I woke up feeling drawn to write about India. Its been a few months since my return, but the experience lives in me. Something about that time spent there and the experience I had, it will live in me forever.
During my 12 day journey in India, I was uncomfortable the majority of the time. I got used to “Delhi belly” as they called it and made Imodium my best friend. I felt under slept, irritable and had sharp flair ups of anxiety in most situations. People were everywhere; cars driving every which way, chickens, cows, people peeing right in front of me, starving people, begging people, hugs, kisses, loud noise, crowds, rules barely followed, except the simple rules of living life.
Someone might hear the tales of my time in India and react, your trip really sucked… but are you kidding me, it was beautiful! It was life… and thats how life IS. Life is always happening and what makes me unhappy is when I try to fight what is. When I try pretty much anything outside of what is. India came up this morning because I stopped rolling with it and turning to a place of trying and questioning excessively. I woke up saying fuck it, let’s let this flow as it is right now!
One of the destinations on my journey in india was to Kerala, for a Yoga Retreat with LA Teachers Lauren Eckstrom and Travis Elliot. When I plopped out of my wild ride from the airport to boat dock, I was greeted by two friendly faces. They belonged to a couple I knew from our last yoga retreat in Peru. They were glowing with life, shining from the inside out. They might have felt sweaty, under-slept, like they went through the life wringer, but what I felt and witnesses was wild, free, vibrant and alive.
The couple had just step out of a car ride that was about 8 hours long and in India a car ride like that feels like a constant brush with dead as cars whirl around you and play chicken with your life. Google Maps had told her that the car ride from the airport to retreat was about 2 hours away, but turns out Google didn’t take in to account that India doesn't play by Americans rules. I could tell they went through every emotion on that ride and maybe their recent engagement might even have been revoked (totally kidding, but we all know in the heat of life sometimes those reactive thoughts or words dance around).
She was laughing about the whole experience and kept coming back to the statement “roll with it”. I love having this story in my rolodex of life situations so that in a time when shit feels like its hitting my metaphor fan, I can tap into the beauty of seeing their true emotions, knowing that showing every piece of oneself, the highs, lows, the tears, the giggles, the truth, the raw, the exposed and the underexposed, they all come together and when we see it all throughout the process of a focal point it make up one hell of a life story.