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.
“There’s no place like home,” lamented Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But home is not a structure. Just as travel is not a place we go. Home is who we are. And travel is our innate state of being. Home is an internal longing that moves us into the flights of fancy that require no planes. And travel motivates us to question our existential homelessness. We are essentially both always home when travelling and always travelling when we are home. Because there is no such thing as away.
Traveling, in my experience, is never a linear one-dimensional trajectory into the often unknown places I at times choose randomly from a National Geographic map sent as a freebie on subscription. Travel can meet me in places so foreign yet with a familiarity that is not from here or now, but from a thread that has come unplucked from a different story of another me. I see faces in profile—people in streets, on scooters, behind a glass window of a coffee shop—and I catch myself in the motion of bracing to orientate to a Hello or Vannakam or Namaste, before I comprehend fully that I am in a foreign place where everyone has begun to take on the look of a friend from somewhere else. I forget that I am the foreign place because I am also home.
Last year I packed the conventional notion of home in a box and threw it in the recycling bin. And 6 months into my travels, I feel like home for me is that discarded plastic bottle that someone has added to several hundred other plastic bottles and turned into a fleece pullover for Patagonia. It couldn’t be more different yet is has become something useful, beautiful and has created change in its very own changing. Upcycled. It has a unique narrative and plot.
Travel should always be unresolved. Travel should leave you feeling slightly edgy, like you’re missing something … or lost … like there is an existential longing for something and, like the cookie jar, is always just out of reach. For me that missing is like the pieces of myself I leave behind so I have a reason to return one day. Or perhaps they are the pieces that no longer fit; pieces that slowly become unstuck—unhinged—and fall between cracks in the earth. Like a newly extracted tooth, there is at first a sense of loss. And then—one day, with no prior warning or noticing—the tongue no longer seeks out the old but seeks only the testing and tasting of the new.
It’s a puzzle this drive to seek but not to find; the picture never completed. Perhaps there really is no such thing as completion. Our parents lied to us. Like perfection, completion is not a destination on any map; just a fanciful place. Like Neverland.
Translation comes from the Latin, ‘borne across’. I have been borne across oceans, mountains, borders, boundaries, religions. I have lost much in the process of translation—my language, my culture, my capacity to communicate with anything close to my prior vocabulary. But I have found more than I have let go—perspective, detachment, curiosity. Because just as there is no such thing as away with travel, there is also no such thing as lost. I am always here … in perpetual arriving to be where I must be for that which is arriving to meet me too.
I plot routes. The routes plot me. I walk the same paths but they are different. I am different. Same same but different. Through moving my brain triangulates the stability that sneaks through the portal of the not knowing. My plans move like the fascia of the body; tensegrity keeps them bound as well as free.
(Taken from my journal February 2024—exercise for travel writing course, Deer Park Institute, Bir Billing, India)
My very first adventure travel experiences took place at an age somewhere between diapers and being told to behave—beaten into behaving—in a manner more appropriate for a suburban showpiece primed to eventually marry someone who would take me off my mother’s hands. I was, however, an intolerable feral creature trapped in the lacuna between this world and that; not quite wild yet definitely not tame. That came later. But before I was cornered, I was free. I discovered a universe far and away from appropriately dressed knife and fork meals where every morsel must be consumed—swallowed like my words—from the exact same seat at the family table.
I travelled as often as I could … although then it was more escape than travel; more Houdini than Happy Camper. My destination was the giant roots beneath the sky-high canopy of the tibouchina tree stationed approximately 100m from the French doors to the patio. I travelled there with my black furball who followed willingly, enticed by the picnic kibble I packed for her to endure the journey. My own snackbox contained anything both edible—and some things not so—that I could reach in the kitchen. I ran the gauntlet of visibility across the immaculate lawn devoid of diversity, like my family, and ducked beneath the foliage of finger-like fern tendrils that seemed to hold and guide me through the final portal into the damp peaty undergrowth of my belonging.
I can’t remember if I left the house with clothes or if I discarded my perfect outfit in the flourishing mud of the fairy garden. I can distincltly remember that my destination was not fond of the shackles of such trappings. I had to be stark naked; this is how the fairies could identify me.
So close yet so far from the constricting home environment, I was able to exist in this lacuna between worlds. No planes, trains or buses were needed to transport me to this authentic dimension of my inner dynamic beingness, where the roots of this tree assimilated me and hid me from that other world where I somehow couldn’t exist; a place not of flourishing. The only world I knew for the hours—that were days and seeming eternities—was the one of magic that forged me into the being connected to all the trees I would later climb, visit and revere: the Banyan in Auroville that stretches its arms outward, sending aerial roots to probe the earth for support; the upright Fir in Diana’s garden that I would ascend like a spiral staircase to collect pine cones to start the fire; the Milkwoods on my plot where I am custodian; the Cherry Trees in London that for several weeks of each year pop pink candyfloss flowers and then lay them like carpets over the sidewalks in the road where I lived, and the Willows that have wept so much now that they are ready to sit down. They are my teachers, my paradise, my freedom.
I have feet, not roots, so I can can move. But I am forever connected to the underground network that somehow connects all these trees and acts as a transmitter of my forever … even when I find that portal elusive.
‘When we try to pick out anything by itself’, says John Muir, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’ Water is like this. It holds and connects the memories, dreams, illusions and delusions of everything and everyone on the entire planet.
With the chaotic India I know and love loitering just meters beyond this walled compound, I stand with feet braced on marble slabs radiant with the morning sun. Undulating water captures the reflection of Amritsar’s Golden Temple, bewitching its leaking image to manifest magnificence greater than the structure itself. Mesmorised, I weep … viscous tears that stick to my eyelashes and blur my vision before, ever so gradually, building momentum to slide down my cheeks and settle at the corners of my mouth.
Gu means darkness or ignorance; Ru means elimination of that darkness; Guru means light coming from darkness, and Gurudwara is the doorstep of the Guru. Amrit means ambrosia, a substance so aptly reflected in the name given to the body of water that, bar a 65m causeway, maroons the Seikh shrine crowned with a 500kg gold-coated dome: Amrit Sarovar. Simply looking at it floods me with a somatic response that hitches me to everything beyond the soma.
If water holds consciousness—or, in fact, is consciousness itself—then this temple amrit, where literal millions of people have come to bless and be blessed, is so much more than the sum of its parts; more than the sum of the pilgrims, devotees, travellers and nomads who plunge themselves beneath the surface of this sweet nectar to emerge, reborn.
Travel, for me, is like pulling a treasure chest out of the depths of the ocean. It is my rebirthing. All things both delightful and frightful; shiny and shocking. Covered with barnacles, seaweed, and throttled by umbilical rope, the treasure is locked away with rusted chains, seemingly impossible to access. Yet there it is, and the only obstacle to gold and jewels is reluctance, resistance, fear and ignorance. This is the growth point—the crowning—adapting through a myriad complex situations to bring new clarity.
I stand at the door—on the limen—to my inner guru, seeking the gold that only I have the capacity to alchemise. The treasure is the deep inner landscape of putrefaction; the transmutation of lead to gold with each step, thought, emotion and prayer. Yet, like my tears, water has the capacity to both obstruct and clear one’s vision. And so I too must annoint myself with this ambrosial amniotic fluid so I can bust open the rusted lock and emerge from the treasured womb of my dreams.
Like the four or five hours’ long queuing that devotees must do in order to glimpse the holy book in the inner sanctum, there are no shortcuts to the treasure when a decision is taken to navigate the deep work of psychic dredging. If you want to get to the Inner Sanctum, you must be prepared for drudgery, claustrophobia, patience … gallons of it.
Where vision is blurred, alchemy brings insight. The tears that ebb and flow—the nectar-like medicine for my soul—this ancient wisdom claims, are the crystallised thoughts that life and love can trap. A holy dip strips me naked, to the bone, layer by karmic layer. Never gentle … always strong … water can cut grooves in stone; can rupture mountains; can ratchet open the mind and return its forgotten essence to the curl of the upper lip, where the tongue can catch a glimmer of it’s wisdom … a cyclical flow of watery tears to saturated consciousness awakening my psyche. A re-cycling; a re-viewing; a re-membering. In unbecoming, I become it all.
If the SriNagar lakes are for me the primordial fluid, and the tunnels through the mountains back into India, the birth canal, then Amritsar’s Golden Temple is the ritual purgation that prepares my new soul for incarnation. I use the experience of my body to access the inner dimensions of my being—my ultimate and quintessential source—to perpetually step up to meet my dreams … because it is only the wise who recognise that their dreams are always on their side.
The heart doesn’t wrinkle. Emotions grow only more fine with age. The mind surrenders. And the soul wisens and expands beyond it all.
As I step into life, I get lived. As I live, I become life itself.
Gluten intolerant Gretel without her bread crumbs, lost on a trail wanting to ‘just see what’s around that corner’, Google maps spinning … am I lost or is Google? The existential question of time and space. Rerouting … Rerouting … Rerouting … The network of mapped algorithms doesn’t align with the reality of the territory. Rewiring.
My mind wants to settle; wants to sit at a window and write for days. My body wants to move, housing as it does the soul that wants to soar … explore … fly free. Inner conflict builds the required curiosity to walk through every open doorway … the open ones here present in abundance. More of a chance to get it right—to not break my nose trying to get through the nailed-shut one—I find myself somehow still enjoying the space of the limen … the threshold … the liminal space that holds the potential of it all. And I keep finding magic. Because I’m aligned with magic. Like attracts like.
Travel inspires perpetual forced orientation, reorientation, calibration and recalibration. And, as each string gets plucked and tuned, my entire being begins to resonate with the synchronicities that are no longer an enigma. They are the norm. And whilst I relish in the dance and trance of dissolution and surrender, life creates a structure that negates my will and carries me. I simply show up … because showing up is my superpower … and the rest just happens. This is the nature of being. Being is not a passive existence. Existence takes practice. Practice is a lot of doing. Doing is essential in order to be. For me the being is contained in the exploring. Everything and all.
It’s been raining. A cleansing ritual both beautiful and inconvenient as I sit on the edge of my bed drying my laundry with a low wattage hairdryer. I leave for colder climes now—snow cold—packing wet clothes a dangerous choice. Unpacking to pack and packing to unpack again, another analogy for the life that is living me now. And I leave another place that has homed my doing and being … contained my un-containment.
The noxious odour dangles from the taxi’s rearview mirror, swinging out a metronome beat as we navigate the steep and gnarled zigzagging route down the hill from Junglaat in Naddi to Dharamshala. I think back to my arrival here; the smell of my luxe room stinging my eyes. I sweep the room like a sleuth looking for bugs … locate and dispose of all scent sachets and open the windows with the overhead fan on full. Freezing.
I glance up now as the sun catches the patchwork web of prayer flags marking my daily passage for runs, hikes, adventures and daily meditation at Tushita. A rainbow stretches out of its pot of gold. Good morning beautiful it says. Yes, I feel beautiful. Glossy hair and skin after braving a local hairdresser on the recommendation of a synchronistic meet up with a client from SriLanka. Weeks of enduring a climate that leeched the moisture from my body, I ponder the next planning phase that takes me back to the leech infested waters of the SriLanka rainforest. The next planning phase already begins. I won’t stop moving now … traveling is my nirvana.
The metronome stops. My autistic brain settles.
I don’t get the same pangs of longing anymore when I leave a place. I have rediscovered the feral freedom of my inner child trapped by suburbia now knowing that any place once discovered is a part of my cellular being and what resonates will draw me back.
His name is Samraat. He asks if I am going to the waterfall.
“I have a scooty”, he says. Tempted, I stop and consider his offer. Water drips from my waterproof hood. I wipe my face with water-logged glove. I feel like a child out on an adventure. “Time constraints”, adult me prompts. The inner child pouts. Plans are obstacles I curate to prevent me from getting bored … and then I regret not being able to free fall.
‘Bungee Jumping 1.3km.’ I see an arrow to complete surrender and wonder how far I would go to jolt my psyche out of limiting patterns and paradigms.
“You need a guide”, Samraat persists beyond my distracted mind. Water drips from my fingertips. I’m torn. My morning intention on lacing up my walking shoes was to baptise myself in the waterfall … just my head. The snow has been melting for several days now and the waterfall is my only access to the nirvanic nectar sliding down ravines carrying blessings from god. Not that I believe in god. I’m not sure what I believe in … besides nature … and kindness.
I gaged an hour and a half’s uphill hike would get me hot enough to take the plunge but it’s a rainy day in Bir and the snow is sure to come again tonight.
“Why do I need a guide?” I probe. Animatedly, Samraat tells me about a a big rock he will have to help me climb over. Indignant, I state my certifications as a mountain guide as well as a yoga teacher, qualifying me with both the strength and flexibility to conquer any old rock in a riverbed. But it’s a kilometre away, I’ve walked five and I’m no warmer than when I set out. My hair is wet, my socks are too and I have to be in class in 90 minutes.
I’ve been compared to a horse on an outride before — the whiff of home and I’m off. Focused, single-minded, I don’t need to check time to know it … to feel into it.
Samraat is speaking again, telling me about tours. I no longer hear the content; my body prepares for the canter. I am engaged and disengaged … ADHD. He has a captivating smile, a generous way of being. So, before my body engages full throttle, I retrieve my phone with cold-stiffened fingers. I pass it to him. “Add your number”, I request. “I would love to connect when the rains pass.” Because everything eventually does. Anicca, anicca, anicca.
For now I simply allow the holy drops to anoint me as I push through the veils of where I am and where I hope to be.
Chanting is primordial. It can carve through rock. It cuts through dense matter in body, mind and soul. I close my ears so I can hear better. The vibrations on my chest are like taut animal skin drumbeats; like taut ligaments after two weeks of yoga training.
I had to walk. Unshackled now like my now loosened vertebrae.
Lacing my hiking shoes stirs my senses as my body prepares—bristling—for something missed for too long. Two weeks of 5am to 9pm asanas and cross-legged learning has stretched me on the rack of physical and mental expansion.
But, yes, I need to walk now. I need to write. I need to integrate.
I pick a point on a map—Sherabling Monastery—and pack a daypack. My hands tremble as I click the buckles signalling to my body that it is now free. It always was. It needs reminders sometimes … somehow. Everything in yoga comes with its counter pose. This is that.
My lunchtime poori and hot pickle also craves its counter. I stop at a village store—the one with the hessian sack in the back corner. I lift a chunk of jaggery to my face. Sweetness of molasses that conjures memories of farmlands of my youth … riding horses and milking cows. Smell is a superpower; it can pull one unwittingly through portals. It’s how I first fell in love with India over two decades ago—the smell of mud after monsoon rain; the giddy of jasmine flowers dripping from coconut-oiled hair; the merging of street side spices and syrupy sweets invade my nostrils.
Back in the present moment, I invoke my guru’s words, “Mindful doesn’t mean slow.” As someone naturally fast, and often criticised for my seemingly mindless speed, his words return as a whisper as my body finds its rhythm on its trajectory through the forest. I stop to check the map—getting lost is too familiar. What is lost anyway, I wonder. No more cars, bikes, no crunch of gravel underfoot, I hear the silence of nature which in reality is never silent. Eagles shriek over the caressing undertones of the pine trees playing their needles like finely-tuned string instruments. I lift my face momentarily to catch the music. My senses are a funnel and nature fills me; restores me; completes me.
And then I am on the move again in the time and space dimension with that objective in mind: fourteen kilometres … back by 5pm … writing assignment … yoga exam preparations … coffee!.
The snow drenched mountains send their icy whispers down to the valley on the wings of eagles. I approach to paragliders. With a smile on my lips and a chuckle in my throat, I am swept along trance-like by ancestors walking this solo journey with me. It is they who whisper in my ears, “you don’t have to do this all alone, we are here. Remember.”
Storms brewing. Lighting flashing. Thunder banging on the roof. Piercing drops of rain completing the symphony. Wet washing drip, drip … dripping. Sensory overload. I lie awake. Unable to move. Frozen. “I am not my body.” “I am not my body!” “I am NOT MY BODY!” I can neither warm myself with the numerous bedcovers nor can I rouse my body to leave them long enough to gather the layers required to warm myself enough for sleep.
Solar geysers lay dormant under unseasonal cloud cover. My 4.30am pre-course wash is as crisp as the air breathed under the door. The limen holds nothing back here. Beautifully packed sari-cloth bags of summer essentials—with only a few woollen inclusions for SriNagar trekking in April—is left mostly unused in the back of the cupboard in my simple monastic room. Half wet on razor cold tiles, I focus on strategic layering of everything warm, including double socks, double beanie, gloves and puffer, wrapped up finally with the wool shawl purchased in a panic on seeing the weather report for Himachal Pradesh before leaving Auroville. Decades-old memories of Annapurna’s Thorong La Pass as the contents of my 13kg backpack decreased in proportion to the increase in altitude.
Morning warm up class of stretches, butt-kick running, jumping jacks, and 10 to 20 rounds of Surya Namaskar witness the gradual shedding of skins both internal and external. My layers of protection lie in a reverse-order pile on the floor as I lie corpselike—Shavasana—integrating this latest death and rebirth.
I walk out of Tara Hall after morning practice as the clouds open a portal—Parighasana—to reveal a fresh white frosting on the looming mountain range overlooking Deer Park Institute of Bir Billing. The night makes more sense to me now.
The well-curated itinerary around the yoga course in Delhi faded like ink on blotting paper, leaving just a impression from which to recreate something new. The blurred lines plot an accidental orbit into the far north for a while. Climbing doesn’t occur without first finding the faith and the courage to leave the foot and hand holds on a rock face. And in the letting go, I soar. I find my wings in an intensive yoga teacher training at Deer Park Institute and, in the nature of duality, I also find them clipped. Like day four of any ten-day Vipassana Meditation course, I find myself pushing through my desire for the containment and and my calling to fly free … the contortions of both body and mind needing integration days of mountain runs and solitude.
Sound, like water, can carve through rock and bust apart particles of solid matter. Chanting for me breaks apart energetic dark matter for transmutation into sound and ether. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are the sutures that bind me together as the shackles are released from each individual vertebra and pockets of energy get snapped open. I saturate my body until my cells become porous.
Drowning in self, I find more clarity in the creation of membranous boundaries and viscous fluidity as the outer has become a better reflection of my inner primordial universe. I’m not sure if I feel secure so flexible … my rigidity keeps me safe. I hold both the flow and the structure with equanimity; a deeply ingrained understanding of impermanence. I want change … I seek it … a Vāsanā … it seeks me. A subliminal calling into the void of confusion in order to understand.
Just like in yogasana, everything has a counter posture. One without the other causes injury and dis-ease. Like the terror-inducing fulcrum point of a bungee swing, I oscillate between all knowing and ignorance and slowly come towards centre as I become more equanimous about the knowing and the not. Instead of curating the itinerary, I have worked at better managing the flow; instead of flooding the banks, I am building the dams required to contain spaces of guarded refuge without strangling free movement.
The pitch of my travel chant has changed frequencies now and I am modulating a more harmonious rhythm. Travel plans that would originally last only four months stretch closer to eight or nine, a fitting gestation period for the safe birthing of the me I am becoming; the womb I am being for myself.
The magnificent duality of beauty and breaking has tendrils into attention and intention as my loosened grip on planning sends me free floating to Sahasrara awakening.
Today I walk; my running shoes the training wheels for flight.
It was 2010. In a guesthouse in the tea district of Kalimpong. More specifically it was in the bathroom of the guesthouse. Three weeks into a five-week backpacking trip across India, a tanned and naked 4-year-old boy with white curls had mastered the Indian squatting style as he filled a pale green bucket with water and used the plastic jug to wash his body and cool his head. His huge blue eyes always darted about as his mind computed, and every so often he would express a well-formulated sentence or question. I always stayed close, not only for when he needed me but for my joy in observing his expansion into this new version of himself … a version connected by threads to something so ancient it needed merely a reminder for it to incarnate. He turned to me with eyes still actively evaluating the question. “Mum,” he asked, “can I be a monk when I grow up?” “Of course, NooNoo,” I replied, “you can be anything you want to be.” He returned to the creative wash time and I could tell he wasn’t quite finished with this particular thought process. I was correct. “Actually,” he continued, “I don’t want to be a monk, I want to be the man who teaches the monks.” Pensively continuing his water play, he was searching for the correct words for the teacher of the monks. And then he beamed, eyes bright, staring directly at me with such a content look of joy on his face. “I want to be the Dalai Lama!” he declared.
And that was that. Intention set, thread thrown, life path paved. Of course I knew this wouldn’t be a reality in the form of what we know this world to be. Yet, I have a sense that on some level in some dimension, the weave of the story of why this particular human came to me is knotted into the fabric of the red thread now wrapped around my left wrist.
As someone who considers herself adept in the art of letting be, letting go and letting god, I can also be fierce when stubborn. There was something about the masterfully planned month-long yoga program in Delhi that had to be prised out of my tightly clenched fist. Leisure, sabbatical, adventure: these are things that do not need to be justified through studies and struggle. Time. Patience. Practice. Pivoting on the trajectory back to the void, data points get computed and wired into the roots entwined in the new foundations I am building. The Tree of Life.
Gazillions of pilgrims and travellers ahead of me don’t diminish the sense of pioneer I bear like a branding tattoo. I’ve taken India off her pedestal; seeing her more realistically for who she is. And I love her for all her authenticity. She hasn’t changed. Of course. I have. Of course. I solidify the teachings and learnings. Off course.
I explore her more fully with a new friend I have known for lifetimes. Scapegoated from my own family of original sin, she invites me into her family fold and I am home. We share space, memories and dreams as we wander the streets, the markets, coffee houses and bookstores. I find Rooibos Tea on the menu along with Chinese Tea … the dot-to-dot of spiral weaves connecting me to my birth home and to the tea ceremonies in my multi-national soul home.
Early morning Lodhi Garden runs with her father—“Go, go, I meet you here one hour”, he declares, swiftly picking up on my super-charged energy levels. This is my happy drug. I run so fast I almost hit a low flying bird. I run to keep warm. I am fast not only because I am cold but because the physiology of my radiant smile is the fuel for my accelerator. Five laps. Friendly faces. Connections. Joy … pure and simple. Life and love is woven from it.
I leave Delhi in an electric cab. “Burn fat. Not oil” demands a large painted bicycle street side. A man on a motorbike pulls up beside a sign on a park wall. “Feeding of monkeys here is strictly prohibited.” He is holding a clear plastic bag heavy with bananas. It’s not his lunch. He feeds the monkeys. Lost in translation? Brazen drivers read between the non-existence of lines and signs. A peacock flies across the road in front of us. Electric blue. Energetic Phoenix flames blazing. My microbiome has once more been imbued with another layer of immune health. My being has been further educated with a new module upgrade. I am charged with a new vitality. Plugged in.
I recognise that decades-ago travels have been more boundaried, more disconnected from myself that I couldn’t fully connect to others like I can now. I recognise how this trip is on the trajectory that highlights how radically this has changed. My puzzle connectors find their bigger picture. The bittersweet parting after three days that sit on the vertical timeline holds beauty in the knowing that there is still so much to experience here; things and people to return for and to.
I’m not a fan of the fast approach that doesn’t allow acclimatisation to the new landscape. I also don’t like packing … jamming everything into prescribed allowances … or the cattle herding of airports and moustachioed officials with hooded eyes and sticks. I feel more of the era of large trunks of flowing garments, riding on the backs of elephants. Servants set up camp en route. Tigers and imminent dangers alert me to where I am. I was made for an era of intrigue and exploration, the pioneering days of breaking expectations of who I am meant to be and who I am. And in the same gaps and disparities, I find the pendulum sweet spot where I can curate some comfort and ease without either climbing the elephant or being trampled by it.
Just to affirm I’m always ahead of my time, I was too early for Sri Lanka—still monsoon—I’m also too early for Himachal Pradesh—still snow. I’m okay with that. Podium place always. And the timing is also always perfect. The portals keep opening. As I let go into the void, blessings come flooding in. I make connections and drop the future into my past so I can live into my present.
I wasn’t meant to come to Dharamshala in the 90s or early 00s. It had to be now. It had to be solo. It (and I) had to be empowered and ready to ask the right questions rather than seek the often desired answers. I wake up. Is that Everest peaking? Dry mouth and drooling at the back of an uncomfortably small plane. The descent brings clouds. The mirage gradually takes shape. No, not clouds … the majestic Himalaya Range stretching the breadth of my sight, face almost pasted to the small airplane window. Porthole … sounds like Portal.
As I become so fully engaged with who I am, there is no longer any separation with the other. I walk, connect and panic about being frozen whilst trekking … I find a Decathlon. It’s closed. I feel I am being called to adapt. I buy Tibetan socks in McLeodGanj and learn how to measure foot size on a fist. It’s mostly impossible to determine from where a life lesson will come. Three days again feel like three weeks as ice-cold days stretch wide open beneath Dhauladhar. Caught in the shadows, the snowy peaks rise up in sunshine.
A friend catches up with my journey—not surprisingly a few lightyears behind my flow—and asks which tea has won my heart. “Duali-tea”, I say, “of course.” India is a paradox which brings the dark and the light, the shadow along with the golden shadow, into awareness. For integration rather than resolution. Because not everything needs to be resolved.
Integration is what I feel most fully when meeting with His Holiness; a meeting I have held in intention since that 4-year-old reminded me of what my future holds. It is now time to give it attention. Energy. Flow. The child in me connected to the child in him, and His Holiness and Penelope no longer existed as identifying labels stitched on human form. Our engagement held no austerity. Only innocence. Only love. Only compassion. We were simply two souls delighting in the joy of the knowing of something perhaps I will never know; dissolving and free falling into the depths of each other’s gaze. The later photos show even his security guard captivated by the interaction. Giggling like children, there was nothing to ask for, so I opened my hands and offered him blessings from his soul friends in South Africa. There was such emptiness and, in the emptiness, such fullness. I feel complete.
Leaving Naddi, Dharamshala and Junglaat … for now … I arrive in Bir to eagles and paragliders. Initially terrified of boredom if planning to stay in one place for more than five or six days, the journey keeps stretching out like hand-pulled Tibetan noodles, and one month at a time now feels quite cosy. The monastic Deer Park Institute will be my home now for a month. With the unfolding of my winter suspension, I discover that in the surrender of my plans to the divine intelligence, I have arrived in the composting of my spring. In the seeking and planning, I sometimes forget that all I need do is show up and whatever is seeking me will find me where I am. Unwittingly and yet with the ancestral guidance of those who walk beside me, I am discovered by a full month of courses and workshops for which my heart has sung. Invocation. Sacred AUM.
Next month I return to the home of His Holiness for another week to unpack more of what the mountain masters hold and offer and to ask of this holy place what it can receive from me. There is always more. I simply have to keep practicing opening my hands, my eyes and my mind to sift and shift all the debris clouding my vision of what I’m here to do.
I am the liminal guru, on the threshold of learning and teaching, breaking and building. As much of an enigma as India herself.
As the end of a poem I wrote decades ago divulges: … I am old. I am wise. I am high I am all the flowers and the trees. They are me I am unpredictable. I am power. I am many Penelope, you are seen by all. But you are things no one can see.’
Where attention goes, energy flows. We manifest that which is watered with our intention. What we resist we also manifest. Words knit thoughts into ideas. Woven with the needle of attachment into the fabric of our being they become heavy—a wet blanket. A shroud of ideals. The River of Attention flows on a trajectory to the Sea of Consciousness. Merge. Diffuse. Dilute. Resisting the growing pains of change is like holding back the rapids. Drown in the spaces between its inevitability or emerge in its growth. Death or discomfort.
The hundreds of golden dragonflies—wisdom, adaptability, spirituality—flutter as the scarf takes flight around my neck following me through my e-cycle portal to the next moment on my passage. The supreme Matrimandir. Millions of gold-plated steel mosaics mirror the dragonfly print scanning down and around like intergalactic radar discs. Spiral walkways lure me inwards and upwards. The monochrome chamber of crystal gazing … the nucleus … the midpoint. Sterile womb. Concentrating, I find my fulcrum as cobalt blue emanates from somewhere behind my eyes. Lights flicker, flash, fairy dust. The giant orb ingests and projects everyone shrunken upside down. And I wonder if we are inside or outside or which way is ‘This way up ⬆️’
Over the noise of the new age mantra, ‘let it go’, I begin to chant my own mantra ‘let it stay’. I welcome in my curiosity to mediate. “What do you have to say?” it invites.
Daughter to a narcissistic woman, wife to a narcissistic man, I have learned that, like the dragonfly that is now frozen on my window in its process of transition to its next incarnation, death is also growth. Transition and Transformation share space on the same sign; their arrows unwittingly point to a severed car planted vertically in the road. Intentional art. Unintentional irony.
I welcome in my hyper vigilance. I welcome in my anxiety. I welcome in the surges of adrenalin that remind and compel me to keep moving forward; to keep extending … to keep widening the gap so I can pass through. “Not yet fully dilated”, the midwife announces.
Some sickness is severe enough to require complete severance before it is healed. Sometimes that is just time. The waiting room. Pacing. Away is sometimes the only way. Engaging with new and foreign landscapes and humanscapes changes my dialogue, reprograms my cells. Time amputates the limbs of fear. Life is not an exercise of endurance; it is a practice of observation. So too is travel. Too often I clench around my resilience, believing strength to be more valuable a quality than flexibility. My six-pack bust open through pregnancy; a forever reminder—resourcing is not a swear word.
Birthed into motherhood, I fell on my sword of conventionality, rejected nuclear family dynamics and—inadvertently at first—began the excavations that would clear the ground to live our best lives. Somatic architecture. Literal excavating, to create the sanctuary I created for my son’s nurturing, precipitated the more extreme excavating I do on every layer of my own being. Breaking down walls, digging holes, unearthing Moonshine, recovering skulls and broken ceramics, sinking metal rods like roots to strengthen the ground and support the milk wood forest garden. To support me too. And, in tandem, before the abode went up, the most foundational work of retaining and levelling land, constructing a treehouse, installing a trampoline and climbing wall, and suspending swings, ropes and nets from the trees … because constructing harmony is both up and down, in and out, side to side and a spiral dynamic that never ends.
Most importantly I welcome in my joy. I welcome in my gratitude. I welcome in the abundance and ever-present reminder that the entire cosmos rides on a pinhead dropped on the map of this very moment. The best lessons in life I learned not through the ease of fitting in but through adaptation and recalibration to my own brand of exceptional.
Choosing my child was expansive. Choosing mothering meant breaking down the constructs that prevented this expansion. Choosing isn’t easy. Not choosing, less so. Previously I would travel to knock down the walls within and a few without. Now I use some doors already opened. I love adventure; I love experience and excitement; I love pushing into the edge of my ache. It’s a superpower.
Forehead to trunk, I wonder if hug is the same in tree language as I wrap my arms around a fraction of its girth to ground my spirit at the epicentre of Auroville; to offer my mantra of welcoming. A leaf falls like a spear to the ground. Unattached. The banyan tree stoically reaches downwards and outwards, creating surface area, shade and stability as it dangles roots from high above the ground knowing that with time and nourishment those roots will find their ground and will, at an imperceptible pace, first touch the earth and then, with threadlike fingers, take hold of it. Penetrate it. Leafing through the pages of the Kama Sutra.
Like the banyan branches, I too have stretched a long way … opened—not always willingly—and allowed my leaves to fall. I have travelled the spiralling dot-to-dot highways of leaving to arrive to leave again … to not know when the next life cycle will come. I have suspended roots waiting to find ground, tentative, not gripping … not yet knowing … retracted. I can’t live comfortably in the world I created to become the person I needed to be for the small human to whom I committed eighteen years of my life … many in conflict, many is flight, mostly in overwhelm. This is the root of my dis-ease, the mud for my lotus, the aerial roots of my banyan. Kindness to self is now at the core of this labyrinth.
The things I put behind me become the things that propel me. I strap them on like dragonfly wings. Nothing will—nor ever can—stay the same. And so I also keep momentum. Like a Five Rhythms Dance, I welcome in my capacity to whirl through all of them … again and again and again. For some, sitting in an armchair staring out a window is harmony. For me it’s being in free flow through the forest.
Too often we eat out of fear of being hungry. We sleep because we’re scared we’ll be tired later. We consume literature because we’re terrified of looking stupid. We attach through love because we are afraid of loneliness. We shed billions of cells daily—we shed skin and blood and everything in between—yet we are so terrified of being empty that we keep topping up. It is only when we get to the very edges of these—feeling the hunger, feeling the exhaustion, feeling the not knowing, feeling the loneliness—and then cracking the shell of our fear of letting go, that we can start scooping out the detritus. The baby is born fists clenched. The corpse is burned hands wide open.
I have to feel the pain to break. Open. To run far enough to feel I can’t run anymore. This is the edge—basic yoga—the breaking through the discomfort of purification. Running eighteen kilometres for me stretches me into the realms of advanced yoga, completely emptying and then pushing beyond, until pockets of dense cells are broken open and the energy released. From debris to dynamism.
I flow. I expand. I am saturated by a new microbiome. Sponge like. I change my mind, open my heart, breathe through my emotions and move my physical being to new dimensions of self … step by step, breath by breath, thought by thought and with each and every d-doff … d-doff … d-doff …
What once crippled me only temporarily paralyses me and what once paralysed me now shows me where I’m stuck. The foetus contracts and expands on all planes. It doesn’t decide to do this. But, unless it does this, it will exit the birth canal having returned to primordial fluid. Empty.
A Forest Whitaker doppelgänger drives by on his motorcycle; a name that speaks for the trees. The Crying Game. I haven’t watched a movie in months. I don’t even miss them. Life has become a movie. Everyone is a protagonist in this epic adventure novel I call life. Every change in environment contains the next plot twist. It’s a drama, a comedy … a nail-biter at times; an edge-of-the-seat unfolding of what my life is becoming; who I am becoming … frame by frame.
The trees always grow back. People can too. Some choose not to. And that’s also okay. The harmony comes in the excavation and then the play; the retaining and the surrender to forces both known and unpredictable. Surrender is an actual place on the Auroville master plan. So too is Discipline, Miracle, Humility and Serendipity. I find the sign for Harmony; it’s at the Skatepark. I say farewell to the forest; a sign says Farewell in return. There is no sadness because nothing actually ends. Life is the surrogate for death. Goodbye is a portal to hello.
The black homestay cat, Maya, brings me a gift. She sees I am slowly packing up; she wants me to stay. Disemboweled rat, however, is not my love language. To discover that I must move again. The Dalai Lama awaits, an unexpected meeting in snowy Dharamshala. The crowning before delivery.
“a dream there should be somewhere on earth, a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of good will who have a sincere aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony…” — The Mother … (had a dream)
A dream is a portal. So too is a nightmare. Chaos and order both are portals. Auroville was that dream. And Auroville is that portal.
When my son finished school he chose to go straight into his studies. I’ve claimed his gap year. Has we slipped dimensions. Cause. Effect. Unlawful Degree by Distinction. I extend my stay at the sublime 4 East Coast Home and book a flight to Delhi for the 8th of February and a flight to Dharamsala 3 days later. Movement can come incrementally. I am exploring options to stay till July… or August … or forever. Will either of us make it back. Is back even an option. Forward is also an anomaly.
Most people dream of a life that is a dream, an illusion. Some dream of a life grounded in reality, in humanity, in freedom and in truth. I’m settled and decide to stay that way. I’m well and happy and finding ways to recalibrate. I have my moments … but they are more like salt in a lake here than salt in a glass of water.
For me. The forest is the portal. Running is my vehicle. I am curious about a path but lack the courage to take it. Yet. I run through a spiderweb. That too is a portal. Superhero. I run. Step by step … no other way for now. Spiderverse awaits. I see a mongoose … My eyeballs search my brain; looking for the plural. I run some more. Everything… the good, the bad, the beauty and fear … comes in plurals.
Altruism is not necessarily grand gestures of generosity and service; altruism can be as simple as being happy and, in being happy, holding happiness for those around you. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is a smile. Sometimes moving a fallen branch from the road or stopping to treat a fallen scooter driver. The paths are dry and sandy. I stoop to retrieve a shoe on the sandy red dust road. Croks it says—erroneously spelled brands come cheap here. I place it on the foot of the small boy who dropped it riding pillion with his mother. A hybrid Cinderella portal to that time way back of wedding sari buying and Nic back-to-back with me on the moped, shouting, “go fast over the next speed bump, Mum, so we can get more air!”
I pass a field of boys playing cricket, pausing to slip into the many memories of four, six and seven-year-old Nic on his Indian cricket tours; playing on the ghats in Varanasi, the town square in Darjeeling, parks and beaches in Goa. I remember the excitement at the IPL in Bangalore and how content he was joining in every cricket game we passed and jumping on the backs of motorbikes with my young colleagues in Auroville for daily cricket games. A part of me wishes he were here and I was studying law.
Space time glitches with precision. Looking for doorways … trying to draw them into my objective reality. Will I still be writing on the other side? For three consecutive days on my forest flings, the same ancient cyclist dismounts his equally ancient cycle at the exact location as I approach in the opposite direction; the same bare-chested Korean teenager runs past me at the exact same junction, and the silver moustached man in a saffron hoodie gives the same steely stare as I cross the new road lined with the remains of the trees. The Chainsaw Massacre was banned in the same era as the birth of Auroville; another thread tethered to inception.
When I recognise the anomaly, it stops happening. Am I through, I wonder. Are you still reading this?
Wild boar sandpits keep me moving forward. I run. The portal to a memory of reading of Ulysses’s wild boar scar on the morning I later encountered a wild boar trapped in a wire fence … human-made in conflict with nature. It is also my trail of crumbs to Penelope in waiting. I can’t stop. My sweat evaporates only when I’m in motion. I stop. Mosquitoes land in clusters on exposed flesh to suck my blood. My edges blur with the steam rising off my body and the mosquitoes drown. Sweating blood, words are like threads through blisters.
I pass the Youth Centre, aging and not yet wise. Perhaps I am straddling the time warp; gradually dissolving across the threshold. My toenails blacken and I run some more.
Feeling stuck in a Philip Pullman novel, I remain on the limen, crouching, my daemon beside me. An elephant. Too heavy to carry, this elephant guide crouches beside me, Diana on her back, my real mother and guide—both creature and human. Both. Because everything travels together. In tree pose, she joins the forest, passive activist; ever-present. Compassionately mothering me into the adult who knows who I am and who isn’t afraid to be the Bohemian she was.
As the sun snaps open its brazen eyes and seeks me out between the silences, leaves spray dew, christening my passage through this puzzling tunnel. I don’t look up, It smacks of ambush. I keep looking over my shoulder. Paranoid South African. It sounds like I am being followed. It takes me a couple of runs to figure out it’s the sound of the nylon running baggies I borrowed from Nic shloofing together between my thighs.
I encounter a herd of cows. They block the path; look docile. But I am wise. I back away, remembering the cow in Varanasi I got too friendly with that horn butted me in the solar plexus; left me breathless and unable to call for help. Some things are more scary than they seem.
Everywhere puppies are suckling. Calves too. The puppies stretch themselves to reach the mother’s teats. The calves contort. If humans had to suckle a cow, I wonder, would they still believe they need its milk. Cognitive dissonance. A herd of goats freely graze, stretching as they do to reach things partially inaccessible and I am taken to the Annapurna mountains of Nepal where the sock-eating goats stretch to reach trekkers’ laundry.
If the tree represents the forest, the road represents humanity. The trees will not get defeated because they are not at war. Holotropic breathwork masters. They know we aren’t yet able to breathe. We fight instead … and burn. False breath, false transformation. We fight because we fight the ignorance we neither desire to confront nor change. The opposite of caring isn’t not caring; the opposite of caring is caring too much. And like a heart breaking doesn’t destroy the heart but only opens it to more love, the trees collude with the elements and the creatures to ensure their seed spawn travel beyond this imagined utopia. The trees don’t fight back. They lift their roots like Ents and retreat to safe haven, a simple manifestation of a current incarnation in wait for the roads to crumble to dust. They trust we won’t last forever.
A man squats in a field; his morning constitution. He holds a newspaper—read and wipe. My sari-clad being makes it into the Hindu Bureau; I feel a sense of relief it’s only online. A dog shits on a speed bump—I share the sentiment. The bumps and dips in the roads, like the bumps and dips in life, build my resilience through the bruising and the pain. I learn to put pressure on the pedals when I ride the potholes so I don’t break my vagina.
The light rain has done nothing to settle the red dust. Everything steams. It’s humid. I crunch the dirt thrown up by motorcycles, cows and construction vehicles between my teeth.
I take refuge in the trees. I offer my love. I breathe. The trees breathe back. I sing with the birds. The temples sing in response. Life is a chant. I spiral in birdsong and shade. And from the villages beyond the trees, Bollywood blasts from a megaphone and my body moves in synch. I dance in chaos and move to flow … and back again. Both polarities can reside in harmony; a harmony borne only through the portal of conflict. Order leads to chaos and chaos will ultimately always make way to order. Harmony isn’t calm … harmony is about being able to move between it all and not get lost in the clinging onto just one aspect of the entire range. Order is safe but chaos brings change. Within everything is the seed of its destruction. Struggle always manifests new life, generates resilience.
Post a 4-day water fast (translation here is 4 days no water as opposed to the 4 days only water that it is) I choose an integrating walk in the forest. I see a runner in the distance. My competitive subconscious kicks in. I run to overtake him. Podium position. It feels simultaneously pointless and fun. I get my dopamine where I can. Not running away from anything. Running towards everything.
The head of a kid goat lies with a vacant stare on a roadside table, its severed body already butchered, more distressing than butchered trees. Trees grow back, goats don’t. Nearby, an old goat sits on its concrete block not wanting to move where the rope no longer tightens around its throat. The other side is tied to a tree, beneath its branches a shady patch of grass. It reminds me that I too feel like I am tied to the branches and pulling away despite it throttling me. At the end of my tether. How often do we tie ourselves to that which seems to bring comfort only to find we are strangled by our own knots?
It takes 2,979 hours to walk to Japan and 1,850 hours to walk to Bali. My journey stretches out like the thousands of steps and I feel such liberation in my diminished attachments and in not being missed. I won’t be returning as planned on 11 April. I won’t be walking to Japan or Bali but I will be flying to Kathmandu. They offer a 90 day visa and I’m thinking it would be a waste not to utilise all 90. My work is loved here; I feel I am too … both appreciated and received … but I must leave. Some aren’t ready to heal. The trees have spoken and I need to let the dead leaves drop so the new can grow; I need to expand my branches and drop aerial roots so I can expand outwards to provide more shade for those who need it.
The world that I am used to is gone and I am on the limen of finding the new. I buy a magnificent scarf emblazoned with golden dragonflies and when I reach my bedroom door, there is a dragon fly clinging to the string tied to the lock. It flies in after me.
Reminiscent of clearing my storage after four years; moving only what was absolutely essential into the house I built, so too have I cleared my inner storage containers and what I now put back in is what will stay and sustain and support.
I have become the woman who would have taken care of me as a child. And now I take care of the me I have become through the portal of travel.
WELL WORTH BEING 