Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu

Above are pictures of a recording session in Chennai after my friend Sanjay bought some speakers from this amazing artist/musician. I asked if I could record a song, and he said yes. It's a rough cut, but it's my song all the same! Wow, serendipity happens again.
Below those pics are some photos of the friends from Seattle I am staying with in Tiruvannamalai: Sanjay, my neighbor from Wallingford, Gonga (with the white beard), and his wife, Tara.

I have reached a place where I could stay for a long time. I can only stay for four days now, then I am going to do a week of volunteer work with victims from a fire in another state, but then I think I will return again afterwards to soak up some of the amazing vibes of this place. I am staying for free with friends from Seattle who live here semi-permanantly. My neighbor, Sanjay, from Wallingford, introduced me to his friends Gonga and Tara who have started a temple here called Universal Fellowship of Light: All Saints Temple. This temple consists of one large room with photographs of many saints from all over India, as well as a spare bedroom/bathroom in the back. I am staying in that bedroom.

It's funny, because I thought I was coming to India for spiritual reasons. I thought I would meet some amazing yogis or medicine people, maybe learn from them or work with them. But mostly my trip has been about endurance, acceptance, patience, and about my relationship with myself. India is a hard place to travel in. It's tiring. It accosts you from all sides with offers to buy things, with poverty, with loudly bleeping buses and rickshaws, with children asking for money and pens, and with stares from men and women who are not ashamed to zap you with their eyes for many minutes without breaking their gaze. It's been amazing and tiring at the same time.

In south India, since I flew here from Delhi on Feb 14, I have spent all my time in Kerela, at beaches, soaking up the sun and the waves, at Amma's ashram singing devotional songs, in the mountains where they grow tea and spices, and at fishing towns eating my fill of fresh fish and prawns. I have been missing home, even though my time has been full of fun touristic activities. There comes a time, in the traveler's circuit, when visiting tourist places becomes more exhausting than fulfilling. I think I have reached that point, at least in India.

Then I came to Tiruvannamalai. I don't know, but something about the energy of this place is what I have been searching for all this time in India. I feel like I am arriving here too late, like I should have come directly here and not wasted so much time on the beach, etc etc. And staying with a friend, an American, a neighbor, for God's sakes, from Seattle, is comforting to say the least. Walking into the "All Saints Temple," I felt intuitively that I AM meeting these saints, finally. After all of this exhausting travel, I am finally connecting with why I came to India: for spiritual knowledge and illumination.

The mountain and the land itself are filling me with the calmest energy I've felt in my whole time in India. The sense of calm is also making me realize how tired I feel. I am excited and warmed by the homecoming that I sense, connected to the mountain itself, the energy of this place, and to seeing my friends from Seattle. The mountain's name is "Arunachala." It is known to be the actual abode of Lord Shiva, and many say it is the most sacred mountain in all of India. Pilgrims flock here every full moon to circumnavigate it. Many saints and yogis have and continue to make their lives here, meditating in hidden caves in the mountain or giving teachings in the nearby town. A guru who is famous in the West, called Ramana Maharishi, lived here in caves for many years, and now his ashram is also here. A verse in the Arunachala Mahatmyam, (taken from Wikipedia) translated from Sanskrit into Tamil by Sri Ramana Maharshi says:

"Arunachala is truly the holy place. Of all holy places it is the most sacred! Know that it is the heart of the world. It is truly Siva himself! It is his heart-abode, a secret kshetra. In that place the Lord ever abides the hill of light named Arunachala."[5]

Ramana Maharishi used to walk every day around Arunachala as a meditation, and says that "If you go round this hill it will give you its grace even you don't want it." It may sound cheesy, but I really feel that this is a sacred place. I don't just believe what everybody else is saying, I can FEEL the sacredness in my bones and in my blood. It feels like connecting my umbilical cord again with the universal, undying, infinite source of light.

Tomorrow morning, I am going with Sanjay, Gonga, and Tara to walk around the mountain. We plan to leave at 5 am to avoid the heat, and take the "inner path," the path that goes through nature and follows closely to the mountain. We wil walk slowly, in silence, "like pregnant women," as they say around here.

I finish this post with a heart that is open and waiting for grace. I know that grace is there, love is there, it's just coming slowly and gently into my tired body, like a dove settling into its nest after a long flight.

Writings on Love from Ammachi's Ashram

Love. There's something about it that we yearn for. Our heart is a magnet or a drain pipe always drawing love towards us. We can never forget love, once we've experienced it. Love touches us where we are most tender and innocent, where we forget to delineate the difference between self and other.

There is not always a way to escape from love. Sometimes the feeling is simply unavoidable - a white dove exploding from our chest in a flurry of feathers and breath. We don't know how it works. Sometimes love fills us with the most incredible ecstasy; other times it drains us until we feel as empty as a bowl with no fruit inside. Either way, love is a journey and a destination. It is a story in itself, being told through a network of many lives and many bodies.

Would love exist were there not bodies to feel it? Would love exist were there not an object to adore? Feeling love is the simplest, most beautiful thing on Earth, yet it has the capacity to attract many complications. Love without judgement is rare. Oftentimes love comes with more questions than answers - how do I express this feeling? Does this have to do with the other person, or with me? Will my heart be received or rejected?

Maybe John Steinbeck was right when he said, in "East of Eden," that the thing all humans are most afraid of is rejection. I can easily take trains by myself across India while relying on my innate strength and courage, yet it is more difficult for me to tell a man honestly about my tender feelings for him than it is for me to walk down a street full of beggars. I can hide inside myself when walking down the street, but I can't do that when I stand up for my feelings.

I would like to think that external courage begets internal courage. Where does the word come from, anyway? It comes from the word coeur, which means heart in French. Angeles Arrien interprets this to mean that courage implies standing by your heart. Being courageous doesn't need to have anything to do with journeying outside and away from yourself. In fact, it can be quite the opposite. It can require more courage to journey into yourself and see what lives there because there is no escaping yourself. When you are traveling, there is always the option of packing up and leaving a place if it does not suit you. With yourself, you are stuck. There is no one else who is going to rescue you. You are there all alone on your one little raft, floating on the endless sea of your own feelings. You can cry for help, maybe from God or from a trusted friend, and you can be blessed by grace. But you alone are the antagonist and the protagonist, the hero and the demon, or your own story.

In many ways, a new feeling of love requires us to shift our realities. Are we aligning with our own truth? Do we accept our own authorship of our lives, or do we shirk this responsibility off onto others through blame and judgement? Is there a new action, a change that is needed to reflect the feelings that we have inside our hearts?

I am always seeking to have my actions mirror my feelings. In this way, I draw out of myself all these internal escapades into a place where I can actually see them and interact with them in the real world of people and relationships, journeys and destinations. We are all called to do things which ask us to define who we are. In a way, we can define ourselves by our actions, by what we do with our time. This is not meant to be a judgement, only an honest perception of reality. How does time feel for us? Are we able to direct our own flow of time, or are we constantly following a schedule that was set for us by someone else? Do we even know why we do the same things day after day, without shifting the pattern? These questions can guide us into a higher state of self-awareness, so that we ensure we are the conscious leaders of our own lives.

Conscious leadership means being aware of all the factors which influence our choices, and knowing through some intuitive process that we are following our own truth. We don't have to see or understand all or ourselves to know we are on the right track. A self is a very infinite thing, and best perceived in terms of orbits and gravitational pull, rather than microscopes and the glare of a spotlight. We are all orbiting around something, and it is our job to become increasingly aware of our relationship to that something. What does the pull feel like? How does it influence our direction? When do we slow down, and when do we charge forward? These are all things which have to do with our center of gravity in relation to the mass or density of what we are orbiting around.

As we explore the various spinoffs of our central orbit, we come to understand what we are made of. This is something we can never truly see. John O'Donohue speaks of the human soul as something which can never be seen in an objective way, only felt and sensed by the subtle energies of the heart. When we get a glimpse of what we are made of, we get very excited. Our ecstasy begins to increase, along with our great love of empty spaces, epic stories, heroes and heroines, and things which call us into life. We don't have to forget anymore. With one whiff, we are resurrected from the threat of a life lived outside ourselves, and we want to know more. Where does this power come from? Is it mine? Can I cherish is? Can I grow this garden which I so adore? Can I cultivate the garden of my own soul?

And so begins the journey of a thousand lifetimes. A gardener's work is never finished. There is always something more beautiful to plant, another garden party to organize. In the same way, we are never finished with the exploration of our own souls. Would we really ever want to be? There is a sheer magic about new light dawning, of untold stories emerging from the shadows, of inviting new friends over to share a plate of soul food. I think it is a great gift that we can never truly see ourselves, for it allows us to go on exploring our frontiers until the end of time.

You might think this a lonely enterprise, this never-ending search for truth. But you see, truth is there all along. It never leaves. It is always guiding you, helping and consoling you along life's slippery waterways. The fact that we can never fully see ourselves allows us to grow closer to other beings who can then reflect the light of our own truth back to us. We can then see, through their eyes, what we are made of and how we grow into more beautiful and magnificent forms.

The gift of life is the gift of relationship. Without multiplicity we could never live this story which is so tantalizingly unfolding. There is no need to rush. We can be here, fully present, fully aware of our own role and our journey. After all. love is a feeling, and feelings take time to explore. Love is something we keep communicating, day after day. We keep giving it, we keep receiving it. In doing so, we nourish the very roots upon which we stand. When we remember to communicate love, we remember why we are here. Let us keep remembering. In our own unique ways, let us keep approaching the blinding light of our souls to weave the fabric of time back together.

Aho! Namaste.
Melissa