The new website is beginning to take shape. The re-designing is nearing its completion process. As a part of that process, I am supposed to send to the developer all the content regarding Paul. We are introducing a new section in the website, called “Honoring Paul”.
This segment will hold Paul’s nuggets of wisdom, his writings, links to his book, “The River of Life” and Church of the Wheel Recordings (meditations conducted every week as a part of Church of the wheel gatherings in 2020).
It has taken me forever to compile this data for the website. There has been a weird underlying fear/resistance or something else that I cant put my finger on. I have delayed this work for more than a month now.
As I finally push myself to look into this and begin compiling this, a gush of memories comes flooding by.
Paul and I
Together, me and Paul were so anchored. Someone told me that I was a very grounding factor for Paul. He could do what he did because I was his anchor.
In hindsight, the opposite is also true. I could do what I did, aspired, aimed for and felt so confident about was because he was there. Simply there. Although, while he was alive, I had this grudge that he always wanted to do what ‘he’ desired/decided and not what ‘we decided.
But even in that dominance, I knew what to stand for and fight for. It helped me know what was needed – personally or for shamanic vision. His force, dominion and stubbornness gave me a sort of a positive push to take charge of my life, my passions and gave me clarity on who I was and what I wanted.
On the surface it felt like a power struggle or an ego battle between two partners but deeply and subliminally, his projections and my projections, his baggage and my baggage kind of made it very clear who we were as people, what each one of us desired from the heart, wanted and needed to have happen.
Inspite of our challenges, I was so confident about myself. Passionate about my purpose and ferocious and wild. I did not care about the world and what they thought about me. For that matter, I did not even get deterred by Paul’s opposition of my point of view.
More often than not, he would always come back and say, “Darling, don’t let it get to your head, but you are always right.”
We mirrored each other’s baggage (we were twin flames after all) and we complimented each others’ strengths.
Paul and I, twin flames
We both were an anchor for each other. The only friend we perhaps had and ofcourse the only family. We were family with and for each other. Both of our biological families were sort of absent and in many ways dysfunctional.
I for the longest time have taken pride in the fact that I have been the black sheep of my family and that all the family dysfunction that exists – ends with me. To process the pain of the lineage and clean the past has been THE most arduous task of my life.
The soul’s purpose to teach Shamanism and other subjects, and its evolutionary journey in this life time has been my biggest anchor in this life time until now.
It has also served as an anchor for keeping my relationship with Paul afloat because even in those challenges that I faced with him, I could see through a different lens. I could feel that my higher self was always present. The birds eye view of the conflicts and the relationship dramas that we created was always present. Our love and our spiritual work together was the anchor that kept me rooted and confident.
As I compile the data regarding Paul, all of this comes flooding back.
People feel that my grief regarding Paul is not resolved yet. While that may be true, because grief has no timeline and it is an ongoing process, I find myself grieving for different reasons now. I find myself lost not just for his loss but apparently for the loss of self too.
I don’t know who I am any more. I feel like I have no anchor.
My anchor in my own self feels penduluming.
Some find an anchor in their children. Their well being keeps them going. Some find an anchor in their work – career, job, business, making money. That keeps them driven. Some find an anchor in loved ones left behind – parents, children, siblings, etc. Their love and support and supporting them, gives them a footing to keep moving along.
Some find anchor in charity. Some find anchor in their pets. Some find anchor in their travels. For some, like me, often the spiritual journey becomes an anchor. Purpose and contribution drives us. The desire to do something better for society, for fellow human beings, keeps the flame burning on and keeps one anchored.
After Paul passed away, the only words that I found telling myself were “I am only alive for my purpose,” I want to finish my purpose.
For three years, my spiritual journey of UNBECOMING and my passion to teach what I so strongly believe in, kept me afloat. It anchored me. It helped me make peace with my human experience and existence. I started viewing human life with eyes of love, desire and compassion. I wanted to thrive and not just live. My despair was eating me away from inside but it is the spiritual quest, passion to teach and write, kept me anchored and yet moving.
More often that not, our anchor becomes our crutch and we become attached to it and thereby entangled in it. It becomes a part of our unhealthy ego state. I was guided to break away from my attachment to my purpose and an aching desire to contribute to society.
This guidance propelled me to birth my year long mentorship program, “Soul Re-memberance”. It was a sincere endeavour to explore who we are at the core if we are not who we believe we are.
This birthing was the most intense journey. And even though the mentorship program is over, it still continues to seed, sprout and grow in all of us who were a part of this experience.
Interestingly, this exploration, seeking, introspection, unfolding no longer anchors me.
I think of the kind of work me and Paul birthed while we were together. Even through opposition for and of each other, we blossomed. Our work bloomed. Whenever me and Paul reflected back, it would seem we have done a LOT MORE compared to the time we have been together.
Everything just flowed through and gushed through like the River. Everything was abundant. I struggle miserably, since the past several months to find that anchor again. Someone said that joy should be my anchor now. It felt like a wonderful thought.
I never knew what brings me joy. When I go to nature, I am thrilled. I am ecstatic. I am happy. I am content. I feel joy. And it makes me feel that perhaps Nature brings me joy and nature is my anchor.
Thol Lake and Bird Sanctuary
I come back to the mundane and I feel the aching pain again. I feel the void and emptiness all over again. The misery starts engulfing me again.
Work, purpose, spirituality no longer anchor me.
I feel I am miserably failing to find the anchor in my own BEing. OR rather in JUST BEing. I am miserably failing at finding stillness and joy in each moment.
Sadness has made a permanent home and joy feels fleeting. For the first few years after Paul passed away, I struggled with harnessing a Desire within me. What should I live for? I felt absolutely desire empty. Healthy desire is the seed to evolution, expansion, creative expression and most importantly, ‘something to look forward to, something to live for.’
We are taught to abandon desire in the name of spiritual liberation. But this is just one facet of desire – desires that keep us chained in this human experience, life time after lifetime. But there are certain other aspects of desire that often the masculine spiritual way of being sort of over looks or doesn’t acknowledge / talk about.
Desire is holy. It is the seeding ground for birthing something. It is the ground for being fertile and alive, if we learn to harness its energy in an appropriate way. It is needed for creation. This is the reason, the Gods ‘desired’ the union of Shiva and Parvati. The kinetic force of Shakti was needed to help Shiva – the shav to come alive and ‘ participate’. Desire is pertinent to the forces of CREATION.
I have known misery for the first 50 years of my life. And after Paul passed, it took a lot of work to seed the desire to find pleasure in this human experience. The work first began with understanding my angst towards being human, being amidst the human field and seeing the good in it. The self righteous ego had to be pacified greatly. My soul had anger being born in this human field and repeating the life and death experience again and again.
But it was born nonetheless and there was an intrinsic hurry in what it did. All my life, I have not just been a fast speaker, a fast eater but there has been an inherent hurry in everything that I do. Even during my corporate jobs, I found myself finishing all tasks at hand, pretty cleverly and quite fast. I would wonder how are others so slow. I would wonder how are others so busy all the time ( I still wonder about this). I would always have ample free time at hand. I would always finish my work ‘fast’. I breathe fast. Everything is FAST.
This subconscious pattern to finish everything ‘quickly’ had also become pretty evident in my spiritual journey. There was a haste and a hustle in ‘finishing’ everything, to get everything over and done with. To clean the SLATE FAST.
Some of you who know me, often label me as being hyper. But, behind this state of being hyper was a deep seated subconscious pattern of “just finishing everything I am here for FAST” so that I can go back and return home. This pattern has only come to my awareness after Paul passed. The spiritual initiations kind of sped up and became more intense than ever. When I screamed for Divine Grace, I was reminded about my own desire to “finish” everything “fast”. I had to pray to ‘slow it down’.
It also took work to accept the fact that our human experience is not just full of struggles, challenges, trauma or misery but also a field for the Spirit to experience its divinity in its full grandeur and the soul besides having a purpose is also here to enjoy the human experience, fully.
We live inside the dream of a creator God and hence everything is but a dream, a play, an illusion. We often refer to this experience as “Maya”. To detach from life as an illusion vis a vis being in full acceptance of this experience and enjoying it without attaching or entangling in it is a journey we all are perhaps here to master.
So, accepting my human birth and desiring to experience its fullness by making peace with it and not rejecting it was the first desire. It took work to seed this in me,
Perhaps this seed can be my anchor. And the acceptance that the journey from ground zero until now has not been a failure. But a breeding ground for what might be ready to sprout now.
The mind has yet to find its stillness. The Being has to learn to just BE. Statements like “I don’t know who I am anymore” or what am I to do next often loop in the mind.
Spiritual seekers often get attached to their seeking. Dropping the quest and being present fully in any given moment of pain or joy and being in full surrender and acceptance of what IS, requires constant nudges to the programmed ego mind.
Being present at the Thol Lake
We perhaps incarnated on earth to experience life in the earthly dimension. In this process we somehow created a mess instead of just Being and experiencing life. In undoing this mess and in the process of unbecoming, we feel more pain and not less.
I am beginning to decide that pain cannot be my anchor even if it might have unconsciously become one in the past, quite unknowingly. As I struggle to find my new anchor, I remind myself to breathe. And this reminder to breathe becomes my anchor in that given moment.
Being in the present moment takes courage and is the most difficult aspect. The moment becomes present to all the pain we carry inside. But alongside the pain, while being in the present moment, is also the act of witnessing it without attachment.
There is “PRESENCE”. Can this be my new anchor, going forward? I don’t know.
I am present to my tears as I write this. I pause and just Breathe.
Sometime ago, when I had enquired about the next step of my work, I was guided to contribute to and work with young adults. Although our workshops have no age bar, I didn’t know how to specifically reach out to this age group.
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by Rotary Club to hold a drum circle and fire ceremony for 100 plus young adults.
The theme of the 3 days event was “Creating Future Leaders.”
This two hour event marked the beginning for me at Shamanic Vision to plant seeds in young fertile minds.
Opening up the sacred space
After opening up sacred space, we spoke about and discussed Mother Earth and how we are exploiting the earth. We spoke about reciprocity, partnership and gratitude to Mother Earth for providing for us.
We spoke about nature, different elements and their contribution to us.
We discussed how our body is made up of these 5 elements and what role each element plays physically and spiritually.
We also drummed to recognising our true nature and briefly talked about how our authenticity gets masked by social, cultural and religious conditioning.
We did another round of drum circle with the prayer to Divinity to help us recognise and BE who we truly are.
After that we had a beautiful fire ceremony. We wrote on a piece of paper all negative dysfunctional beliefs we need to release and surrendered that to the spirit of the fire.
Fire ceremony
And we drummed, sang, chanted and rattled to this process of letting go.
We then wrote on another piece of paper that which we need to manifest in our lives. We surrendered this piece of paper to fire too.
Fire destroys. Fire births. Fire transforms.
We concluded the session with expressing gratitude to the spirit of the land that held us and all the organisers who put together this beautiful event.
In some of us pain often leads to numbing or masking of the Self. When it feels too much to feel pain or when the underlying belief is that pain makes us weak, we often distract from feeling it. We hide behind our ambitions and addictions. We use several distractions to deflect from feeling it.
We use our courage to project that we are brave and that we are letting go and moving on. We project that we are leading busy, active, happy lives. We find our anchor in being busy or in other distractions.
Source: Facebook
In this case, we may often go about living our life as if nothing is wrong and every thing is alright. This often comes across to everyone as being healed and moving on. It may not really be so and it may only be an illusion that every thing is alright.
Just like everything and everyone else, pain too, needs an “acknowledgement.” It may take time but it often finds its way through.
Sooner or later pain does find its way and screams out loud so that we may pay attention. Sometimes it strikes as mental illness, sometimes as physical symptoms and sometimes as a different crisis like an accident or some other life threatening situation or a deep personal loss.
Sometimes it projects as strife with family members. In many cases, our children often project our own buried stuff. If we pay attention, we see the presence of our own pain in some of their behaviours or even in their rebellion. Sometimes pain screams through our outbursts.
Pay attention to what your body is saying.
Then there are some of us, who feel everything quite intensely. Pain cuts us deep and tears us open. Feeling it and processing it feels like a never ending roller coaster ride. Often it breaks us or leads us to a deconstruction. Rebuilding from there, feels more energy consuming, tiring and simply impossible.
Because of the intensity of the pain, we may unconsciously wall our hearts so that we may not be hurt again. We block our receiving. And, we might keep circling back to the pain over and over again inspite of numerous healing attempts. The rebuilding feels scary and here we may find our anchor in the safety of the known, in this case our pain.
Pain has the capacity to not just break our hope and spirit, but it also has the capacity to open our hearts and break down our walls, if we allow. In this case, we realise that pain is a messenger and it has a lot to teach us. It draws our attention to aspects of self we tend to bury, mask, deny or ignore because of fears – fears which spring through our upbringing or past imprints.
There may be some of us who may allow pain to be an initiation. I am not saying that pain is or should be a pre-requisite for growth or spiritual evolution and healing. But pain can be a mirror reflecting deepest aspects of the self – aspects of the self we are afraid to own, look at and dive into.
This approach to pain that it is not here to destroy us but actually reconstruct us may take a lot of patience, courage and inner resilience. It may feel tempting to look the other way than understanding its wisdom and work towards integrating and embodying it.
A deep acceptance of what is, in spite of volatility and uncertainty, becomes the need of the self. Deep pain, often propels us towards deep surrender. In this case, the person often finds his/her anchor in the Self and in the Divinity and Magnificence of all that is.
What is your anchor? Where do you naturally levitate towards?
I was invited by Karan & Shokhi of the Happily Whatever After podcast on their episode of Sacred Connections. In the conversation, we dived deep into the power of spirituality to transform relationships. I shared insights into why we often attract the “wrong” partners and how this is linked to unresolved patterns within ourselves. You can listen to part 1 of the podcast on YouTube here.
“Make no mistake about it – enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”
When our soul chooses to embark on this journey, all that we hold so dearly and attach ourselves to, begins to be scraped off.
The journey of our spiritual evolution or rather the journey of our unbecoming is similar to that of the snake that sheds its skin.
We are called to unbecome/shed all the skins /masks that have become an intrinsic part of our identity.
Over several lifetimes and generations, we pick up imprints, samskaras, ways, attitudes, beliefs, attributes that begin to define who we are and we unconsciously keep operating out of those imprints quite involuntarily over and over and over again.
Neelam may feel she is aggressive or behaves in an aggressive way, but is being aggressive her true nature or is that a defense she learnt in her childhood to feel safe?
Is that a coping mechanism she learnt from her mother?
Is that how women in her lineage were?
Is that the story she picked up in her mother’s womb?
Is that the way of being she learnt in her upbringing years as a consequence of certain events which unfolded in her life?
If Neelam is not all that happened to her which now constitutes an integral part of her identity, who is she?
Can Neelam really become her authentic self and HER TRUE NATURE until she involuntarily keeps operating out of old programs?
A point may come in the journey of Neelam’s soul, where she may begin to question everything that she is or has become.
Is that her true nature? What masks has she worn upon herself to protect her wounded inner child? Where is her true self hiding?
If Neelam has to come into her true nature, a samudra manthan within her BEING has to happen. The churn has to bring forth the reality of all the unpleasant truths (the poison) which Neelam has chosen to believe or enact about herself.
Until this process of Samudra Manthan happens or keeps happening, the aspects buried deeply in Neelam’s unconscious will keep surfacing until she finally acknowledges, accepts and lets them go.
Once the process of this deep churning is over, the true gems (gifts, medicine, treasure) buried deeply within the ocean of her unconscious will rise and come to the surface.
All the buried stuff that comes to the surface cannot be bypassed or be overlooked by distraction. And there is no choice but to accept and embrace the vish (poison) rising in the process.
Samudra Manthan is indeed a huge metaphor for each one of our lives. And it can be a pain inducing process indeed. It can bring up conflicts and more chaos before it finally brings up peace and treasures.
Samudra Manthan is a journey similar to that of the journey of the underworld. The journey of the underworld is depicted and narrated in so many different ways where the seeker is often challenged to dive into the underworld, is lost, betrayed or killed only to be rescued, revived, re-birthed or resurrected again, to come back with new gifts and treasures.
Samudra manthan is a journey which goes on individually and collectively within all of our lives. Some are mildly affected by it while some have been given no choice but to ferociously jump into the process.
What kind of manthan/churn is happening in your lives? How has it impacted you positively or negatively?
More often than not, we assume that a person going through grief needs privacy or isolation. Although, everyone grieves differently, grief is so heavy that it needs an unconditional presence, a container to be held and most importantly be witnessed non judgementally.
Grief has no timeline and more often than not, we judge the person whose grief lingers. Statements like you are attached to the comfort of pain, let go, move on, be brave, are often more damaging than the density of grief itself.
When we invalidate a person’s grief in the name of being strong or moving on, we not only invalidate the loss and the emotion of grief, we also invalidate The PERSON experiencing distress.
Grief is a wave. It ebbs and flows. Just like the waves of the ocean. If we do not control it or negate it, it comes forth and then very naturally retreats.
We often try to fight it because:
We have numbed our emotions because of shame and fear
We are tired of grieving or
We some how feel ill equipped to process our pain, do not have the liberty/comfort or resources to feel and process it
A person who has been unable to process, feel or metabolise one’s emotions may find it difficult to BE PRESENT to other person’s grief.
We often feel inadequate when someone is grieving. We do not know what to say, how to behave and how to react or respond.
This innate sense of inadequacy subconsciously propels us to give suggestions, advise or gyaan to the person grieving. We do not realise that we are only trying to make our own little child feel adequate. It is indeed not supporting the person in pain.
Encouraging a person to feel his or her grief while being present unconditionally to what they might experience can more often than not be THE BIGGEST contribution to that person’s existence at that point in time.
When this gesture is absent, the undigested pain can often give rise to another wounding in the person’s grieving. Thoughts like do I matter, why should I live, does my pain matter, is something wrong with me might become the centre stage of the grieving person’s existence.
I personally experience a lot of unrest, shame and anger when my pain is invalidated and not witnessed.
It is perhaps this frustration and anger with the collective that might have contributed to my illness in the grieving period.
And perhaps my pain of feeling invalidated over and over again has given rise to my desire to exit this world time and again. I have been wise enough to not let this voice overrule other voices and instincts. I have been fortunate enough to have a spiritual foundation to support me through my teachers and student community whenever I am stuck or go through a crisis. That said, it has not been easy and continues to be a herculean task.
I miss physical presence when I am grieving. I miss soothing words when I am in pain. I miss someone nurturing me as I navigate through my pain. I miss physical touch and comforting when I am grieving or in pain (physical or mental).
I succumb to being a victim at times. Alas, I am only human.
I am a warrior. But the warrior is now tired.
I hear myself and my thoughts and feelings every day. Sometimes I continue to grieve bitterly and sometimes I swallow the lump in my throat.
While articulating the journey of grief, I wonder today whether my disturbed mental health is because of the various lumps I have consciously and unconsciously swallowed – of anger, of despair, of frustration, of loneliness.
There are many grieving communities in the world and one can turn to them for support in the lonely journey of our grief, trauma and pain. I often introspect why I didn’t turn to these communities when I was at the peak of my grieving period. I do not know. Perhaps I was afraid or rather my orphaned inner child was afraid of being ostracised, isolated or judged AGAIN.
Perhaps now, I am becoming ready, bit by bit daily to offer grief education and grief support so that whatever I have gone through or am going through, others who are experiencing grief, may not have to go through.
Many times we need healing or counselling. But more often than not, we just need love and a nonjudgemental presence to be a witness to our pain and most importantly to feel, “We belong and we MATTER.”
I personally believe that the fundamental need within each one of us is to know and believe in our cells, that WE MATTER.
And I wish to tell each one of us going through an existential crisis or some kind of pain or grief, however big or small, that YOU MATTER.
