India and change: Walking Barefoot through Life's Lessons

Discover the transformative power of stepping off the beaten path as I recount my enriching travels through India's spiritual heartland, Tamil Nadu. Join me in exploring how this journey offered more than just sights and sounds—it provided profound lessons in embracing uniqueness amidst unfamiliar surroundings. Feel the pulse of Bhakti yoga and the grace found in temple rituals, while also reflecting on newfound appreciations for everyday freedoms. This episode marks a fresh chapter as I return to share these insights with you, inviting you to see the world through a lens of gratitude and wonder.

Venture with me into the contrasts of life's harsh realities and awe-inspiring beauty, experienced during a night pilgrimage near Shiva's mountain. Walk barefoot with me along chaotic roads, face fears, and witness both the struggles and splendor of life firsthand. From nostalgic visits to Kovalam  Beach to the calming practice of water gazing meditation, this episode invites you to embrace life's unfolding without labels. Reflect on the lessons life offers daily as we draw parallels between the fluidity of water and our own journeys. Plus, explore how online energy healing sessions can further nourish your spirit, helping you find balance and tranquility.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Lessons From Off the Beaten Track
• 9:12 Lessons Learned Through Life's Challenges
• 20:19 The Power of Life's Water

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:39

So welcome, dear listeners, and we are now at the start of February and I have returned from my travels. If my voice sounds slightly croaky, I seem to have picked up some plane flu on the way. I'm feeling better than I was yesterday, but I really wanted to share a podcast of my adventures and thank you for being so patient whilst I wasn't on air for the last three, four weeks. But I've returned from my travels and it was an experience. At times it was dangerous, at times it was joyful and at times it was beautiful. It was tough loving all the emotions and feelings together. I felt really healthy, I got really sick, it was kind of all things and more, and I have returned feeling like I can't really describe how I feel.

Speaker 1: 1:40

It's been over 20 years since I made a similar journey, but this journey was a bit different because the place that we went or the places, rather, that we went was so off the beaten track and I um can't really put it into words, but I'm gonna do my best because this is a podcast. But firstly, I just wonder how you've all been and how your January has been as we now get into February and for some people the earth starts to warm up a bit or the first signs of spring start to emerge, depending on which part of the world you live in. If not, it will be the first signs of autumn. Either way, it's a time of great change, and I would say that the Kapha period, which is generally where I live from January through to spring, is a very big time of change because it can a bit like my journey that I've just been on, have everything at once. So have one experience maybe sunshine one day and the next day it feels completely different, whereas on my trip I had the feeling of joy one day and the next day the feeling of fear. And how does one navigate through that at the same time as having compassion for oneself, which is always an important factor in all of this and to take the trials and tribulations of life, whereas when one's been on an experience that's different. To come back into the world and navigate through it when you've got you can't do something different and then see things with the same lens. In my experience, that's quite a difficult or impossible thing to do. It's not what I feel we're meant to do either when we've got a fresh perspective on life.

Speaker 1: 3:41

And one of the things I really enjoyed is when I actually came back and I appreciated all the freedoms and joys that I overlooked in my everyday life, that I have here, and the autonomy that I overlooked. But when we're traveling, we don have the the normal autonomy that we have when we're at home, where it is all new and everything's so different and we have to put a lot of trust into um other people as well as ourselves, which is something that may or may not come to you naturally and yeah. So I thought I would do a series of weeks where we're going to talk about the lessons I learned from India, and I've also got three amazing guests that are lined up, so I am going to have guests again. As you know, I lost some relatives and I actually lost someone who's really dear to me just before I went on my trip to India, which was very sad, but that is life as well, unfortunately, but I digress a bit, but I feel that I'm ready now to have guests on the show again, as well as doing self-hosted ones. So, lessons from India.

Speaker 1: 5:00

So one of the biggest lessons that I learned was the power to be seen as we went on a off the beaten track spiritual tour of the temples in Tamil Nadu. So as we did this navigation through rural parts of Tamil Nadu and my partner was reconnecting with um, his ancestors and the people, I had like a mixed reception from people. They were either nice to me and, um, the children like were fascinated and they would like say hello and um, this nice lady asked if she could take my photograph, but then there were some times when people weren't so nice to me and I couldn't be seen from the judgment of what I looked like. I was very respectful when I went into the temples and I do follow spiritual practices and, um, there was only one temple that actually turned me away. They were. The rest of the temples were very kind and open and it was a bit awkward sometimes queuing and having everybody stare at me, but then the lesson I learned from it was like you know what, the power to be seen and just be yourself, and and so what if I? What if I stood out, and and and so what? People were looking at me and and maybe they're just looking out of curiosity and you know what. So be it. But for a bit of time it felt a bit strange when I went into restaurants, um, because I wasn't fairly rural places and people would just stop eating for a minute, look and then go back to their eating. And my partner pointed out I was experiencing what he had to experience most of his life in different places. And, yeah, it was definitely eye-opening experience.

Speaker 1: 7:08

And the other lesson that I want to share today that I learned was the power of kind of grace and faith and the, the bhakti, um, devotional yoga experience, the, the bhakti, the devotion that I saw, um, all in the temples and and people would queue for hours just to stay at these deities and and they were beautiful, of course, but at first I kind of didn't fully appreciate it. And then some places they were just rushy through because there was so many people. But then there was one place and I think it was Durga, and I got to stare at the Durga statue for a bit of time and I just felt this overwhelming or beautiful sense of love and presence and then it kind of I got why the people did it and and the devotion and the beauty, the beauty of it. That's not to say that I enjoyed going to all the temples um, I didn't. Some of them I did. I really found the, the Babaji place that we went to in the countryside beautiful, and there was a really nice man there who had spent time in the UK and um, I went to. I went to this other small temple as well, which is the saint. There's a saint that has lots of light and, um, and he, the priest there also gave me some advice and I found that really moving and they were so there was real kindness and I was in this temple and I wasn't feel comfortable and this lady put a hand on my back just to make me feel um at ease and um, I saw her when it came out and we just like smiled at each other and that was really beautiful. So there's really beautiful moments.

Speaker 1: 9:12

But then there was like hard moments. Like we're doing a night pilgrimage around the city at the base of Shiva's Shiva's mountain, and the road felt dirty and dusty and I had like really sore feet, because I'm one of these people that likes to have my shoes on like all the time, apart from in the summer where I walk on the grass, but generally I have my shoes on all the time and they didn't really get on too well with the shoes. I tried various slip-on shoes and my feet got really cut and then there was mosquitoes and I'd forgotten to take my must, bring some mosquito or rather malaria stuff, and I got really into the mind thinking that I was going to die either from, like the germs going into the cuts in my feet or I was going to get malaria or something like that. And it was quite tough. Um, there was other people doing the tour but it was night time and there was there was people like sleeping on the on the streets and there's lots of wild dogs. And then I saw, like this, this um baby puppy that was dead curled up, which was quite sad. And then I saw like a cow and the owners for some reason had put like um limbs of some dead animal over the top of this, these, these cows which should have painted that. I didn't fully understand that and I think sometimes questions are best not asked.

Speaker 1: 10:49

Um, and then you're walking along and it was kind of late, and there was this child that was walking along a tightrope, guessing at the parents request like for money, and again I was thinking I'm not gonna judge, and then part of me thought that child should be in bed, but then I thought who am I to kind of dictate or decide what, what is right and wrong in this situation. And then we walked past, like this great, big fenced area. It reminded me a bit like Jurassic Park movie and it had a picture of elephants in it and they said, please keep out, entry at your own risk. This is our terrain. And I walked past this for quite some time and there was like what did I see? It was huge, absolutely huge. It looked like a wild boar, but it was so much bigger it didn't see me, but for a moment we were kind of walking along together, him or her, from inside this fenced area which was protecting wildlife, me on the other side, and it was such a gift to see it, such a majestic creature Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have liked to be right next to it because I'm not stupid, but it was really beautiful. And then I also got to see these beautiful deers, and these deers were different to the ones you get in the UK. They had really big kind of ears and they'd come to the edge and my theory was that perhaps these creatures would come right close to the fence because they knew, like their predators wouldn't come that close because of, like humans being on the other side. That was my theory anyway.

Speaker 1: 12:35

So I experienced so much beauty but then pain, like people sleeping on the streets, um, like animals foraging through piles of rubbish, um, beautiful glasses, or rather, um, it was like fresh sugarcane juice which you could have, and then my partner, who's always eaten nuts, tried some nuts and then he had like an allergy reaction to that, and so, as you can see, there was bits where it was kind of beautiful, but then there was bits that were like dangerous as well, and there was one time there was only one time that I didn't feel safe, and so I decided to stay in the hotel, but it was a number of factors. It was also the same day as a funeral of a loved one, and this town felt a lot harsher than the others, but either it was harsher or it was the lens that I was perceiving it, but generally, um, I got on with it all and and um, yeah, and then what was so beautiful was that I got to um, I'll tell you more about this tour in the podcast, but just to say that at the end of the tour, I got to go to Covilland Beach, and I hadn't been there for 21 years and I used to. When I was a yoga student, I used to get one day a week off from the ashram and we would travel there in a taxi and sit on the beach and study, and it would be like heaven. Because every week I'll be thinking, oh, what food can I have? That isn't the ashram food. But my stomach had shrank so much that I'd only ever managed one meal on that beach. But I tell you what that would be like, the the highlight of my week, um, and really made me help appreciate things. And I went there and it changed a bit. Like they built a bit of a promenade, just a small one, and it had changed a bit, but it still kind of had that kind of essence. There was more tourists there but it still had regained its charm. When we went there was hardly anyone there and we just used to sit near the fishing boats when they were like on the sand and and study there and. But now there was more tourists, but it was. It was really nice to kind of go back and revisit that.

Speaker 1: 14:55

So the purpose of this podcast was, and why I'm sharing this story, is to show that there's one can experience a whole load of things and one can get hung up with labelness. Is I like this? I don't like this, and the biggest lesson I learned was to experience life as it unfolded, which wasn't always easy because, again, we like to label things, but that's what I found really helped me. So I just wonder is there anything that you can do this week where you can just maybe have a few minutes each day and just either review your day or at the end of the day, or review your day the next morning, um, the previous day, the next morning and just think what, what was it that? What was the lesson that I learned from allowing myself? So what was the lesson that I learned from allowing myself to experience so many things in so many ways?

Speaker 1: 15:55

And for today's meditation, let's have a glass of water in front of us. Top tips for the meditation is either sit nice and cross-legged on the floor with a nice straight back always nice to sit on a block or a cushion, or that's not available for you. You sit in a chair with the back nice and straight. The important thing is you're not slouching, and if you're doing something that requires a little concentration, all you need to do is just pause this and you can reconvene the meditation at a time that is good for you. If you're doing the meditation, let's begin. So for today's meditation, you'll just need a glass of water in front of us. So let's begin.

Speaker 1: 16:43

So, as you sit up, have this water in front of you at a level that you can see with your eyes, either straight ahead on a table or if you're looking down, then you're looking down, but just have that glass of water there and we're just going to inhale and we're going to exhale and we're just going to look at that glass of water. Perhaps it doesn't matter how far you filled it up, but just observe without judgment. What is the texture like of this water? Is it still? Is there any odd bubble that happens in it? Or perhaps it's completely still? Is this water clear or is it slightly murky? How does it sit within the container? How does it sit?

Speaker 1: 17:46

So this water, as you stare at it, can represent the present moment. Sometimes we feel that things don't change or they become stagnant, but if we just observe the water a bit more, you will see that there is life within it. You will see that there is life within it Water, the life force that nourishes us so much, so calmly and so deeply, why this can be a symbol for life. Things can be still or appear to be still, but there's still life unfolding within that glass. So we're just going to look at this glass for a few more minutes. Just try and observe the entirety of this glass. So I'm going to go ahead and get the camera out of the way. So now just gently tip the glass a little bit and see how life can move.

Speaker 1: 20:19

For this may seem like an ordinary glass of water, but if you were to boil it, it would make steam. If you were to freeze the water in an ice cube tray, it would make ice. If it's fresh drinking water and you were to drink it, it would nourish your being. You can wash with the water. The water is a life force, a bit like your everyday life. So come back to this water gazing meditation whenever you want to experience with calmness the entirety of life. So thank you for listening and I'll speak to you very soon. And, as always, if you would like an online energy healing, then do reach out to us.