the journey; it’s about finding and mapping the thread-like connectors on the external landscapes of life as well as the internal synaptic links of the brain. Because I am never only exploring and witnessing that which I traverse, but also exploring and witnessing myself differently through the eyes of those I see and through the reflections and refractions of the outer on the inner.

In countries where marriage is not questioned, I am often questioned why I am not. It’s a choice that came from choice—to love myself enough to fill the spaces that love asks of me; to create my own connectors and big pictures. Too often I have traded my sovereignty for a taste of the domestic … tethered myself to ‘stable’ men who find happiness in a normality that doesn’t form part of my DNA. And I discover that perhaps the very same thing that unnerves men about me—my inability to settle down—unnerves me too.

This trip is a coming of age after decades of sacrifice. The patched repairs are gradually getting chipped away and repointed to provide new reinforcing in my genetic structure. Tensegrity is not about rigidity and strength as much as it is about fluidity and adaptability. And, since sacrifice means to make sacred, I take this journey across my soul, not as a tourist but as a pilgrim.

I breathe the maps into being … into MY being. I change with change, and change changes me, in reciprocity and collaboration. Everyone seeks change. Few want to change. Travel provides the libido to build strength to maintain and sustain all I have adopted and adtapted to here. I can choose to either consciously create the maps … or the maps will create me.

A fantastical journey can be dramatic and challenging but it is only in following the breadcrumb trail of dot-to-dots back to the beginning that I will reach my destination. It will take a long while to integrate this village into my DNA but it is already an integral part of my being. The picture on the box redraws itself as my puzzle pieces create new connections. This odyssey for the story that completes my picture does not, this time around, constitute a separate part of my journey but is an extension of who I now am.

Twenty Seven: No Challenge, No Hero

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I have developed a mistrust of lawyers over the years. They have always been the people thrust on me by people of dubious character, with harmful intent. Used as the kryptonite for others to distract and overpower me, they have been the pawns in wars fought against me. I am not unscathed. So, when my son declared matter of factly in the car one day last year that he had registered to study BCom Law, the horror I felt bordered on outrage. I stammered. I had no words. Not this intelligent, kind, conscious young man! My thoughts whirled and my heart pounded. Brainwashed, I thought … sucked into the system, I gasped … poisoned by his private schooling and narcissistic parent. I am fortunate that words do often escape me. I am not often succinct, let alone silent, especially when indignant and stupefied. Yet here I was … silent … gaping and dumbfounded … and I was still. I was driving. It was a blessed saviour. Because I was wrong. 

There is good and bad in everyone and there is good and bad in every profession. Not all lawyers should be vilified because of the bad people who hide behind them. And every profession with a bad rap needs another good person to step in and shift the perception. My great grandfather was a British Judge in Colonial India. The India I love where my paternal grandmother, Diana, was born and grew has a karmic hold on me. This karmic bond that made her an activist—and unwittingly caused me to rebel against the construct—has created an aspiration in my son to unwittingly go back to source. 

I have spent many hours and healings pondering and deep diving into the possibility—however unlikely—that this ancestor of mine, caught in a paradigm of horrendous crimes against this land I long for, was one of the good guys. I have spent many hours and healings pondering and deep diving too into whether his Indian-born redhead fought the South African Apartheid because of the example of good she was shown or in reaction to the bad. Because some people don’t evolve into anything other than the kryptonite others require to become a superhero. And some people’s parents are that kryptonite.

Having spent so many years moulding myself to fit a system; to fit a society; to fit a community of people who value structures of control above all else, I remember with shameful distaste looking out from my cool marble double-volume Investment Banking office block at protests against capitalism taking place in the street below and feeling contempt and pity for these ragged unemployed mongrels with too much time on their hands. I felt they must envy me in my branded clothes with my Toni&Guy crafted hairstyles. How wrong I was. Anarchy is also a system with its own set of rules and dogma. Karma is the vehicle that can either transport you or run you down.

It took me years of accumulating and aspiring to a dysfunctional norm before falling from my wobbly pedestal in divorce and disillusion to begin finding those threads that brought me into a more harmonious weave with Diana’s legacy of simplicity, lightheartedness, gravitas, integrity, creativity, and strength to live outside of dysfunction which, in her day was a whole lot more difficult than in mine. I admire her with deep bows of gratitude as I see how my son too is following this thread, and weaving together the tapestry of activism and consciousness with the clear-headed pragmatism of a Virgo birth with Libra rising under a Sagittarius moon. 

Watching me fight annually to retain custody against a man—and the legal system he used for this unjust endeavour—also contributed to the shaping of my son into the young man who seeks this path of knowledge towards understanding of justice and its shadow side. Even the bad ones are in their way the greatest teachers. It’s as erroneous to discard the systems because of the people as it is to discard the people because of the systems. If a bad person hides in the jungle, it doesn’t make the jungle bad for shielding her. My reality is a construct of my own mind.

There is a saying that anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. I cannot be harmed by a vengeful person imbibing poison she expects to kill me. I cannot find someone else’s inner peace. But I can find my own. I observe my inclination to lean in too far, too soon. To feel safe. I act first. Too terrified of a surprise attack, I walk straight into the wall … or a fist.

If life is suffering then my pain resides solely in my resistance to said suffering. Breathing into it and accepting its natural and necessary occurrence, I can breathe out the struggle and no longer feel the pain. Two weeks ago during a visit to a dentist in Chandigarh, I worked with this theory. Using only the breath and mindful awareness, I allowed the dentist to remove an old crown one day and fit a new one the next. With no anaesthetic, I used the experience to deconstruct my brain’s narrative that the nerve pain was dangerous or detrimental and I gave my brain the opportunity to cut through habituated patterns and see another reality and truth not based on past stories. This is how I learn to feel safe.

So this framework has filtered into other areas of life as I breathe through my reluctance to tap into the construct I discarded. I have befriended the pawn a recent perpetrator/victim (look out for another post on The Drama Triangle) has used to create her own smoke and mirrors drama and I have befriended my requirement to recruit a lawyer who will be as good and honest and trustworthy as I give her the credit and integrity to be. And I use these data points to shift my perspective of the karmic bond my son has to entering this field: to change the paradigm and to heal the ancestral line; to blend the yin and the yang, the creative and the pragmatic, the gentle and the bold.

I use my self-development as a glider and, from a place of eagle-eyed vision, I acknowledge the duality that guides the river of self knowing through the safety of foreign terrain as I place a Lawyer as one bank and a Sangoma as the other. This is the weft and weave that makes the tapestry come alive on the loom … the poise and pause of musical notes … the margins of the page.

There is no happiness without the transmutation of suffering and all superheroes have their nemesis.  Without the kryptonite Superman would not have his superpowers; without challenge there is no Superhero. The systems and the shadows have shaped me too. So I befriend the jungle once more and know that I am safe there … and also not … but mostly I am.

Twenty Six: Monsoon Bower Bird

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“Please speak of how you view the possibility of attachment to non attachment,” I ask the dharma teacher.

I am at Kopan Monastery to heal my body and mind from resonating at the frequency of the fatal diseases I might have contracted from the dog bite, and to recover from setbacks encountered on the home front. On a three-day water fast, I travel the darkened tunnels of a healing crisis with fever and fitfulness and I find the comforting containment of 700 monks and nuns chanting and performing pooja to be instrumental in my wellness.

I notice, as I ask the question, my hand running fingers through the thin blonde hair I have always equated with femininity as I admire the teacher’s beautifully smooth-shaven crown. I am drawn to life in a nunnery and commit to shave my head on my arrival in India … yet I also know how fickle I can be. Life as a renunciate mocks me as I consider relinquishing the bower bird aspects of my identity … the beautiful shiny objects I have around me, even on my travels.

I sit each morning as an observer, an outsider looking in on the monks as they arrive dressed in robes that simultaneously shed their identity and give them one. They prostrate and take their seats. They are vessels, showing up in service to the prayers; chanting for others what others can’t do for themselves.

I sit and contemplate on no more than what I witness. The pooja, the music, the clapping away of evil spirits. When a British Colonel arrived in Lhasa after gunning down thousands of Tibetans, he is said to have felt great pride in the Tibetans clapping for him on his arrival, mistakingly believing their attempts to dispel evil as their celebrating his prowess.

The opposite of doing is not apathy; it’s allowing … a yielding rather than a seeking. Meditation is an action. It is a deliberate and intentional allowing of all that is, in order to practice not attaching to any of it through the sense organs. Gathering to wash the plates and utensils from food preparations, the chatting and community is as profoundly important as the nourishment from the simple food. Quality of life is expressed through moving hands that find their intelligence in ordinary tasks. Is this what malas could be used for? I wonder.

As the fever passes, I feel both relief and disappointment. Relief that I may have healed myself from potential suffering. Disappointment that I may have saved myself from dying. If you know me, you will understand that this is not in fact a depressed dig in the darkness, but a lightening of something quite liberating. Regardless, a little more context may be required for those who don’t know the true meaning of the word GuRu and may be more attached to just the one syllable without considering its counterpart.

I have never felt fully committed to this incarnation. Call it trauma, abuse, nervous system dysregulation … no matter … contemplating death these past days, I recognise that I am more attached to death than I am to life. So the tears I shed are related to feeling that dying from a dog bite in a country that honours death as much as it honours life would be a better fate than ultimately taking that long walk into the ocean when I am done with this so-called me I am becoming less and less identified with as I travel to integrate the past five decades of my fabrication.

There is a middle ground always: not attached to either life or death but fully committed to and incarnated in both. Like a suspension bridge that must be fully rooted in both banks. Straddling. Clinging to neither … and also to both.

My writing habits have gone into holes and tunnels and transcended the notion of linear time. There are gaps … chasms. And, as with my meditation practice, I have to keep coming back to the cushion to start again.

I am in India now at Deer Park Institute in Himachal Pradesh. So much life has happened between my time here in February, and this time now. I have written less than I aspired to, traveled and explored way more than I imagined, connected, studied, expanded (and also contracted), integrated and shed so much of who I believed myself to be. To honour this new version of myself that can’t recognise myself in the mirror anymore, I travel to McLeodGanj, two hours each way by cab, to a hairdresser I met in February. My instruction to Mukti back then was still my usual, “Just the ends off please; I’m trying to grow it”. This time I am not bold enough for the full head shave—yet—but I flick through Pinterest to show him some images that match this new Penelope V11.9 and tell him to work his magic. I close my eyes and breathe.

This is the only death I need right now.

Monsoon season is a flushing of all the rubbish; a cleansing of the earth and a transition into autumn. India has six seasons instead of four … six opportunities to adapt or die.

Twenty Five: Death on the Carousel

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‘Hm’, I said, not meaning for it to be such a short sharp expression of a somewhat surprising realisation. I often disappear into my thoughts; occasionally I get jolted back with the realisation that I have spoken something—usually a question—out loud. Today, sitting in an armchair in the library of Kopan Monastery where I am staying for a week, I found myself unwittingly tapping on my phone, writing about death. The subject had been discussed in the earlier dharma talk and, on entering the library, my eyes and hands thankfully landed immediately on The Book of Joy by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I tend to experience excessive overwhelm when choosing a book in a library or bookstore and often the doors have closed while I am still drifting trance-like up and down aisles, touching and leafing through—and often sniffing—hundreds of books I fail to narrow down to just that one. It seems unjust somehow to eliminate so much unread potential with the accumulated value of hundreds of thousands of writing hours by hopeful authors. This is why ‘thankfully’ interjected there. As it happens, I read very little of the joy book. Surrounded by all those words and wisdom, a quite typical Penelope thought crossed my mind: I am more afraid of my luggage not appearing on the airport carousal than I am of dying.

I decided to unpack that—so to speak—in light of my current day of drifting in and out of sleep; my previous few days of stiffness in my knuckles, forearms and upper back; general tension and weakness in my body, and an incapacity to fully function. The now almost fully-healed wound on my right arm reminds me of the potential cause of these symptoms: a dog bite a week ago in Pharping Dollu. 

We are all on the limen of life and death and not one of us knows exactly when we will unwittingly cross. Yet cross we will. So, when the darkness beckons, I submit. Sometimes I go so deep into the dark without a flashlight and, to the alarm of many, I’m not afraid of staying there a while. And then I write and I share. But no one wants to hear these travel stories. People want to live vicariously … they want to suck the dopamine hits from my days on the road. They want romance stories not murder mysteries; they want beaches and sunsets, not oil slicks and smog. People want to be wooed by their projected fantasies onto the ones who leave; unwilling or unable to live their dreams into existence.

I have so often been dangerously and excitingly close to crossing that limen between life and death that I can freely claim to have intentionally dangled a foot over the threshold on more than one occasion. This time, however, I had to weigh up the risks of taking my chances dying from a disease I had a minuscule chance of contracting or getting a vaccine and risking injury or death from a medicine I had a minuscule chance of needing. Either way I might die and I had 24 hours to choose which death risk I was willing to take. Those hours felt like a hike through hell as I had to not only consider my choice to vaccinate or not but also navigate my unfamiliar discomfort with death standing vigil at the foot of my bed. 

Every breakthrough is accompanied by a fever.

I awoke from a torrid night with the absolute surrender to my mortality and my autonomy in taking my chances crossing the threshold potentially whilst still exploring Nepal. Life, after all is only a practice and death is inevitable … and if this is my destiny then my freedom to choose this was also pre-determined.

Like the luggage on the carousel, I recognise that suffering is in the anticipation only; the struggle and the resistance. It lies in the attachment. Some have suffering imposed on them and some get stuck in adversity as though an addiction whilst others embrace it out of fear of who they would need to be if freedom was their new reality. Still there are others who never experience suffering and adversity and always seek an elusive freedom as a fish seeks the water it swims in.

The weight on the airport scales is nothing compared with what I drag onto planes … the emotional baggage; the leaden soul. Dark nights and prolonged depressions are also travel. Longterm nomading has nothing to do with escaping anything and everything to do with facing everything … in ever-changing landscapes that highlight the myriad crises and give endless space to tease them apart … to sometimes break them open … to make space enough to step back, get perspective and rebuild with breathing space. Because nothing can be escaped. All I can do is express how it actually feels, not how I want it to feel. And not how vicarious travellers want to experience it either.

So I travel to recover and heal from a lifetime of living in survival mode, decades of abuse, breakdowns and mental afflictions such as narcolepsy, ADHD and autism. I travel to break down the walls of the necessity to function according to other people’s perceptions and expectations so that I can transmute and transmit my light through the cracks in the dark matter of dis-ease, dis-function and dis-order. I travel to free myself from the here or there or now or then; to find the moments of existence that contain everything and nothing. Because true freedom can only be found through the gateways. I travel to practice living well so that I can die well.

Death still lingers as aches and pains as I face up to where I am in its liminal space. As I stand at the carousel of life and luggage, I none the less give the three black monastery dogs an uncharacteristic wide berth as I walk to the Gompa. Just becasue I am questioning the power of my mind to slip either into healing or suffering and how prepared I am to cross the threshold does not mean I actually want to die just yet.

I travel to question my questions so that I may never find the answers.

Twenty Four: Handmade Himalaya

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Pokhara—Nepal’s Promised Land—comes with its own unique challenges and blessings. Bars and restaurants take over the Lakeside area with names like Crave and Paradise; there are strip clubs now and a Pokhara Disney Land. Tourists from all over the world consume in a frenzy anything on offer. I pass people on the streets who look like they have just stepped out of a video game and I am offered ganja and ‘a night to remember’ whenever I cross a certain threshold on the main road. Twenty-three years have not been kind.

Pokhara also comes with a gift I could never have imagined or anticipated: a room in an apartment with a balcony and Himalaya views. It takes several weeks before the rains clear the sky enough to see them and, when they appear, their golden morning halo is worth each day in wait. I share the apartment with the elderly Kashmiri man who, with his wife, hosted me in SriNagar after snow trekking in Aru valley; he has a shop in Pokhara and all he asks in return is that I attend to customers on Fridays while he goes to Mosque.

Whilst most people in Pokhara troll the main streets and the lakeside for dopamine hits in the form of fast food, ganja, liquor, shiny plastic trinkets and karaoke, the beautiful duality is that those I judge are also the ones who sleep in. I seek the sanctuary of the peace that descends in the early mornings when I go for my runs, my walks, my solitary yoga, and general contemplation. It’s the time of day when I am able to notice the things that matter … like superb coffee, tranquil vibes and friendly strangers … kindness and beauty also overflow here.

“The word peccadillo, which means a ‘small sin’, comes from pecus, which means ‘defective foot’, a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings life generously offers to those who seek them.“ ~  Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

And, as in The Pilgrimage, I too walk the path of generous blessings … whilst my shadow confronts me in the form of a black dog who snarls at me on morning runs and rips to shreds the stick I use to defend myself. With the crazy love affair I instantly develop with duality, the only way I can find harmony is to follow my compulsion and get out of the city only days after my arrival. Pokhara is just the foreplay; to experience the orgasm, there are literal mountains I must climb. 

As the Quintessential Pioneer, Explorer and Adventurer, I am usually questing at speed ahead of others … getting lost to find my way, and generally moving through landscapes with determination, strength and courage. So choosing to take a guide is not easy. We walk together to the permit office and after just those few kilometers I know we will travel well together. Ten days, I say to Tikka, and we can decide if we want to go further after that.

I last trekked in Nepal shortly after America erroneously declared war on Iraq. I have flashbacks to the person I was trekking the then 21-day Annapurna Circuit 23 years ago, fresh out of Barclays Capital with boots I had worn only the once in the High Street adventure store, carrying my 13kg Macpac (which has subsequently done several local trails and Camino de Santiago routes), crawling across suspension bridges at first and then acclimatizing to fearless scrambling across landslides. No smart phone, no Google Maps … no AllTrails or Komoot … only something printed off the relatively new Internet called the YetiGuide, pinned to my pack in a ZipLoc bag. If we got lost, we didn’t know it, because we were always somewhere and there was always a village tap to wash at, a hot dal soup, and a floor to sleep on. Each day just another day on the mountains, we walked in bliss of our youthful ignorance. It’s impossible to know the landscape before walking the territory so the gift is always in letting go of having to know the way.

It feels like having a guide is a betrayal to my independence … and yet somewhat reassuring to be able to follow for a change; to learn that he too follows no maps besides his own instinct and intuition, finding new pathways where new roads have cut away the old trails … that he too is sometimes lost without being lost. The first day or two exposes some resistance to the mecahnics of the trekking: recalibration around not needing to check that Tikka is ok; acceptance of his checking that I am ok; allowing him to carry my extra water bottle; submitting to his carrying all my vegan snacks, and feeling comfortable with his managing nightly arrangements for a free bed in teahouses of people he knows. It just takes me a few days to trust to let go of the needing to know; to sink into the moment-tomoment step-by-step and breath-by-beautiful-breath.

I am a wilderness guide who is also capable of being guided. Slow and steady the leader becomes the led. But slow and steady doesn’t always work for me. I overtake and usurp the leader, transforming him into the led. A potential power struggle becomes a game and then a comfortable rhythm as we mostly walk in silence with occassional fountains of inspiration at smoking stops (by the time we trekked again, he had quit). We climb relentless stairs for hours and days, get drenched in a thunderstorm, dry ourselves in a house that emerges from another dimension, walk in slow motion over literal carpets of rhododendron flowers, cross exposed ridges, push through thickets, gorge on wild berries, engage in fireside therapy with fellow travellers, and wake up to views of mountains that seem like a mirage. Days feel like months as inner landscapes of alchemically putrefying DNA beneath dirty hair and dehydrated skin becomes woven into my being as rapidly as the outer landscape changes. Some day—perhaps in another 23 years—I will have integrated the gavitas of this passage through the mighty Himalaya and grow the capacity to express fully the impact it has had. Not now. 

Pokhara becomes my base camp for over a month as I head off on explorations from there. A 10-day trek combining Panchase, Mardi Himal Base Camp at 4,500m, and several villages—including Lwang and Dhampus—flows into a week overlooking Begnas Lake at the tranquil Mountain View Eco Farm, and a return to Pokhara to meet a Spaniard I met at Low Camp. This flows into a 6-day trek to Mohare Danda at 3,500m, a trek to the Peace Pagoda, and a bad judgement call hiking to a homestay in Sarangkot for two nights. Each time I leave the city I settle, and each time I return I instantly vibrate at the frequency of fresh-brewed coffee, slow roasted cashews, perfumed fruits and Amul dark chocolate. I find I can no longer walk anywhere without confronting intense overstimulation. I duck into Disney Land several times to escape the vicious city dogs and slip dimensions into my Xanadu days, lacing up white skates—circa 1980—and whirling around the rollerskate rink. Courses in sound bowl therapy and Thai Massage in the city keep me away from zombie shopping and dopamine eating. And when I find myself resonating more with the latter, I make the decision to leave for good. It’s way too easy to sink into the familiar comforts of consumerism.

I have travelled well since then: back to the Mountain View Eco Farm at Begnas Lake where a storm swept through snapping massive trees and displacing anything not tied down; I have found hiking trails and cricket games from the hilltop heritage town of Bandipur; I have spent a week adventuring in the forested Pharping Dollu enchanted by the multiple temples, monasteries and sacred caves, and I have explored every square inch of the ancient and magical city of Bhaktipur.

I discard cells and possessions as I go; I lighten my load of attachments as a practice towards full renunciation. The less I have the more I am. The inner glamour girl is dead and the embarrassing number of little black dresses and designer shoes she clings to in Cape Town must go too. Born with fists tightly clenched, we ultimately all die with palms wide open. And in between, everything gets rewired from earth to ether … body and spirit … as I move across the landscapes that remake my map. I must integrate now before I can weave these threads and new narratives.

This is my current territory and new reality. This is my handmade life.

(See my Instagram profile for more places and pictures of this epic adventure).

Twenty Three: The Spaces Between

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Some people travel to find themselves, some to lose themselves. I travel to discover that which brings me to life through confronting death and adaptability. Travel wakes me up from the narcolepsy—and also the more generalised sleep—it informs me; wisens me. It opens the portal to the writer in me so that I can write out into the world that which I most need to learn … so that what needs to live through me can fill my vessel and reweave my narrative.

It’s the movement of travel that I most adore. The momentum, the dynamism … the swings and spirals to find that sweet spot of equilibrium and poise. Balance is an unnatural state—a new age erroneous desire—it alludes to a state of stagnation. Sitting at a desk in front of a window to write, the curtains are drawn on my mind. But put me next to the window on the backseat of a taxi on a bumpy, windy road under construction with an uncomfortably full bladder and an ache of hunger from a 7-day fruit fast, and I am instantly inspired.

Triggers confront me—consume me—as I am forced to work cell-by-cell on past traumas to remind myself that I am truly free and that I can finally write without fear of recrimination. I lean in deep enough to touch into the fears, the anxieties, the debilitating threats I faced of getting thrown out of home or losing custody of my child if I spoke my truth … if I shared my reality. Courage walks hand in hand with fear. I am known to overshare if given the chance.

The barrier on a bridge has been opened like a gate. A rusted reminder of mortality lies in the riverbed beneath. Giant stairways and planted beans stretch to the giant in the sky. Departing souls have easy access to high places. Also a reminder that first one must fall to rise. Death feels easy here. Heaven and hell are only as far apart as earth and sky. There is no separation, only perceived segregation. There is no ‘other’. The inner child takes the crone by the hand. They jump and skip. Heads thrown back, they laugh at the sky. The sky knows change. It is unmoved.

Houses retreat into rubble and dust, making way for a new highway. Memories of a Yangtze River trip invade my mind as people are displaced to higher ground. The road becomes like a river washing away houses … an unnatural disaster; a crime against humanity. It looks like a war zone; it’s difficult to breathe. My eyes seek attainment and attachment to the next dopamine hit. A bus with DELUXE emblazoned across its front is being worked on by two bare-chested men exposing cages of ribs. Deluxe is just another word—a branding that has no intrinsic meaning value.

I am reminded by rivers of rubbish down hillsides and in forests that there is no such thing as away. Like the tongue that keeps seeking the broken tooth, the psyche will consistently and obsessively keep seeking the wounded parts again and again. We think we can throw certain things away whilst accumulating other things when in reality everything always exists and it is simply we who are shifting in and out of the objective reality of those very things we believe we are either discarding or holding onto. So I discard words and, in deleting sentences and paragraphs, I detach also from the meaning they hold.

The silences between musical notes are what frame, contain and make the songs possible. The weft and weave of story is the same. It’s the spaces that allow the piece to breathe, that give it both life and death in non-dualistic harmony. Words are plucked and rewoven, always leaving a knot untied or that one loose thread as a reminder that nothing is ever complete or perfect.

As I learn to write again with honesty and authenticity from that fierce place in my core, I write away all the shields. And as I learn to cease the word vomit that perpetuates my narrative, I learn to re-create spaces between the words so I can steep myself in the breath of the present. I pour words on my skin like nectar until they wash away—slowly, slowly—the outer layers … until my armour can rust and fall away.

The aim is not enlightenment; the aim is truth. My voice and my silence is my message.

Twenty Two: Grazing on Garlands

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The calendar date is 11 April. The tiniest sliver of new moon glows saffron light from the sun. Eid Mubarak, it harkens. Navratri too. I check out of room 111 at the deluxe Delhi Terminal 3 hotel to check in to IndiGo flight 1155. It’s 11.11am as I hoist my bags onto the scale. My second bag weighs in at 11.1kg. I don’t know. But I understand. I can’t explain it … it is just so. Airports and aeroplanes are facades that make portals more manageable … more believable … less woo-woo. There’s absolutely nothing woo-woo, or comforting, about Delhi airport as the multiple security checks, without fail, leave my hand luggage spewed all over metal counters, where gloved hands perform surgery and extract seemingly innocuous objects from the bowels of my bags. ‘Yes, that’s a pen in my notebook’, ‘No, I don’t have a sharpener in my pencil case’, ‘A powerbank, yes, those are the cables for my laptop … uh-huh, a headtorch’. … duh (under my breath) … ‘Nope, I don’t have any lighter or matches’. ‘I don’t smoke,’ I thrown in for good measure. I get a visible sigh in response as he indicates for me to move on while I contemplate how I manipulated so much stuff into that bag in the first place.

There is that quintessential pre-arrival moment on the aeroplane when everyone starts shifting in their seats, fondling phones, craning necks and bobbing heads, ducking and elongating towards the windows … first this side and then that side, eager to find a gap. Clicking buttons and clicking tongues as the people in the window seats claim their entitlement to a full view of the kilometers-high mountains we begin to descend into. It’s terrific and terrifying.

Nepal is a country that is a slice of land holding most of the world’s highest mountain peaks … sandwiched by India and Tibet, now China, it has nowhere to go but skyward. In terms of surface area, if flattened it would be massive … bigger than the whole US of A in fact. The sight of the fluttering Nepalese flag mimics the mountain peaks with its double pointed triangle. Peaks and valleys make the country as much as they make the person. The quintessential Nepali Dhaka Topi mimics this too.

Same, same, but different echoes from 23 years ago. The name of a coffee shop I wanted to open. A parallel life. And here I am. Exactly where I always am. Draped in a garland of marigolds. The Nepalese Namaste affords everyone divinity in every greeting and is reflected in Well-Come signs everywhere with the hallmark symbol of Nepal: an outline of the bowed head of a woman, eyes downcast with hands in prayer position. This Kathmandu airport arrival is everything the Delhi departure was not. Reverence is a religion. Caressing the marigolds, I beam through the portal to Nic as a 6-year-old traveller in India as he grazed on the abundant marigolds at temples and celebrations and imagine him grazing on this garland. I miss him. And I feel hungry. But the expiry date on the bag of nuts is January 2082. I am suspicious.

To reinforce this time travel, I am told it’s New Year in Nepal in a few days. It will be 2081. Nepal is also an average of 15 minutes ahead of India, which is 3,5 hours ahead of South Africa. People’s birthdays don’t occur on the same date each year but on the day of their birth month when the moon is in the same phase as it was when they were born. My birthday in Nepal is not the 14th but the 27th of June this year—waxing gibbous 66% illumination according to moongiant.com. How many dimensions do I now straddle? My brain fires synapses looking for something familiar. A dog crosses at a zebra crossing—it’s black and white … chameleon identity crisis. The familiar can be dangerous though. It negates anything outside of my objective reality and offers no stretch into growth points of uncomfortable lack of knowing what I am looking at.

The sun matches my marigold garland; hazy orange suspended in smoggy sky. Recovering from being eclipsed—ego wounded. Three months ago I arrived in India from SriLanka to the same saffron orb between palms. Now it peeks between chaotic buildings and unfathomable wiring. Glitching like my brain. Trying to pull back the veils of disorder to investigate and discover what lurks behind … what awaits the blooming. A bald nun on a motorbike—a future trajectory beckons. ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ said Shakespeare. I will one day comply. Everything is a possibility; a potential for recalibration and transmutation. My apprehensive inner electrician awaits the next instalment.

Trusting someone with my safe passage, I am teleported into a valley at night. Less than 30km, it takes many hours. I can’t find my bearings in the dark on a mountain pass. I feel trapped in time and space. Pass and passage come from pace, which comes from stretch, something I am unable to do. The passage is rough and potholed. The driver shouts on the phone while he paces. Stuck! Lost? My birthing is stalled and my arrival gets misaligned.

People often ask why I need to plan. It’s so I can give up the planning. It’s my dichotomy. I have to know where I’m going next so that I can choose not to go. I need to know I have a choice (just the one) to protect me from getting stuck where I am. So when we find the place I plan to stay for six weeks to volunteer, the reality becomes somewhat different as I recognise my patterns of usually want to leave the moment I arrive anywhere. I try and blame the new moon but it is aloof in its dismissal of my hollow accusation. The planets can’t be blamed either. It’s only me. Edgy and wanting to flee, it is only in establishing an exit strategy that I can yield to where I am.

Since the external is always a reflection of the internal, I work until my fingers blister and my soul goes awry with the next push out the birth canal. I take on a fruit fast and call a friend in Pokhara. He sends a car to rescue me … from nothing more than myself. I lasted seven days in purgatory … and that’s ok. I acknowledge that this is also a guide to show me my way and there is no mistake in the making of such.

Life is full of answers and this is only one question.

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” Meno