“Don’t be dead serious about your life – it’s just a play.” – Sadhguru
I’ve been around a lot of ‘dead serious’ people recently. Usually they carry a rather long ‘serious’ face, pay attention to only the rather ‘serious problems’ and consider themselves ‘very responsible’. Don’t ever try to tell them to loosen up! ‘If it’s not serious, it’s not important’ is their motto.
I’m not one to really judge how serious or important some aspect of ones life are, maybe it really is very important to that person. What boggles me most is the lack of perspective! It baffles me how they become so engrossed in the enormity of whatever it is that is so ‘serious’, that they are unable to take a few moments to consider how tiny their problem really is in the larger perspective of things.
What I’ve come to realize over the years, is no matter how absolutely ‘huge’ a situation feels at the moment, even in the face of death, if one can just pause a few seconds and watch ones own tiny’ness’ in the enormity of this existence, then ones self importance fades away. You feel small, tiny, insignificant, unimportant and relaxed. Suddenly, life feels like a play, where you have to go out and give your best, without any control over the outcome. Seriousness naturally gives way to ease and lightheartedness. This simple shift into ‘insignificance’, this simple change in perspective, is all it takes to move from ‘seriousness’ to ‘playfulness’. Seriously!
Wandering is defined in the dictionary as ‘travelling aimlessly from place to place’. I guess I didn’t wander entirely aimlessly, somewhere it was my intense desire to experience well being in my body and mind, feel exuberantly alive and in touch with my deepest inner core, that took me from place to place, occupation to occupation, wandering to settling, to wandering once again. Wandering was what probably saved my gypsy soul from crumbling under the rights and wrongs, the pressures of societal bindings. Wandering led me in directions where I would have probably never tread, had I succumbed to the fears of my very ‘risk averse’ mind.
13 years ago, is when I first took a detour from my ‘very normal’ life. After being laid off from my techie job, i went through a sort of existential crisis of why I was doing things that meant nothing to me and what it was that I really wanted from my life, what was it that made me tick. As I got offered a job in my ‘dream company’, I let it go, with the only explanation to myself and those around me that – ‘my heart wasn’t in it.‘ I questioned my own ‘very abnormal’ decision along with others, wondering if I had lost my only pivotal chance of a bright future and if I was now doomed to failure. But there one thing which I had no doubt about – I had for the first time actually had the courage to listen to myself and let my inner voice speak. That day is when I first began ‘Wandering’.
Wandering led me back to India, where I met my Guru. Yoga came into my life, opening up a dimension within me that I never knew possible. I felt as though I had stepped onto a roller coaster of sorts with life happening at an enormously crazy speed. It was as though my life were completely out of control, and yet I knew it was not so. Every action, every moment took on a new intensity….sleeping, waking, eating, drinking, I could feel myself come exuberantly alive. I had come home.
Within myself I felt as though I had finally found what I had always been searching for, and yet my physical body, my mind, started purging, going through a cleansing of sorts. I felt as though pains of a thousand lifetimes had opened up all at once. The next 12 years it was as though a flame had been lit within, holding me, sometimes even gently caressing me as my physical being went through unprecedented ‘issues’. I knew I could have never come out of it sane if I didn’t have that guiding force by my side at all times.
I wandered in search of healing, both within and without. Help came whenever I reached out. I found three companions that became my strongest anchors and guides on this journey – yoga, art and food. Through them I reconnected, reconfigured and re-learnt to live my life in the physical world. They have healed me in so many ways and have been instrumental in shaping a ‘holistic heart’ – balanced and still, in tune with the body and mind and yet exuberantly alive.
Bring along your ‘Gypsy soul’ and come ‘wander’ with me as we explore the makings of a ‘Holistic heart’.
The Holistic Heart 