The answer is are you really ever ready to do anything? Or do you only think you are ready but never know until you do whatever it is
that you are contemplating doing? Like becoming a parent or jumping out of a
plane or making that drastic chop at the hairdresser….. You can try and prepare in your mind all you
want but we never really know what is coming in the next moment.
Even if you do something you have done a thousand times before, each experience
will be different to the one before right? Because you have never been in this exact moment
until now!
But this was debut experience for me. Feeling almost like I
had exited the real world to be placed into a cocoon that at first felt like a
prison….until I realised it’s beauty. Today I have left what I called home for
the last 2 weeks, the Ayur Yoga Eco ashram.
Which was really half way between a yoga retreat and an ashram. It
definitely wasn’t like some ashrams that have you getting up at 4am, where you
must hand over all electronics, no hot water and you only eat rice and lentils
for all meals, sleep on concrete, scrub
floors and chant until the deities embody you! Years ago I had spoken with a
colleague about visiting an ashram and it has always been on my to do
list. Why? To challenge myself. To see
what I am all about. Maybe it is the feeling of being lost and unsettled at
times .Maybe being single without a family
of my own permits time for such crazy thoughts about who I am and what’s inside
this sack of skin. But the interest to learn about
ourselves should be high on our priority list no? We are so eager to learn or study
about history or religion or what happen on last weeks episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, that we don’t
REALLY know about us. But it’s hard to try to do this when we are stuck living day in day out the same
shitty way. Being overly stimulated with technology, people, appointments,
schedules, to do lists, and always being on the rest of the worlds time and not
your own. Self discipline seems to give way to a constant search for
gratification which means a lot of the times we fail to realise what we have. But removing
as many of those external road blocks is the perfect way to get out of your own
way and tune into your thoughts, feelings and even more primitively….your
senses.
My story is hilarious now I look at it! Arriving late at night after being driven for hours alone
and into the middle of no where was daunting. The nearest city was over an hour
away and the local village only a small dirt path dotted with a few shack
houses where washing your clothes in the local stream in the main street and
communal living is the norm. And greeted with no information other than “yoga
at 7!” from the dude that lead me to my cabin in a paddock of darkness.
Scaaaary!!! But that is India. Too much information is considered unnecessary,
don’t concern yourself with anything in
the future, just focus on what is happening right now. Hard to get your head around at first but they
are really onto something I think. The first couple of days was a cross between
being irritated, calm and uncertain. Set on the banks of the river, a large
open space dotted with a few cabins, surrounded by palm trees and rice fields
as far as the eye could see was what kept us occupied. Along with a schedule of
early morning meditation, 2 hours of yoga morning and afternoon a daily yoga philosophy
class and of course set meal times. We had simple wooden cabins with a bed, a
toilet and shower, desk and wardrobe walking through knee high grass in the mud
and dodging a wildlife sanctuary of frogs, geckos, bugs to get there.
A simple life. But we didn’t realise that the simple life was so far removed from what we are used to that you feel like you are jumping out
of your skin to get to the next moment. It was so hard to just ‘be’ and not be
planning for the day or week ahead. We crave to not have to do this at home!! Most of my
thoughts for the first couple of days were ‘what the F have I done?’ and 'how
they hell am I going to be able to do this everyday for 2 weeks, I will go
crazy!!' And we all felt like this. Others were even thinking of leaving. But
why? Why are we so annoyed with NOT being time poor for once? Not being
stressed with work or family or what ever else we manage to let stress us out.
A small theory of mine was that I felt purposeless. Like I had far less
responsibilities than what I was used to. It really made me start considering
the families I saw in the local village and how having less really makes them
satisfied. Their daily purpose is to work and provide for their family, to cook
and clean or attend school and social interaction. And it is funny how I
complain about not having time when I am at home to read my books, or to write
these blogs, to play with my photography or to make sense of the junk I have
saved on this computer. But a barely did any of this, I kept putting it off.
And guess what I chose to do instead? I chose to just ‘be.’Because after a week of getting used to this lifestyle we were let out of the cage and took a trip into Mysore. And that was the day that I appreciated this adventure. Because an over abundance of traffic, people, pollution, money, commercialism and unnatural noises was an attack on the senses. It made arriving back to our place of peaceful tranquillity, fresh air and constant routine a feel like a relaxing day spa. We didn’t even have to worry about feeding ourselves. We just show up. Our biggest concerns in life were which direction we should take our daily walk! Sounds like life of a princess right?? But I challenge you to spend so much time with yourself, with constant thoughts that have limited distractions, that have you question things about life, yourself, the people in it, what you are even doing with yourself, what is and isn’t important and a fear of the realisation that this is it. This is you.
Right now you are living every second of this small amount of time that you have been given on this earth to be you. It will never happen again. Time is passing and this is the one chance that you have got at living this particular life. The other challenge is 4 hours of yoga with our teacher Sujith telling us ‘don’t break yourself’ as we try and do the scorpion pose!! Good times!!!
This I will miss about the ashram:
·
Navigating dirt paths after monsoon rains…….in
the dark!
· Being so excited that after 1 week getting my room clean and my sheets got changed from white to bright colours
· Mid morning peak hour dragonfly and butterfly traffic.
· Having my senses finely tuned because I had the time to notice a snail growing it’s shell, that palm tree leaves can be deafening, I could smell in the morning that it would raining the evening, seeing all the colours of the rainbow on dragonflies and that salt sugar and that beetroot mixed with a little salt and fresh ginger can taste like the most flavoursome dish you have ever had!
· Getting over the fact that almost every time you go to pee that there most likely going to be some kind of bug…..and that is after you have successfully sidestepped frogs and geckos to get there.
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