Palmistry lessons with Badrish

I climb thirteen stories to a temple nestled in the mountains and there is a sense of peace up here in the sky such as I have never felt before. I look out at the jungle and the city spread below and I feel small and inconsequential. Not so long ago, that thought would have filled me with a wild sense of unruly panic but today it felt good for in reality I am small and inconsequential: one living breathing part of this throbbing, heaving world and that is a beautiful thing. The city is bursting with trinkets and coloured fabrics and smoky incense and crumbling bookshops fat with books and I could wander around it running my fingers along the fringes of life forever.

I am having palmistry lessons from a self-proclaimed mystic named Badrish, who claims that he was saved from suicide by a vision of god and a rainbow light, and that he has the divine power of healing. I want him to heal me. He draws me a map of the alignment of the planets at the time of my birth from a complicated book written in an alphabet that is alien to me, and advises me of the right gem stones to carry and which auspicious days I ought to look out for. Every day I sit in his austere room as he tells me stories of my future, of his past, of the people he is currently healing and he teaches me mantras and gives me lessons about life, playing the part of each character with theatrical gestures and different voices. He explains the movements of the planets I was born under in alignment with the mounds of skin on my palms and I scribble it all down in a gold gilded notebook, tasting witchcraft on my tongue.

Sometimes there are power cuts and we sit on the balcony in the light overlooking the street, as the neighbours make us chai in metal cups and he smokes his five o'clock cigarette. He spits his dreams and disasters onto the pavement below us and talks about his wife and his children and life in the mountains. Today he told me one of the best ways to release negative energy is to dance, and that everyone should dance every day. He is a shambling shaman with a wicked glint in his eye and a lot of patience, and every hour I spend with him is strange and wonderful.

The first day of my twenty second year on this earth dawns, and I suck up the fear that tugs relentlessly at the ends of my hair and jump onto the back of a motorbike belonging to a magic man from the mountains and we career wildly along the chaotic roads of India to visit a temple. We weave through the streets where real people live and dance and cry and sweat and love, where bags of grains and seeds and rice bulge into the road and plastic flowers spill into the dirt and a wedding band dresses in red sequin jackets carry imitation gold pillars to the venue on their heads.

We make water offerings at a Shiva temple, as people chant and play instruments and weave garlands of fresh flowers as offerings to god and the faith and humility of people is so strong that it gives my slowly healing soul warm hope beneath her bandages. The man from the mountains tells me that this temple was not made by man and that it simply exists, that throughout history various people have tried to destroy it and yet they cannot. People put god before everything here and while I am not blessed with such belief I can't help but envy the trust that they have in a higher order, in karma and the idea that everything will happen naturally the way it is supposed to.

I ride past the river and up into the mountains for green tea, where I am given another blessing and sit in the sun with a yoga teacher and muse about life until it is time to collect my astrology chart from Badrish. He pulls a necklace made of white stones from his bag, a gift for my birthday to symbolize peace of mind. He knows that I am hurting, he can see it in my hand and he repeats a mantra and tells me that I have no need to feel the way the way that I do, that the world is good and I want to cry. He sits cross-legged on the bed in his bare room and I watch his face crinkle like a brown paper bag as he says a prayer for me and I feel for the first time in a long time that everything will be okay.

I subject myself to a traditional ayurvedic panchakarma massage where my naked body is rubbed with a rough bag of wheat and a lady sits on my head and teases the knots and the strings and the balls of wool and the thick black smoke and the tension of a thousand unanswered questions out of my tender muscles. I sit with new friends at a table overlooking the Ganga, as the reflection of the candles on my birthday cake dance on the water like falling souls and I let it all wash over me, tasting honey on my skin.

Swamiji, the leader of my ashram made a speech during the evening aarti about how birthdays here are not merely celebrations: they mark a rebirth into a new life and a new frame of mind, free of all the pain and the burdens of the past and one infused instead with the spirit of this place.

Angels appear in a multitude of guises here and every conversation forces words from my fingertips like bursting lava melting the pages of my notebooks and after a period of such stony silence it is like summer rain upon my body, my barren mind finally flowing with the monsoon season like streams of coloured ribbon unfurling from the tops of mountains, saturating my pages with tongues of fire and great bulging blooms, setting the worlds in my head alight.

I meet a lost soul in a juice bar who is carved from the same molten rock as I am, who completely embodies everything I have ever felt about the world. She feels just as trapped as I do by the tight shackles of societal convention and she has thrown them off and emerged sparkling. When people ask her what she is 'doing' she fires the question back at them and finds more often than not that they are short, of time and of love and of happiness and of living.

She gives me the courage to vocalize thoughts that have been swimming through my blood for a long time and I realise that all of the pressure that piles on my head in London like a hat full of bricks is completel;y self imposed. The dark brown stain of an empty day, the panic rising in my chest at my own confusion and my repeated failure to create, to produce, to build is  merely a result of my own state of mind. It is perfectly okay to take things slowly, to drink a coffee or to read a book, to walk in the park and to enjoy all the small moments of your day. Life is not about achieving things or making money or climbing climbing climbing that ridiculous ladder that actually, ultimately doesn't lead to anywhere. It is more beneficial to stop for breath and enjoy the view, to enjoy the here and now, to gulp the air and to see what is happening around you. This may sound obvious but this viewpoint has been hidden for me by purple storm clouds like bruises of expectation and ambition flowering constantly under my sun-starved skin.

I take a laughter yoga class and spend a morning lying hysterical on the floor, miaowing like a cat with a room of strangers and chanting Hare Krishna and throwing my hands in the air and the teacher sings us a happiness mantra before telling us that everything: our bodies, this world, our material possessions, other people, are all transient and yet the soul is eternal. These fleeting illusions will not make us happy. Happiness is something that comes from inside. Once you learn to be happy, choose to be soul-happy in any situation, giggling with sheer joy at the wild accident of beautiful life, then you will be happy and only then can you make others happy.

I can't believe I couldn't see it before but this dazzling realisation courses through my veins and makes my skin tingle with light. Instead of toxic smoke now I am coughing up gold dust.
I spend a languid afternoon gorging myself on the present moment and watching Ma Ganga flutter her eyelashes from a tree house far above her, when a great plume of smoke billows from Laxman Jhula bridge and creates an ethereal cloud above the water. A backpacker at the adjacent table tells us that it is the ashes of a spent human being scattered from the bridge. The wind takes the broken body into her bower and carries her gently into the mountains as Mother Ganga opens her mouth wide and swallows the crumbs whole but the soul lives on and beautiful life falls into beautiful life and the world turns and turns and instead of being dizzy I am moving with her.

Unravelling the tangle

As always, it takes a while to match your footsteps to the same pace as the locals, as they sup steaming mugs of chai and stare out onto the water, letting the long and wide hours of life wash over them gently. I wonder sometimes if that is all any of us are really doing; simply passing time in this life until death. If this is the case, if our jobs and the lull of our daily routine are merely things to keep us entertained, then surely none of it really matters, and we ought to pass our days and waste our time in whichever way we choose? Or perhaps that is a selfish way of looking at the world.

Life here consists of scrambling up the sides of mountains to reach fairytale waterfalls, being wary of the elephants and panthers lurking in the darkness. Mountains have a quality I have found in no other form on earth, simultaneously imposing, humbling and frightening yet also watchful, gentle, almost motherly. They symbolize the power of nature over the human race for mountains are dangerous terrain for many of us, although some men have conquered them, an interesting paradox. We watch thunderstorms wrapped up in knitted ponchos and clutching glasses heavy with the sweet secret of lemon and ginger tea. We sit cross-legged for hours on the floor listening to a classical Indian sitar, as the music twists and curls above our heads like coloured smoke and a tiny Indian prince dressed up in sequins and beads twirls in the ash clouds and everything seems beautiful. My austere little room is draped with brightly coloured salwar kameez and ethereal scarves, washed with love and drying in the gentle breath of the afternoon sun. I race along the beach feeling the ragged breath in my chest and I look up at the Himalayas and I remember that I am alive. We sit at the feet of holy men in enchanted gardens as they hand us rosary beads made from the dried fruit of trees and stare deep into our seeking souls invite us to ask them the meaning of life. We exchange worn pennies for exquisite reams of fabric and are led into family houses consisting of only one room, to have our measurements recorded to be blessed with creation on a foot-powered Singer sewing machine.

I love the decorative aspect of India - everything is colourful and sparkles in the most unnecessary way. Ancient cars are strewn with garlands of fresh flowers, motorbikes are tangled up in tinsel, even the donkeys wear beaded necklaces and women dress in full saris to clamber up the sides of mountains. Gruff looking men have mysterious gem stones rammed onto every stout finger and teenage boys cram friendship bracelets onto their thin arms. Everything is bejeweled and the most mundane items glitter in the sun. The crumbling buildings are painted with delicious pastel blooms and even the temples have strips of gold foil hung from the ceiling, dazzling in the light. This attention to detail is representative of an attitude to life: things are beautiful simply for the sake of being beautiful. To bring joy and light and laughter to the eye. In a world of wilderness and darkness and danger and despair I think that this trivial decoration is such a brilliant and absolutely human trait. The art of doing something just because. If all the world is illusion which will fade and change, why not dress it up and enjoy it, before it is gone?

We were graced with the presence of a real life guru in our yoga class this week. Rain poured from the balconies and onto the heads of the giant Shiva statues standing guard over the lush ashram vegetation as she sang vedic mantras to us. We sat in the darkness like crumpled lotus flowers blossoming against all the odds as this wizened brown owl spat pure gems of wisdom into the air. Rubies and sapphires tumbled from her lips, disappearing beyond the reaches of our hungry fingers, teasing the egos we are trying to leave behind.

She made a distinction between what we perceive to be the 'I': our history, experiences, family, job, personality etc. and the real self that goes beyond all of these things to which we try to listen during mediation: pure consciousness, evidence of the divine within all of us. This is why we ought to learn to control our minds, in order to actualize the real and eternal self. Although this idea seems intrinsically tangled with the concept of reincarnation and the idea of the soul coming to earth in a variety of forms, I cannot help but think that perhaps that perhaps here Eastern philosophy has touched upon something of incredible importance.

It is that feeling that is deep inside many, if not all of us, that thing that we can see in the eyes of wild men and women, that glint we try to make Other with stories of gypsies and vagabonds and runaways. We condemn drop outs and hermits we push those without permanent addresses or bank details or facebook accounts to the fringes of society because we fear them. We are scared because they are brave, because they listen to that ripple of discontent that glimmers in all of us.It is the feeling that makes us want to stay curled up in bed in the mornings, the reckless impulse that makes us want to tread on the grass, to stay up all night, to run through the wilderness and get drunk on stars and feel dandelion clocks in our hair. The temptation to leave it all behind, to burn our money and to give away our possessions, to scream on an empty beach and dive naked into the ocean, to turn our backs on civilisation and be reunited with this wild, wonderful insatiable earth.

Is this feeling evidence for what the guru was talking about? Is it the revolt of the eternal self, crying out deeply from the dark caverns of our bodies, begging us to break free from the shackles and the constraints and the conventions of society to be allowed to dance freely in the balmy air, the true essence of what we really are?

We practiced our asanas outside one afternoon and when I was breathing in time with the mountains and smelling the blades of grass between my feet and feeling the gentle sun soaking my skin like a hot bath I felt the most golden sense of peace. As I listened to the wind and peered through half-closed lashes at the cornflower sky I felt so in tune with my surroundings, so light and so free and vibrating with life.

How do we take all of these elements of philosophy and yoga and inherent feelings about life and these golden moments of perfect peace and incorporate them into our daily lives? Which is most important? All of this talk of moksha and enlightenment is very well, but I also derive pleasure from inane and meaningless things like cups of coffee and wearing pretty dresses - surely these are valuable if not important parts of life too?

Before I came here, I was despairing over the idea that there is nothing more to life, that we are born and that we die and that the rest is merely make believe. The idea of this was overwhelming me, permeating every aspect of my existence and making me weep into my morning museli. So far, instead of answers to my big questions I have made a list of even bigger questions, however the one thing I think that I have found is reassurance. Here people believe so wholeheartedly that they see meaning and destiny everywhere and in everything. They are desperately aware of the spiritual apsect of the human psyche, and I think that is what draws seekers here. I am yet to find answers, but I am finding reassurance in the fact that perhaps we don't have all the answers, but that something, somewhere does and all of our energy and our hopes and dreams and disasters are not in vain.

India?

Rishikesh, India, is a place for seekers. I am not even sure exactly what it is I am seeking  but I am certainly looking for something. My soul is screaming and I giving her a place in the mountains to roar. It is full of enchantment, steeped in a cultural awareness of something larger than ourselves, illustrated in technicolor gods and goddesses wreathed in golden flowers.

 I came here to find the silence to listen to my own mind but was not prepared for how incredibly noisy this country is, filled with a flurry of reckless vehicle horns and the relentless cries of street vendors pushing their wares. Heady swirls of sandalwood, nag champa and cow manure permeate everything, choking my mind. Beads and trinkets glister from every corner as fresh papaya rots gently under the orange sun.

Everything here is a contradiction. I walk through ripe gardens in the darkness at six o'clock in the morning, barefoot and dressed in white to practice yoga and to cleanse my body of impurities in order to make room for prana, the life force of the universe. I meditate in thunderstorms as monkeys swing from the balconies. I drink endless chai and read endless books and sit around a sacred fire every night to sing and to watch the sun set, as people float little boats made of leaves and filled with flowers and candles down the river Ganges. I am learning about the colour of each chakra and how to decipher my moon sign, conversing about karma and destiny and wondering which path to carve for myself, listening to eye witness accounts of levitating yogis and watching the man who owns the currency exchange healing people with huge chunks of crystal.

There is incredible peace and beauty here but it is also frightening. Strange deities and hungry eyes loom from every corner. Here skin colour indicates wealth and my own translucence appears to glow in the dark. A creature covered in beads and peacock feathers lurks in the streets trying to prise money from unsuspecting foreigners. Everywhere is full of trickery if not magic as emaciated cows and wild dogs snap at my ankles. Darkness falls early here and nights tucked away in my sparse room in the candlelight, to be woken by the ominous call of chanting and ringing bells are long and they are lonely.

My yoga teacher is trying to teach us about acceptance and balance. She said that we ought to accept difficult situations in our lives as a result of our past misdeeds and that we can do nothing about them now. She told us that our emotions and passions should not get the better of us, and that the path to enlightenment is rooted in balance, in accepting our difficulties and annoyances and letting them wash over us.

I am trying my best to live in the moment, to listen to the birdsong and the wind blowing through the jungle leaves during morning meditation, to feel the rise and swell of my own breath like the ocean, to appreciate the crude, transient and unapologetic nature of this wild life but I am finding it so difficult.

It is so tempting to turn my back on all of this, to leave the confusion and the fear right here and to walk right back into my life in London.

And yet even the most skeptic among my new friends admit that they cannot deny the pull of this place, the recurring idea that perhaps life is not merely a string of coincidences, and I can't help but feel that something brought me here.

In a sense, the niggling sensations of restlessness and insecurity and loneliness tugging at the edges of my scarf  are representative of everything i am trying to leave behind. I want to learn how to exist in the moment, how to forget about the omnipresent pressures and questions and fears stacked in my head like piles of heavy books waiting to be read. I came here to find answers and clarity and yet I am more confused and afraid than ever.

But I am trying.