I seek not to find
I seek to forget
So I can re-member,
all the parts that I learnt to know.
Those parts not true
Dis-membered.
I seek not to ground
I seek to uproot
So I can un-pluck,
all the notes that have been played.
That broken dance
Dis-corded.
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.
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.
Next stop Hiriketiya Bay 🐳
WELL WORTH BEING 