I have been trying to find the seed to write as I have been reluctant/resistant to tell my stories and reveal all the mucky truths … still that fearful little girl inside not wanting to invite the wrath of volatile family members who offer nothing without conditions … so I have been trying to write everything apart from what is trying to be written.
There are opposing voices in my head—one warning me the just be quiet because of the impact the truth has, and the other down on its knees begging for this truth to be told. Truth isn’t the same as facts. Truth is something deeper.
After an episode of coercive manipulation last year, I no longer feel the need to fawn or fight as I lean into what Anne Lamott says: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better”.
I can’t tell a powerful story if I’m afraid of hurting people—writing from a place of fear is never a good way to proceed. My first obligation as I forge ahead is to the truth of my story and that means not censoring myself.
Some stories need to be told, and while the telling may come with some fallout, my compulsion to share my own story is because it helps others feel less alone; those who need to be reminded that in a world of eight billion people, it is inevitable that there is going to be an awful lot of shared experience and, although we all have our unique interpretations of events, we are not unique in our struggles. We mostly just need help getting to the other side of them.
This is what my work is all about—not transcending anything but simply being my authentic dark and twisty self so that I can hold those parts of other wounded souls. I am not into false positivity; I am into real hard life stuff … the cracks and breaks that guide the way into the gifts that each one of us has.
My lifelong studies, self development and spiritual growth have led me to the gifts I was born with—not to tell people to let go of the past and leave the pain alone but to sit with them in their past and in their pain. It is only in going into the dark that one can one day come out into the light once more.
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.
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.
WELL WORTH BEING 