travel-writing – WELL WORTH BEING

The snow drenched mountains send their icy whispers down to the valley on the wings of eagles. I approach to paragliders. With a smile on my lips and a chuckle in my throat, I am swept along trance-like by ancestors walking this solo journey with me. It is they who whisper in my ears, “you don’t have to do this all alone, we are here. Remember.”

Storms brewing. Lighting flashing. Thunder banging on the roof. Piercing drops of rain completing the symphony. Wet washing drip, drip … dripping. Sensory overload. I lie awake. Unable to move. Frozen.
“I am not my body.”
“I am not my body!”
“I am NOT MY BODY!”
I can neither warm myself with the numerous bedcovers nor can I rouse my body to leave them long enough to gather the layers required to warm myself enough for sleep.

Solar geysers lay dormant under unseasonal cloud cover. My 4.30am pre-course wash is as crisp as the air breathed under the door. The limen holds nothing back here. Beautifully packed sari-cloth bags of summer essentials—with only a few woollen inclusions for SriNagar trekking in April—is left mostly unused in the back of the cupboard in my simple monastic room. Half wet on razor cold tiles, I focus on strategic layering of everything warm, including double socks, double beanie, gloves and puffer, wrapped up finally with the wool shawl purchased in a panic on seeing the weather report for Himachal Pradesh before leaving Auroville. Decades-old memories of Annapurna’s Thorong La Pass as the contents of my 13kg backpack decreased in proportion to the increase in altitude.

Morning warm up class of stretches, butt-kick running, jumping jacks, and 10 to 20 rounds of Surya Namaskar witness the gradual shedding of skins both internal and external. My layers of protection lie in a reverse-order pile on the floor as I lie corpselike—Shavasana—integrating this latest death and rebirth.

I walk out of Tara Hall after morning practice as the clouds open a portal—Parighasana—to reveal a fresh white frosting on the looming mountain range overlooking Deer Park Institute of Bir Billing. The night makes more sense to me now.

The well-curated itinerary around the yoga course in Delhi faded like ink on blotting paper, leaving just a impression from which to recreate something new. The blurred lines plot an accidental orbit into the far north for a while. Climbing doesn’t occur without first finding the faith and the courage to leave the foot and hand holds on a rock face. And in the letting go, I soar. I find my wings in an intensive yoga teacher training at Deer Park Institute and, in the nature of duality, I also find them clipped. Like day four of any ten-day Vipassana Meditation course, I find myself pushing through my desire for the containment and and my calling to fly free … the contortions of both body and mind needing integration days of mountain runs and solitude.

Sound, like water, can carve through rock and bust apart particles of solid matter. Chanting for me breaks apart energetic dark matter for transmutation into sound and ether. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are the sutures that bind me together as the shackles are released from each individual vertebra and pockets of energy get snapped open. I saturate my body until my cells become porous.

Drowning in self, I find more clarity in the creation of membranous boundaries and viscous fluidity as the outer has become a better reflection of my inner primordial universe. I’m not sure if I feel secure so flexible … my rigidity keeps me safe. I hold both the flow and the structure with equanimity; a deeply ingrained understanding of impermanence. I want change … I seek it … a Vāsanā … it seeks me. A subliminal calling into the void of confusion in order to understand.

Just like in yogasana, everything has a counter posture. One without the other causes injury and dis-ease. Like the terror-inducing fulcrum point of a bungee swing, I oscillate between all knowing and ignorance and slowly come towards centre as I become more equanimous about the knowing and the not. Instead of curating the itinerary, I have worked at better managing the flow; instead of flooding the banks, I am building the dams required to contain spaces of guarded refuge without strangling free movement.

The pitch of my travel chant has changed frequencies now and I am modulating a more harmonious rhythm. Travel plans that would originally last only four months stretch closer to eight or nine, a fitting gestation period for the safe birthing of the me I am becoming; the womb I am being for myself.

The magnificent duality of beauty and breaking has tendrils into attention and intention as my loosened grip on planning sends me free floating to Sahasrara awakening.

Today I walk; my running shoes the training wheels for flight.

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.

Next stop, Galle Fort.