Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss”. Pilgrims follow their bliss/ters.
On no past Camino de Santiago or long-distance local hike have I had to deal with blisters. The only trek I suffered from blisters was in 2001 on the Annapurna Circuit (Nepal) when I walked in leather boots I took out of their box to pack in my backpack … I didn’t walk in them once before boarding the plane to walk for 21 days across and over the Himalaya at 5,400m altitude.
Symbolically, my life in 2001 was plagued with abrasions that caused more pain than pearls and by 2016, my first Camino of 250km with my then 11-year-old son, I had recognised and was acting on my need to nurture my wounds.
Some people diminish their wounds; some deny them; some go into a trauma response and simply obliterate them from memory; some defend their wounds and use their pain as a badge of honour, and some just never quite manage to shine because that would mean giving up on the psychic injuries they have been subjected to.
Adapting to different footwear—I now wear Altra trail running shoes for Camino and will be wearing T-Rockets running sandals on some days too—and conditioning my feet long before the journey, as well as every day before and after walking, is a good analogy for building capability and competency to face challenges … and also to recognise where the stone in my shoe is going to hinder my journey and where the stone in my shoe is the grit that the oyster uses to make the pearl.
It is erroneous to bandage and splint healthy body parts, so there is a call for discernment in how one treats one’s wounds, both from the past and those that present themselves currently. Self-care can reprogram one’s emotional, physical, psychic and mental bodies to engage differently with personal injuries or traumas and shift perspective from being overcome by wounds to using them as a pathway to healing.
As I walk this journey from next week, for Mental Health I will be intentionally working with fellow pilgrims who approach me with specific needs around grief, loss, trauma and dis-ease and I am cognisant of needing to be discerning in how much self nurturing and self supporting I must do in order to be able to support others on their unique walk to wellness.
We are not here to be perfect, we are here to heal. And the first part of any healing process is to recognise the wound as a symbol of healing rather than as an obstacle in its way. It’s important to not get too attached to the strapping and then fail to acknowledge that the wound is no longer there. Struggle can be used as a tool to justify one’s actions or one’s suffering and to eliminate the need to step up and show up. A wound isn’t a life sentence and a bandage isn’t a ticket to victimhood. Letting go of the identity of injury can be empowering and can create the space for taking on the responsibility of stepping fully into one’s essential self.
Take care on the journey by training well in order to diminish the risk of injury and by also preparing well by carrying a first aid kit.
Questions to ask yourself:
How do I grieve whilst supporting others through their struggles without comparison?
How do I create discernment between compassion and a bleeding heart?
How do I bandage the internal wounds that hurt more than anything that bleeds?
How do I relate to past wounds, injuries and traumas on an emotional, physical and mental level?
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
It may look like the same route as the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims before you yet it is different for your walking it. A pilgrim’s unique footprints make for a unique pilgrimage.
The Yellow Arrow is a sign of reassurance that one is following one of the routes on the pilgrim’s way and is an iconic symbol of direction in one’s life as well as ancestral direction and rites of passage—pointing out A way which is different to THE way.
When finding and following these markers it’s a reminder to honour those who have come before. There is a ritual to walking a path that many have taken before, honouring them for carving the way and then honouring oneself for creating one’s own journey from the way. There are many paths leading individuals back home to themselves.
A well-trodden path is still the path untaken until one actually takes it … and then one gets to make it one’s own. It is important to get lost in order to find my way and there is a particular practice of non-judgemental observation that comes with the acceptance of this. I feel it’s important to find myself in a place so unfamiliar that I am challenged to work out how to come back to myself or to accept the new place in which I find myself.
Every part of the entire universe is already right here in this one moment … this one step. There is no manifestation magic in life; it’s all about showing up and placing each foot down with attention and intention. In alchemy it is the third stage in the process, Citrinitas, which is the stage of education before Rubedo, the stage of transformation.
The present moment is your refuge, and this is your home … each footfall brings you back to your self and each self that footfall brings you to is changed because of the footfall. Each contour is as unique as the contours on each individual’s thumbprint; each arrow perceived as just a subtly different shade of yellow; each vista viewed with new eyes; each drop of dew a different prism of light.
Stepping into each moment builds awareness of what’s in the way, where the path is leading, how open you are to your intuitive GPS, when to follow outside signs or inner cues, when to change direction etc. Trust in self appears in the showing up without knowing where the path goes but recognising that no matter where it goes it is going somewhere and it’s ok to adapt along the way. It’s impossible to be ready for every eventuality before a journey but it’s possible to be prepared to be resilient enough to figure it out on the way. To be able to flex into the curves and detours of any journey is a skill we can develop through recognising that there are over seven billion unique humans and, therefore, over seven billion unique paths.
Questions to ask yourself:
Where did I lose my way?
How was I able to find my way again, find a new way, or ask someone to guide me?
In the moments of getting lost how did you recalibrate to a new way by asking for guidance?
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
As I embark on my most challenging pilgrimage, 1,000km on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, Walking for Mental Health, I am drawn back to reflect once more on the symbols of The Way that I have previously walked with.
The first symbol is the most important for me as it indicates the strategic part of the planning phase as I consider what to pack … adding and then eliminating … ruminating and deliberating … trying to envisage the climate, the landscape, the skin feel and mostly—perhaps obviously—the weight vs the comfort of choice.
If a backpack is too full, the physical body will be strained over capacity and the mind will be less focused on the path ahead as a consequence of the pain. Carrying an extra weight on one’s shoulders has become normalised and it’s common for people—adults, children, corporates, healers—to be brought to their knees by this weight before asking for support. Equally, the journey can be hindered by too light a pack as a result of not paying enough attention to the necessary items one needs to carry on a journey; this could also indicate a—conscious or unconscious—negation of certain personal needs and basic requirements for comfort and health.
We all tend to accumulate too much, often out of fear and death denial; a habit that is hard to break and one that ultimately results in being unwittingly burdened with more than we can carry. It’s important to see what and who lies beneath the layers we have built around ourselves and the burdens we have chosen to carry, and then to create new habits to do with shedding rather than accumulating.
To strip down on an emotional, physical and mental level takes courage because it shows us our authenticity and the corresponding vulnerabilities. By stripping down I don’t mean full renunciation; I refer to discernment around needs according to values and a slow un-layering in line with each person’s capacity and desire for transformation.
Questions to ask yourself:
What am I carrying today that may not be mine and/or what is the impact for me?
What can I remove from my backpack, and who, if relevant, can I give it to?
What’s essential that I might add or that would be worthwhile adding to my backpack for now?
Observations:
Awaken your ability to recognise when, how, where and for whom you may be over-burdening yourself.
Build your capacity to feel into how your whole system is responding to the weight you are—intentionally or unintentionally—carrying on a physical, mental and/or emotional level.
Look at what doesn’t need to be there as well as what is potentially missing that will benefit the pilgrimage and ease the long walk.
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
“Please speak of how you view the possibility of attachment to non attachment,” I ask the dharma teacher.
I am at Kopan Monastery to heal my body and mind from resonating at the frequency of the fatal diseases I might have contracted from the dog bite, and to recover from setbacks encountered on the home front. On a three-day water fast, I travel the darkened tunnels of a healing crisis with fever and fitfulness and I find the comforting containment of 700 monks and nuns chanting and performing pooja to be instrumental in my wellness.
I notice, as I ask the question, my hand running fingers through the thin blonde hair I have always equated with femininity as I admire the teacher’s beautifully smooth-shaven crown. I am drawn to life in a nunnery and commit to shave my head on my arrival in India … yet I also know how fickle I can be. Life as a renunciate mocks me as I consider relinquishing the bower bird aspects of my identity … the beautiful shiny objects I have around me, even on my travels.
I sit each morning as an observer, an outsider looking in on the monks as they arrive dressed in robes that simultaneously shed their identity and give them one. They prostrate and take their seats. They are vessels, showing up in service to the prayers; chanting for others what others can’t do for themselves.
I sit and contemplate on no more than what I witness. The pooja, the music, the clapping away of evil spirits. When a British Colonel arrived in Lhasa after gunning down thousands of Tibetans, he is said to have felt great pride in the Tibetans clapping for him on his arrival, mistakingly believing their attempts to dispel evil as their celebrating his prowess.
The opposite of doing is not apathy; it’s allowing … a yielding rather than a seeking. Meditation is an action. It is a deliberate and intentional allowing of all that is, in order to practice not attaching to any of it through the sense organs. Gathering to wash the plates and utensils from food preparations, the chatting and community is as profoundly important as the nourishment from the simple food. Quality of life is expressed through moving hands that find their intelligence in ordinary tasks. Is this what malas could be used for? I wonder.
As the fever passes, I feel both relief and disappointment. Relief that I may have healed myself from potential suffering. Disappointment that I may have saved myself from dying. If you know me, you will understand that this is not in fact a depressed dig in the darkness, but a lightening of something quite liberating. Regardless, a little more context may be required for those who don’t know the true meaning of the word GuRu and may be more attached to just the one syllable without considering its counterpart.
I have never felt fully committed to this incarnation. Call it trauma, abuse, nervous system dysregulation … no matter … contemplating death these past days, I recognise that I am more attached to death than I am to life. So the tears I shed are related to feeling that dying from a dog bite in a country that honours death as much as it honours life would be a better fate than ultimately taking that long walk into the ocean when I am done with this so-called me I am becoming less and less identified with as I travel to integrate the past five decades of my fabrication.
There is a middle ground always: not attached to either life or death but fully committed to and incarnated in both. Like a suspension bridge that must be fully rooted in both banks. Straddling. Clinging to neither … and also to both.
My writing habits have gone into holes and tunnels and transcended the notion of linear time. There are gaps … chasms. And, as with my meditation practice, I have to keep coming back to the cushion to start again.
I am in India now at Deer Park Institute in Himachal Pradesh. So much life has happened between my time here in February, and this time now. I have written less than I aspired to, traveled and explored way more than I imagined, connected, studied, expanded (and also contracted), integrated and shed so much of who I believed myself to be. To honour this new version of myself that can’t recognise myself in the mirror anymore, I travel to McLeodGanj, two hours each way by cab, to a hairdresser I met in February. My instruction to Mukti back then was still my usual, “Just the ends off please; I’m trying to grow it”. This time I am not bold enough for the full head shave—yet—but I flick through Pinterest to show him some images that match this new Penelope V11.9 and tell him to work his magic. I close my eyes and breathe.
This is the only death I need right now.
Monsoon season is a flushing of all the rubbish; a cleansing of the earth and a transition into autumn. India has six seasons instead of four … six opportunities to adapt or die.
Pokhara—Nepal’s Promised Land—comes with its own unique challenges and blessings. Bars and restaurants take over the Lakeside area with names like Crave and Paradise; there are strip clubs now and a Pokhara Disney Land. Tourists from all over the world consume in a frenzy anything on offer. I pass people on the streets who look like they have just stepped out of a video game and I am offered ganja and ‘a night to remember’ whenever I cross a certain threshold on the main road. Twenty-three years have not been kind.
Pokhara also comes with a gift I could never have imagined or anticipated: a room in an apartment with a balcony and Himalaya views. It takes several weeks before the rains clear the sky enough to see them and, when they appear, their golden morning halo is worth each day in wait. I share the apartment with the elderly Kashmiri man who, with his wife, hosted me in SriNagar after snow trekking in Aru valley; he has a shop in Pokhara and all he asks in return is that I attend to customers on Fridays while he goes to Mosque.
Whilst most people in Pokhara troll the main streets and the lakeside for dopamine hits in the form of fast food, ganja, liquor, shiny plastic trinkets and karaoke, the beautiful duality is that those I judge are also the ones who sleep in. I seek the sanctuary of the peace that descends in the early mornings when I go for my runs, my walks, my solitary yoga, and general contemplation. It’s the time of day when I am able to notice the things that matter … like superb coffee, tranquil vibes and friendly strangers … kindness and beauty also overflow here.
“The word peccadillo, which means a ‘small sin’, comes from pecus, which means ‘defective foot’, a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings life generously offers to those who seek them.“ ~ Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
And, as in The Pilgrimage, I too walk the path of generous blessings … whilst my shadow confronts me in the form of a black dog who snarls at me on morning runs and rips to shreds the stick I use to defend myself. With the crazy love affair I instantly develop with duality, the only way I can find harmony is to follow my compulsion and get out of the city only days after my arrival. Pokhara is just the foreplay; to experience the orgasm, there are literal mountains I must climb.
As the Quintessential Pioneer, Explorer and Adventurer, I am usually questing at speed ahead of others … getting lost to find my way, and generally moving through landscapes with determination, strength and courage. So choosing to take a guide is not easy. We walk together to the permit office and after just those few kilometers I know we will travel well together. Ten days, I say to Tikka, and we can decide if we want to go further after that.
I last trekked in Nepal shortly after America erroneously declared war on Iraq. I have flashbacks to the person I was trekking the then 21-day Annapurna Circuit 23 years ago, fresh out of Barclays Capital with boots I had worn only the once in the High Street adventure store, carrying my 13kg Macpac (which has subsequently done several local trails and Camino de Santiago routes), crawling across suspension bridges at first and then acclimatizing to fearless scrambling across landslides. No smart phone, no Google Maps … no AllTrails or Komoot … only something printed off the relatively new Internet called the YetiGuide, pinned to my pack in a ZipLoc bag. If we got lost, we didn’t know it, because we were always somewhere and there was always a village tap to wash at, a hot dal soup, and a floor to sleep on. Each day just another day on the mountains, we walked in bliss of our youthful ignorance. It’s impossible to know the landscape before walking the territory so the gift is always in letting go of having to know the way.
It feels like having a guide is a betrayal to my independence … and yet somewhat reassuring to be able to follow for a change; to learn that he too follows no maps besides his own instinct and intuition, finding new pathways where new roads have cut away the old trails … that he too is sometimes lost without being lost. The first day or two exposes some resistance to the mecahnics of the trekking: recalibration around not needing to check that Tikka is ok; acceptance of his checking that I am ok; allowing him to carry my extra water bottle; submitting to his carrying all my vegan snacks, and feeling comfortable with his managing nightly arrangements for a free bed in teahouses of people he knows. It just takes me a few days to trust to let go of the needing to know; to sink into the moment-tomoment step-by-step and breath-by-beautiful-breath.
I am a wilderness guide who is also capable of being guided. Slow and steady the leader becomes the led. But slow and steady doesn’t always work for me. I overtake and usurp the leader, transforming him into the led. A potential power struggle becomes a game and then a comfortable rhythm as we mostly walk in silence with occassional fountains of inspiration at smoking stops (by the time we trekked again, he had quit). We climb relentless stairs for hours and days, get drenched in a thunderstorm, dry ourselves in a house that emerges from another dimension, walk in slow motion over literal carpets of rhododendron flowers, cross exposed ridges, push through thickets, gorge on wild berries, engage in fireside therapy with fellow travellers, and wake up to views of mountains that seem like a mirage. Days feel like months as inner landscapes of alchemically putrefying DNA beneath dirty hair and dehydrated skin becomes woven into my being as rapidly as the outer landscape changes. Some day—perhaps in another 23 years—I will have integrated the gavitas of this passage through the mighty Himalaya and grow the capacity to express fully the impact it has had. Not now.
Pokhara becomes my base camp for over a month as I head off on explorations from there. A 10-day trek combining Panchase, Mardi Himal Base Camp at 4,500m, and several villages—including Lwang and Dhampus—flows into a week overlooking Begnas Lake at the tranquil Mountain View Eco Farm, and a return to Pokhara to meet a Spaniard I met at Low Camp. This flows into a 6-day trek to Mohare Danda at 3,500m, a trek to the Peace Pagoda, and a bad judgement call hiking to a homestay in Sarangkot for two nights. Each time I leave the city I settle, and each time I return I instantly vibrate at the frequency of fresh-brewed coffee, slow roasted cashews, perfumed fruits and Amul dark chocolate. I find I can no longer walk anywhere without confronting intense overstimulation. I duck into Disney Land several times to escape the vicious city dogs and slip dimensions into my Xanadu days, lacing up white skates—circa 1980—and whirling around the rollerskate rink. Courses in sound bowl therapy and Thai Massage in the city keep me away from zombie shopping and dopamine eating. And when I find myself resonating more with the latter, I make the decision to leave for good. It’s way too easy to sink into the familiar comforts of consumerism.
I have travelled well since then: back to the Mountain View Eco Farm at Begnas Lake where a storm swept through snapping massive trees and displacing anything not tied down; I have found hiking trails and cricket games from the hilltop heritage town of Bandipur; I have spent a week adventuring in the forested Pharping Dollu enchanted by the multiple temples, monasteries and sacred caves, and I have explored every square inch of the ancient and magical city of Bhaktipur.
I discard cells and possessions as I go; I lighten my load of attachments as a practice towards full renunciation. The less I have the more I am. The inner glamour girl is dead and the embarrassing number of little black dresses and designer shoes she clings to in Cape Town must go too. Born with fists tightly clenched, we ultimately all die with palms wide open. And in between, everything gets rewired from earth to ether … body and spirit … as I move across the landscapes that remake my map. I must integrate now before I can weave these threads and new narratives.
This is my current territory and new reality. This is my handmade life.
(See my Instagram profile for more places and pictures of this epic adventure).
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 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.
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.
Where did the world go wrong that online platforms are inundated with courses on abundance, positivity, how to find love, etc. False positivity. Affirmations. Manifestation. These are the buzz words consistently and obsessively touted as the pathway to Happiness. But, being told to stay positive, find love, manifest your perfect life, all allude to a set of ideal criteria that will make you ‘better’ … which has the sole consequence of making you feel worse. And what if there really IS no pathway to happiness? What if happiness already exists in each and every moment? When you can stop avoiding feeling or being a certain way, happiness is a natural by-product of the contentment that comes with being present to whatever arises and the realisation that perfection lies in ALL of the messiness of life. What if all you have to do is stop looking for it … and just STOP and LOOK? Abundance was here all along.
WELL WORTH BEING 