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#94: Body as an instrument

I was recently unwell in a way where a concoction of things, chronic and acute, had me in bed for a few days. Eight punishing issues were cropping up at once. I tried not to add value judgments, which helped reduce mental chatter and made it easier for me to go with the flow. I alternated work-in-bed, Netflix-in-bed, reading and rest based on what my body could handle. By the second day, the observer in me starting seeing each issue as a thread of human experience: gastric distress, back spasms, inflamed adductor, twisted pelvis and grief just to name a few. I thought of people who had dealt with these threads at one point or another. I examined the threads that were new to me.

For example: When people had back problems, I understood theoretically but not until this experience did I really “get it”. I felt from inside how completely debilitating a back spasm could be. How all bodily movements, not some, are silently supported by our core. I knew that our core includes our back and not just the abdomen, and that true abdominal strength comes from deeper muscles and not just the surface-level 6-pack muscle. Yet, not until this event did I patiently isolate and feel the firing of different layers of core muscles. I finally played with the exquisitely designed jigsaw puzzle made of bones, muscles and tendons from inside my animal.

There is sometimes a struggle in spiritual practice about whether it’s more important for us to nurture the spirit or the body. The body is seen as temporary while the spirit more lasting. And I absolutely get this wisdom; I’ve personally benefitted from feeding my spiritual wellbeing in dark moments. But…we are clothed in this earthly bodysuit till our dying breath. If we don’t have a body, we are literally not alive. Like all animals, we have sophisticated abilities for functional activity, growth, reproduction, and continual change before eventual death, and we also face periodic glitches. I have come to see that this glitch-ridden experience inside our frequently painful bodysuit is how we unlock our spiritual practices. Body is where the nuggets of insight, wisdom and empathy live.

We can’t each go through the countless human experiences to be had. But we can go through some. Some of us will face cancers, heart attacks, severe burns, while others will face chronic migraines, irritable bowels and weak bones. Some will have the ache of untimely loss, addiction, and postpartum depression, while others will have to care for a parent with Alzheimer’s or a schizophrenic sibling. Between all of us, we cover the entirety of human experience.

Modern tech would have you believe that intelligent life can operate without a body, while simply simulating the predictive capacity of the brain. What we completely miss is that true intelligence isn’t just prediction, it’s also compassion and resilience birthed from painful surprises. This is the valuable journey that a human body allows. Over time, we can become instruments of all that is tender and powerful at the same time. Like a tree that filters environmental toxins and releases oxygen.

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”― Robert Bly, poet

#80: Metabolizing hard emotions

Ants seems to have a focus, a sense of connectedness and resilience I aspire to. I see hordes of them walking their path with purpose as a collective, sometimes carrying objects that appear too big for their small frames. Put your finger in their path and they walk around it, making a new path without fuss. And they always pause to interact with an ant coming from the opposite direction, as if exchanging important everyday intel. If we zoom out on a human life, as if looking down from an airplane, we are no different. We commute literally and figuratively on a path towards our goals alongside others. We encounter roadblocks, we bump into other humans and exchange information.

I don’t know if ants are able to go about their business without internal turbulence, but humans are a constant swirl of emotions. You can bet that our emotions will arise and fall every few minutes the way waves crash onshore repeatedly; especially when we interact with others or do work that matters to us. It’s in our cells to experience emotional waves in response to others and to create waves in them whether our interactions are deep or shallow. Our emotional waves create thoughts, which drive actions, which in turn drive more emotional waves…and on and on we go rippling. I’m assuming ants don’t go through this.

Sometimes these internal swells become all consuming and throw us off our path entirely. Our instinctive response to such moments is to either spew emotions or suppress them to live lives of control. In the latter option, we create barriers so the waves don’t crash so hard. But over time, we not only smother that difficult feeling, we block our ability to feel and express in general. The barriers we create to protect ourselves end up locking us in our psyche where unfelt and unexpressed parts of ourselves create layers of density. Suppressed emotions only have two avenues for release ― our reflexive reactions and unexpected bursts of emotion ― so under the right pressure, our dense emotional layers tend to blow up like volcanoes. This brings us down the long winding road back to option 1…the indiscriminate spewing of emotions. 

There is a third option. Over the last few weeks, I’ve created a mental model that I’ve found productive in navigating my own raw emotions. I’ve started viewing quiet moments as spaces to metabolize life and emotion. To digest and move through whatever comes up in the course of my days. To see how like waves, my emotions churn up mud and sediment, making it hard to decipher reality. That the waves feel scary only when they’re tossing me around without my control. But when I sit on the shore and observe without judgment or involvement, they eventually subside. Rather than shutting the door to my difficult feelings like I used to, I now invite them in for a silent coffee when my house is quiet. At some point in this self-accompaniment process, it feels like I’m metabolizing life, learning, and growing with it. I also find important information contained in my hard emotions, that within the ache and fear is the intel for my next step. What’s more surprising is that once I gather that intel, the waves subside on their own and I start walking on the path again with more ease.

Until the next wave ofcourse. I still see myself flinging raw and unmetabolized emotions on others or into my own actions but now I have a framework to anchor back to.

“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.” — Gabor Mate, physician and author specializing in treatment of addiction

#54: The container of love

My summer vacations growing up were some of the most memorable times of my life; surrounded by the voices, laughter, and tears of cousins of all ages. My uncle was an esteemed general in the Border Security Force, a part of the Indian armed forces and the largest border guarding force in the world. So every summer, between 7 to 11 kids would descend on the sprawling military campus wherever in the country our uncle was posted. Together we concocted endless escapades that were sometimes fun and sometimes injurious but always memorable.

During these visits, we also got valuable exposure to a mix of Indian cultures and places—the jeep excursions into the rainforests and waterfalls of Shillong, through lush mountains of Jammu & Kashmir, and over desert landscapes of Leh and Bikaner. The farm picnics in Punjab next to gushing tube wells and the endless cold coffees with ice cream. The parties that went late into the night, set to an eclectic mix of music, surrounded by handsome uniformed men with impeccable bearing, and charming women in beautiful saris. Adults with technicolor stories from their saturated, adventure-filled, lives. This only begins to get into the nooks of experiences we had as a pack of kids. Each experience became a cherished lifelong memory and a shared language of connection, a brick in the strong foundation of love upon which our current lives sit.

Then there was this other sad and distressing side to life…when my mom, siblings and I went back home, acutely aware of the gaping hole my father’s death had left in our lives. The sustained psychological and financial impact of losing him weighed us down. The impact that could have completely decimated our lives. But what kept it together is the genuine and lifelong support of family; of my aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins who with their simple everyday acts of warmth created the strongest sea wall that no tsunami of pain could dismantle. With every wave of grief and financial lack that tore at us, they added more stones, more boulders, more cement. No single action might stick out to an observer, they might just note a family hanging out together, but to those of us inside this cocoon of love—especially those marred by grief—these moments of togetherness were profound gifts of care. It’s the stuff you read about in extraordinary tales of love, the stuff they make movies about.

What allowed these actions to germinate was a thoughtfully and lovingly created container. A physical and emotional space that set the ground rules of who was welcome (everybody), how they were treated (like old friends with compassion and generosity), and the tone of everyday life (one of patience, care and adventure). And the people who were instrumental in creating this space for all of us kids were my aunt and uncle, who I started seeing as my second set of parents. My aunt gave me courage and unconditional love, fended off juvenile attacks from my siblings and cousins, and squarely had my back…even when I was the troublemaker. My uncle epitomized courage, sociability and intellectual curiosity—whether about geopolitics, travel or farming. Both were examples of patience and unmatched generosity. Despite the adulation and professional respect he received daily, nobody was too young, old or poor for my uncle to engage with. And while we kids crawled all over his house, he was out there addressing some of the most violent terrorism in the world.

My uncle passed away recently, leaving an enormous legacy of love and impact. Even as our family reverberates with pain, each of us is grateful to have his rare example of care and generosity. There are many generals in the world, but we had our very own Clark Kent with a superhuman combination of strength, integrity, love and humility. We all looked up to him. He was also charismatic and astonishingly handsome. We are blessed to have a first hand blueprint of a very well-lived life. 

Everyone has ancestral lineages, influences and teachings. Mine brim with exemplary love, care and true accompaniment that make a life worth living. Life’s rhythms create busyness and we sometimes forget the nurture that was passed down to us. The last few weeks have brought my family visceral remembrance. No matter where we live in the world, my pack of aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters and nephews have acknowledged my uncle’s container of love in amazingly similar terms. My wish for us is that we embody his traits as we move through life, that we welcome everyone like he did and create a sense of meaningful connection, curiosity and joy wherever we go. That we go on creating more and more containers of love. 

“Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”— Abraham Lincoln

In loving memory of Ravinder Singh Mehta, our real-life Clark Kent.

Seattle, September 2018

#47: Marking Time

I have an orchid that blooms diligently year after year; it was a house warming gift from a friend. The first year it bloomed from scratch in my new house, I shared its beauty with my family over video calls and messages. I had planted several interesting indoor plants in this new home so the orchid was one of many but what differentiated it was that, unlike others, it flowered. Then later that year my brother, who was a part of this message thread, passed away unexpectedly.

Since then every time this orchid blooms, I think of him with an achy heart. Not because he had any attachment to orchids but because the first time it flowered in my new home, we shared the joy. There is also a sweetness to this experience since the flowers appear only once a year over the summer. The unique shape of the flower along with annual blossoms may make you think that it’s a fickle plant but that’s not the case. It’s my easiest to care for plant with a flowering cycle that I can count on. And so I await this orchid’s flowers with a bittersweet feeling. Sweetness that my wait gets showered with the gift of a flower and the bitterness of marking time’s travel from my moment of loss.

This year, just as three buds started to appear, I adopted a cat named Fern. In her inquisitiveness, Fern sniffed and bit off one bud and the other two got dislodged while moving the orchid to a less accessible spot. In one fell swoop, I lost one of my key markers on this very private journey of loss. Before this episode I hadn’t acknowledged the role this flower was serving for me and now that I’ve lost it, I have been thinking about how its annual rhythm helped me navigate personal time and loss. The orchid didn’t create or remove the sadness of loss. It was more like an etch-a-sketch clock, self-created and impermanent. If it wasn’t an orchid, I would have likely anointed something else with this meaning. It seems to me that these personal markers infuse private meaning to time. While our focus is on time and not the markers themselves, if we didn’t have the markers…would we understand time’s passage the same way? If we didn’t have a sense for what a minute, hour, or year means in very personal terms, would we be able to infuse our compressed lives with so much joy and meaning? These markers give our aches, joys, and loves a time-bound container. They are like a metronome, keeping the beat of our lives, reminding us to live in alignment with our innermost nudges.

Even though my orchid’s fate next year lies in Fern’s self-control abilities, I think for now it will continue to serve as my private marker of love and loss.

“We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads…

You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us

There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people

We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are

But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.”― Alberto Ríos

#46: Destruction and creation

Destruction is not something we wish for ourselves or our loved ones. The word destruction, understandably, has only negative associations and fills one with dread. It is “the act of destroying something or the fact of being destroyed”, and who wants that! Yet, we experience and participate in destruction throughout our lives― when the work we spent years doing no longer fits us, when the business or life partnership we commited to dissolves, or perhaps when we need to give away our beautiful and thriving plants because they are toxic to our new cat. In case you’re wondering…yes, I adopted a cat named Fern and she has been a destructive force for my routine, focus and décor.

My larger point is that destruction doesn’t always occur in serious and existential ways; and while it may often appear in small ways, the change and adjustment feel difficult. And within this adjustment may lie seeds of creation. As we create our new normal, we exercise parts of ourselves that we hadn’t before and observe aspects we didn’t know existed within us. Despite our best efforts, life changes and old habits, ideas, and structures get dismantled and new ones take shape in their place. We repeatedly engage in this hard dance of destruction and creation. Fern and I are currently engaged in this dance, and our time together has been bewildering and joyful.

“May I feel all I need to feel in order to heal; may I heal all I need to heal in order to feel.”— Marguerite Rigoglioso

Fern