Holy Sh*t!
Our OCD-curing intensive month in India after one year of improvised world wandering.
India: a land of ancient mysteries, spiritual discovery, overpopulation, curry, rice, piles of rice, yoga, cows and filth. All kinds of filth. I had always been drawn to Mother India, though all of what I knew about it before going I learned from an undergraduate course on the films of Satyajit Ray, the Wes Anderson film the Darjeeling Limited, and because an ex took up a Hindu path and we did puja (ceremonial prayer offering) in our home twice daily. I heard that it was pretty dirty, but I figured I would get used to it and just do what the locals do. I needed the exposure so I could learn not to be paranoid about “germs.”
I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when I was seven because I was washing my hands until they were red and raw. Bored and under-stimulated by the conventional school system, in my teens I was prescribed some drug for anxiety. Now I know that I just began to feel restless and trapped in a formulaic existence to which I refused to conform. The drug took away all my feelings so I could passionlessly perform responsibilities without the distraction of creative urges. My life was so controlled and fear-driven and I didn’t even realize it. I couldn’t even leave the house without makeup.
Then in my late twenties I discovered alternative medicine and by some miracle began to heal myself. I studied improv to learn that even imperfection can be perfection. This is where I met Jesse. He lived in an apartment with just a mattress on the floor and a spork and lightsaber chopsticks in the kitchen. The only furniture I brought was an IBM Selectric typewriter. Finally I had the space to write without distraction. But even that wasn’t enough. Still I agonized over every detail of life, no less my writing. I had been stuck for too long and we were both ready for an adventure.
When we left Toronto with only what we could carry, our only plan was to go West.
Now I don’t even wear makeup. The state of perpetual travel necessitates pure freedom and spontaneity. It’s challenging but I am learning so much. Being with one person at all times teaches you how to be selfless. Carrying all you own teaches you to be practical. Combine that with a meditation course, the first thing we did when we arrived in India, and you have a perfect storm of self-healing, the kind that Western medicine just doesn’t facilitate or even tell you is popsicle.
As we moved West through Asia, the dirt got thicker until finally my face and nostrils were coated with a mysterious black film that not even soap or the waist height taps could neutralize. But I survived. I even started to like it.
India was the final chapter in the process of eradicating my contamination fears. The whole experience of travelling non-stop for one year sure does teach you how to make the best out of literally any situation. This is the foundation of Lifeprov, the formal name we have given to this healing method, deliberately relinquishing control in order to actually live life, essentially turning our conscious non-planning into an aesthetic choice. This allows us to encounter nature in interesting ways and teaches me to be less of a control-freak, and maybe even a better improvisor. Whenever we hit the trail with all our possessions on our backs, the thrilling momentum of moving towards the unknown takes hold. If public transit isn’t an option, we insist on walking until we find a place we want to “camp” and lock up our packs.
We stick out like sore thumbs amidst throngs of Indians, whether wearing our packs or not. Some approach us to get “one snap” like we’re celebrities. Near train stations, strange men who barely speak English relentlessly accost you to get into their tuk-tuks (covered attachments to motorcycles that function like taxis), or bicycle rickshaws, or to simply allow them to follow you around telling you how to spend your money, insisting that they don’t actually want any of it themselves. One day I just gave up trying to convince a driver that we just LIKE to walk and sat down and started singing “Hare Krishna” until he left.
There is every kind of feces peppering the roads we share with motorists basically leaning on their horns at all times and the animals who roam free amidst piles of garbage. With no formal receptacles, you just throw everything wherever. I had been doing a pretty good job of not stepping in anything until our first evening in the dark alleyways of Varanasi, where our adventure culminated, as the density of the dirt intensified and I gave up any resistance to the living conditions, embracing this way of life, somehow closer to nature even amidst the most repugnant of crimes against Mother Earth, encountering the disaster without contributing to it. You do eventually have to throw stuff in one of the piles, because those ARE the garbage receptacles. As we began with the meditation retreat, where we became vegetarian and learned to wash underwear twice daily by hand, this transition was gradual. Though I didn’t even realize it at the time, our second destination was probably one of the most pristine places in India.
We departed from the Vipassana meditation center in Chennai with a group of people who were heading to Auroville, probably the one place in India we knew we wanted to spend the most time. Crammed on a bus for a few hours in a blissed-out eye-gazing stupor having been reunited after the 10 day ordeal on a high that felt like total Enlightenment, I knew maintaining that sense would be a lot of work but that Auroville and India was the perfect place to learn to do it. Nihal, a dark-eyed Turkish sprite, had been living there for many months volunteering with handicapped children and living at “Aspiration Community,” one of the guest houses where short term visitors could stay and eat meals alongside the permanent community that ran the place. For $20/day we would get three meals and our own experimental domicile.
Auroville is highly charged. Eager to meditate twice daily with all the graduates of the program, we ended up only having a few good meditation sessions with our Vipassana friends. Yet opportunities for solace abound. We sometimes meditated in our room. I would tag it onto my yoga practice. It was like we were unknowingly whipped into a kind of rhythm that is the very pulse of India, with Auroville at the heart of all that is good. The magical utopian community runs with no rules, no real police and no formal religion, yet there is a palpable spirituality that is enmeshed in its very design. It operates on a four point charter:
1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
We rented bikes from the Aspiration manager and pedaled our way through the spiral streets of its galactic geography, hoping to penetrate it just by riding up to the many communities with names like “Certitude,” “Discipline,” and “Surrender,” but as it was low season, not many people were around. Additionally, in order to integrate into one of these communities, we learned, at least one month commitment is required. If it weren’t for this round-the-world ticket which you have to use in a year and which takes us from one place to another in what is starting to feel like light speed we would probably have ended up taking several lifetimes to make our way around this planet. But we were not giving up so easily. Riding bikes in spirals through the mostly man-made permaculture forest of Auroville is actually a perfectly wondrous way to spend one’s days even if it relegated us to the lowly status of mere visitors.
Of course once we gave up trying to find interesting things, they started to reveal themselves to us. Sadhana Forest is an amazing organization founded simply on the act of planting trees. It is a totally Vegan permaculture project where you can volunteer for a minimum of two weeks, unless you are over forty or have kids. They host a weekly movie night when they give a tour, invite you to bathe in a mud puddle, feed you an amazing meal and show you a weird conscious movie. We watched the Animal Communicator, about a woman who spends extensive periods in communion with nature and so has developed the ability to read animals’ minds.
We ate an amazing meal at the Solar Kitchen, an experiment in using the sun to cook. But unfortunately the meal we ate was made using gas burners that day.
At the center is the Matrimandir, a geodesic globe surrounded by amazing architectural features like fountains and a lotus-bud shaped urn that was filled with dirt representing each country of the world and each province of India at its ceremonial inauguration. While visiting this whole “Peace” area, you are required to maintain silence, and of course no cameras are allowed. Just to get to the grounds is an elaborate procedure. You first make an appointment to view them from afar. Then you make an appointment to enter the Matrimandir’s inner sanctum with a group the following day.
As you enter the building you are bathed in serenely dim light. Everything is white. Directed by floating humans to put on white socks, you ascend spiral ramps in a queue to the inner chamber. This room, expressly designed to “help one find one’s consciousness,” is breathtaking. If the experience of sitting for about a half hour around the largest optically-perfect glass globe in the world with a single ray of sunlight perfectly directed on it from above does not satisfy your spiritual needs you can make an appointment for the next day. On this occasion you have graduated to a higher-status concentrator (not meditator), and are given the opportunity to select one of the “petal” chambers beneath the main structure of the globe in which to concentrate further for another hour. We underwent this experience twice meditating in the rooms for “Graditude,” chosen by Jesse simply because it was Green, and “Progress.”
The Auroville drinking water is miraculous. It is treated using a dynamization system that I really don’t understand, but it is delicious. We gathered a bunch of it before departing from “Magic House,” a micro-nation for which we became Stewards simply by reading their legislation. We spent our last night there on its roof under the stars, prepared to confront less savory water sources with equanimity and an emergency supply in our Platypus water bladder.
We walked out of Auroville and were quickly whisked away by train, a very special ordeal that I came to relish. Similar to being in jail, except with your real estate limited only to the size of a cot, sleeper class became our comfort zone as we thrust ourselves between cities. We booked every ticket pretty much the same day, and managed to reserve spots, albeit, not in the highly coveted A/C class which we sampled only once and found way too cold. Our average train ride was 12 hours, the longest being from Chennai to New Delhi, two days. Since we didn’t get that ticket early enough, we were sent to General Seating, where people are packed in, without A/C of course, some standing with their luggage, ready to spend two days in a very special wrung of hell. We couldn’t even fit in there, so nonchalantly sat in Sleeper class and quickly befriended a strange Punjabi Jesus Pastor who sold us his seat. I’m not sure where he sat, but we also upgraded with the Coach Conductor and were lucky enough to share one cot near the ceiling and the fans where we would spend two days reading, sleeping, being uncomfortably stared at by married men travelling with babies and positioning themselves so that you remain in their eye-line, and sampling all the food served in a steady stream of hollers.
We arrived in Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. This is where I would celebrate my birthday. Since I quickly realized that by wearing shorts I am basically naked by Indian standards, it seemed the kimono I was given in a tea ceremony class in Tokyo was my only appropriate garment. The guy from our hotel who took us around was pretty hellbent on seeing my Indian makeover happen, so my request for Mehndi naturally evolved into our eating lunch at his mother’s house and then my being draped with a blue sari. I was magically transformed.
Even though I was still slightly disturbed about the dirt, the strange men, and everyone trying to take our money, I used my Vipassana training to detach and just be. People would ask if I was Indian, and if people weren’t already asking for our photos enough, they were now.
I was surprised later on in the hotel with a cake, and walked the streets in my sari barefoot, serving pieces to whoever was around.
The obvious final step in my transformation was bathing in the Ganges, the receptacle for the dead bodies of pregnant women, handicapped children, and lepers, and the ashes of everyone else, including George Harrison. All I knew about Varanasi is that it’s the most holy city in India, where tons of people are cremated and sometimes even eaten. Also tons of bhang is drunk, a delicious weed concoction I used to make with my Hindu ex, not to mention extensive use of cannabis in all forms for spiritual purposes. But that’s not what I was looking for, at least not by the time we actually got there. I don’t think I was looking for anything in particular, I was just ready to go.
I sat on the bank of the Ganges next to a sadhu/guru waiting for puja to start while being harassed by drug dealers who just don’t take “no” for an answer. It was like they couldn’t understand why we didn’t want to get fucked right up. “You take some opium then go into the room with your husband! Ooohhh! Like flying to the moon! You go for very long time.” Like we looked like we needed it or something. I took a hit from the weird pipe the spirit leader was casually having passed around, trying to be demure about the sanctity of the whole situation while really just wanting to tell people that it’s inappropriate to be selling things at a time like this! That’s just what I did at Fatehpur Sikri outside Agra, supposedly a holy site that has been turned into a Muslim tourist trap. I felt like Jesus storming the temple telling sales-harassers with a smile, “I won’t give you money because money is evil!” But at the Ganges I was exhausted and didn’t want to cause a stir. I took a stance of passive resistance, offering my subtle wisdom until they went away.
Several puja ceremonies were going on. Bells are wrung, food offerings made, and parsaud (food offering you get to eat) is handed out to anyone nearby. We continued walking south on the banks of Mother Ganges to the main puja where hundreds of devotees gathered. I hadn’t decided if I wanted to touch the water, still concerned even about perpetuating my Obsessive Compulsive superstitious magical thinking and in turn contracting some life-threatening illness. Some people were swimming in it, others were burning near it under piles of logs, carried there under adorned silks to be cleansed in ritual cremation. I observed with detached fascination, one part of me feeling like I’m still pure Hindu at heart, another feeling like any religious practice is a waste of human energy. One thing’s for sure: it was mindblowing.
We were carrying two small flower arrangements with candles that you make wishes with and send into the waters that two very aggressive five-year-old saleswomen managed to get us to buy on our arrival the first day in Varanasi, when we first approached the waters. Instructed not to go near the water with shoes on Jesse put his in as we struggled to light our candles, someone assisting us. I hesitated but put my hands in. When a Hindu woman peer-pressured me by demonstrating the proper way to encounter the holy water: scooping some up and shaking it off briskly over your head, we took turns approaching and essentially washing our hair with the water, letting it drip into our eyes and ears. I let go of any fear.
Something definitely happened. I don’t believe in magic (anymore — at least not in the OCD magical thinking sense) but it’s been a week and there has been a definite change in me. They say Mother Ganges cleanses you of all sin. Now I don’t even know what sin is. But maybe it’s not just the water that did this to me. After the ritual bathing we pressed through the crowds and winding streets of course without a map or phone, trusting only our instincts and the kindness of strangers with the legendary Blue Lassi Shop on our radars. We had tried a non-bhang concoction there which had blown our minds enough already, and easily learned online that this is the place to have bhang if you ask, but to be careful, some experiences can be outright terrifying leaving you disoriented and whacked out. The stuff is potent to the inexperienced.
Of course we’re not inexperienced. I didn’t even realize it at the time but I had been preparing for this process of purification for years. We went for “Medium” level strength. Before I knew it we were befriending the shopkeeper, who we learned works with his brothers for his dad, the business started over 70 years ago. The walls are lined with the passport photos and creative contributions of foreign visitors leaving love on the blue walls. Our friend took photos of me in my blue sari because I matched. I felt like the shop’s mascot. He took us for chapati in a tiny shop where the power briefly went out. I was looking forward to eating by candlelight in the tiny ten by ten room crammed next to military personnel carrying machine guns, engaged in my own internal battles with intrusive thoughts while demonstrating with ease how I had become half Japanese and half Indian by using chopsticks in my right hand and eating with my fingers with my left hand.
This night and so many others of the past year will be with me for the rest of my life. I am constantly making sense of it through writing, disseminating my experiences to all the friends and family I miss so much every day who want to know what the hell we are up to, running offline and into the wild with just our backpacks, getting married in Las Vegas, auto-didactically studying sustainability and spiritual science and learning to say “Yes, and…” to every offer the universe gives us.
And so this is how I’ve turned thirty-one.
The few Western travellers we did meet in India all were so in love with it, some have been travelling there for years there is so much to see. They all gave us invaluable advice. Writing this now I already yearn to go back, even despite the dirt, the shit, the crooks and the spooks. It might not even make sense but there is a purity even in the dankest of corners.
