Journal Entry from a Cave

When I walked out of my cave I felt absolutely terrible; I am not good at not finishing what I started. But for some reason I felt like I was running dry and that the cave in my solitude could no longer hold me. I had gotten more out of the evening than I’d imagined and simply felt that my solo, at least this one, needed to be altered.

But I felt hopeless. I didn’t want people to see that I had “caved (nothing wrong with a little pun). But in that I started to wonder who I was staying for. And then I remembered how iffy I had felt about the solo to begin with. It is such a beautiful thing, but I felt that I had no training for it. I have no form of meditation that works for me, nor is there something poignant in my life that I need to sit alone to consider.

Actually, that is poorly stated. There are always things to consider and I can in a way meditated: by running, hiking, dancing. If I had been given the roam of this island and two days in which to travel it, I think I would have accomplished it.

But that isn’t the case so I shouldn’t divulge. I want to be proud of what I have accomplished. Patience is surely my sore suit and I was able to be still for a long time. Longer than I ever want to again.

I have realized through this cave that at least now, meditation is not something important in my life. At least not in the “count to ten on every breathe” way. I also have began to understand the importance of people in one’s life. I used to spend so much time alone, constantly cutting ties merely out of lacking effort. This experience has made me appreciated and notice the affects of having company.

Surely I need a better balance than living in an LR community has given me. I need to have time to go out into nature like this. But on my own accord. At this point, this experienced has ruined this beautiful island for me. The place htat just yesterday I was in love with now builds up a heaping depression in me. Instead of building appreciation out of the beauty that this place holds I saw everything as dull and blurry through my teary exhaustion.

Maybe someday I will be able to do this solo. Perhaps I simply wasn’t ready. But it also showed me a lot about my needs.

I have a need to be going somewhere. Or at least to be covering ground in a literal sense. I have moved so far from my depression that kept me lying in bed. Alone, motional but for crying. Stillness used to make sense to me but it was coated in sadness. It wasn’t until I started moving that I began to feel okay. Motion restarted me, de-froze my heart, my spirit.

I understand that this soli is not meant to feel alive like a hike in am ountains. In fact, I feel that I very much understand and appreciate what this soli is about. I think it is beautiful and well created. That is why I felt the need to try it even though I was at a point in my life where I wasn’t prepared to do the whole 40 hours. I thought that I could/should just push through it, like I do everything else in my life. I thought I could just show up and the beaty of the experience would alter my state of preparedness. For awhile it did. Stepping onto this island, I certainly felt altered. Since being here, I have reentered myself and for a few days committed to self-healing. I think the nights in caves have been good for me. I haven’t slept alone in two months let alone a cave high above and far away from the boy and friends that I love. I didn’t feel scared in said cave. Not that I felt perfectly comfortable, but it felt like a good level of darkness, nature, solitude was enrapturing me. I think these 3 nights in the cave where a good escape for me, whether I wanted it or not.

And perhaps the most pleasantly surprising thing about me leaving before 40 hours is that I am suddenly capable of writing things down. It has been so long since I could articulate myself and now I see words being splattered down easily, helpfully. Suddenly I have a journal entry that is genuine.

I want to appreciate Abby, Tialoc, and Horst. Not that I thought they’d make me feel bad, but I am comforted by their supported. I needed to hear that it was okay that I had come down and even more so that I could then either stay down or come back up. I really want to send love to them because it meant so much to me just to be given some advice. Not to be left in my own pot of judgment and sadness but to be questioned in a comforting manner. Though I thought I wanted it to be left alone so that I could forget that I’d left, that wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. Tialoc helped me (just by listening) realize that I had left at the time I needed to leave. Abby helped me understand that my suffering during the solo was normal (not in a “you are like everyone else” but in a “it makes sense” kind of way). She also made me appreciate the integrity of this solo. I am so grateful I came back up here to write instead of soaking myself with the comfort of company. She also made me realize (if I hadn’t already before that) I have some things to work on.

I guess I knew this. I’ve known how unbalanced I have felt since KT died. But I can’t just up and sit in a cave and hope to rebalance. For me it takes baby steps. For me it takes a healthier fusion of structure and freedom. Up until now, I’ve been told where to go, what to do, what to write and haven’t had any solo time to decide on my own. When I get back to the states I am going to work on that balance, making sure to put the proper amount of scheduled things in with free time.

Someone who really affected me over this experience was Jordan. From the moment I heard her explain that she knew she wasn’t at the point where she could do a 40 hour solo I felt envious of her self-awareness. As I continued to say that I could do it, I knew in me that I was overstepping my boundaries. I really admire her ability to “say no”, to do what is right for her. I am awful at that. I always want to prove myself even of things that show none of my color. Stepping out of the cave today was huge because I was taking a stand for my emotions. Emotions that I usually push aside.

I came into this cave declaring that I wanted to open my eyes. My experience in it did the opposite; I recognized my own tunnel vision and lack of healthy perspective but couldn’t alter it. Stepping out and returning with a journal however I feel my eyes opening. For the first time in awhile I can recognize my needs. I need to be mobile and need to be able to sing and honestly, I sometimes need people. I need the touch of a hug, the squeeze of someone holding my hand. I need to hear people talking even if it it doesn’t involve me. Maybe this shows that I am scared of myself, and surely in ways I am. But more I see it as finally admitting that I can’t do everything on my own. I need to love and need to be loved. As of now, I see people to be “the divine”. We are all one, we are all “God”. Together. We need each other to evolve. I have spent too long thinking I could do it all by myself.

Since arriving in Auroville, three months ago, I have felt myself shifting. Just being away from home, in a place built intentionally for human development I noticed that I was changing. As days have gone by, I have continued to learn and grow in so many ways. There have been days where I’ve felt more free, natural, and happy than I have ever felt. As I sit here in the common hut of Sadhana Forest, I realize that this is one of those days; early wake up for two hours of work in the comfortable morning sunlight, an amazing breakfast of fruit salad, two more hours of solid work, another amazing vegan meal, and finally an afternoon of relaxing, reading and talking with my boyfriend. Truly, it has been one of the most amazing days. And as I analyze this day and wonder what has made it feel so perfect, I realize that it is the lifestyle in which I can embrace while living at Sadhana. Ave Ram says that living at Sadhana is “living simply” and I suppose that’s true. But perhaps living simply is exactly what I have needed to do. And although it is considered a simple life, in ways it is far more complex than the life I left three months ago. Suddenly I have all these new spectrums of awareness. Sure I knew about peak oil, knew that the world is in dire need of changing to more sustainable energy sources (my dad has a Prius, I know the deal). I also know that the way the average American, and more specifically, the average American student going to university (if we can call anybody average) has a lifestyle that is in one way or another disintegrating their mind and body. Be it alcohol, gorging on pizza, classes, a relationship, a group of friends, etc. we are absolutely running ourselves (mind, body, soul) into the ground. When comparing the college lifestyle to the routine I have come into now I can’t even recognize who I was before. I feel that in this place I am capable of “just living” as opposed to constantly distracting myself with tasks, people, and substances.

As I think to what the future holds, the changes that will take place as soon as I leave Sadhana, and then as soon as I leave India, I get so anxious and nervous. I fear that I will fall back into the person I was before I came here; not that this person was so terrible, she just feels so far away from where I have come. Though in ways I know that I must go back home and return to certain people and projects that are important to me, I strongly want to hold onto all that I have taken out of this experience here. I therefore must consider the parts of this lifestyle that has drawn me in and see what I can carry back to the states, rethinking and revamping the routines I have fallen into there.

The first thing to consider, as I always tend to do, is the way I eat. All of my research (through literature, internet, and real-life experience) has been based around the topic of food. In Auroville I have had the amazing opportunity to eat locally. This is something that had already become important to me in the states but that seemed harder to follow through with there (mostly due to the convenience of grocery stores that have absolutely everything). In Amherst MA it is quite feasible to continue eating local foods. I am therefore determined to refocus myself in terms of where the food I eat comes from, hitting up the farmers markets, looking into the community supported agriculture in my area, and simply reading labels.

I have also started to analyze what food I eat. Going to “Peas verses pills” yesterday, a workshop sure to convince its students to change their eating habits, I was nearly persuaded to give up meat and dairy. Coming straight to Sadhana, a project that only serves Vegan meals, I was given the perfect opportunity to practice. Here I have been doing fine on the diet, but I cannot say assuredly that I will stick to this veg-based diet. The workshop has certainly affected my mindset though, and I am committed to severely lessening the meat and dairy products in my diet. I feel comfortable with this commitment and feel now that I can find the support I need (mainly the recipes) to be mostly vegan/vegetarian. I see now that not only does it destroy the environment and is completely inhumane for animals, but it also affects my body and mind.

I have also been converted into a biker. At the beginning of the semester, each Living Routes student was given a bike to be the primary method of transportation. I fell in love with this bike immediately and it has since brought me on so many adventures and I share with it so many amazing memories. When I return home, I want to trade my casual car rides, well even my dependency on my car in general, in for a new road bike. Amherst has some great bike paths and though it is much hillier than Auroville, the town is completely bike-able.

Greeno, the co-op that I work for back at UMass, is a huge part of my life; I love cooking, I love being apart of a student-run business, and I love the sense of community it has brought me. It is the main place in which I have learned to work within a community setting. But there are aspects of that community that I would really like to change. Or at least, it is time that I find other communities that will accommodate.

The main problem I see around Greeno in the business sense is that there sometimes is such a focus on money. To be fair, it is mostly to do with keeping prices low for our student-customers. However, I sometimes find that we are supporting companies that are so not-co-op-mentality just so that we can get the best price. I really want this attitude to shift, and for my co-managers to find a way to sell our food at a fair price to students while also supporting projects that these customers would also want to be supporting. Something I would really love to look into is buying all of our supplies from other co-ops (before this trip I had no idea how many co-ops actually existed in the US!).

I want to surround myself with people who are inspired by the idea of “living simply”. Of course I want to be conscience of the way I use energy (I don’t really need a TV and I can certainly start using an energy jack which I can turn off when not in use) and I have always been pretty good about water use. But beyond that, I want to live in a way that thinks in terms of Permaculture: everything has a use. I want to work a garden that (in its own New England way) allows its plants to grow in one seemingly jumbled group.

Truly, I see myself coming back to this very spot: my head against a pillow, my back against the floor of the common hut in Sadhana Forest. Sure, I will bring what I have learned and who I have become back to the US for the next year. But I feel that this kind of lifestyle is exactly what I need right now. I think that if I can bring myself back to this kind of situation, I can really start to write a concrete plan of how I’m going to bring practices of sustainability back to the US.

For as long as I can remember, food has been quite significant for me. If you look at pictures of me about a year after coming to the states from Madagascar, this would become evident. Living overseas, treats like McDonalds, microwave popcorn, and ice cream cake were absolute novelties. So when my family moved back to the US, I indulged.

I am finally realizing how my tastes are changing the older I get. Had I been asked then, I would’ve assured that a cheeseburger and milkshake would always be calling my name. But sitting here this afternoon after a breakfast of locally-made peanut butter on fresh baked bread, a morning snack of beautifully ripe papayas pulled from trees of the farm I was working on, and a big lunch of hot virago (made from a grinder sitting not ten yards from me) with vegetable sauce and baked squash I recognize the shift that has occurred. I have become a lover of local food.

In more ways than one really; I love the taste just as much as I love the notion. I have come to understand my bad habits of eating are not only unhealthy, but disgustingly unsustainable. “The food we put into our mouths today travels an average of thirteen hundred miles from where it is produced, changing hands at least 6 times along the way” (Nabhan, 23). This is a big reason why I have elected to work on Discipline Farm. I love the idea of knowing exactly where my food is coming from. I love that my hands touch the same soil that grew the tree that hosted the papaya that I scrape into my mouth.

Auroville has presented me with this tremendous opportunity to eat food that I can trace. I work at the base of it all: the farm. All of the Auroville farms and bakeries and other food processing places take the food to Food Link, a food distributor. There it will be divided up and sent off to various markets around town. When I walk into Pour Tous or Ganesh Bakery or Hers I am assured I can buy food that has not traveled farther than 15 km. That is such a luxury.

Every morning I wake up to the sound of shuffling, my roommate coming in from her run. It is about 6:30 and I still have 25 minutes before I have to get up for a Tai Chi class. Lying in bed, the room brightens as the sun rises revealing the room to me. There are four white walls, three raised beds, a lockbox to make us feel secure in leaving our more expensive items in the room, and a long cupboard filled with books, clothes and notebooks. I suppose the room feels a bit cramped for what I am used to (a full-size bed in my own bedroom) but considering it is only temporary, I don’t have a problem with it. Here, this early in the morning, I can already recognize many ways in which my life is privileged, although I often let myself forget them.

The first sign of privilege comes not from waking up to my roommate who has just been on a run. In many places in the world, a woman would absolutely not have slipped on a pair of jogging shoes and gone out on her own to exercise; many cultures in the world do not consider women athletes whatsoever. But for many women on our trip, running is a recreational act that we as women feel that we can participate in. This may be seen as a mixed privilege because since being in India we have realized that running isn’t the safest of acts for us; we have gotten gawked at, mocked, chased after, and grabbed during the act. However, the fact that we have grown accustomed to feeling safe whilst running reveals our backgrounds, showing that life has been kind enough to give us the privilege of security.

Second, I have in much of my life enjoyed the privilege of time. Though I tend to keep my schedule busy in a way that might seem overloading, I have always had the privilege of choosing that schedule. At school, I choose to work, involve myself in numerous extracurricular activities, as well as being a full-time student. None of these things are absolutely necessary for me to do. If I chose not to work, I would have less spending money and I would have to be more particular about my choices on food and house shopping. But it would be completely feasible for my lifestyle considering the monetary support of my father. Here, I am certainly on a tight schedule and often feel weighed down by it. But it is a semester I chose to throw myself into, a program I excitedly signed up for. So even though a 6:30 wake-up is about an hour and a half earlier than I would have asked for back home, I know that I have had the privilege of choosing it for myself.

The room that I was put in at Mitra Guesthouse shows many aspects of my privilege. It is a clean, white, medium-sized room that I share with two other people. For the standards all three of us have been set because of our lives in the states, it is quite a small area to live in. But in comparison to many of the Indian families that have opened their homes to us during our trip, it is beyond comfortable. Our beds are raised as opposed to being thin mats or mattresses on the floor, our walls are thick and protective as opposed to some of the eroding mud huts we have seen and they bear large windows that let in cool breezes as well as give us beautiful views. The decorative wooden cupboards stretch across the length of the room, which is good because we have brought and accumulated enough goods to fill them up. The amount of “stuff” we have is incredible and beyond what many Indian families have to fill their whole houses with.

Finally is the fact that all of this, this schedule, this room situation, is all temporary. I have come halfway across the world, away from my house, my school, my family for three months in which I can experience a whole new lifestyle. Perhaps I needed a “new beginning”, or maybe just some space from my old beginning. I got it. I have the privilege of taking myself out of a situation if I need to. I can go on a vacation through Kerala. I can stay for three months in Auroville. I have been given the funds and support to take the time that I need to get out of UMass for a while and experience something new. But while I do this, the places I am coming to are full of people who don’t know the meaning of a day off of work let alone a month. Nor do they have any conceivable way of getting halfway across the world to spend four months. I think that the privileges of “starting new” and “getting away” are significant and often overlooked.

Honestly, I could go on picking apart my morning of waking up for many pages. I could dissect everything I own, everything I do, naming how each thing is fleeting and an unnecessary comfort. And this is only a quick snapshot of my day, before I even go out into the world where other people are. I think acknowledging privilege is an important step towards anti-racism and leveling the playing field. I allow too many days to go by without recognizing how lucky I am even though I have spent so much of my life in places where people are so poor and have so little.

Homeopathic Healing

I woke up this morning feeling quite ill; achy muscles, stuffy nose, exhausted. Of course, these symptoms are not unfamiliar to me. They are the feelings of a cold or a flu coming on, something that happens quite often to me back home in the states. If I were there, I would react by skipping class that day to either buy some over the counter drugs or to stop by the health clinic to visit a doctor who would inevitably hand me over a prescription. I have grown quite accustomed to allopathic health solutions, for the most part finding them efficient enough.

But in the past year or so my mind has been shifting and I have wondered what exactly I am doing to my body every time I find a problem and “fix it” with some drug, some prescription pill. I have begun to consider America’s health system and found many flaws there. Coming to Auroville, I have had the opportunity to further consider health systems. I have been rethinking the way that I treat my body and come into new ideas that might be more beneficial than the mindset adapted from working within American healthcare systems.

I signed up for the “Pease Verses Pills” workshop with very little intention; I had seen a signed posted and figured it would be good for me to participate in an Auroville class. But spending the day at this workshop I came to so many realizations; it really opened my mind to think about my health in different terms. Homeopathy is a type of healing that considers both the mind and the body. According to Nandita, the intelligent woman who led the workshop, homeopathy believes that health is being in the moment both physically and mentally. This means that one can adjust to their environment (i.e.: sweating when its hot, shivering when its cold, smiling when you feel happy, etc.). In order to be healthy, one must be very considerate of oneself. Instead of relying on someone or something else to take care of you (going to a doctor, popping a couple pills), one must be aware of how they are feeling and think about what could be causing the problem. Each individual is responsible for their illness and is capable of healing themselves.

As opposed to conventional medicine which seeks out the individual problem and goes to the source (fixing the headache or the sore stomach with a drug that will react directly to that point) homeopathy tries to understand the whole picture. Conventional medicine sees the body as a machine; an illness is a broken piece that can be tinkered with and fixed. Nandita preached a more holistic version of healing where one tries to understand why a patient is weak so that they can recover and become strong again. As opposed to seeing sickness as something that is broken, consider what the body is trying to tell you.

Sickness is an act of self preservation. The body has many ways of translating how its doing to you: symptoms, sensations, feelings, alterations in functions, and intuition. Each individual must therefore be awake to what their body is trying to tell them. When something goes wrong, you as an individual must not be treating yourself right. How is your body feeling? What has brought your body to feel this way? Besides the concentrated area of infection, is anything else in you feeling off? These are some of the questions an individual can ask themselves in order to start processing their illness homeopathically.

These are therefore the questions I ask myself today as I am forced to lay sick in bed. Sure, I could take some fever-reducing pills, some sinus medicine and perhaps I’d feel much better. But that would be ignoring the signals that my body is trying to send me. Maybe it is because I have been moving so much, between traveling and adventuring through Hampi these last couple of days. Maybe its because I have been feeling sad and anxious about the end of the program, about leaving friends, India, Alex, yet have been pulling on a happy face because I don’t want to think about it. There are many reasons that I could have fallen ill today. Though I have not trained myself well enough to understand what my body is trying to tell me, I am at least starting to think more homeopathically.

“Our Natural Love for Life Sustains Life”

It has almost become cliché to exclaim that I feel connected to the world, the universe(!). Whilst walking through nature, in solitutde, the sounds, smells, and sight come out strongly and seem t resonate with the mind, body, feelings. As I walk through nature, I am at my best to appreciate anything. I can stop whenever a patch of sun breaks through the trees, enjoying its warmth on my face. I can step lightly, gently crunching leaves under my feet, or sprint steadily, disrupting the calmness around me. Nature has always allowed me to feel at my best.

It therefore makes plenty of sense that it is biologically inserted in me to feel connected or “deeply afficilated” with nature. I have a constant pull to surround myself in its elements.

Food:

Though humans are becoming accustomed to heavily processed food, I think it is in our nature to crave real, raw, untampered with food. My diet since being in India has shifted to be much more organic; I can feel both physically and mentally the affects of this. I have never felt so healthy, awake, and present. Though something in our minds tells us to crave oily, fatty, junk food, I think the more genuine side is telling us the truth.

Animals:

I have grown up surrounded by animals, both domestic and wild. It is easy for me to express my sense of loyalty for domestic pets because I was raised on the attitude that they are my family members. I grant them personalities and put energy into keeping them well. But it reaches beyond animals that I have such a relationship with. It is such an instincitive feeling to want to help any suffering life. Whether it is a trapped mouse that you had set to “get rid of” or a lion struggling with a fractiure paw, there is a gasp of air and a reaction of wanting to help. I think that we all recognize what it means to feel vulnerable to life and therefore respond to noticising in other forms of life.

Plants:

I think we have a similar response to plant life. Seeing a suffering tree, an infested flower makes me consider the life of the plant; what brought it to this stuggle? It is naturally decomposing or has something or someone forced it into this state of despair? I think that we can be as protective of our plant life as we are with our human relations but we don’t allow ourselves to be. It is so easy to objectify plants, using them for our benefits without considering their life lines. Without considering their need to be replenished.

In fact, it feels that that is what we are constantly doing: objectifying nature and ignoring its life lines. I see it constantly. People trashing the ground, causing carbon and not replanting trees, making food that no longer resembles the part of nature that it came from. We let ourselves become disassociated with a world that allows us the most genuine health and happiness. I think this is why so much appears to be askew in our world. We are ignoring “Biophilia”, forgetting to give in to our attritions. Love for the natural world. Because of this, we are not sustaining the world we live in. We are running out of recourses, or diversity, or species, overcrowding our land with unhealthy people. But if we listen to our instincts, we can find that “our natural love for live (can) help sustain life”.

01 February 2008

Today I am physically exhausted. After two days of hard gardening, a night of
African dance class, a night of Capuera class, a week of Tai Chi and many nights
of rustled sleep, I feel that I have reached some sort of peak. The problem is
that I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to miss anything; I don’t want to pull
myself away.
It looks like we are actually going to start the semester now. A week of
community building was more than enough for us and it is exciting to start
focusing in. I somewhat reluctantly put myself in a base group focused on the
“social” aspect of our studies. Though social makes sense for what I have been
studying at university, I had wanted to force myself another way for this
semester. Specifically, I have been interested in learning more about the
ecological sides of Auroville. However, in coming together with the other five
in my base group I realize how much I can get out of learning with them.
Another part of our semester is that we all have a “service learning” project,
which is an internship of our choice. There are so many cool things I can do
but I’m focusing in on farms. I’m looking into working on Fertility Farm, the
Healing farm, or the Buddhist Garden. However, I also might slither my way into
an internship at the Pony Farm. No, seriously. If I don’t actually work with
the horses I am going to volunteer on my time off to work there and hopefully on
Sundays do the therapeutic riding with handicap children.
I guess I’m getting overwhelmed by how much I want to do here. So many amazing
classes and workshops, activities that I can be a part of…and that I want to be.
However, I am caught in this feeling of “well if not now, when else?”. I was
so proud of myself for going to the African dance class because it truly is
something I’ve always wanted to do but just felt so incredibly intimidated. Now
I feel very committed to working at it, getting better. One of these days I’ll
be able to toss my body indiscriminately around. And hte capeura class was
really cool too. it is a mix of tai chi moves, but sped up to African dance
music; its like African dance-fighting. I'm better at that than at african
dance so far.
We are also chanting and meditating a lot. I love the chanting though I'm not
so good at the meditating part. Auroville is by rule not a religious place but
has a huge emphasis on spirituality, evolving spirituality. So its been really
great for me to delve into that stuff too.