Symbolically the shell is from the ocean and is linked to Venus (self love). It is the so-called medal at the end of the journey once the shore is met and one is able to baptise oneself in the salt water and become new once more—like a baby, and with unconditional love for self.
The way it ties together the network of support is that its image is used as way markers along the route, marking the way through landlocked villages and cities in the hopes of—in days or weeks or months time—the pilgrim will reach the end … which is also the beginning.
It is not only an inner and outer totem of the achievement of the completion of this particular pilgrimage, it also denotes an opening of the heart and a vessel from which to gather water to drink or anoint oneself. It is also used to ask for donations of food and money.
Sometimes building self kindness can be through random acts of kindness to others. Showing someone else the way can be a guide for self awareness and more adept self trust, self love and self guidance. The notion of offering a helping hand draws attention to the focus on the work I do with my hands and how that reflects on how to give—but not too much of myself so as to not become depleted—and, with the same open hand, to receive what I need from others.
The lines on the shell are known to represent the different routes taken by the pilgrims so, having this as a source, we can trace our different narratives with the outlook that there are many pathways to the same destination and the goal is in the experience itself. Being open and aware to the needs of others is the beginning of a journey home to self.
Questions to ask yourself:
How did I stay open and flexible to changes in the direction my day took?
What are the inner signals of courage I can pay more attention to?
How did I engage with and harmonise giving and receiving?
The end of one journey is always only the beginning of something else so there can never be any expectation of finality. Life is only what you can hold in the Scallop Shell.
On this pilgrimage, because I am walking to raise awareness for mental health and will be intentionally working with people who approach me for coaching, meditation, therapies etc, I will hang a donation box from my backpack with a QR code that pilgrims can scan to access my socials, the work I do and the cause I am walking for. This is aligned to the scallop shell which can also be used as a begging bowl and I am doing this as a way to break down my ego as I open myself to receiving donations from strangers like a nun.
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss”. Pilgrims follow their bliss/ters.
On no past Camino de Santiago or long-distance local hike have I had to deal with blisters. The only trek I suffered from blisters was in 2001 on the Annapurna Circuit (Nepal) when I walked in leather boots I took out of their box to pack in my backpack … I didn’t walk in them once before boarding the plane to walk for 21 days across and over the Himalaya at 5,400m altitude.
Symbolically, my life in 2001 was plagued with abrasions that caused more pain than pearls and by 2016, my first Camino of 250km with my then 11-year-old son, I had recognised and was acting on my need to nurture my wounds.
Some people diminish their wounds; some deny them; some go into a trauma response and simply obliterate them from memory; some defend their wounds and use their pain as a badge of honour, and some just never quite manage to shine because that would mean giving up on the psychic injuries they have been subjected to.
Adapting to different footwear—I now wear Altra trail running shoes for Camino and will be wearing T-Rockets running sandals on some days too—and conditioning my feet long before the journey, as well as every day before and after walking, is a good analogy for building capability and competency to face challenges … and also to recognise where the stone in my shoe is going to hinder my journey and where the stone in my shoe is the grit that the oyster uses to make the pearl.
It is erroneous to bandage and splint healthy body parts, so there is a call for discernment in how one treats one’s wounds, both from the past and those that present themselves currently. Self-care can reprogram one’s emotional, physical, psychic and mental bodies to engage differently with personal injuries or traumas and shift perspective from being overcome by wounds to using them as a pathway to healing.
As I walk this journey from next week, for Mental Health I will be intentionally working with fellow pilgrims who approach me with specific needs around grief, loss, trauma and dis-ease and I am cognisant of needing to be discerning in how much self nurturing and self supporting I must do in order to be able to support others on their unique walk to wellness.
We are not here to be perfect, we are here to heal. And the first part of any healing process is to recognise the wound as a symbol of healing rather than as an obstacle in its way. It’s important to not get too attached to the strapping and then fail to acknowledge that the wound is no longer there. Struggle can be used as a tool to justify one’s actions or one’s suffering and to eliminate the need to step up and show up. A wound isn’t a life sentence and a bandage isn’t a ticket to victimhood. Letting go of the identity of injury can be empowering and can create the space for taking on the responsibility of stepping fully into one’s essential self.
Take care on the journey by training well in order to diminish the risk of injury and by also preparing well by carrying a first aid kit.
Questions to ask yourself:
How do I grieve whilst supporting others through their struggles without comparison?
How do I create discernment between compassion and a bleeding heart?
How do I bandage the internal wounds that hurt more than anything that bleeds?
How do I relate to past wounds, injuries and traumas on an emotional, physical and mental level?
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
It may look like the same route as the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims before you yet it is different for your walking it. A pilgrim’s unique footprints make for a unique pilgrimage.
The Yellow Arrow is a sign of reassurance that one is following one of the routes on the pilgrim’s way and is an iconic symbol of direction in one’s life as well as ancestral direction and rites of passage—pointing out A way which is different to THE way.
When finding and following these markers it’s a reminder to honour those who have come before. There is a ritual to walking a path that many have taken before, honouring them for carving the way and then honouring oneself for creating one’s own journey from the way. There are many paths leading individuals back home to themselves.
A well-trodden path is still the path untaken until one actually takes it … and then one gets to make it one’s own. It is important to get lost in order to find my way and there is a particular practice of non-judgemental observation that comes with the acceptance of this. I feel it’s important to find myself in a place so unfamiliar that I am challenged to work out how to come back to myself or to accept the new place in which I find myself.
Every part of the entire universe is already right here in this one moment … this one step. There is no manifestation magic in life; it’s all about showing up and placing each foot down with attention and intention. In alchemy it is the third stage in the process, Citrinitas, which is the stage of education before Rubedo, the stage of transformation.
The present moment is your refuge, and this is your home … each footfall brings you back to your self and each self that footfall brings you to is changed because of the footfall. Each contour is as unique as the contours on each individual’s thumbprint; each arrow perceived as just a subtly different shade of yellow; each vista viewed with new eyes; each drop of dew a different prism of light.
Stepping into each moment builds awareness of what’s in the way, where the path is leading, how open you are to your intuitive GPS, when to follow outside signs or inner cues, when to change direction etc. Trust in self appears in the showing up without knowing where the path goes but recognising that no matter where it goes it is going somewhere and it’s ok to adapt along the way. It’s impossible to be ready for every eventuality before a journey but it’s possible to be prepared to be resilient enough to figure it out on the way. To be able to flex into the curves and detours of any journey is a skill we can develop through recognising that there are over seven billion unique humans and, therefore, over seven billion unique paths.
Questions to ask yourself:
Where did I lose my way?
How was I able to find my way again, find a new way, or ask someone to guide me?
In the moments of getting lost how did you recalibrate to a new way by asking for guidance?
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
As I embark on my most challenging pilgrimage, 1,000km on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, Walking for Mental Health, I am drawn back to reflect once more on the symbols of The Way that I have previously walked with.
The first symbol is the most important for me as it indicates the strategic part of the planning phase as I consider what to pack … adding and then eliminating … ruminating and deliberating … trying to envisage the climate, the landscape, the skin feel and mostly—perhaps obviously—the weight vs the comfort of choice.
If a backpack is too full, the physical body will be strained over capacity and the mind will be less focused on the path ahead as a consequence of the pain. Carrying an extra weight on one’s shoulders has become normalised and it’s common for people—adults, children, corporates, healers—to be brought to their knees by this weight before asking for support. Equally, the journey can be hindered by too light a pack as a result of not paying enough attention to the necessary items one needs to carry on a journey; this could also indicate a—conscious or unconscious—negation of certain personal needs and basic requirements for comfort and health.
We all tend to accumulate too much, often out of fear and death denial; a habit that is hard to break and one that ultimately results in being unwittingly burdened with more than we can carry. It’s important to see what and who lies beneath the layers we have built around ourselves and the burdens we have chosen to carry, and then to create new habits to do with shedding rather than accumulating.
To strip down on an emotional, physical and mental level takes courage because it shows us our authenticity and the corresponding vulnerabilities. By stripping down I don’t mean full renunciation; I refer to discernment around needs according to values and a slow un-layering in line with each person’s capacity and desire for transformation.
Questions to ask yourself:
What am I carrying today that may not be mine and/or what is the impact for me?
What can I remove from my backpack, and who, if relevant, can I give it to?
What’s essential that I might add or that would be worthwhile adding to my backpack for now?
Observations:
Awaken your ability to recognise when, how, where and for whom you may be over-burdening yourself.
Build your capacity to feel into how your whole system is responding to the weight you are—intentionally or unintentionally—carrying on a physical, mental and/or emotional level.
Look at what doesn’t need to be there as well as what is potentially missing that will benefit the pilgrimage and ease the long walk.
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
“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.
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
I bought a sari when I travelled through India about a decade ago. I have bought many over the years. They are draped throughout my home as a love sonnet to India and a symphony of remembrance to my paternal grandmother who was born here. But this particular sari is different. Pure slippery silk in the deep cobalt blue you would see in a stained glass window, and woven with pure silver thread, I bought it whilst dating a man I loved. He had spoken of marriage and this was my intended wedding drip. Unable to find it for several years, it was only when packing up my house for this trip that I rediscovered it. I follow the trail of crumbs to find out why.
I depart Sri Lanka in a state of blissful calm having forged more meaningful relationships in a month than I could imagine possible in several years. This maiden visit was not, as I initially believed, eight years overdue but exactly on cue. It contains me. It infuses me. It recodes my DNA. If India inspires my grit, Sri Lanka has been my grace.
The drive from Galle Fort to Colombo International is as slow and mellow as is manic the drive from Chennai airport to Auroville. Psychedelic daydream. Un curated. The hazy persimmon sun hangs between palm fronds tracking the trajectory of the day. A goat runs across the road; its frantic herder throws herself between cars to beat it back in formation. The once comforting and familiar smells assault my nostrils. Human filth molests my eyes. We almost hit a calf. The car lurches. An entire herd takes up a lane on the highway, lumbering, oblivious. Time warps … both linear and spiral … both vertical and multi-dimensional. The sun is swallowed by horizontal smog resting on rooftops. The journey is long; the drive spasmodic. A fairground dis-traction.
Paving the road to relocate to Auroville has been twelve years in the making and, as my son leaves home—allowing me to create this transition—Auroville is a human experiment in its demise. ‘Paving’ has become a swear word. Trees are massacred to make way for roads, housing, a city of people ready to populate this foreign utopia. I am unsure this still feels like home. But I am suspended in the liminal space between places, external and internal, and I tread tentatively to feel into who I am as a reflection of that.
If Sri Lanka gave me comfort in structured travel, all of my plans for India strangle me. I bite the SriPada white string off my wrist; even that feels like a garrotte. My AuADHD brain causes literal writhing and groaning as I ruminate night and day … sleepless, delirious. It tears open my capacity for worship at the alter of my introspection. Not having been allowed to develop and apply interoception as a child, it is still a struggle in my 50s to discern wants from needs. And as I find myself occasionally still defending my need to travel, I recognise that the intensive course I have sequenced this entire trip around is a decoy to justify taking time out for Me.
Manifestation is directly correlated with what I currently put my energy into, so resistance simply manifests that which I resist. And yet here I sit on that very cusp I fear the most, wanting to change everything about my next few months and paralysed by my fear of making the wrong decision. I’m not afraid of going into the unknown. What I fear most is the not stepping into the unknown … the terrifying prospect of choosing inertia over movement … the feeling into the pause when I have to choose whether to step forward or not … the insatiable courage and curiosity.
I have spent my life in service to everyone else’s agendas—mother, husband, son—and bulldozed my way through more than the RDA of studies in support of the work I do for others. So, doing anything out of obligation rather than desire has this week become my main gear shift process and priority; a fragile time of subtle recalibration—not wanting to overcompensate and shift too far in the opposite direction … maintaining poise whilst tuning into the silence that still has something to say.
Awareness is, however, only one wing of the bird. I often fly in circles.
I reorientate to—and in—the surrounding forest, looping to begin with so I don’t mistake one red dirt road with another, and then gradually broadening my forays. I reach out to touch the trees. A Mimosa frond closes over my finger; a forest friend reaching back. In the seed of everything is its destruction—a plant, a city, a person, a dogma. As I orientate to my environment I orientate to my Self. It too has the seed of its departure. I take a familiar path. It leads to an unfamiliar field. Am I lost? I wonder. I wander. Everything looks the same. Everything looks different. A creature lurches in the bush; the smell of lemongrass floods my senses. India is a land of distinction and dichotomy. A labyrinthine mystery.
Defined as ‘excellence that sets someone or something apart from others’, the word distinction mocks my equanimity. My son’s six Matric distinctions prove his competency. Confident he will be just fine on his own, one final push and I am solo. Confident I will be too. I pass a sign to Surrender and understand that this is always the very first step in the process of manifestation. It is only in attuning to and creating appropriate conditions that the unfoldment and formation of the foetus can occur. When I open up to what I seek, what I seek will find me. Cows barricade the road. I’ve learned to honk my squeaky e-cycle horn at everyone and everything. Wide-eyed diva eyelashes gaze back. I drive around them. Some things do just need a wide berth.
Whilst it is seemingly obvious that it’s impossible to survive without also thriving, it’s questionable whether thriving is a feasible notion without the fulcrum of surviving. I regularly throw myself over this tipping point. The love, the hate, the everything in between. When struggle becomes synonymous with productivity and achievement, travel teaches me how to regularly come back to centre. Not permanently; just to feel into the equipoise before the next swing of the pendulum. Expansion and contraction—this is the harmonious interplay of integrating Equanimity.
My itinerary lies frayed on my laptop screen. I piece it together with pliers and superglue, the prescriptive picture on the box no longer the one I am creating. There is another waiting to take shape—I am both creator and student, instructor and imbecile. Struggle is both a personal and universal lack of acceptance. It’s impossible to evolve AND be resistant. Change is like getting caught up in a wave—if I tense up, the force will use my defiance to pummel me; if I loosen, however, I can tap into the water’s power to pop out. To find air. To breathe again.
Sunrise cycles bring a deep bow of gratitude to my father for inspiring the early morning worshiper in me as the colours of Pongal are laid out on dawn-drenched doorsteps in honour of the hope of abundance … that may never come for some. And I reorientate too to the perception of abundance; the value placed on it, and its very nature. My e-cycle eats my trouser leg. I stop to eat another mango. Permission spills out here. I drink it with my morning coffee. I dress it like a Pongal bullock and dance around a Pongal pot dressed in a sari of possibility. I merge temporarily with the me who was here twelve years ago and I slip timelines … and everything I imagine these next three months to be, fall to shreds in the throes of trance.
I listen to Joseph Goldstein on mindfulness. Would he fail me, I wonder, if he knew I listen whilst running in the forest. I overtake a couple on their e-cycles. My body is strong since Chinese cupping and Moxibustion but my gut goes into crisis as it no longer holds anything. The couple return the challenge. I up my game, drawing on reserve fuel, motivating purification as my being busts open and shatters apart less integrous cells that can then be expelled from my body. Healing only fully happens when the system is empty.
I am empty. And full. Both And.
I make coconut shell espresso cups for my new Aeropress and learn face yoga; I drink copious amounts of Marc’s Coffees and invite Chun to facilitate a tea ceremony beside the koi pond at 4 East Coast Home, my new digs; Yashi’s serves up my favourite coconut cappuccinos and Mohanam prepares special thalis I consume whilst writing content for their new sustainable business website. I don’t skip a day without fresh fruits and green coconuts and I am resetting my system physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Travel—and India specifically—has the capacity to both shatter my heart into pieces and break it wide open.
I don’t need red sequin shoes. I don’t need a false guru. All I need is the heels on my feet and the capacity to swiftly tap them together three times. And I am home; not to a physical space but a place within myself I no longer want to escape.
I stare at the words on my laptop screen, images stare back at me. Like a 3D puzzle, it makes sense only when I stop trying to see what I know … surrender to what the image knows of me. I discern the bigger picture when my eyes learn the images in a different code. Everything I require requires something from me.
Arrival in Galle at Le Bella Inn 1912 is to a celebrity welcome. Procrastination terrifies me so, with my precrastination skills, I made this reservation four months ago. Exalted as the very first person to book a room here, it is presumed that my lucky charm energy resulted in subsequent non-stop bookings, including a dozen from South Africa where the owner has recently toured. Within five minutes I have his oath to assist me with a long term visa extension next time I am in Sri Lanka. Wise action is the path to manifestation.
For me, the first thing to do on arrival anywhere is to walk. But a sign outside proclaims that life starts after coffee. The 19-year-old waiter brings me real coffee; his t-shirt tells me that dreams only work if you do. Manifest is a verb. So, the second thing I do is walk … compelled to keep walking until my feet have drawn the maps on my body and my soul starts to recognise the terrain. Competency building to find my vibe; to dispel my demons into the cobbled roads. The difference with aging as I travel is that my inner elements require a little longer to find resonance with the outer; I need a little longer to calibrate; to integrate. If I don’t immediately do the thing I fear, I get locked in the inertia of it. A cobra recoils into its basket, its flute-playing master closes the lid. Imprisoned. The gun metal ocean tones reflect the rows of cannons of this once heavily defended island. Gun fire shoots me back to the 5-year-old desecrated by her molester on the cannon at the not so defended Durban Library.
An ancient on a bicycle delivers coconuts to Tap House across the road. LKR200 he states. Tapping into the distinction between tourist and traveller I follow the trail to the source, encouraged now to leave the confined bastion of Galle Fort and venture to the street markets. The mania of the city always calms me; slows my stride; brings me closest to my core. Traffic that makes no sense; people and dogs slipstream in flow. I join the harmonic discord. Brightly embellished fishing vessels and cats devouring discarded tails counterpoise the stench of death at the fish market. I follow a cow across a traffic circle. Vehicles mirror me. Fruits and vegetables with knobs and spikes and colours never seen in Cape Town’s aisles of homogenised produce. And king coconuts for LKR100. I get two. One young for ‘drinking’ and one mature for ‘eating, drinking’. I stroll the streets and back through the sally port still eating the flesh on arrival back at the Tap House: Cool King Coconut LKR450 affirms my mini adventure that stretches me into the edges and keeps me real. What ‘feels right’ is simply what feels familiar. When’s it’s uncomfortable—when it burns—that’s when it matters.
Forged in the fire; more beautiful for the fire; I find equilibrium in the water. But first a run—the fire of dynamic meditation to release the kundalini energy to cleanse my emotional body. I do four laps of the fort walls; each re-turn to the lighthouse exhibits another sublime perspective of the rising sun. I have my skipping rope. It strobe-lights the view and I zone out as my entire being becomes a part of my sensory experience and my cells vibrate with joy. Whereas I once I adhered to following my blisters, I now surrender to Joseph Campbell’s true adage and follow my bliss. Exorcising self sabotage is not a once-off event. Magick is a process; practice makes practice.
Writing too takes practice. The foetal heart is formed as it travels in contraction over the brain to nestle in a knot of chambers in its slotted cage in its chest. I write with my heart brain. I write until the writing writes me. Reconstructed. The Tetris Effect.
Imagine a city where the culture isn’t about sitting down to eat or drink; where the main purpose of walking isn’t to shop. Imagine reverting to tribal culture being genuine progress, where people connect and engage over music, dance, shared experience. Where you can be normal even without an addiction. Conversations can often sound something like back and forth WhatsApp exchanges—threads frayed, only randomly matching. Glimmers of a stitch.
When I travel my body reprograms my brain with felt senses and shifts my approach from top down to bottom up. Sensory signals or guesses; I get to choose which side of the scales to place each experience. It is only with the heart brain that one can ultimately fully comprehend. Cognitive dissonance lingers in a dark skull box. The blueprint knows where to inspire and where to protect. Denied ecstasy … also disillusionment. I feel.
I stare out the taxi window en route to Colombo Airport; words look back. Forests and hanging fruits. Fecund. Phallic. Feral I am. The wanting to stay taints the wanting to go. Gratitude. Grit. The wanting. The waiting. The pause. Breathe. The driver straddles the lanes. Neti neti.
Waiting at the airport for the international flight to Chennai, the tension of the opposites waits with me. I attempt to connect the dots back to who I was when I arrived at this place a month ago. Deer-eyed. Interrogated. The Circle of Zen is not always a simple brush stroke. This cycle that has brought me back to the same place is an explosion and collapse of rainbows and black holes. Order, chaos and everything in between. Each new day a new me. Travel creates the earth’s tarot cards that give direction based not on cardinal points but on the ever-churning and spiralling internal highways that never get me lost. Because I can never be lost. Because I am always right here. Where are you?
After a month in Sri Lanka, I will have to re-orientate my being around my old lover; India … to feel if her devotion is strong enough to hold me. Usually when I’m anxious I shop online. The only thing available to me is an upgrade. “Gulp!” I don’t want to leave but know that I must … it is only in the leaving that I will be able to return. Sri Lanka has chipped away at my heart and snuck inside. If you look real close you will notice the chains are broken.
With each departure I feel the pull to stay and the pull to go. The journey ahead is again unknown and begins with negotiating a fare with the tuk tuk driving brother of my hosts at Vegetable Garden House. “Seven or eight hours drive”, he says. I offer forty Dollars, he counters with seventy and we settle on fifty-six plus I’ll buy lunch en route.
We climb past the sparkling lake. The temperature goes in the opposite direction. Tea plantations form stairways to the moon. And Buddha stands watch above it all. The Empire turns in its tepid grave. Despite the attraction I can neither ignore or negate the shadow side. What is seen as a lake is in fact a dam for tea irrigation; a pool of pesticide run off and an unnatural pool depriving the villages and eco systems downstream.
Whilst most folk deny their shadow in favour of their light, I err on the side of the opposite. I don’t curate; I mine. I unearth diamonds under layers of coal; seeing all facets is my superpower.
We descend the stairways of rice paddies, returning to the heat of the day. Far from hell, I consume the variegated landscapes for lunch. Sense doors are gateways to my soul; the only relevance of the external is my response through the portals of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. To find that sweet spot of reflection and integration it is important to not mistake resistance for discernment and to recognise that aversion and craving brings neither respite nor the fulfilment of desire. If pleasure cannot give life meaning then the lack of pleasure cannot take meaning away.
The dots of the puzzle can join in a multitude of ways; A to B is not always obvious. Like the precariously poised hillside stalls, adventure brings teetering between groundedness and flight.
The driver chews betel and spits russet saliva. A wave washes over my foot. He drives faster in the rain. Dogs flee. Ganesha removes no obstacles. Shiva with his cobra necktie looks indifferent. Betel alkaloids can stimulate adrenalin or euphoria … he’s not euphoric. The roads aren’t worthy of a map and the tuk tuk has the suspension of a hobbled rodeo bull, so bumpy my phone logs mileage. The journey is long, but I learn to recognise that interesting is more important than speed.
A wall of water; I arrive in the rainforest. And all is calm.
New Year’s Eve is just another Sunday. No pressure and anxiety or pretending to resolve to be a better version of myself. No contrived celebrations to shed some old me that likely will still exist tomorrow. No hedonistic and redundant rituals laying pathways of expectation and failure. No false festivities and empty intentions that negate the reality that tomorrow will be just another Monday.
Instead there is the forest and the river and the rampant wildness reminding me of life’s constant flux of endings and beginnings. Nothing is ever the same. So I chant and I meditate and I climb into bed listening to the lullaby of it all. My intention with the ending of today is to use each and every night as an opportunity to assess and recalibrate so that each and every morning is a new year, a new day and a new me … to use each and every exhale as a letting go and every inhale as an invitation to the new.
Be mindful of this moment; this moment is your life … said someone.
I wake in the still darkness, hungry … for a cold shower, for meditation and chanting, for a swim in the waterfall and for perfumed fruits and real coffee. All is satisfied in that order. And just as an added bonus, a leech attaches itself to my wrist. I want to keep it there for a while. Always fascinated by the ancient healing technique of bloodletting, it feels part of the cleansing ritual. My host sprays salt water on it and it drops to the ground. There will be more where that one came from.
It feels as though I have slipped dimensions; through a crack in the continuum … as though someone else is living my comparatively normal life back home and I have escaped the constructed reality that had me chained.
WELL WORTH BEING 