day 3

The haze outside seems to exert a considerable power on me safely inside my apartment. I, like many others, am feeling angry and helpless. Till Tuesday evening i could see a bit of the blue sky and some happy, light clouds even when on ground level it was smoky. Since yesterday there is only the grey acid smoke covering everything. I watch my mind as it looks for a target to pit it's anger against but blaming Indonesia or anyone else makes no sense - though yes, i do take great pleasure in blaming the palm oil companies supposedly responsible for this. That doesn't change my lack of control over changing the environment. I could control my own path through it but with it triggering my allergies I feel somewhat drowned. I find myself feeling angry with my weakness and my vulnerable body. I see others walking around and at least getting to work - actually right now being able to just keep up the appearances of normalcy would feel very good. Some part of me calls me a sissy for giving in to my allergies and a battle rages inside around this.

The truth is I don't have much will to go outside and I also don't have the ability right now to forgive myself for not being able to keep going. 

My mind and body were dull this morning. I had woken at 5 am with the smells invading my nostrils despite my closed room. The smells do feel stronger now with the cumulative effect of many days of depletion of fresh air. No birds flying around or chattering on the balcony. I miss them. As someone said the mosquitos too are gone and the geckos, though I suppose that the cockroaches and the rats are surviving. 

I reluctantly texted my Sensei that I won't make it to training today. I will try to get a mask and move on with things tomorrow. Who knows how much longer this haze will be around for and i too need to get on with things.

I am half-way through Ursula Le Guin's, 'The Lathe of Heaven.' Its a book about a man (Orr) whose dreams change reality. The man is reluctant to use his ability and wants to be cured. His psychiatrist (Haber) on the other hand is quite willing to change their dystopian world into a more peaceful one and directs Orr to makes changes. Last night I just read the scene where Orr confronts Haber once again and Haber tells him thats its man's purpose on earth to change things to make a better world. Orr says the Universe is not a machine with parts each with a function and he doesn't believe that things or he himself have any purpose. Haber insists on playing God but each change he asks for has some disastrous consequence.

So, the question everyone asks about the characters is which one would you root for? the man with the power to change the world but who does not feel he can play God or the man who is willing to use his powers. Of course in our way of thinking the latter could be labelled evil especially since he also orders changes that make him more powerful. Every change has consequences and like the charmed ones many of us are taught that using power for personal gain has negative consequences. But as one of the sister says in the episode I watched yesterday, 'demons do anything without worrying about consequences.'

In books and films the same laws that tell us that the consequences of personal gain are ultimately negative do also apply to the evil ones and we gleefully watch them meeting painful ends. Something feels right about this but there is an element of righteous vengeance too there. What if instead of being vanquished the evil ones learnt some lessons that changed them from the inside? That to me might be very satisfactory but as a writer I often read how nobody wants to read about such peaceful things. Actually if I had read books that showed such changes I might not polarise the world so much nor fear the darkness within but know that it could be shifted.

I myself at one time believed that the ends justified the means. Only through slow soul searching I do now believe that the means already contain the end in them. Violence can never lead to peace. Non-violence is the only way. Kind of limiting in this world of ours where wars are waged to bring peace. So much of my search is to find my purpose on this planet but what if like Orr says I too have no purpose or do not matter in the large scheme of things. Something inside shudders and I can't think like him either. So I don't have an answer to what I would do if I was given powers that could change the world. How passive would I remain? What risks would I be willing to take to make change? Though most risks that involve others are not mine to take.

Fortunately expressing what I feel does give some energy to body and mind for as the PSI climbs once again  to 198 after dipping to 127 at 7 am hope dips.

Day 2

I was woken this morning in a peculiar way. My phone which I put on silent and put away in my desk at night began vibrating. Normally I sleep through texts but phone calls wake me and people close to me know that and will call if it's an emergency. It was 8 am and I had planned to sleep till i naturally woke around 9 am. The call was from my husband but even before I called him back I knew that he wasn't really trying to reach me but the call button had been accidentally pressed on his phone. It jolted me out of an antihistamine tinged sleep.

Several years ago, in late 2001 I was woken in strange way every morning around 4am. After initially cursing and resisting it I began getting up and meditating. It was a time in my life when I was most connected to myself and that universal force that guides us all if we listen. I felt close to my destiny (yes, i have been watching a lot of charmed). I have a feeling that something is waking me up and telling me 'you have work to do. stop faffing.'

My closest Singaporean friend and I have a joke about how hard it is to hear the voice of the Universal Force in Singapore. We both have trouble meditating here but slip easily into meditation in other places. Its like a fog comes over us when we enter the Singaporean field at Changi. She said she's felt it all her life and it was a relief to talk to someone about it and not have her thought crazy. So if this is a call from the UF I am surprised that it got through.

The haze was clearer this morning and when I woke I could see the  CBD buildings fairly clearly instead of just the silhouettes I had been seeing since saturday. The smog had lifted a bit but when I opened the window the smell of things burning rushed in and filled my lungs and reluctantly I shut them tight. Those hours of keeping windows open yesterday have left their mark and my throat and chest burn more today. My nasal passages feel constricted and head unclear.

I do have to get busy. Yesterday I did write words on my BF-memoir but I am discontent with it. Its has no coherence yet and I need to find some thread in it that I can follow and write on but yet I can't. I worked a few hours on some other work I am responsible for but by about 5pm I felt unable to focus. My karate training got cancelled but I could not bring myself to get into some self training as the haze had thickened and being outdoors was impossible. I consolidated some of my training notes from previous gasshuku's. By 8pm I gave up trying to work completely and began watching Charmed.

Charmed is a delightful concept. Magic, powerful sisters, good and evil and incredible characters. I watched all of season 4 over the weekend and the character of the Seer flirted with me. I loved watching the way she talked, her manipulations and most of all I loved hating her. She was so evil. Her thirst for power was endless and ultimately it killed her. In the real world the quest for power is often rewarded and the person or organisation seems to grow and grow. Often it seems that even if one wants power to 'do good' ultimately it corrupts.

Perhaps this is my own belief and one that has kept me running away from power. Perhaps it is one of the barriers that keeps me from connecting to my destiny. If wanting power is evil then does it mean that good remains powerless? I used to be scared that I had a large dark side and if I had power i would use it badly but now strangely I know that I am essentially good and some of my ideas of dark and light are shifting. I wonder if the way that good works in this world is not through power but in some other way?

On yesterdays post a couple of my friends commented on the nature of authentic being. I realised then that I was more interested in authentic relating for it feels even harder as it involves me and another. It feels more important to my current path though its unclear why.

Time to get going. I am hoping to meditate, get some exercise in the gym and then work on finding the patterns in my memoir. I know I am writing essentially for myself but also because sharing my healing journey is useful to others. My fantasy novel draft seems to have fallen to the side unfortunately.  Until tomorrow.

experiment?

Ok so this is an experiment. I am here alone for 30 days. This is the first time since the beginning of the year that I have had this kind of time to myself, and I am going to experiment with writing a post everyday, keeping a record of sorts. I will not think too much about what i write. Just put down whatever thoughts, concerns and fears that float up through the day. Every morning for 30 days till I get on the flight to Milan I will write. I am unsure yet whether i can reveal all i feel and I suppose its partly an experiment of how much of myself I can bare in a public space? But it's more than that I am experimenting with though I am unsure what exactly it is. A part of me wants to know what and why I am deciding to do before starting but another is urging me to just do. So here goes.

I feel like I am here today where I should have been at the beginning of the year. There is an urgency to make plans to accomplish a lot. Write 1500 words a day on the BF-memoir and work with 2-3 scenes on my fantasy draft and train well so I don't arrive at the European gasshuku unprepared. There is much i need to get done before I leave on the 19th of July. I feel I must be in doing mode and I can only allow myself to feel anything after I accomplish these targets and the other work I do. But is it really wise to function this way?

My daughter left yesterday. I felt such an empty ache in my heart as we sat together after she had checked in. The ache was there all last week as a dull certainty and continues on today but its easier to handle after the parting is done. I am happy too that she is gone where she needs to go and I also know that i need this time to myself, but i feel a knot within. We barely had enough time together this time. Though the time we did have was richer and deeper than before. Open conversations, authentic relating and hardly any huge fights. Its hard to let that go.

Authentic relating with myself and others have been my biggest need after the events of this year. I feel that most of the problems of this year could have been avoided if I had just paid attention to my core feelings in every moment and acted from them. I have needed to find that core again and relationships have been one of the ways to do it for in them I have a 360 degree mirror.  A mirror that sees right through me and reveals my innermost self, beyond the masks that I may have put on for the world.

To use my relationships as mirrors I need to be authentic and truthful in every interaction. Not all relationships can really stand totally honest relating and some have fallen away to the side. But others have strengthened and its been good to find that even on this lonely island I do have scope for very real friendships. 

Honest relating does not mean being totally open and just spilling everything with everyone. It does mean though knowing clearly what I am feeling and showing it to the extent that the relationship needs and wants. It means acting from my core in every moment but also distinguishing which interactions and situations can take how much honesty. It may not be possible to be deep in every relationship but it is possible to be authentic.

It's hard to breathe and focus today. The haze is triggering my allergies and it's oppressive and suffocating. Since yesterday the air quality has been in the unhealthy region and its supposed to stay that way. I don't know how others are functioning through this but its scary for me to not know when i can breathe fresh air again. It is clouding my thoughts and It's a challenge to express what I want to and I am wondering how I will be able to train when I can barely breathe.

Thats all for today.

Dancing with Vertigo

Last Sunday disappeared as I was struck by my nemesis, vertigo. It’s my fourth or fifth attack. Each time it gets more violent and debilitating. This time for about two hours I could do nothing but sit upright on my bed, follow my breath and try not to throw up or fall off the edge of the earth. I just stared into nothingness waiting for the symptoms to ebb. If I even moved my eyeballs too quickly I felt the world spinning out of control.

It is my most frightening body symptom. For some reason I hadn’t noticed till this episode how similar it is to a bad hangover - the heaving stomach, the constantly moving ground, the jelly like muscles, the slurry thoughts - multiplied about a hundred times over. I felt gripped in the unbreakable metal claws of some large being that was turning me round and round, shaking me up and down, wanting me to listen to some message that I couldn’t hear. Yeats line, ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’ echoed through my head.

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that my scariest body symptom resembles my most lethal substance (a potent mix of alcohol and tranquilizers) addiction. This addiction almost killed me when it put me in a coma for five hours sometime in 1999. Dates and the linearity of events are unclear around that time in my life. Under the addictions crushing grip life had plunged into anarchy and Yeats poem 'The Second Coming' had begun to make sense on a very intimate level.

How I acquired that addiction and how I rid myself of it is one of the stories I want to write about in the BF-memoir. But today I want to continue to dwell on the message vertigo has for me. It is a spiritual message I know but my meaning of the term spirituality itself is something I have to re-discover.

I close my eyes and slowly feel the sensations of the vertigo. Sufi dervishes whirling in repetitive circles appear out of nowhere. I find my way into their ecstatic trance, their direct experience of the sacred truth of life. Something I long for even when I have forgotten I do. Something I seek in the sudden feeling of being in flow when immersing myself in karate or the surprising heart opening I experience when I fall madly in love. Multiplied a hundred times over of course.

When I had my first attack of vertigo I thought it was directing me to align myself with my ‘true north’. I thought then that being a good person was the way. But today I know it’s more than that. As I experience a loss of external hearing I hear other sounds. The life affirming roar of a powerful waterfall, the thundering silence of the beginning of the universe, the ringing of a million stars on a moonless night.

My addiction did have a spiritual message for me too. I only discovered it in 2001 after I had wrestled back precarious control from its physiological and psychological pull. I walked back to the edge of the dark abyss and risked losing it all to get a glimpse of its meaning. I used to drink to forget the million conflicts surrounding me. When I approached the drinking with awareness I discovered that the cocktail of alcohol and tranquilizers would take me outside my body and for a brief moment, before i passed out, I would have a 360-degree perspective and a forgiving heart. To find that state without using any substances was my task then. Today I don’t have any serious addictions - though I stay up late to finish a book or beat my own score in a game or to simply procrastinate - and I have travelled far along the spiritual path the addiction led me to.

I feel on the edge of another unknown path. But some part of me has a memory of it. 'This was where i was before I was here,' it says. The task now I think is to once again push the boundary, feel beyond the senses, give up the illusion of control and allow the spirit to leave the body in search of deeper truths. I don’t know how to do this today but others have done it and so it’s possible.

choices

My blog has been plagued with spam views which creeped me out and made it difficult for me to write for a while. It also made me question my choice of putting myself out here in this uncertain space. Questions about vulnerability, being judged and feeling silly came up. But its something I love doing and I am back.

I am looking at Shams Tabrizi’s lines that I have copied into the inside cover of my journal.

‘…Human slowly advances when he accepts his contradictions.’

Often I know I am truly alive by the conflicts raging within my body and heart. Contradictions that cannot be resolved, merely observed. Today I am thinking of whether or not I should continue writing the boiling frog memoir I started. Just about 3000 words written and already so many intense moments and emotions have emerged. Will writing this take me to healing or bring up past events that will tear my life apart again? Will it mess up my current stable relationships? Should I write it as a fictional account or a true story? I must do it, I don’t have to do it. I will find answers but probably not today.

My mind lingers lightly on a confrontation I was faced with this weekend. A friend felt that I had not been there for him when he had needed. This friend had lost someone very close to him. Someone who was mother, father and probably friend in the days of his childhood. My husband and I had been with him when he got the news and stayed with him till he made preparations to leave and was wanting to sleep.

Then deep in our own crises I checked in on him through his social network bleeps and wrote a message there. Satisfied he had many friends around him I put him out of my mind. But he had expected me to follow up and ask how he was. Contrastingly my husband had expected him to get in touch with us once he returned to Singapore. I on the other hand had no expectations from him or from myself about this.

So, three months later when these questions emerged I honestly answered them. He reacted with hurt and made a choice to not take the conversation further and break contact with me.

As is my habit I first tried to understand his viewpoint. I know his choice came from hurt and disappointment. A sense of trust betrayed. After a bit my focus changed to myself and I found that I felt that I had done nothing that required an apology. The lines from Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s 'The Invitation' came to mind.

‘It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me

is true.

I want to know if you can

disappoint another

to be true to yourself.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.’

I had quoted these lines to another friend in 2002 after defending a choice I had made. She at that time had felt betrayed and abandoned by me. I had admitted that I had not realized she had needed my support and then proceeded to explain myself. I too had been going through a crisis that she had not observed and had chosen to keep my energy close to myself. Both of us had spoken our feelings and our friendship had come through stronger. She being a poet herself had acknowledged the painful truth in those lines and said she wanted to live in a way where she would not betray herself.

To be able to betray another to be true to oneself is not an easy choice. Any betrayal whether of self or of another is painful. But so often we make a choice that will make us look trustworthy in the eyes of another and in doing that break trust with ourselves.  In both these incidents I had made a choice where I had disappointed another and was seen as faithless by them.

But in the first case the relationship was strengthened and in the second it broke.

As I continued to think of the current relationship dilemna I also touched a strong anger within. In these same months my family also had been through strong storms. Besides the stress of moving and of being cheated my daughter had been ill with the high fever of a kidney infection in a foreign land, my mother depressed and in pain and my husbands mother had surgery in both eyes. We were grieving the loss of two well loved pets. Friends whom I had not seen in a year wrote or called one of us when they realized what we were going through. But this friend did not contact us at all. There are different sides to any story and its good to be reminded of that.

Every conflict teaches me something about myself and the boundaries within which i operate. Here, I was left with questions about friendship, what I look for in a friend and what I will give and receive in relationships. It is part of the de-cluttering I began earlier this year. Over time I have come closer to living my core values in relationships and mostly i am happy where I am. 

I also see that to be true to oneself one needs to first know oneself and not be afraid to follow the dreams and questions that might lead through disturbing paths to reach this knowledge. And so I might have come closer to the choice about continuing to write that memoir.