I am Listening

Rashmi was part of the eighth Swadharma program conducted in January 2020. After the program, she moved back to her home town and started working on her Ikigai, she is an entrepreneurial educator and has started her venture Knowledge Plus Primary. Simultaneously, Rashmi is exploring and reconnecting with her hobbies, painting, and dancing. This is her story:

Journal writing is a topic that is a part of the curriculum for 6th to 10th graders. In it, oddly enough, a student is marked on how well s/he describes his feelings around a given topic, say, for example, examinations. Many teachers and I were one of them, also train the students how not to write their absolute authentic feelings and put down a ‘made up’ content which would yield higher grades. I was not only one of these teachers, but also a very bright student (bright here is defined in the most befitting social manner) who was one of the highest scorers in such English Creative Writing questions.

Almost a decade later, sharp at 4.30 pm, for 5-weeks, I was again encouraged
to write my journal. On the first day, here at Swadharma, when I was asked to
write it, I found it to be superfluous. This feeling of it being redundant came
from a couple of places. Firstly, I just couldn’t accept that my journal was for
me, no one reads it and yet I am supposed to write it. I mean if no one reads it,
why am I writing, I know my feelings, what’s the point in writing it and wasting my time and energy. Secondly, why am I writing my deepest darkest feelings in it, when I judge myself for having them? But I still had to do it, because people at Swadharma had asked me to and the ‘bright’ student in me always does what is expected of her.

Amidst these conflicting thoughts and from the power of repetition of this
practice, came about a shift. Approximately two weeks into the program, I
started liking the practice which I earlier despised and found unproductive. I
still remember this day clearly, Afterall, I have put it down in my journal: I was
describing a painful relationship that I was in when I was 19 and I found myself advising my journal friend from a third-person perspective. I was helping the 19-year-old me to get out of that cage of pain, without judging her. I was listening to her, offering a genuine space and ear. I advised her that she was doing the relationship with the right intentions and yet things somehow turned sour, which happens at times in life. I stopped suppressing that part of me, I ceased to be hard on her and I opened my arms to accept her. All this said and written through my journal, my friend, my agony aunt now.

Well, this is just one example. I went through many such experiences and found new peaceful ways to vent out and forgive, to accept. Swadharma was a peep into my own soul, a soul that was lost because the body dictated. I would rather say, the mind dictated, the body just followed. I would do Swadharma all over again, with more dedication and faith, if I had the chance to. Here, I found coordination among all my scattered pieces of being. I learned to listen to myself. Today, I am no longer that teacher and the poorest student of life (poor here is defined in the most befitting social manner), because now I make many mistakes and grow through them.