Throwback Thursday

Tags

anxiety, creativity, relationships, spirituality, stress, Work, writing

What strikes me the most when reading these old posts is that I was trying to do too much; working full time in a demanding job, swimming several times a week, writing, spiritual seeking/meditation etc, trying to keep in touch with friends and family, and enjoying and being present for the relationship of my life with the love of my life.

Yes, creative people need time alone.  Yes, I had been used to solitude as a child and as a single parent with those lonely evenings and weekends.  Yes it was an adjustment living with someone.  But I think it would have been easier if I hadn’t been rushing around doing so much, if I had made some space and learned to prioritise the most important things and let go of the rest. 

I still have those tendencies (to overdo the busy-ness), but I am more aware of them.  Right now we are living and travelling together, and are with each other most of the time.   I can write when my husband is there, and I don’t worry about doing much else.

The possibility of ease (first published August 2014)

When the going’s good I find it almost impossible to imagine feeling down, low in energy or less than totally happy and supremely grateful for my life.  When things occasionally dip a little, I find it so hard to get out of and such a puzzle to work out how it happened.  That’s because I am a thinker, an over thinker, and it is not easy to think yourself out of a slump.  Easier to think yourself into more and more happiness, if one is already happy, like a snowball of prayer and gratitude and bliss…  When actually down, thinking is not the answer.  Waiting, or waiting with faith, is.  After a few days it comes to me: what it is that’s the matter, what I did or didn’t do to get me to this place.  Sometimes it’s PMT, sometimes I’m just tired.  This time, it was neglecting my need to be alone sometimes.

I prayed for my house to be filled with Love and I realised, it’s me who can fill it, God gives me the support and motivation to do so, but it’s me who actually does it.  When there’s any friction, it’s all the more noticeable because it’s such a happy house usually.  On the other side of friction there is learning, closeness and new insights.  But in the middle of friction is such confusion and muddy thinking that I couldn’t even write anything for a few weeks.  Now, however, I am bursting, I had to take the morning off work just to write down all the thoughts that were pouring out of me and to organise all the little scraps of paper with notes and ideas on.  But in the middle of friction, everything bad is magnified.  It is easy to become irritated and irritable, even whilst wondering fearfully about what is actually happening, where all the bliss went…

One day after work I stopped at the supermarket and instead of rushing home I paused in the car park for five minutes.  It was close to sunset and the sky was shot with yellow and gold, the clouds luminous at their edges.  The air was cool and warm at the same time.  I had bought myself a little tub of fresh olives and I leant against the car, eating them carefully so as not to spill any oil on myself, whilst looking at the big, open Norfolk sky and feeling the air on my skin.

I have just finished reading Whit by Iain Banks.  It is about a religious cult that tries to operate in the spaces, to be creative in all that they do, in order to be closer to God.  So they travel the most complicated or unusual way rather than just hopping on a train, because in those interstitial places, is where God is found.

In the supermarket car park that evening, I realised: Be Creative.  It doesn’t have to be at home.  I have Saturdays or Sundays most weeks to myself anyway, I also swim two or three times a week, I drive an hour each way to work five days a week, composing my thoughts, my writing.  Sometimes I pull over and write things down in my notebook.  I realise driving is not quite the same as being alone not having to do anything.  Reading Iain Banks, I realised I’ve always enjoyed interstitial time.  Like when I pull up at the pool and instead of going straight in I read for a while or just listen to something I’m enjoying on the radio.  Or when I pull over and park up for a nap during a long journey (or let’s face it, not that long, it’s just me, creating a little pocket of space, although the talcum powder footprints on the passenger door hint at something more exciting than just curling up on the back seat and dozing to The Archers).  Often it has revolved around food, especially ‘naughty’ food that I am happier not admitting to eating.  Smokers do it with cigarettes, I suppose, that little bit of semi forbidden or secret time.

Sometimes I’m a bit slow when it comes to realising things about myself.  In the middle of the friction time, I was chatting to a work colleague I hardly know, in a rare moment of sharing and we were both saying about how we struggle to get any time alone in the house, as our partners are usually home before us.  She told me the story of how the other day she had hoped and looked forward to an hour and a half at home, but what with being delayed at work, a phone call from her mum, and new neighbours deciding to pop round and introduce themselves, this time dwindled as she counted it down in her head until she was left with just five minutes.  I understood completely.  I said, but I feel so bad, I so longed for my man to come to live with me and now he’s here I’m talking about wanting time on my own.  She replied smartly, but you must do it, because otherwise you will get irritated.

But it still wasn’t until the olives in the car park a week or so later that I realised what had been the cause of my uncharacteristic irritation.
I will endeavour to make the most of the little spaces of time alone I get in the house, to use them for writing or reading or napping or whatever I want to, and appreciate them!  But I must also accept that they are rarer and learn to be flexible and to create little pockets of alone time outside of the house: really feel it when I go swimming, for example.  Go upstairs and nap or write even when I am not alone in the house.  Create a pocket of independence and stillness whatever and wherever.  It doesn’t take much.  An afternoon alone in the house to write once a week.  Ten minutes alone with a tub of olives and a pretty sky.  And then I am back, full of love.

Chennai, part two

Tags

Broadlands, Cats, Enlightenment, Hindu stories, Hindu temples, India

I fell in love with you and I cried:  Chennai, part two

(Draft chapter cont’d, with extra bits for the blog)

When we arrived in Chennai, I said out loud to my husband, ‘I’ll finish ‘Kochi,’ then I’ll just do a bit for Chennai; there probably won’t be much to write about, it’s a city and I’ve probably used up all my noticing everything energy on Kochi.’  ‘Ha ha ha,’ said the forces of the universe.

We stayed one night in the first guesthouse then moved to Broadlands which had been recommended by Y who lives in Chennai (who we met at Osho’s guesthouse when we first arrived in Varkala).  The guesthouse, set on a dusty side street off the main Triplicane High Road, didn’t look like much from the outside except for its quirky welcome sign (see Instagram travelswithanthony for Broadlands pics).

Stepping inside though, was like stepping inside an old French chateau; the guesthouse has around thirty to forty rooms, built around a central courtyard with a square balcony, with stone floors and dusty hallways, and winding stone staircases leading to tucked away rooms and a roof terrace.  The rough- surfaced old walls were painted faded old white, the paintwork of the banisters of the balcony and the many doors leading off it old baby blue gloss, (the same colour as my Goa birthday ring).

In the courtyard below there were plants in big old white painted stone plant pots and a big green tree, full of crows, its branches growing up above the banisters.  On the dusty stone walkway of the balcony there was an orange cat; one of the guests was taking care of her.  ‘She’s sick, and pregnant, she needs to drink, she’s dehydrated,’ the guest said.

Our room was big and spacious with white washed walls, blue doors and concrete floor.  The high ceiling had wood beams painted baby pink, and lots of cobwebs.  There were three big windows in the room and one in the bathroom, all fitted with mosquito mesh and blue shutters.

From the windows in the room we could see the big white mosque next door, the flock of pigeons on the waste ground between us and the mosque, the neat paved grounds and car park of the mosque, houses and flats in blue, green and peach, and a red flowered green tree.

From the window in the bathroom, white buildings with a glimpse of bright yellow house in-between.  The balconies at the corner of one of the white buildings made gaps like two windows; through the top one I could see the yellow building, through the bottom a green one.  I looked again another day, the green had changed colour.  I was momentarily confused, that scene had been so strong, had I misremembered?  No, there was a sheet or a towel on the balcony!

I saw Indian squirrels for the first time since Panaji, before that I’d only seen them in Hampi, running about on the abandoned sheds of the waste ground outside our window.

At night with the light off, when we opened the double blue doors to the bathroom and put the bathroom light on, the bathroom glowed blue like a portal.

In the morning we were woken at 04:45 by the call to prayer.  We were so close to the mosque that it felt almost painful on my ears.  I went back to sleep, and despite the early morning wake up we have both loved it each time we’ve stayed near a mosque; there’s something timeless and quite magical about hearing the call to prayer.

The next day I sat on the blue painted wooden threshold between the space outside our room and the balcony walkway.  I was writing or should have been writing and having a few moments to myself.  Instead of writing I was trying to find a title for my book, the kind of thing writers can waste hours on.  Going over and over, searching, trying to come up with something, even though I knew that wasn’t how it was going to happen, that a title needs to just come.

At least I’ve set my intention, put it out there that I want to find one, I thought.  I wondered if there was an Indian word, like Namaste (‘Namaste India’), but something less well known, that I could use…  I could ask Y, I thought.  (Y was coming round in the evening to take us to a temple.)

In the courtyard below were three women, part of the house keeping staff of the hotel, standing together in a group.  They were wearing everyday cotton sarees; everyday for them but beautiful to me, like so many things in India.  One red with purple swirls of colour; one an orangey pink with black print; one pale blue almost matching the gloss work with a printed pattern of creamy yellow buttermilk and orange pink leggings which matched the orange-pink saree of the other woman.

The woman with the red-purple saree was wearing a big gold nose stud which flashed like a light.  She was standing with the sun on it in just the right place.  I was sitting in just the right place to see it, and looking at just the right moment.

The three women standing in a circle, or a triangle, in the courtyard and the nose stud shining in the sun was like a scene from a film; easily as beautiful as if they had been dressed in Indian wedding finery and as special to me as the orange cat from the night before.

I forgot to ask Y, but he gave me a title anyway.

I got ready for going to the temple and had a little time to spare, (interstitial time*).  My husband was downstairs using the WiFi and talking to C from Detroit who was staying across the walkway from us.  Y was on his way.

It was raining, we had been surprised by the rain in Chennai, apparently it doesn’t always rain at this time.  The mosque and its lights were white in the dark and the mosque’s pool of water glittered.  I moved the cane chairs with their cushions and our clothes hanging on them back from the windows with their open shutters and sat down, my feet propped up on the other chair.  I had only the low light on so as not to attract mosquitos.

In front of me was a little red table.  Spread out to cover the bed were my lungis, purple and gold and green and gold.  The light from the mosque shone on the rainwater on the blue painted shutters, they looked as if they had been sprinkled in blue glitter.  A fork of lightning flashed in the sky in the gap in between the shutters, one open, one closed.  As the wind blew the shutters the light danced over the raindrops and they glittered even more.

Is it okay to just to be happy?  And what do you have to do to get there?  A lot, because of how things are set up in life.  I thought of the John Lennon quote:  His teacher asked him, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’  ‘Happy.’ he said.  ‘She told me that I didn’t understand the question.  I told her she didn’t understand life.’

(Here, I got a notification that I had to resign into the WiFi. I went on WordPress for a break and saw, ‘For my life to have any meaning, I have to live it for myself.’  That’s the meaning of life, to live it.  To live it for yourself, via escaping conditioning, family, everything that gets in the (your) way)

Y arrived and the three of us got a rickshaw to a completely different part of town.  The area around the temple was busy and colourful with stalls selling, ‘Everything to do with visiting the temple,’ Y explained.  God clothes, which I had previously thought were children’s clothes, fresh flower garlands; the smell of the blossom sweet and strong, the same as the blossom I had put in my hair at the temple in Kanyakumari), ‘And of course food,’ for afterwards.

We walked (clockwise) around the outside areas (non-Hindus are not allowed inside).  The rain had pooled in puddles on the stone floor under our bare feet.  The outside of the temple was decorated with beautiful coloured mouldings.  Coloured electric lights, like fairy lights, were placed around, decorating a statue of Ganesha, a juxtaposition of old and new.

There was a stable full of well fed, happy looking cows, some milk white, the others different shades of browns.  Keeping cows at the temple was a mixture of cow rescue and to use the milk.

Y told us Hindu stories (I couldn’t find the one he told us, but here’s another)  and pointed out religious devotional writing on the stone walls.  ‘It’s all like love poetry,’ Y said, ‘Like, ‘‘I fell in love with you and I cried.’’

I felt myself well up.  Even though Y is one of us, we’ve said anything to each other (I’m beginning to believe you find your people via travel, or on the internet?), and the other person there with us was my husband, I choked back the emotion and changed the subject back to the cows.  But when Y said I could go see them, that made me all the more emotional, thinking of how gentle they are, of the street cows left to eat out of garbage, the horrors of the dairy industry.

At the temple there are poojas six times a day; we saw the last one of the day, which is longer and bigger as it is the closing ceremony of the day.  Everyone stood outside the main temple and looked in.  The crowd began to chant, a low, repetitive singing that wrapped itself around us.  Clouds of incense filled the temple and the courtyard where we stood.  The main statue of the God was being bathed in milk.  Lots and lots of milk, poured over like a fountain or a waterfall.  Y told us it’s not just milk that is used, it’s fruit salad, all kinds of offerings…  I was bordering on being overwhelmed.  Nothing can beat this, experiencing a Hindu temple with a Hindu and a good friend.

In another temple room, the God’s wife was dressed up in a gold and green silk dress.  The dresses are changed during every pooja; people bring the dresses, hence the stalls outside.  At the end the God’s feet were carried on a small chariot from his temple to hers, where they spend the night, symbolising the God spending the night with his wife.  ‘Even the gods need sex,’ Y said.

I had wondered what happens to all the milk.  Afterwards, walking away I saw cats.  ‘There’s lots of cats,’ I said.  ‘There’s a lot of milk!’  Y said.  People take some of it, some of it runs off, the cats drink it.  Rivers of milk, for cats.  There were cats on a wall just outside the temple, just beyond the wall was a little house.  I could see into their downstairs room, there were lots of orange and orange and white cats inside, like a cat cafe.

Later I admitted to having a moment.  I told Y about the poetry, about the title for my book, that ‘I fell in love with you and I cried,’ could be my title, although I forgot to tell him the bit about asking him for it.

I told Y about the women in the courtyard, the beautiful scene, the nose stud.  He told me that in Kanyakumari (my favourite place in India, so far) there is a statue of the Goddess Kanyakumari, apparently the nose stud of the statue shone so bright sailors thought it was a lighthouse and ended up getting caught on the rocks.

(I’d always thought a lighthouse was to warn sailors of rocks, to tell them where not to go, rather than somewhere for them to head to.  Discombobulated that I could have totally misunderstood something so everyday I looked it up on Wikipedia.  Yes lighthouses were originally built to guide ships in to a safe harbour.  Later in more modern times they became warnings re where not to go.  Here is a link to the page and another to a surprising interesting biography about a famous lighthouse designer and builder, a great story about getting gifted opportunities and making the most of them.)

Back at the guesthouse the three of us chatted, swapping ‘spiritual’ experiences we’d had since the last time we’d last seen each other.  Y told us about returning to Chennai the day after we’d met and spent our evening together, he’d had to get a fifteen hour bus ride back to Chennai then go into work to prepare for teaching.

At work he had loads to do- photocopying and getting ready- and only half an hour in which to do it.  He felt spaced out, paranoid, thinking he looked stoned; but everyone was smiling at him and offering to help.  Y realised he hadn’t eaten for fifteen hours.  He asked for some water, one of his students poured some Red Bull into a glass; it looked like a potion.

He thought of what R (who we met at Osho’s guesthouse at the same time) had said about drinking the potion when you are born, the potion that causes us to forget who we are.  ‘Don’t drink all of it, then you’ll remember,’ R had told us.  Y remembered this, and only drank some of it.

Y felt a force of energy crackle all the way up one side and pass all the way though his head and body.  Time altered.  He felt full of energy.  He did all the work, that he had so much of and so little time to do, the work that he’d had only half an hour for but that should have taken even more.  He looked at clock, only ten minutes had passed.

Chennai…  Pondicherry…  Chennai…  Thailand… to be continued…

Travel update 

For pics see my husband’s Instagram travelswithanthony

We are in Thailand, Koh Phangan, same place as last week; my stepdaughter came out to Thailand for a holiday with us.  Thailand is clean, orderly, great food, beach, sea…  Did I mention the food?  Noodles, tofu, fresh vegetables!  Heaven.  But I am still looking forward to getting back to India.

My husband left on Wednesday with my stepdaughter to get the ferry to the mainland, stay the night in the town there before getting the all day train to Bangkok on Thursday.  They will spend one night in Bangkok, then on Friday my step daughter flies home, and at around same time our friend arrives from the UK.  My husband and our friend will stay the night and the next day in Bangkok before getting night train here on Saturday.  They will arrive here around lunchtime on Sunday.  So I have four nights on my own.

First night, couldn’t sleep, and stricken with anxiety especially after we had a spider a couple of days ago.  (My brain fuzzed this out so it looked like fluff, and my husband dealt with it while I cowered crouched on top of the toilet in case it ran into the bathroom).  (My strategy while he is away is to stay outside the room as long as possible then keep the lights off in evening and at night so if there is anything I won’t see it.  I trust that we will keep out of each other’s way.)

The next morning, I pulled myself together, tidied up and put all our stuff away, and arranged for the room to be cleaned, especially dusted.  I went for a swim, a walk on the beach, and wrote.  Kind of like a retreat, in the midst of an idyllic holiday resort that’s gearing up for the Full Moon Party…  Be flexible Rachel, it’s all experience…

Writing update

WordPress, as well as daily life, and discussions with my husband, has been inspirational recently and I hope to get onto that over the next few weeks.  Thank you to Des and Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha for almost giving me more than I can process.

I’m seeing patterns in my writing, which I’m seeing as helpful re writing and as validation re being on the right path.

Sat- day off, (over did it Fri, lack of sleep, travel, etc).  Sun- typed over breakfast and after lunch while the others were doing other stuff, just typing from notebook, organising, moving bits, reading notebook.  Mon- no, busy/out.  Tue- some typing up from notebook.  Wed, Thu, working on this.  I got it done on Thursday evening, so proud of myself!

*Whit by Iain Banks  Talks about interstitial time, religion, cults, and (healing hands) healing.  I recommend it!

Thank you very much for reading

See you next week

Throwback Thursday

Tags

anxiety, prayer, relationships, religion, spirituality, Throwback Thursday

In Love with Life (first published July 2014)

This week I have bought and drunk two kale and spinach smoothies.  This would have been unheard of before now.  I have always been very reluctant to even try vegetable juice, been vehemently anti food fads and super foods and so on and until recently I was fairly lax about eating properly.  But I do not necessarily know what’s best.  I used to be similarly dismissive of spirituality and religion, maintaining there was nothing whatsoever spiritual about me and that I didn’t believe in anything!  I wonder now whether I should track back all the things I was sneery about as an angry young woman and cynical about as a grown up woman, and embrace them: starting with vegetable juice and moving onto, let’s see, success, money, forward planning, and miracles.

I went through a phase of being into the Law of Attraction and practicing The Secret but I could never get that excited about finding a parking space in a busy car park (partly because I would hate to have to reverse park into the one remaining space with a queue of cars behind me, parking not being my strong point), or visualising cheques in the mail.  But I did and do believe in maintaining a level of serenity, openness and optimism which does inevitably make the day (and life) go better.

I’ve moved up a level now though.  Recently I have been praying five times a day: in the morning before I go to work, at lunchtime, at the end of the working day before I go home, in the evening at home, and before bed.  I kneel on the floor and say thank you and feel connected with God, and send distant healing to anyone on my list for the week.  That’s it.  And, oh my, what an effect it is having!

Everywhere, people seem so happy and friendly.  At the swimming pool, I heard three lots of children having a really fun time with their parents, lots of laughter and no stress.  In the supermarket a dad was having a laugh with his adolescent daughter, threatening to embarrass her by dancing, they were both laughing and caught my eye.  The lights blew on my car and a man at a garage helped me for ages for free.  My friend who has been very depressed suddenly shifted and sounded so full of change and light.  I visited the university where I trained; I was glad to be able to tell my old tutor what I was doing and so touched when she said that every time she drives past the hospital where I got my first job, she thinks of me.

I had the bravery (re spiders) and the motivation to go up in the loft and get rid of stuff and tidy the house, I also had fun seeing friends, I did healing and writing, all effortlessly, seamlessly, as if this week was a microcosm of a perfect life.  Shopping in the city and then going to a family barbecue, with none of my normal anxieties about time, getting everything done, getting ready, what to wear, what to say.  It was all so easy, just sitting on the grass, chatting away, entertaining the kids so totally unselfconsciously then sitting with the adults later, no shyness, no blank spaces, no tiredness, just total ease…  Home at 10pm, a quick tidy round and wash up without even thinking about it and certainly without any stress about getting things done.

Me and my husband both independently deciding that one evening was the evening to reconnect with each other, to ‘party’ (by which I mean a bottle of beer, a cigarette and an episode of something funny), but still, we were so happy with each other, taking a step out of the routine of the week which usually just revolves around cooking and eating and going to bed early enough to get through the next day.  Thinking that evening how lovely everything is, how all this extra stuff keeps happening, all these things that I hadn’t even known I wanted but that have just been so nice, and that all this has happened since I started praying.  I had this sense that it’s like my life will improve in ways I can’t even imagine.  I can’t imagine, but God can…  Immediately after I had this thought, my husband looked at his rota and said, ‘I don’t have to get up at 5am, I have to get up at 6am!’  I said, ‘so just when you thought life couldn’t get any better!’  Him, laughing, putting on a cool American accent, ‘Yep, it just keeps on getting better!’

The drawback with The Secret is that we are limited by our own imagination, you have to visualise it all yourself.  This way (the prayer way) opens up possibilities I can’t even imagine.

Throwback Thursday

Tags

creativity, Decluttering, religion, spirituality

Decluttering:  I still stand by its therapeutic powers.  Losing my sports massage virginity (therapy without words).  Maybe overdoing the spiritual searching (still have a tendency to do that sometimes). Definitely catastrophising (nothing’s changed there either).

‘I long for the days when everything I owned fitted into the boot of a Fiat Uno’*  (First published in July 2014)

It is no way news that de cluttering is therapeutic.  Last week I did my clothes and shoes, even quite happily throwing away the (too high) gold sandals I got married in only last year.  Today I tackled the really hard stuff: the art and craft stuff under the stairs.  The wire mesh I made handmade paper with fifteen years ago and that I kind of always thought I might do again with my step daughter but haven’t.  The little cardboard pot of sequins I used to make cards with.  Coloured pencils I have had for years, little paintbrushes.

This stuff is hard because on the one hand it seems to reproach me for having abandoned that side of things- I no longer make cards or sew- but it also forces me to realise that I am not the same person I was.  That can be viewed sadly or perhaps it can be viewed happily: Wow, what an amazing creative person I used to be, even when I had no money and a little child and was a single parent and was probably a bit depressed, how cool was I?  I remind myself that that cool young woman helped lay the foundations for me to grow into the calm**, centred, super happy person that I am today.

This week I had an experience that I couldn’t describe in words (a challenge for a writer): a sports massage.  As she twanged the big tendons of my neck my mind skated over how to describe the feeling this induced: it was not at all a sexual feeling but it shook though my body like an orgasm.  It was a feeling like a loss of control and yet not.  The feeling of stress leaving the body, or leaving via the body, was like a spiritual experience (except that it was physical not spiritual).  As she went over and over an area of my back, working out a knot, I experienced it like a rollercoaster, up, up and over and each time me trying to relax and let it wash over me and not fight against it.  The feeling of rebirth afterwards, a mild euphoria, and the next morning, skipping, singing, even my voice sounded better.

In the pool this week there was some kind of gala going on in one half and there was a PA system, plugged into the mains, on a stand inches away from the pool.  I thought of people being electrocuted when their hairdryer falls into the bath.  I wondered if such a big amount of water would dilute it or would we all die.  Would it hurt?  Okay, I thought, everyone’s okay.  There would probably be compensation.  I wrote my book.  And my blog.  I found God.  I was happy.  I wouldn’t have to worry about or deal with old age or illness.  I accepted it.  They unplugged it.  Oh well, not my time.

I read a blog about blogging, in which the advice given was, that you need to do it for a year before you know if it’s worth doing.  That advice could also apply to spiritual practice.  Although I already know it’s worth doing, it’s more about a test of my commitment, much like how healing training takes two years.

After a weekend of complete R&R I realised I wasn’t going mad or embarking on a dangerous course, risking losing connection with my husband; I was just tired that’s all.  A week of staying up too late, working late and getting up early to go to a conference, that was all.  I do like to catastrophise (have I said that before?)  In bed one night, my husband enfolded me into his arms and I felt our breathing merge, felt myself merging into him at each contact point.  This long, no sex cuddle was like being in a cocoon or having steel bands of love wrapped around me, and the next morning I realised, not only can I love God through loving my husband but God can love me through the love my husband gives to me.

*our good friend DW
**on a good day, anyway

Throwback Thursday

Tags

prayer, religion, spirituality

Still searching…

I’m still me

(First published in June 2014)

A few nights ago I was in front of the bathroom mirror thinking about Gwyneth Paltrow* when I had a sudden realisation: I am not her, I am me.  I’m me.  I’m me!  I thought about her in front of her bathroom mirror, being her.  I thought about all the time women waste wishing they were more like someone else.  I thought about how it doesn’t really matter what you look like anyway.  But most of all, I thought: Wow, here I am, in this life, in this body, in charge of myself.

I had the same feeling driving to work the next morning, listening to Muse, in a car that is not an old banger, is full of petrol and if I need any petrol I can just go and buy some; I always have enough money for food, I have the best job I could possibly want, my legs and arms work, I have no serious aches and pains, and despite a wild and careless youth** I have been left with nothing more serious than an occasional cold sore.  And, my God, I have my husband.  The fact that I have a husband is amazing enough, but my husband is so fucking cool, he lets me be so free that I don’t even recognise myself sometimes.

I thought, how did I get here?  How did someone so unconfident get to the top of their career? (I could go a tiny bit higher but it would be hideously boring)  How did someone who used to be so frightened that I thought I was going to wet myself on the bus on the way to college, get here?

So, did you reach any conclusions? My husband asked, when I told him about all this.  I didn’t have an immediate answer.  All I could think was, I made it hard, but I made it interesting.  I spent a year doing a millinery course and two years doing a fashion course.  I wondered why I didn’t take up writing earlier (because I was too scared to read my stuff out to a class until I was in my thirties).  I wanted to go back and say thank you to all those people who helped me.

So, have I reached any conclusions?  The only one that really seems to mean anything at all is this: someone must have been looking after me all along, because I really don’t see how I did that journey all by myself.

I am going to say a tiny bit about religion here.  I am looking at it, yes.  Not because I ‘need to be told how to live my life’ as atheists sometimes sneeringly say about organised religion, but because I want a framework, a method, a route to be closer to God.  Yes, in theory, I can remember God just by myself, every minute of every day, but in practice, I forget to remember.  That’s what a prayer habit or regular practice of any kind is all about, it’s a cue to remember.

In January, I thought my spiritual journey of the previous five years was over.  But unless you get stuck and stay stuck life is a journey… a journey home, a journey to God?  Anyway, despite what I thought at the time, my spiritual journey hadn’t ended.  I had just paused to look at the view, and to catch my breath.

It’s important that I pause and catch my breath regularly because there are two fears that come up for me.  One is the classic, am I going mad?  The other is, will it affect my relationship with my husband?  Will I find I don’t need him anymore?  Will the presence of a third party affect things?  If I get into a religion will it end up affecting our lives and relationship so much that we end up breaking up?  But as someone who had embraced a religion said: I’m still me.  And as my healing teacher told me: you won’t lose yourself, you are in control.

So don’t stay up all night watching you tube clips about people’s religious conversions (I haven’t done this I just know someone who has and know it is an option!).  Distract myself with light and frivolous stuff e.g. rom coms and light books that have nothing to do with spirituality or religion.  Exercise, sleep and eat right.  Look after myself.  Whatever I had decided to do before, keep doing it; writing, healing.

Remember that I can love God through loving my husband, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.  That’s why religions prescribe charity, because it’s no good just having faith, you have to act on it in your life.  My husband is my life.

*I have no idea why it was she who popped into my head

** When I say ‘youth’ read ‘teens, twenties and thirties’

Throwback Thursday

Tags

Cats, creativity, healing, spirituality

It’s sweet that I found life so lovely even in the midst of pushing myself so hard at home and work.  I would have done well to read the Osho quote below: 

“Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand ~ relax.
If you relax it comes, if you relax it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”

Oh and my cats!  I really did have the loveliest, cuddliest cats ever but they couldn’t come to India (sob…)

I knew you’d find me, cause I longed you here. (Nick Cave) (First published in May 2014)

I felt the need to ‘heal myself’, to ‘rebalance my own aura’.  (I am still experimenting with how to conceptualise and describe all this stuff.)  Instinctively, I lay flat on my back on the floor in the dark and felt space tilt and slip away.  I always used to like lying on the floor when I came home from work, ostensibly to stretch out my back.  This new meditation method is so much more me than the cross legged sitting with pins and needles that I used to endure.  And for the first time in years, I had a whole period with no pains or cramps whatsoever.

A couple of times in meditation I felt something.  The organisation I am doing my healing training with believes in spirit guides but I am not yet sure what I believe in.  Other healing traditions believe in chi or auras or other systems of energy.  What would my spirit guide/guardian angel look like if I had one?  A nun, an angel, Maya Angelou, a young man named Ross, a scruffy long haired green shirted man, a badger?

I said to my husband that I couldn’t imagine any cats being nicer than the cats I have, they are so friendly, always willing to be picked up and cuddled, always waiting for me when I come home from work.   For me, they are the perfect cats.  I also added that I couldn’t wish for a nicer house than the little one we have.  My husband said, I know, we have a lovely life.  A few minutes later he shouted to me to come into the garden.  There was a rainbow right over our house, so that our house was right in the middle of it.  He said, I just felt the urge to go outside and then I saw it.

At work, the sense of lightness continues.  I have been chucking things out and clearing out my office.  Someone even asked if I was leaving.  I had to go to a meeting that I was not looking forward to; I put on a positive attitude and arrived laden with nice food.  The difficult people didn’t show up and it actually turned out to be a really good day.

On Saturday I met a friend and we went round the shops together, meeting outside Top Shop just as we did twenty years ago and returning home laden with bags.  I bought something light and breezy, to make my outside match my inside.  That evening my husband and I went to visit friends for a couple of days.  It was good to take a step out of our environment and out of our routine and relationship, to freshen our perspective.  When we got home, my husband offered to go food shopping without me.  I hadn’t had any quiet time this weekend so when he left me in a cafe with my notebook and pen he really was giving me a wonderful gift, and not just because I hate going to the supermarket.  Forty five minutes of alone time in an otherwise busy although lovely weekend.  Plus a cheese toasted sandwich, a scone and plenty of tea.  That’s about as close to heaven as I can get.

Kanyakumari

Tags

India, Kanyakumari, spirituality, Tamil Nadu, Travel

Kanyakumari is situated at the Southern most tip of India. It is the place where three seas meet and where you can see the sunset and the sunrise over the ocean. The view from the hotel balcony looked out directly over the main street, beyond that a huge statue and a temple on an island in the sea. We found out that Kanyakumari is a pilgrimage site; a ferry takes people to the island back and forth all day, full of people with queues at the quay.

Below our balcony the street was busy with rickshaws and people; late into the night we heard the sound of metal hitting against metal from food being prepared at the street stall on the corner below. The balcony and the view was like a very mini version of our balcony in Main Baazar in Delhi. Early in the morning we were woken by building work and the noise of traffic, so different to where we are staying in Varkala where it stays quite sleepy until nine or ten am. We saw an outrageously loaded up scooter with bags and bags of brightly coloured plastic buckets and spades and beach balls sticking out all around and above it. My husband saw eight adults get out of a rickshaw. Granted the rickshaws we saw in Tamil Nadu were slightly larger and more comfortable than the Kerala ones, but still…

We didn’t go on the ferry, and we didn’t see the sunrise or the sunset as it was overcast. We visited two other temples, one that we arrived at accidentally as we walked through the town, and one that we saw in the distance and walked to.

But the most touching and awe inspiring, the things that made the most powerful impression were the houses which were painted and tiled all different colours, some tiny, like how old fashioned dolls houses are done with wallpaper, but this was tiles, and inside all different colours, a room pink then an archway and the room beyond it green. Some all crazy colours, stripes and wild combinations. Everywhere we looked there was colour, a bright pink wall, an orange house.  Even the fishing boats were painted up prettily and painted inside too. Some even had eyes painted on at the front.

And the people, so friendly, a woman who took hold of me so tight and squeezed me and who asked us to take a photograph of me and her and send it, by post. No one in that family seemed to have a computer or a phone. A little girl wrote down the address, the only one in the group who could write in English. They lived in one of the houses near the other temple, that we walked to.

The temple was the most beautiful gold, situated near some tumbled down buildings. Inside it was full of brightly coloured statues and beautiful mouldings. In the centre was a floor of sand where some young men were relaxing, the temple man was fast asleep on a blanket spread on the sand.

There was a very big white church, around it a square, in glass cases scenes of Jesus’s life; nearby were two smaller churches, one pretty pastel coloured, another white, and several little churches in amongst the houses. It was the same with the temples; as well as the three big temples, there were many smaller temples, and an old closed off temple with carvings of the elephant-lion yali at the pillars, plus all kinds of shrines, religion everywhere.

‘Indian people, we believe in God,’ a man we met on the train said.

On the train there we had booked seats but we couldn’t find our carriage so just sat somewhere else. The guard told us to go and sit in our proper seats so we went off to search again. We asked a group of young Indian men who first of all fell about laughing (young people laugh at us a lot, and the girls really look at what I’m wearing and my tattoos; it’s a good way to let go of worrying about what people think) then said ‘This is India, just sit anywhere,’ When we did find our seats people were in them so we sat somewhere else again and told the guard we were happy where we were. I think he wanted us to get the seats we’d paid for which were AC, but we were happy to sit in the ones with just the windows open. Fans are available but they weren’t needed. On the way back we asked a policeman on the platform, he pointed way in the distance (Indian trains are very long) and said, ‘B1, by the green tree.’ Sure enough, that was exactly where our carriage was, right next to the green tree. It was three tier AC, which means the bunks of beds are three high (second tier ac, which we got from Delhi to Goa, had only two tiers of bunk beds, which is obviously more spacious, and the beds/seats are more comfortable).

In Kanyakumari we saw only two lots of Westerners, two women with rucksacks confidently shooing away street sellers and negotiating a rickshaw, seemingly comfortable in their clothes and looking like experienced settled-in travellers. ‘Do you think that’s what we look like?’ my husband asked. ‘Who knows what we look like,’ I said. We also saw a man and a woman with an Indian man, we heard the Indian man say to them, ‘You are in India,’ and we looked at each other and laughed. My husband recounts a story of when he was here twenty years ago, fighting his way onto a packed train, finally getting seated, hot, sweaty and stressed, and looking up saw an Indian man dressed all in white stretched calmly out on the luggage rack, who looked down and said ‘This is India,’ and my husband laughed and realised, of course, yes.

There were lots of Indian tourists and sightseers and the town is totally geared up to them, not for Western hippies, not an Om t-shirt in sight. Instead there are stalls selling cheap Indian style shirts, sarees, cotton dresses; t-shirts and jogging bottoms for kids, baby clothes, plastic tat, and cuddly toys so outrageously bright it was something else walking past them at night, rows and rows of almost fluorescent pink teddies. ‘Your name carved into a shell,’ shell mirrors and plant holders and the wildest brightly coloured shell based ornaments. Rough furry coconuts with a hole cut in with an ornamental bird so that they looked like bird’s nests. Whole stalls selling spices, beautifully packaged and arranged. Chalk rangoli patterns decorated the pavements outside most of the shops.

There was much less English spoken; at the chemist shop I had to make buzz buzz noises and flap my arms to ask for mosquito cream, which made the woman in the shop laugh.

On the street people sold sunglasses, pearl necklaces, postcards and fold out paper maps of India; at the side of the road men sold stuff from on top of motorbikes, piles of lungis stacked up on the seats.

We didn’t stand out as the only tourists, the Indian tourists were easily recognisable too with their smart Western clothes and they were targeted by the street sellers and bought sunglasses, not all the focus was on us.

We walked to the end of the street where we saw the decorative coloured mouldings of a temple and before we knew it we found ourselves in the temple entrance. We took off our shoes and went inside. A man at the entrance sold us a big beautiful flower each, its petals lush and thick, the flower wet and heavy in my palm, filling my hand.

A temple guide took hold of us, directed my husband to take off his shirt, pointing to a sign on the wall that said that men had to take off their shirts to enter. The temple walls were made of almost black stone, we found out later that the whole temple was carved from a single piece of rock. We walked around in a kind of square, our guide pointing out things as we passed, bowing to and we followed his lead, a statue of Ganesh, a statue of Hanuman, and pointed out carved writing on the walls, but all this was conducted at such speed that we barely had time to look at anything. We found ourselves at the end, handed over the flowers, my husband was given a banana leaf containing red powder and white blossoms; the man dipped his finger in the red powder and put it on my husband’s forehead, and directed my husband to do the same to me. A woman pinned a string of white blossom folded in two into my hair, using one of her own hairgrips to hold it in place. We gave the man some money then out we went to find our shoes, carrying the banana leaf of powder and blossom, blessed if slightly bamboozled.
(There were people going around the temple by themselves at their leisure, we didn’t have to have a guide and do all that, but it is easy when arriving somewhere new to get caught up and go along with things!)

In the street a man selling necklaces came up to us, we declined, he asked us where we were from and said that he had lived in the UK and gave me a necklace ‘as a gift from the heart from India to the UK.’ He asked if I had anything from the UK I could give to orphan girls he worked with. The only thing I had was a bunch of new hair bands (hair elastics for pony tails etc) that I keep in my purse. He didn’t look at all impressed and sought reassurance that these were definitely from the UK. (Of course you can buy hair bands in India but those of you who have long hair and like to tie it up will probably relate to how frustrating it can be to be without a hairband when you want one, and these were actually quite precious to me.) Anyway I handed them over. Then he started asking for money for the necklace, after having made much of wanting to exchange gifts. I explained that I didn’t want to buy anything. He paused for a moment and took it back and exchanged it for a smaller thinner one.

I walked down the road with my red forehead blessing, surrounded by the smell of the blossom in my hair and wearing my white plastic necklace. We sat for a bit on a bench looking out to sea, feeling blessed and touristy in equal measure.

After dark we walked down to the fishing boats. As I looked up I saw the temple on the island lit up beautifully, kind of like the Royal Albert Hall on an island in the sea. As soon as I saw it the main lights went out and the temple disappeared leaving only tiny white lights dotted around it, presumably to save electricity.

In the restaurants three separate groups of Indian people asked to take selfies with us, a group of men who couldn’t speak any English but who laughed at how tall my husband was compared to one of them; my husband stood on his tiptoes and then crouched down and everyone laughed, and two groups of women and girls who had come to see the temple. The non involved diners didn’t stare or take any notice, no apparent judgements on us or the selfie takers. Walking around we saw lots of hotels, both budget ones and several grand looking ones, it seems like it’s busy all year round with pilgrims, sightseers and tourists.
On the second, and last evening after dinner we went and sat on the little wall near the fishing boats at the edge of the residential area. We could see lots of twinkling golden lights on a distant spit of land. With the last of the light we could still see the prettily painted boats and the faded pine green of the dhoti factory wall and beyond the houses the bright white steeple of the big church.

Even the sign at the entrance to the residential area had Welcome written in green chalk. I am almost in a state of temporary romantic love with the place, fantasising about moving there. At night, my favourite, the most dolls house looking house was draped in multi coloured fairy lights and a lit up sparkly sign said Welcome (for a wedding we found out later).

I wrote in one of my old blogs that one day (in the UK) my husband called out to me to come into the garden, and showed me a rainbow that went right over the top of our house. He said that he’d just had the urge to go outside, and there it was. We thought it was a lovely moment, and it was. But in India it’s like there’s rainbows everywhere. You don’t have to look for them. Every scene is packed with so much colour and beauty that it’s almost overwhelming. It is like being in a permanent state of bliss or altered state where everything is bright and beautiful, except that it’s like this all the time.

FOOD

There were no Westernised restaurants and it was good to experience more like the type of food options that we will have once away from the main Western touristy areas. We ate at a simple cafe restaurant, masala dosas for breakfast, plain dahl and chickpea masala, lemon rice and cashew nut masala with roti, vegetable noodles when we arrived. The masalas were both delicious, the noodles were plain but fine, the dahl was more watery than we are used to but tasted nice. Still in a tourist area but not really for Westerners. The food in two out of the three cafes we went in was served on plastic yellow plates with plastic disposable sheets on top of the plate, with disposable waxed paper cups for tea. The sambar and chutney was ladled onto the plate next to the dosa, with the man coming around to refill halfway through- I love India! In Kerala and Goa, it was served on a metal tray with wells for chutneys and sambar. Thali is often served that way too, especially in real Indian places not Westernised tourist places, with rice spooned on and rice and curry refilled as you eat, you have to be quick and say stop if you don’t want to get given too much!

In the third cafe food was served on china plates and the tea served in the metal cups and saucers that we had last seen in Panaji. Then, I didn’t know what to do; the cups are so hot that the tea takes ages to cool, and the saucers are deep like bowls. I wondered whether we were meant to tip the tea out into the saucer but I wasn’t sure so just waited patiently for it to cool.

In the interim I had read White Tiger, where the narrator from North India arrives in Bangalore and is faced with the metal cups and saucer arrangement for the first time. He looks around to see what everyone else is doing, but they are all doing it differently, they are all strangers, newcomers and no one knows what to do.

Later in the book the narrator again makes reference to drinking tea from a metal cup and saucer, only this time, he knew the proper way to do it. Except maddeningly he didn’t tell us what that was! So I looked up on the internet and my original instincts were right, yes you transfer the tea from cup to saucer and saucer to cup to cool it down. Maybe there’s an exact way to do it re quantity etc, and if I get invited anywhere posh I will ensure I find out. In Kanyakumari, I poured about half to three quarters of the tea into the saucer, which is big and deep, more like a small bowl, left it for a bit, then poured it back into the cup. The saucer has a larger surface area than the cup, and the little bit of tea left in the cup had cooled too, so the tea was drinkable much quicker than just leaving it in the metal cup.*

At the same time I also looked up the correct way to eat a masala dosa. I mean I thought I was doing it right; I wash my hands before and afterwards, I use only my right hand (I found at the beginning that keeping my left hand firmly in my lap during meals helped avoid accidentally giving into any temptation it had to help, especially when tearing bread, that can be difficult to do one handed at first) and I never use cutlery for dosas). The YouTube video was funny, especially the clip of someone trying to attack a triangular standing up folded hat like dosa with a knife and fork. (Ditch the cutlery, start at the bottom, for that particular type). Tear off small pieces at a time, which I probably did already, but am now more conscious of doing, and only use one sauce at a time. This I didn’t used to do, dipping and mixing and making a mess, now I am much more neat and tidy. Not that anyone is giving out gold stars…*

*dear readers, if I have got any of this wrong or missed anything out please do let me know!

Travel update                                                                                                    My husband arranged the two nights in Kanyakumari as a surprise! We came back to our familiar guesthouse and restaurants feeling quite sentimental, especially when they kept the restaurant open specially for us to watch the football which started at 11.30pm, even getting us comfy chairs and cushions and generally taking care of us.

Writing update
Friday of last week I did the blog, Saturday I had a day off, Sunday I had a day off, Monday and Tuesday we were away but I wrote notes about Kanyakumari. Wednesday we returned and I started typing up Kanyakumari, same Thursday and Friday (today). So today’s blog post was a draft of Kanyakumari, I didn’t have the time or inclination to write a separate blog post or to work on the ‘Kerala’ chapter this week. Next week, back to ‘Kerala,’ hopefully with a renewed energy after having had a break, and with a draft of Kanyakumari completed. ‘Trust the process.’

For pics see Instagram followingthebrownrabbit

Thank you very much for reading

See you next week

 

Throwback Thursday

Tags

anxiety, awareness, Blogging, healing, spirituality, writing

I used to go swimming a lot.  I looked up how to do front crawl and printed out tips from Dundee Arnhall swimming club (randomly) (thank you, they were great) which I used to read before getting into the pool and hold in my mind:  fingertips enter the water first, pull back towards your belly button with the flat of your hand…  Of course I never thought I was that good, unfairly comparing myself to club swimmers half my age in the neighbouring lanes.  I used to overdo it.  I often used to swim a mile (sixty-four lengths), would berate myself if I only did forty.  I remember once sticking to a routine of doing seventy, eighty lengths, even when my shoulder hurt deep inside.

As you can see I hadn’t yet gotten with the programme re veganism (think of the cows!)

But in between overdoing it in and out of work somehow a little bit of light and awareness managed to get through.

This is what happiness looks like  (First published in May 2014)

I called my sister.  My nephew answered and we had a good talk about ICT- his favourite subject, I did my best with my limited knowledge and gave him encouragement with regard to school as he struggles in some other subjects.  I spoke to my sister and invited myself to visit.  She put me off until half term which is a few weeks away but still, we have arranged a date.  We had a bit of a chat, it was nice, easy.

My husband and I got dressed up and went out for dinner.

I went swimming three times this week.  I bought nuts, seeds, dried fruit, herbal tea and vegetable juice.  I went a whole week without eating cheese.

My boss agreed for me to have a six month break from my therapy group.  Usually therapists get burned out and need a break from their patients but in this case I need a break from the other therapists.  Even though some of them were annoyed, I felt ecstatic, like a huge burden had been lifted from me.  I didn’t even feel guilty.  It gives me loads of extra time too.

I noticed the serendipitous little events and occurrences that make life that bit sweeter: arriving at the pool one day after work, hungry, I found a packet of crisps my stepdaughter had left in the car.  And exactly enough change to get a Snickers bar out of the vending machine (which shows that my healthy eating turnaround isn’t yet totally embedded).  The pool, normally so busy at that time of day, was half empty and the one or two swimmers I was sharing a lane with were polite and considerate, pulling over to allow me to overtake.

I texted a couple of friends to arrange meeting up.  Another friend called me out of the blue and we went out for a curry and to the cinema.  I got lost one day and went into a veterinary surgery to ask for directions and the receptionist very kindly printed out a map and directions for me.

I am training to be a healer and was invited to attend the organisation’s AGM.  It was on a Saturday morning and I was probably feeling neutral at best about attending a morning meeting on my day off.  When I got there I discovered the time had been changed and I was there an hour early.  I felt a little put out and considered just leaving but I stuck around with a group of other early people who complained about the organisation- proving that being a healer doesn’t necessarily guarantee continual sweetness and light.  After the meeting, another trainee who is further along than me was getting assessed and I had the opportunity to watch.  In the event I couldn’t hear what was going on and my teacher said, don’t feel like you have to stay, I know you were expecting to leave earlier.  I checked my phone; I had a couple of missed calls from my son, whom I had loosely arranged to meet up with after the meeting.  But I was drawn to stay and say goodbye to one of the examiners who had held my hand for a long time when we had been introduced and had said quietly to me, when it is your turn, you will pass, I have just assessed you.  So I waited until he was finished and afterwards he asked me to demonstrate on him.   He told me that I was very powerful and one of the best trainees he had ever encountered.  Sometimes obstacles are put in our way to test our commitment and if we remain committed, we are rewarded.

At work I did some healing as part of a staff wellbeing day.  I worked for two hours nonstop, nine people in total, with noticeable, powerful effects.  We were set up in the dining room and had such a queue of people that we went on into lunch and I was still standing there, eyes closed, arms outstretched, looking like I don’t know what when the maintenance department came in to have lunch.  Its official, I thought, the weirdest girl in school is now the weirdest woman at work.   Only now, no one seems to mind!

In Stephen King’s book On Writing he describes a phase he went through when he was drinking heavily and the whole family had to revolve around his work.  He said he used to have a huge leather desk that dominated the room.  Now he says he has a small desk in the corner of the room.  Life is not a support system for art, he says, it’s the other way around.  I didn’t fully understand when I first read it, now I think I do:  my life used to be tormented by my writing; always thinking about it, always thinking should I be at home writing, declining invitations.  I thought writing was The Thing but because it was so hard I used to wonder about and experiment with giving up completely as I said before.  Now I realise, Life is The Thing.  Writing is my own personal support system for life.  I live, I write it down to help me make sense of it.  I live a bit more.  It relaxes me, supports me, wipes away ridiculous worry thoughts and OCD by calming and focussing my mind, giving me clarity of purpose in my life.  That’s all it is.  That’s ALL??!!  Sounds pretty amazing really; I have a personal support system that can be bought for the price of a decent pen and a pad of paper.  Isn’t that better than winning the Booker Prize?

Like my spiritual journey, maybe I have been on a writing journey, pushing myself, experimenting.  As a child I wrote stories.  As a teenager I wrote poetry.  In my twenties I wrote a film script and a novel.  In my thirties I finally plucked up the courage to join a creative writing class and wrote everything:  all kinds of poems and stories, even a novella in a month.  I wrote and performed spoken word poetry and performance stories, learning everything by heart.  I wrote and had published several short stories of women’s erotica, culminating in putting on a launch event at a local sex shop.  Now in my forties, I wrote a therapy self help manual and a relationships guide with my husband before my most recent project, my spiritual memoir.  But it was all still with the overall aim of achieving some kind of end product.  Even my spiritual memoir, even though I found it very helpful and even though I kept thinking it was about something other than writing a book, it wasn’t until after it was finished that I realised: it was about something else, it was about living.  That’s what’s so great about blogging: The living comes first.                            

Throwback Thursday

Tags

family, spirituality, stress

This is the first blog post I did.  Of course you never get to the end of a spiritual journey but here I had obviously reached some kind of plateau.  Other than that I was preoccupied with how I spent my time and with doing too much.  I hadn’t accepted as I do now the need to specialise and to have a committed routine for writing.  On a more personal note, although I tried for a while I have now let go of keeping in touch with people who either don’t keep in touch back or with whom there isn’t a real connection.  

Is fun the final frontier?  First published in May 2014

Is fun the final frontier?   So what do you do when you reach the end of a spiritual journey?  What next?  There’s this restless, ‘Is that it?’ feeling.  A crackling energy with no clear outlet.  It’s the way I feel when I haven’t been swimming for a few days.  I toy with using that energy for other things, for work, or conversation but there’s no bargaining to be had.  I need to go swimming and that’s that.  Even though occasionally I play or experiment with not doing it just to check that yes, it really is that important to me.  And I am especially tempted towards this type of experimentation now.   I should also add that as well as my spiritual journey, I also finished my spiritual memoir and not for the first time, am taking a little break from writing, or, as I have done before, experimenting with not doing it, to see what that feels like.  To check if it really is necessary, or am I okay without it and perhaps meant to be doing something else instead.

Except today I started writing this but this is more a documentation of the ‘what next’, rather than the start of a Grand Project.  And whereas before, when I have been miserable and conflicted when I experiment with not writing, right now I have been enjoying the freedom, the sense of space, the oodles of time and headspace and the increased connectivity and participation in the real world.

I look around and see that plenty of people are content, nay, happy with just going to work, exercising, cooking and seeing family.  I wonder if I could be too, although I know immediately that the answer to that question is no.  As my husband said when I discussed it with him, they are fulfilled by that and that’s fine, but if you are fulfilled by other things, that’s fine too.  So I am going to assume that that thing is writing and act accordingly.  No big new projects, no grand plans, just this, writing it up, one page at a time.

So, what next?  I enjoyed having a rest from my head and from my long and winding journey.  I had a massage and enjoyed being grounded in the physical.  But then I had a couple of weeks of just… drifting… getting myself into an almost bored state, thinking, wondering about my state of mind.  I stopped doing any homework for my healing training and I stopped exercising regularly.  I let myself eat a lot and put on some weight.  But I didn’t feel at all bad, even when last minute shopping for an outfit for a wedding reception and looking big.   I knew I was just doing temporary experiments and I was enjoying it to an extent, but without my rigid rather punishing regimes of exercise, healing practice and writing I began to feel my sense of direction was fast disintegrating.

But until I let go of everything, how can I let go and let God;  how can I know what to keep in my life and what to discard, unless I loosen my grip on all of it and entertain, even if just for a brief moment, the notion that nothing is forever?  Boredom breeds creativity, is one theory.   I considered writing a list, an inventory of everything in my life, all the family and the friends, the acquaintances, the resources, my work, the house, etc etc.  I even considered doing a SWOT analysis and a plan linked with regular reviews, just like I do for my department at work.  I thought, shouldn’t my life get at least as much attention as my job?   But life, at least a spiritual life, doesn’t roll like that.   And I want a spiritual life, I really do.

In the last few weeks I went to a family funeral.  It made me feel alive and it reminded me which bits of family I actually like to be with and want to see more of, as well as which people I feel guilty about not seeing.   It sounds so simple put like this:  I will call those people I like and go and see them.   No need for a big family do, just see them for lunch or a cup of tea.  I will call my sister and invite myself over and then diary it to do again two months later.  This is the only way I will see her, as she almost never calls me and I never have a strong enough urge to call her ‘naturally’.  Although I accept that we will probably never be close I feel bad about not seeing her, hence, the need to make a plan to do so.  Some family relationships are mostly based on duty but a cup of tea after work isn’t going to kill me, especially when I think of what other people do for their family members, even ones they don’t like.

So I have used a work type approach on some aspects and for others, a simple emotional one:  I like spending time with those people, I feel comfortable with them.  I want to see them more often than I have thus far.   It’s the balance between the planned and the unstructured, the disciplined scheduling and the intuitive, responsive spontaneity.  Between my plans and the cues and opportunities of the world around me.   So, what to plan and what to let unfold naturally?  Answer:  at every decision fork, simply be aware that there is that choice and then trust yourself to make it.  And if an area of life isn’t going too well, review it against these two ways of approaching it.

When I finished my memoir and came up for air, I noticed the house.  I finally got the bathroom redecorated after talking about it for months.  I began to notice other things that needed doing and got back into doing a bit more housework, honouring the home I am lucky enough to live in.   I still want to be a healer as much as ever, I still love the feeling of my hands heating* up if I just so much as think about it.  I was just on holiday, that’s all.   I will still swim and will probably begin to put a bit more effort in.  I am sure I will eat better and lose a little weight, naturally and without fuss or scales and not out of self loathing but out of sensible respect for health.

And my Love… well, if I had to imagine what he might want… it might be for me to be more content with where I am and not so restless and anxious for the next thing.  I said to him recently that it would be good to take drugs and it be just about fun and not about exploring the outer regions of my head and he said, Hallelujah I can’t wait for you to get there that’s what I’ve been like for ages.  I do feel fun flowing through me, especially when the kids are here; I feel like crawling around on all fours pretending to be a lion, or a gorilla, or making cat noises…   Is fun the final frontier?  I asked my husband.  He replied:  What else would there be?

He is reading a book about creating a simple life to hear God better; we debated that and came to the conclusion, as always, just live** life in your own way, in the way in which you feel closest to God.  For me:  in intense emotion, like after the funeral.  Flashes of happiness after doing a good day at work.  Being at a wedding reception and seeing all the people being so nice and friendly to my stepdaughter.  Driving home with her asleep in the passenger seat afterwards.  Seeing my son chat away to my husband and know that it was him he called when he needed some advice.  Just being quiet and alone in the house.  Life, basically.  And writing, knowing that I have this, this support system, that helps me work it all out as I go along…..

*My original Freudian slip typo said ‘hearting’ up.  Yes, heating up with love!

** And this one originally in another typo said ‘love’ rather than live, and I considered leaving it, as that is true too.

Postscript Re reading the above I note the following influences and experiences: a funeral, a book being read and discussed, attending a social event.  I needn’t have worried about my writing or about what to do next.  The lesson I take from the past few weeks is ‘participate in life and wait for inspiration to strike’.  

Like nailing jelly to a wall

Tags

dreams, Getting started, spirituality, Travel, writing

An update on my ‘spiritual position.’

Honestly, working this stuff out is a full time job.  (See previous posts:  The story so far.  Green Mist theory).

If there is a God (and when I say God I am usually referring to a kind of vague yet huge concept that encompasses The Field and The Collective Consciousness; like a kind of golden light or the feeling that you get when looking at a butterfly.  It goes beyond my explorations of different religions and Buddhism and beyond being an omnist (someone who acknowledges the truth of all religions).

What I think right now is this:  If there is a God and God has a plan for me then it’s this:  It’s what I am doing right now.  It’s what I did in the recent lead up (Orientation) and it’s what I intend to do next (go back to the UK, live on a boat for a bit, then go off travelling around the USA*).

Whilst of course being aware that it’s only ever right now, plans change, and that although all this sounds so easy, unless we are going to turn into full time spiritual devotees and only meditate, study spiritual texts, discuss spiritual matters, and eat, sleep and use the bathroom, life as it is distracts us.  As in Journey the East, it is so, so easy to allow oneself to get knocked off the path and for one’s awareness to slip.

* possibly combining it with a DIY book promotion tour with readings at independent bookshops and vegan cafes

My husband and I have been having a lot of talks about the nature of reality, etc etc.  Last Thursday night I couldn’t sleep so I got up and wrote last week’s blog post.  In the morning I finished the blog post and then we talked some more and I came up with my new spiritual position as described above.  I then typed it up and then went to work on the book (can you see where this is going?)  I don’t usually do anything on the book on a Friday, but I thought I had free time as I had got the blog done early (by dint of being awake typing through the night…)

My eyes began to blur and I couldn’t focus.  I tried to push on through but in the end I had to give up.  I laid on the bed and closed my eyes.  All I could see was a bright white, like a blank page on a computer screen, with distorted tool bar icons making a row of triangles across the top.  I took off my t-shirt and put it over my eyes.  I tried to send myself healing and to relax.

It came to me that by overdoing the spiritual talks, not sleeping and overdoing the writing I had triggered some kind of episode in my brain and that my mind was being somehow cleansed and reset.  A feeling of otherworldly peace came over me and for a few moments I thought, I have a choice, mental illness or a higher state of consciousness, I can’t have both.

After a while I got up and felt very strange so I did a load of stuff to ground myself.  I went out onto the balcony and ate a banana ball and a banana.  I counted five things I can see, hear, feel etc.  I stood on one leg.  I went on YouTube to listen to a song my friend told me about (the one at the top of this post).

The ad below came on (‘Sometimes to find your way you have to lose your mind’)

 

My husband came home and gave me a pep talk about how my mind is  really strong and I am totally sane, and reminded me of a line from one of the first books I read on this journey (the spiritual one not the travel one) ‘The last vestige of the ego is to tell yourself you are going mad.’ (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)

In hindsight it might have been better to just allow myself to stay in a slightly altered state of consciousness; by trying to get out of it I probably made it feel worse, but I suppose I was scared.

Anyway, as Jung says, this stuff isn’t all about butterflies and rainbows, it’s also about making the darkness conscious.  Last night I also couldn’t sleep, but this time I let myself go down into the things that I am afraid of, my childhood memories, the meaning I extrapolate from them, the effects I have allowed them to have.  And I realised that there was nothing to find…  I have explored the worst case scenarios and survived.

At the risk of looking and sounding like cliché, I bought a chunky silver Om pendant.  It caught my eye and overcame all resistance to shopping and spending and seemed a fitting souvenir for my altered consciousness last week.  I looked up what it actually meant (previously I knew it as the sound of the universe, and the man who sold it said it offers protection but I didn’t really know what each bit meant).

https://goo.gl/images/ARZtQC

It explained to me what I had instinctively felt; when we are in one state we aren’t in the other.  One level of consciousness is the normal level, where we experience the world through the five senses, another is deep sleep, another is dream state, another is a higher state of consciousness which is the aim of spiritual practices.  We move between them and they are separate states.

Travel update

We will be here in Varkala for another month and have been busy planning our trip and getting excited about moving on.

 

Writing update

I have been working hard on Goa Part Two (Anjuna, Arambol, Panaji) this week and hope to have a draft completed on Monday.  From Monday I will be working on Kerala, bringing it up to date, as well as looking at the proposal for Hay House.

Thank you very much for reading

See you next week