aftermath of the first trip to India -- exhaustion.
well -- so. my adventures over Christmas 1999 and the changing of the millenium, in India, were full of the exotic, the unexpected, and the miraculous. in total, I spent about one month in Penukonda, and I knew that it was a month like no other: it had changed my life, irrevocably.
it wasn't just learning about (by being thrown into) a new culture. it wasn't just about wearing foreign clothing (we had to wear only traditional, conservative Indian clothing at the ashram, meaning saris and punjabi suits for the women) although the daily costume effect was kind of fun in a theatrical way. it wasn't about being exposed to an intoxicating degree of divine energy, and recognizing that I was more interested in spirituality than in just about anything else...
the sum total of that month (before I really even recognized it) was that a huge shift, internally, in me had transpired, through being exposed to the miraculous in such a hands-on way. through those miracles, a lot of healing had occurred in my heart -- only I didn't really know it in the moment.
I went back to California, somehow thinking that I could pick up the familiar threads of my life before that first visit to India -- and to the contrary, I was completely, utterly, totally, fully, impossibly exhausted.
upon returning to my little cottage in the redwood forest of the Santa Cruz mountains, I found that instead of having a habitually unlimited energy to maintain the rigors of my social life, my music project (in a recording studio), my professional life, and so on... I could eat, sleep, work (doing healing) and sleep. physically, I was shaky, almost feeble, and spent.
something in me then faintly understood that this was a result of having been at the ashram in Penukonda for a month, having received a lot of personal attention from Kaleshwara himself, and thus a lot of deep, deep healing.
it was like the rest that the body needs to take after, say, surgery -- a period of adjustment and integration.
a normal person in normal circumstances might have easily assumed they were suffering some mysterious condition like Barr-Epstein or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
fortunately, by then I was anything but normal and recognized it as something else, and just went with it. something like enjoying the calm after the storm.
these days, in India, it's such a common experience that my colleagues and I jokingly refer to it as 'supernatural fatigue.'
that first bout lasted for about four months, totally. going through that period of forced rest, although a little frustrating on one hand, was a kind of relief: I hadn't fully realized how frantic and frenzied my life was, until I took a break from it.
it wasn't just learning about (by being thrown into) a new culture. it wasn't just about wearing foreign clothing (we had to wear only traditional, conservative Indian clothing at the ashram, meaning saris and punjabi suits for the women) although the daily costume effect was kind of fun in a theatrical way. it wasn't about being exposed to an intoxicating degree of divine energy, and recognizing that I was more interested in spirituality than in just about anything else...
the sum total of that month (before I really even recognized it) was that a huge shift, internally, in me had transpired, through being exposed to the miraculous in such a hands-on way. through those miracles, a lot of healing had occurred in my heart -- only I didn't really know it in the moment.
I went back to California, somehow thinking that I could pick up the familiar threads of my life before that first visit to India -- and to the contrary, I was completely, utterly, totally, fully, impossibly exhausted.
upon returning to my little cottage in the redwood forest of the Santa Cruz mountains, I found that instead of having a habitually unlimited energy to maintain the rigors of my social life, my music project (in a recording studio), my professional life, and so on... I could eat, sleep, work (doing healing) and sleep. physically, I was shaky, almost feeble, and spent.
something in me then faintly understood that this was a result of having been at the ashram in Penukonda for a month, having received a lot of personal attention from Kaleshwara himself, and thus a lot of deep, deep healing.
it was like the rest that the body needs to take after, say, surgery -- a period of adjustment and integration.
a normal person in normal circumstances might have easily assumed they were suffering some mysterious condition like Barr-Epstein or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
fortunately, by then I was anything but normal and recognized it as something else, and just went with it. something like enjoying the calm after the storm.
these days, in India, it's such a common experience that my colleagues and I jokingly refer to it as 'supernatural fatigue.'
that first bout lasted for about four months, totally. going through that period of forced rest, although a little frustrating on one hand, was a kind of relief: I hadn't fully realized how frantic and frenzied my life was, until I took a break from it.
posted by Alx Uttermann @ 3:19 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home