I am in Cape Town until October practicing in my Hout Bay therapy space for Craniosacral Therapy and Coaching; on the mountains for Meditation and Hiking/Running, and online for Coaching and 1-on-1 Yoga and Meditation.
All of my modalities can be combined into half or full day group or individual retreats.
A little background: 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 own unique place of innate health using a variety of modalities.
These include: Craniosacral Therapy, Integral Coaching, TIME Meditation, Transformational Yoga, chakra purification, nutrition and personal psychology. A summary of modalities and costs is available at https://wellworthbeing.com/costs/
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. I work with health, not illness, basing my therapy and coaching sessions on what is inherently well with your system as a starting point and we build from there.
Through bodywork and coaching sessions I re-establish the dialogue between your body and its inherent health and guide you to the best version of you that you can be. What you will get from a session with me is a 100% commitment to your wellbeing. I show up with curiosity and an open heart and allow my expertise, experience and intuition to guide each treatment.
Whether I am treating an individual or guiding a corporate team or school group, I bring the some dedication to the containment of the space and the transmission of information, knowledge and wisdom.
Contact me at wellworthbeing@gmail.com or WhatsApp on +27 74 1011 621 to book your private or group session(s). You can also buy a voucher (or five with a 15% discount) to gift to loved ones. Please share my website with anyone you feel may benefit from my work.
Namaste 🙏🏼 meaning: The divine light within me bows to the divine light within you. It is a greeting used as acknowledgment of seeing in you what you may not see in yourself and to use that as a mirror to reflect what I too have within me. You can use it while pressing your palms together in front of your heart and this brings mindfulness to breath and the subtle movement of your heart and lungs contained within the ribcage. The greeting done in this way fosters interconnectedness and brings a calm presence to the beginning of any interaction regardless of content.
“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.
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.
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 don’t only walk to preserve my budget. I walk to get lost. To see things the driver obstructs; to hear things the engine exiles. Humming birds and porcupine quills. I walk fast; my feet attempting to keep pace with my brain. Both, therefore, get lost fast too. I don’t only get lost of my own volition; I get lost following the erroneous lefts and rights, mismatched hands and words, often both unwittingly pointing me in directions I am loathe to explore. My internal maps plot emotional puzzles poured out of the box onto muddy roads, and I hold both the anxiety of not knowing and the wisdom of where I am.
I spiral the town. A tuk tuk driver has passed me several times on the 10km walk to cover a 4km distance trying to find my way to the Wewurukannala Vihara Temple. “Get in. No money, I help you”, he says, and drives me left where the last hand indicated right. Giant Buddhas and the tunnels of hell. Formidable trolls and grotesque monsters. Torturers and demons. I run from Dante’s Inferno into the den of the temple elephant fighting its chained feet in its own version of hell. Punishment can sometimes come without crime. Movement is not always a choice.
Pushing into physical, emotional, mental and psychic (sweet) pain is the system’s means of purification and it is with this knowing that I follow my path. The roaming map of cardinal points and dotted lines is redundant. To plot the sights I have to find meaning in the terrain. It’s never this OR that. No absolutes. It’s only ever both AND that. Travelling expands me into the dynamic landscapes of the outer and the inner and gives me prompts to live into. It shifts my perspectives and changes my reality, stretches me to shed the ego system in favour of the eco system that informs my knowing rather than my known.
INJF, 29/11, Enneagram 4. I have attached to labels that work for me to shed the ones maliciously given. I struggle with my tangled mind and restless body over liquid marzipan dressed up as a regular flat white, at Dots Co-working Surf Cafe. I’ve been avoiding the coffee spots here. Because it’s Ceylon. It’s all about tea. Opportunistic to a fault, though, any market here is swiftly seized; entrepreneurship aroused by Europeans clamouring door-to-door for real espresso. If Hiriketiya is the goldmine of coffee lovers, Dots is the golden goose and the coffee costs its weight in gold.
STaY WEiRD demands the wall behind Hiriketiya Beach. Last night’s storm has brought the cold river to the ocean. I swim in pockets of remembered waterfalls and ride the waves. Bodysurfing; floating; buoyant. It often takes complete isolation from the regular distortions and distractions of daily life to sit with Me; to not turn away from the things that haunt and hurt; to allow those too to dissolve and discharge. I merge.
Having compensated for so long around ADHD and narcolepsy, perched on that cross-over spectrum with autism, has been a struggle to some degree but mostly a blessing. It has caused me to almost lose or take my life; has gotten me into a whole lot of risk taking, and resulted in some radical burnout episodes. Yet it has also forced me to up my game in motherhood; driven me to all kinds of personal, financial, health and study achievements, and encouraged an immense amount of courage to bubble up from my depths. It is my superpower.
As with maps, labels and identities do not a human being make. They give a guideline to better understanding. Integration is the full access key to cohesion. The terrain is in a constant state of dynamic change as other factors come into play and change the landscape; as new developments get constructed, as new roads get build, as old ones grow over or go into disrepair or are totally demolished. Being is also a verb.
Men with hoes dig and sandbag; the beach collapses like I do into the river in flood. Sun beds teeter on the edge. Always alert, evaluating, deliberating, I show them where to dig a channel to let the water out. Diversions are sometimes required. I linger at the beach, perched on a rock at the far end where my eyes can soften and settle on the hazy palm-encrusted crescent panorama of sea, surfers, sun worshipers, and that spray-painted wall on the very edge of the surreal.
When I travel I don’t have the same drains on my energy. My attention, intention and energy are (hyper)focused on making things good in the world. I feel a great call to go where my work is most needed and valued. I give of my gifts, my skills, my experience and logical thinking. I give of my heart and my commitment. There’s a sense of symbioses that pulls on my year’s word, Equanimity. My work changes lives. It is egotistical to feel insufficient. Arrogance and humility are upside down. I treat a young foreigner. I ‘see’ violation. “It’s not your fault”, I say. She weeps. “It’s not your fault”, I repeat. #metoo
‘It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person.’ — Amelie Rorty
I recognise the irony in how inconspicuous I feel in a place I am so different and yet in Hiriketiya Bay where there are so many people who look ‘like me’, I get that uncomfortable edge of standing out. I micro-dose on public exposure and retreat to the containment of my homestay where writing and meditation are my closest allies and comfort. Detecting a tendency to be infatuated with being the outlier; the weird one; the pioneer who many only understand in hindsight, it can also find me fatigued. I have lapses justifying myself; I play myself down; lose focus trying to conceal myself. The pendulum is my kryptonite; it swings too high. Vertiginous.
The inner parts, both real and also not true, are identities to observe and let go … parts that need befriending not battling. I hold it all in dualistic dynamism: the anxiety with the joy; the isolation with the connection; the contraction with the expansion. The true warrior transmutes conflict into dance and thus the battle ends. Building courage is like building a muscle. I am not fit like I have previously been, but I am strong. I have lost inches of physical matter and, since the cells hold memories, the secreted physical waste drains emotional and mental sludge too.
Hot bitter coffee juxtaposed with warm mango and coconut flesh. My body takes it all and condenses it into a concise and accessible mingling of tastes and textures that create my human experience. I greedily assimilate, remaking all that dwells beneath my skin. I want to change my name to days of the week. Every day is a poem; a metaphor; a waymarker with no final destination. And my body is the poet.
My last day in Hiriketiya brings symbolic showers, an apt affirmation of renewal as I wander to the Bay for a final swim. The ocean is my church. I lie on my back and gaze at the clouds; gentle rain anoints my face.
To retreat is to pull back or withdraw. It also means haven or refuge. A retreat is not a defeat, but a commitment to adjust or rethink. It can be a noble endeavour to recoil from the outside world in order to sink deeper into one’s inside world. It can be the only safe way to develop and enhance one’s mind, heart, body and soul so as to gradually reform old habit patterns and show up for oneself in a more appropriate and supportive way.
The man I married professed to have 18 wives; claimed he didn’t know which one he would wake up to each morning. During the 15 years of marriage it was a boast; his own personal harem he’d say. During the 2 years of divorce, however, I was schizophrenic, bipolar … shamed, an outcast … abandoned by friends and family alike, I found my way by moving … down the road, up a mountain, or across the globe … anyhow and anywhere … “Can’t you just be normal?”
Stories make sense of my world. Everything comes from myth and is told in parables. Words haunt me. Memories are fulcrums that our futures are hinged upon; the seesaw that highlights the anchor point in its motion. As I write, the voices ask what’s the point, who are you to speak about your experiences, what makes you so special, no one is interested in what you have to say, go to your room, eat your food and keep quiet, don’t interrupt me. I write like I live: scrappy. Undisciplined, I break the rules.
As someone who has had many life periods of not wanting to be here, I have developed a capacity to divert attention from feeling isolated, abandoned and generally misunderstood into copious amounts of diploma courses, research and, more recently, podcasts. I learn to live better through gaining knowledge about why I am, how I am, and how better to channel my unique gifts and superpowers into my work, my relationships and my step-by-step manoeuvres on life’s labyrinthine map. Without movement, however, this can become rumination … even stagnation.
When I checked in at CT Int’l I was overweight—and I’m not talking about my baggage. I had been overriding my body’s homeostatic drive with months of anxious buffering against the outside world, the inert emotional sludge now hanging off my dense physical frame.
Arrival at Sinharaja Kurulu Ella Eco Resort after 7 hours of potholes, downpours, dust and sensory overload is New Year’s Eve. My psyche wants refuge. I forego the trekking in the trees for washing under waterfalls. I’m not allowed to trek alone here; they say I’ll get lost. They saw me coming. My jump rope lies coiled, cobra like, at the bottom of my bag. Unused; lifeless. The snake of transformation comes instead in the form of a rescued python my host fetches me to see. It too is immobile in the bottom of a bag waiting to be set free.
As I begin to work into my word for the year—equanimity—I assess whether travel too is simply a diversion from the battles going on inside. It is, of course! And also, of course, it isn’t. It’s like water that falls over rocks, sometimes flexing around them and sometimes carving right through. Never clinging, it gains momentum, flows in and out of all spaces, and keeps moving. Structure generates its flow. And ultimately it merges with the ocean without separation. Humbled.
A word closely related to equanimity is homeostasis, which is defined as the desire for the system to return to so-called normal. How long will this recalibration take? I shame myself for trying to rush it. This is allostasis, the system’s means of achieving stability through change. But what happens when the system is constantly trying to compensate for an abnormal emotional or physical environment? The set point gets recalibrated as an abnormal normal and the system goes into a compromised state of harmony.
A black and turquoise butterfly keeps banging its head on my window. A woodpecker taps on the tree outside. I meditate, I breathe, I contort. Peace descends, strips me, leaves me naked. The tension of the inner critic takes its cue. Slithers up. It clings to me like the leeches sucking on my flesh on New Year’s Day. It lambasts me for being so unproductive, so sedentary and I have to wonder, is this hedonistic—not contributing, only experiencing? What’s normal anyhow?
I walk down to the water, modestly covered; back up not so. The cascades cleanse me; expose my feral. The river is never the same; neither am I. Water is my greatest teacher … it clings to nothing. Except my laundry. Nothing dries in humidity. My skin is moist. I haven’t eaten much since arrival—the water fast during my first week in Sri Lanka merged into mostly fruit and only the occasional vegetable. And as the physical buffering has dropped away, the emotional baggage has too. A resolution isn’t a miraculous instantaneous transformation; it is a gradual ratcheting and greasing of the cogs of change until, slowly slowly, the machine works on its own, unconsciously competent.
There is a distinction between nomad, tourist and traveller. You get nomadic travellers and travelling tourists yet there is a distinction between the three. Whilst a nomad makes a life of travelling and a tourist escapes life through travelling, a traveller slips somewhere between the two as a touristing nomad. I was mostly a tourist whilst married; I could only dream of the nomadic life. It was the tension between the opposites that exposed the traveller in me. I doubt I will ever be a typical tourist again and, as I create a map for my inner nomad to navigate, I travel.
I am mutable. I travel to be anyone I want to be—the harem, the schizophrenic, the deranged. I don’t have to be who I was yesterday. I want to change my names to days of the week. Even that feels limiting.
The jungle breathes for me now, the rivers move me. I offer my host a craniosacral session—I miss my craft—and get gifted a breadfruit curry in exchange. The days now are all about waterfalls and perfumed fruits; connection and comfort. There’s elemental alchemy here. As I plot the route and navigate the journey, it is like placing pins in a globe of the earth. Travel is an opportunity for data gathering and those pins are mirrored like acupuncture needles mapping the nadis and activating the elemental chakra bodies. The trapped energy is released to turn the wheel, and the gears lock in and ultimately drive movement.
Traveller acupuncture. The quintessential calibration tool.
Already my trip has shifted radically through meeting new friends and reconnecting with old ones. I feel into whether the re-planning is due to fear of boredom in the pauses or whether they are legitimate growth-through-travel opportunities. The adventure has begun to sweep me up and I am not resisting … it feels like doorways are stretching open and luring me across the liminal spaces of transition like a space gate.
A baby monkey hangs from the balcony loitering with intent to steal my banana. Ferns hang from high branches, hitching a ride from the undergrowth into the canopy; an umbrella for the plants and creatures beneath. Tension palpates instinct, the neuro pathways create their own patterns, building without thought or knowledge of where the pathways will lead.
I go for one last plunge. I say goodbye to the river … for now. The rocks provide the momentum for both of us. “I’ll meet you in the ocean.” I say.
Those who do not move do not notice their chains. Proclaimed a shrewd woman.
The foetus curls and unfurls in development; contracting and expanding in a natural state of growth. Pupating. Never static. Everything needs space to find its place, to plug into the blueprint of becoming … to emerge and retreat in flow.
My home is that place and space for me. A Bohemian sanctuary of safe retreat and recalibration, this is my womb. Like being under water, all the noises of the outside world shut out, all I hear is the d-doff-doff of the eternal Mother Heart. Foetal eyes closed tight, it’s where I find my rhythm, my momentum, my impetus and vitality. It’s how I can move once more into the world.
And when I move, I travel.
I travel not to find myself but to discover more of who I am beneath the layers that have been pasted like papier-mâché around my feral human form. I travel to return to mother soul. I travel to find purpose … or a reason to believe that the seeking in and of itself is that purpose. Not everyone has an opus. I go out into the world as a single instrument looking to play; as a puzzle piece with connectors revealed, looking for my bigger picture.
This time I travel to find my way beyond my own mothering womb of 18 years. Against the odds I have nurtured as sacred guardian a soul that needed genesis through my own genetic coding to emerge and flourish in both my shadow and my light. He birthed me when I birthed him, synergistically growing me into the mother he required. The infinity symbol harmonises; a conductor directing and collecting. Having leapt the chasm, he travels now through a new fallopian tube. Tumbling through more primordial fluid into an eerie void, he will land with a gentle thud in the universal uterine wall, transforming it into his own womb space of transition and transformation. His own new universe. A brand new birth.
There is a tensile force in everything—I often reference Jung’s tension of the opposites—and often when I begin my travels I can get stuck in the birth canal. I work hard to break the strength of this force pulling me back into cosy womb space until I feel into the strength of the equal and opposite force pulling me forward into the absurdly lit delivery room. Doha airport proves this time to be that tipping point, stuck there as I am for a seeming eternity, nowhere to go, exhausted from labour pains.
And then, schlooop, I am corkscrewed out. Safe now at the bosom of Mama Lanka in the delivery room of my new birthing, my newly opened eyes seek out the familiar. It’s like India … but different. She is a tired mama with the ravaged features of pillage. And I can’t quite find a connection.
“We must always change, renew and rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.” Goethe
I rest like a baby, waking for only a couple of hours at a time, discouraged by my floundering sense of adventure. I just need encouragement when courage fails me. Forceps or suction cup; an intervention. So I order a PickMe scooter, ride pillion and get transported to Mount Lavina Beach where dogs shelter from noon behind ancient fisher boats and tourists don’t. The sun feels closer here. It drains the dye from their towels as fast as it paints their transparent-skin puce. My walk is short. A mirage at the end of the beach entices me with seductions of marble lobbies and cocktails; dark roast coffee and a powder room. I draw close. It is a looming relic as old and as weak now as the British Empire that built it; it is the decrepit Mount Lavinia Hotel. I often quip that when I am done with this life, I will just take a long walk into the Atlantic. Some call this dark humour; those who know me nod and smile … whilst others offer to help me in. The Mount Lavinia looks done. Poised as it is over the ebb and flow of the warm Indian Ocean, each lap of a wave beckons siren-like. Rest now, they say.
It’s important not to fight the pull but to go with it to the very depths of where it is calling; only by sinking to the very bottom is it possible to kick back up. Never struggle against a riptide they say. I surrender to the incubator—Kosgama Vipassana Meditation Centre—for an 8-day sit. I arrive in basic black. Everyone is in full white. Shadow against light.
I write volumes in my head whilst sitting cross legged, mostly in the pain of closed eyed stillness. But the words get washed from my brain like monsoon raindrops on parchment. Diana, my paternal grandmother, is always near, shrouded as I am in the shawl I bought so many years … decades … ago when I did pilgrimage to her birth town, Mussoorie, in India. It had to be pink of course as I only just realise, as a counter to all the blue knits she created while I was pickling in utero in primordial juices of undifferentiated gender. I wasn’t meant to be a girl … yet here I am – SO girl and also SO not. It was Diana who birthed me into the writer, the activist, the creative, the adventurer … the quirky crazy bohemian. The exotic in her spawned the exotic in me. She needed an ally. She didn’t knit blue for a boy; she knitted blue because blue was her favourite colour. I have her blue eyes.
The spiritual symbolism of gecko is rebirth, regeneration and renewal. They are guardians and protectors and a symbol of Diana for me. As an apt reminder of her, each evening during the discourse, a black gecko launches itself off the pitch of the hexagon hall ceiling, it’s jaws clenched around a bug too big to eat that it likely caught mid flight. Bad ass. I am transfixed as it stays there in cobra asana before disappearing. The teachings become a hum of white noise until the bell sounds. I am back. Programmed puppet.
For eleven hours each day I disappear. I am nothing with no identity and no voice … an accumulation of atoms in noble silence—meditator number 11 in room 6A. Room 6A is a mildewy space inhabited only by spiders and geckoes down a dark dusty corridor; the light at the end pulling me towards the cold shower at 4am each day. The big-footed frog clings to the glass doorway. It too is desperate to escape the prison-like barracks I call home for a week. I hate it. And I love it because I hate it.
There is a luminous white bird that flaunts a tail double the length of its body; its head is ink black concealing its enlightenment. A pointy-eared black dog approaches, wide-eyed. My shadow still lingers. I wonder if anyone else can see it … either the shadow or the dog. A black moth loses it’s way and touches down on my head; perhaps there is moonlight there now.
In the mornings I sit at my designated table. 11. It’s at the window high above the road with dense treetops showing off large green coconuts ripe for the plucking, and dates the birds and monkeys have looted; I watch them scamper off with the spoils. I am still not hungry, my body doesn’t want food as I enter day three then day four and five of water fasting.
I watch leaves float from trees so familiar with the letting go, and a frond from a date palm only partially severed from the source of itself and dying now with the umbilical cord still attached. It changes through the hues of the robes I observe on the monks in the Dhamma Hall and on the washing lines—saffrons and subtle shades of chartreuse, and reds. The frond hangs in situ, shackled by inertia.
DDDD-DOEM! Thunder drums and the string musicians pluck the sound of rain as it assaults the earth, first like needles then like baubles. Raised roots are unable to suck it up as fast as it lands. It rises, washing the parched soil like the gallons of water I consume cleanses away the dense matter of the past two months that has barricaded me into this piñata shape. The butterfly within is almost ready to open and expand after so much contraction.
“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” Alan Watts
It’s easy to break addiction to craving, easy too to break addiction to aversion … it’s the addiction to the peaceful place at centre that is the most difficult to expel. Sankaras get shaken to the surface and I grimace—I don’t want to see them but see them I must—then start again with calm equanimity. The pain I feel today will be the strength I feel tomorrow. Anicca anicca anicca.
A mosquito bites me three times and I spitefully murder it. Broken sila. The hall is plunged into darkness and I wonder if I have been sent to hell. Close to full moon, thousands of ants have sprouted wings and taken flight … on the wrong side of the walls of this octagonal building. Thou shalt not kill. The monk teacher has killed the thrill of lumens to enable a gentle sweeping of their confused bodies out into the free moon air. And the next day it is complete.
This course gave me exactly what I needed. The end. I can’t help but wonder if, just as one grows out of a particular therapist, I have grown out of the requirement for Vipassana courses, like a dudu blanket no longer required once the practice of sleep has been embodied.
The umbilical cord is cut.
Before you begin the journey, you own the journey. Once you begin the journey, the journey owns you.
PickMe is the Sri Lankan taxi app that keeps the money here and gives it directly to the driver. You can book anything from a ride on the back of a scooter to an eight-seater touring bus. I used the scooters in Colombo, a car to the Vipassana centre in Kosgama and now decide the 3.5-hour drive to Kandy would have to be by tuk tuk.
First stop: green coconut. I pull out my bamboo straw to suck up the what feels like litres of soothing nectar. And the machete finale reveals there is indeed enough succulent white flesh to scoop up and take with me for the remaining tooth-rattling journey.
Tea flows and I crave coffee … sankaras are deeply rooted. “Sugar?” everyone enquires, with that drug peddling haze of desire. I try to see it as a term of endearment.
The church bells ring and I rise, zombie-like from my bed, conditioned now by the morning gong. What bliss! to settle back into slumber for a few more hours. The delightful Mrs Madugalle, proprietor of Kandy Inn (Friendly Family Guesthouse), has prepared vegetable curry for me for breakfast. “No rice!?”, she clutches her heart, incredulous. “Oats porridge?” she ventures. I glibly shake my head. She slumps into the seat opposite me with a half smile, searching my face for irony. Feeling just marginally ashamed yet very much behind my conviction to no longer eat out of obligation, I counter with “simple fruit or veg is just perfect.” I watch my right hand directed upwards doing the wrist twist thing as I talk, adding an occasional sideways head nod, both knowing and having no clue what either mean. Chuckling, with the sideways nod, she settles on beans and pumpkin curry. “With some dhal?” she adds tentatively. I nod and bow my head in gratitude for this council and opportunity to be heard in all my quirkiness around years of developing food habits that heal me.
Morning tea the British way, waiting for my breakfast, a cat approaches—black with piercing green eyes—and wanders into my room. I walk in after it to ask it to leave and find it has completely disappeared. Perhaps this too is a portal. I feel both nurtured and vulnerable; contained and adventurous … that balanced peaceful place between the aversion and the craving. Kandy Inn is nursing me with healing hands and soothing kindness.
It’s Christmas Day but really just another Monday. I have an appointment with an Ayurvedic doctor after breakfast and then I go exploring Kandy on foot. Natural Coffee Kandy and Tranquil Vegan Rose are first on my list, followed by a walk around the lake and an evening at the Tooth Relic Temple.
Part of the process of growing is to shed as much as it is to acquire. From brutal suctioned birthing into the delivery room, I am now here.
In my opinion mindfullness isn’t necessarily about slow walking, deep breathing, frequent resting and delighting in every flower on a trail. Sure, it CAN be about all of these things. But it’s not prescriptive, it’s not a recipe to follow in the pursuit of awakening.
Mindfulness is about being present with where you are and how you are … right now. And now … and now.
If mindfulness were simply about the new age hippy version of tripping through the daisies it would exclude an entire population of people whose daily lives involve hard labour, stressful work commitments, gruelling commutes and distressing separations.
Fully practicing mindfulness isn’t waiting for gaps or vacations or weekend retreats; unless you can find mindfulness in the chaos, true mindfulness will elude you in the calm and create all manner of psychological and emotional discontent by projecting your ideals onto a reality that only ever exists in the present.
When practiced with integrity and concentration, mindfulness can be present in the sensations of the footfall of your dash for a train; present with the attitude of impermanence of your stress about being late; found in the vibrations of the hammer as it chips away at boulder after boulder, and in meeting yourself in the heartfelt sadness of farewells.
Meditation is a medication that comes without prescription and is not limited to the lotus sitting in silence. Mindfulness can be easily practiced on the cushion yet it will ultimately always transcend this.
So don’t wait to practice because someone has told you it requires stillness and contemplation. Practice it in every moment by being present in your now.
WELL WORTH BEING 