The crossroad...

We have truly no idea how the next moment would turn out. But we don't live that way. It takes immense courage to live like that. As if you are on the edge of a mountain. You can fall off any moment but then maybe you won't. Or maybe it is more like standing at the beginning of infinite crossroads- the point where a node breaks into many others- all in different directions and you can either just keep walking in the same direction or switch to another. What do you do? The road ahead is likely to be the same. But the road on the left could take you on a different path. But then is that yours to take? And usually it is all dark and you can't even see much ahead except a vague silhouette of what lies ahead.

Every moment brings up questions like this and all we can do is to nudge apart the shades of the past which cover the lantern of awareness. Then somehow, something helps you know which way to turn. And you turn and come to another crossroad.

At one point, I used to think that this was getting too difficult. I wanted a simple, well defined, clear path and take any surprise out of it. Having choice comes with its responsibilities. And, at times, we choose to live this difficult life of awareness. And sometimes, we prefer to blindfold ourselves, trust in luck and keep moving on the same path. And then we blame why it is not how we expected it to be.

As I grow older, I see that it is all right to change paths or to keep moving. Except without the blindfold. Then even though things don't turn out the way I expect, I am just that bit more at peace. Even when I have an accident. Because I know that it was the path that I chose and that is enough.

So, what do i deserve?

I never asked this question to myself for a really long time. Never. For me, life was more about doing the "right" thing and protecting others from my feelings. I searched for validation in authors, in friends, in characters on cinema...whatever worked.

But usually others did not get it. So far as I pushed what I felt, under the carpet, no one else knew my anger. When I expected something I wanted from others, something very reasonable like returning a call and did not get it, I rationalized. Oh! she must be busy right now. There must be a really important reason. Sometimes the saint in me told me - Move beyond expectation. Dont ask. Be Loving. Let it go.  Be brave.

It only helped for a while.

The anger grew within and then became sadness. It began to be the way to live. Loving others without loving myself did not work.

I slowly realize that it does not have to be that way. I can ask for what I think I deserve. It is all right to expect. It is all right to feel miserable when I do not get what I want. It is important, very important to find those who will listen to what I ask for and would make an effort to reach out. But ask what you deserve. Have that clarity. Don't be afraid of asking. Otherwise, how would others even know.

Yes, life is complex. Yes, sometimes we reach out and are frustrated. But it is important to wear your heart inside out. To be vulnerable. To show vulnerability. It is a softer heart and a harder path but I am coming to peace with it. 

Who is in your cloud?

"So, what do you do when you feel that you are ALWAYS in the minority?", asked a friend to me in today morning. "How do you react when what you say and feel seems to be different from what others say and feel?", she asked.

I looked back at her. My answer was "Self compassion". From where I am standing that seems to be the only way to deal with this. I have felt a part of such minority for a really long time. I guess many of us have. We try to fit in, adjust, make amends, say sorry and be like others. The urge to be "we" is strong. Overpowering. But sooner or later, for some of us, the "me" will rebel. It will grow stronger and keep asking - a voice that you can't really quiet down. But accepting and proclaiming our difference in perception brings the fear of being an outcast- separate from the herd. And separation is death, shouts another voice encoded within for survival.

Hence, self compassion. To love oneself without any comparison or judgement. Especially when you feel absolutely by yourself and without a hand to hold on to.

But, self compassion can be tiring. It requires rejuvenation. So, a more practical option is to also search for those who "connect" to you. Those soul warriors are few but they are out there. They might not have the same troubles as you have but they have suffered and they will understand what you mean when you say that clearing your emotional debris is no cake-walk. Their bag of worries and their baggage of past might be different but their path and their way of walking on it is the same as yours.

Then, when they talk to you, healing happens.

Today, the same friend who asked me questions about being in the minority mentioned Jeff Brown and I chanced upon his quotes. And I could connect to it. Like a child who sees one sea shell on the shore and then another ...and then one more, I began to read what he said. I began to fill my pockets with these lovely shells till my pockets bulged.

So, create a cloud. Put yourself in it. Put all those who connect to you in it too. They could be friends or colleagues. Even authors. Anyone whose reflections of their journey resonate with you. And even though your cloud might be small, you would feel that you are not alone. Let them go when you no longer connect to them. Let yourself go find another cloud if you dont connect with them. After all, clouds have no fixed boundaries. And neither have you.

So, Jeff Brown - welcome to my cloud. I am not alone, and neither are you..

Hugging the loser in you!

It is common for us to aspire for winning. Get attached to it. Run away from losing. After all, that is how you succeed and grow, you are told.

Let us take this piece of "conventional wisdom" and challenge the wisdom in it. Let us turn it upside down to see if believing this will create any scars.

As i piece my own life together, I slowly begin to unpack those aspects of me which, Debbie Ford or Carl Jung would say, have been disowned. In the last 4 decades of my existence, I have not respected my losing - even though it stared at me in my face from time to time. I turned away when it came near my face. I tuned away when it yelled. I did not acknowledge it. I was not a loser, I told myself. I will WIN.

Incidentally, in my rush to be a winner, I kept creating conditions which made my losing a matter of time. I would never relax. If a relationship was going down, instead of accepting that such things happen, I would either withdraw or push harder to win. It never worked. If I had relaxed, I would have seen how my actions were creating the very suffering I did not want.

The loser label was simply not acceptable.

Reality says we will lose sometime or the other. A job we want might go to someone else. A lover we see as our soul mate might walk into someone else' arms. The life we so tenaciously hold on to will lose to death. Losing is guaranteed. And it is not just OK but also sensible to accept being a loser when life hands you a tough one.

No, I don't want to run away from it anymore. I want to stop and say hello to it. Yes, i am a loser sometimes and that is cool. I want to hug this fear, this demon of losing I have been running away from.   Accepting that i can be a loser allows me stop pushing into those areas where there is no light at the end of the tunnel. It allows me to water those plants which will blossom. It takes away the burden of being all-knowing, all-good all the time. It allows me to look rather at what I do than what result am I going to get. It allows me to enjoy the process. It allows me to breathe.

It's a short life. Win some. Lose some. But live it fully. Thanks to Debbie Ford for bringing this to my awareness.

Let's Watch...

Imagine stories. Expressions from the heart. Words with feelings. Narratives with softness of sensitivity and the depth of human experience.

What happens when you want to play these stories out? What happens when you take a teller's tale and use your body to show how it all felt? Use your voice to capture its essence. With no preparation. All improvised. Play it back to them with honesty and commitment.

Playback theatre is all about enacting our life's stories...again. Sometimes as a fluid sculpture with voice and movement, sometimes as an image frozen in time, sometimes as vignettes unfolding magically and sometimes as stories acted out in a narrow corridor. So many ways to reach out and share. 

But what Playback theatre does is more than a re-telling. It heals. As we watch our own stories played out by an ensemble of actors, there is a part in us which witnesses and somehow puts it back in a different perspective. Almost as if the contents of our memory are re-shuffled. The pain that some of these tales are soaked in begins to subside. The joy these stories contain infects others. We feel better. Much better.

As an actor, I loved playing the stories out. I read somewhere that if we delve deep within, we realize that our feelings are replenished by the same source. Acting required me to dig in and drink from that source. No planning and preparation. Being totally there. Beautiful to feel so connected.

As a teller, I saw my own stories replayed and yet transformed magically. A short frail boy who hit three sixes again became a hero. His joy reaching out and embalming the souls of even those who had never seen him.

As a conductor, I had the opportunity to sometimes hold the threads of the teller's story together so that the actors could always make out its essence. I had to make sure that the art form fit the story. A fragmented story, for example, would be done justice to in the playback form of corridors. So much invisible work that binds the whole performance together.

As a watcher, I had the time of my life. Listening and watching as the human drama enfolded every day and I felt being tugged by invisible strings which reached out from the words of the teller and the expressions of the actors. The Me became a We.

My journey with Playback is new. And like all new journeys there is an overarching sense of excitement and a niggling sense of uncertainty. Who knows where it will go. 

Let's watch.

The price of freedom...

The mind wants certainty. Make no bones about it. It wants to know, to make sure, to cling to certainty.  And since it is a part of us, we can be pushed into this deep craving for certainty. Like knowing where exactly a road leads to and how bumpy is it going to be.

But life does not offer any such solidity. No guarantees. Now, either we can accept it or we can fight it. And believe me how good a fighter you believe you may be, you cannot defeat reality. 

But, we live on, in the midst of this make believe. Hoping that tomorrow will be better than today. Hoping that the house on which you have made your down payment will be ready, that the child you have so carefully helped grow older will think of you fondly, that you will get a better job soon, that your friends will last... Some of it comes true and you begin to believe that you have actually cracked it. Done what was impossible for others. Got certainty in your grasp and life will listen to and honour your wishes.

It won't.

No, I am not trying to be a kill-joy and drive fear into you or push you into one of those "what would you do if it were your last day blah..." statements. I am just saying that being an adult is to accept this uncertainty and live with it. With joy if possible. 

Do all you can and accept whatever happens, seems like a good way to be, to live and to love. It is not a better way to live- it is, in my view, the only way to LIVE. Any other way means numbing your fear of something going wrong. 

And it can be very uncomfortable living this way. The mind resists it, at first. It cant build a story anymore of how things will actually turn out -whether bad or good. It will exaggerate your fears. Play with your anxiety. But you must plod on. Slowly lean into the discomfort. Keep at it. And then one day the spell is broken. 

You are free...only to fight a bigger battle this time. Only to help those who are ready. To respect yourself enough and to love yourself deeply. Because you see that you are not alone, the whole universe resides within. And it takes hard work of a lifetime to feel that connection.

But then, there are no guarantees!

Adult Vs Child

So, what is the difference in being a child and being an adult? My answer is choice. Deliberate choice.

To the unobserved eye, the actions of an adult and child might look just the same. But their intention and level of awareness are on completely different levels. 

How?

Its 6 am. You are doing your daily jog when you see a 5 year old and a 40 year old (dad) enter the park. The child runs towards the flower beds. The dad runs behind him. Playfully. They chase each other, the child cackling with laughter and the adult with a big wide grin till he finally catches the kid. A great start to the day- for both of them, you wonder.

But lets go back an hour. 

Its 5 am. Dad hasnt slept much last night. The new boss has been giving him a lot of grief - giving him stiff deadlines to achieve sales targets. At this time, leaving the job is not an option. Jobs are difficult to come by. And then there is the pain in the heels that refuses to go away. He has been planning to get to the doc for the last 4 days but the only appointment available is 2 days later.  And he has to be there for dad's surgery this weekend that has been freaking him out. Right now, life  is hard. He wishes he could just sleep away the troubles and wake up to a boss-free and pain-free day. But that is just wishful magic thinking. Not gonna happen. So, he talks to himself, reminds how important it is for him to spend these 45 minute with his son in the morning, and begins to get ready.

The kid had a good night's sleep. He looks forward to every morning when he can catch up and play with dad. He is groggy when dad wakes him up, but then he has the whole day to sleep since it is still summer vacation. He does not think too much. 

So, here they are, an hour later. Running around the park. But the adult made a choice. He accepted that life, right now, was hard. But that was ok. He knows that there never will be a perfect care-free morning. Something or the other will always worry him. He has to get into the arena and dare the bull, knowing that he will never have the complete armour. That the fear of bungling it all up would always be there and he has to accept the fear and yet act. 

Brave. Yes, that is what adult acts are like. And mind you, it has nothing to do with age. Some children never grow up.

The gentle beat...

Today, I decide to live with my heart. I realize that it has been constantly at work since I had my first breath. Constantly. Working harder when I ran or climbed, working slower when I rested. But working. It spoke silently when I went headlong into a direction which really wasn't mine- coming from shoulds that others thrust upon me. It sang when I found the right path again. Yes, sometimes the mind shifted into the driver's seat, giving meaning and interpretation to what I felt. Sometimes, even creating fear when I did not listen to it. But the heart was always there. Like a constant presence of the princess behind the curtains. Ready to be revealed if I reached out. And today I decide to...