Tag: forest bathing

Twelve: Harmony is at the Skatepark

On By Well Worth BeingLeave a comment

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.

Ten: Toto, are we Home?

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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.