Mysore India Part 2: Mystical Meltdown

It’s been a couple of weeks since I returned from India. I am, for the most part, recovered from international and perhaps interdimensional travel. 

The theme of digestion continued until the end of my trip; however, the bodily process of breaking down food into energy is just a metaphor for the spiritual process of breaking down all of the new experiences into something that will serve. Upon arriving home, it felt like it was all too much to process. Tears, joy, confusion, and fatigue rose and fell, swirling like the ocean water near shore. However, with time, sleep, conversation, care from friends, baby snuggles, and writing, my system is stabilizing.  I suspect this is all quite normal for a first visit to India, especially for a highly sensitive type. 

I want to directly address the fantasy that a yogic pilgrimage to India is meant to be “relaxing”. This keeps coming up, and I think it is related to the fact that many, if not most, people here in the US are anxious and deprived of relaxation.  My suspicion is rooted in the fact that I used to be like this. Yoga is often marketed as a relaxant. Don’t get me wrong, I do experience an underlying sense of relaxation towards life in general, but there is a difference between that and cravings for temporary yogic bliss. Yoga, for me, is a much bigger process than any temporary state.  Yoga/truth/healing are inseparable. The triple goddess of not relaxing! It has been my experience that when you practice yoga, anything stuck or built up inside your system will start reacting - moving, perhaps even throwing a tantrum.  The build-up of stuck energy in the system, if present, will begin to move, and if you can bear to be with it soberly, it is not relaxing at all. This is not everyone’s experience. This has been mine. By the grace of a higher power, a moment arrived when I was gifted the capacity to meet what was arising within me soberly. After many years of heavy drinking, it was gnarly, as we know, but worth it. I took a two-year break from practicing yoga during that initial phase of healing. Yoga was too activating. 

This healing process has led me to more profound levels of peace and, yes, relaxation. However, it is a process with many peaks and valleys. I was chatting about this with a lovely man whom I practiced yoga with in Mysore. He has been practicing Ashtanga yoga for nearly thirty years, and he said, “Oh yeah, I had seven years of anger come up.” Nobody on Instagram tells you this!  Here in the US, we are often sold glamour and quick fixes. I’m not offering criticism because sometimes that is what it takes to get an initial message out. I’m just saying there is more to it. Seven years of processing anger may seem absurd, but this is the truth of what can happen when yoga really starts working and when you are open to the work. Sorry, my friends, no quick fixes sold here. 

Spending five weeks in Mysore, practicing very intense yoga with a room full of lifelong practitioners and yoga masters, was like turning the vibe volume up to maximum all at once. Did you ever do that as a kid when there were dial knobs on our sound systems? You jack up the volume to full blast, just for the thrill of static chaos busting out the eardrums? Mysore was like that for me. I don’t even really know exactly what got busted up yet; I just know things got busted. I am ultra-sober (no weed, no alcohol, no pharmaceuticals, no over-the-counter, no plant medicine, nada). My nervous system is generally healthy, but it is also susceptible, so being in India may have been especially challenging for me. I don’t know what others experience. I’d love to hear. 

I do know, there are no vacations from the process of healing and awakening. You can’t set it down and get back to it when you feel like it. It is constantly unfolding, a cyclical fluctuation between light and dark, upheaval and revelation, and so on. It is life felt to its fullest. 

So what happened during the second half of my trip in Mysore? So many things, but here is just a taste. 

One quiet morning, I was walking alone on the grounds of Mysore Palace.  An elder Indian yogi in orange robes appeared in the distance and recognized me from the street we lived on. He waved me over and invited me into one of the small,  tucked-away temples at the edge of the property. As I stood in front of the temple deity,  he gently suggested that I shouldn’t stand directly in front of it. “Too powerful?” I responded. With a chuckle, he replied, “Yes, too powerful”. After chatting with him and hearing a bit about the history of the old temple, I continued wandering down the outskirts of the sprawling palace grounds. I entered another larger temple, and I will never forget the feeling of those cold ancient stones on my bare feet. In the US, having bare feet inside is seen as disrespectful, but in India, it is the opposite. I walked towards the inner sanctuary, and the wind whipped around the temple courtyard. There was a gentle buzz within the stone walls. Imagine, once again, turning up the volume full blast, but this time, you turn it up on a peaceful symphony, with no sound to be heard.  There is only the feeling in the body from the soft and gentle vibration of the music. That is as close as I can get to describing what some of the temples felt like. Not all of them. They were all different.  

Chamundi Temple was the most powerful. 

Chamundi is one of the fiercest goddesses in India, and her temple sits at the top of the 1,008 deep red stone steps leading up the hill overlooking the city of Mysore. As legend goes, the Goddess Chamundi slayed a demon that had been terrorizing the land. It was a demon no man could kill. Only a female could do the job.  Chamundi wears a necklace of skulls, and her gaunt body reveals her skeletal frame, draped thinly by her skin. Her eyes bulge, and she is often depicted next to a fig tree. Her imagery is frightening to look at and will blow your Western patriarchal versions of the feminine into outer space, where they belong. She is but one aspect of the Divine Feminine, which I understand as a raw and genderless feminine energy untouched by culture.  Mysore is a sacred city where you can meet the Goddess in her fiercest form if you are ready. She is terrifying yet gentle, ferocious yet protective, mysterious yet visceral. My experience of visiting her in Chamundi Temple is beyond complete comprehension. 

My Hindu friend and I stood in the winding line of the temple, our offerings of fresh jasmine and rose garlands in hand. When it came time to view her (in a less fierce depiction in the form of a stone statue/Murti), it was but a brief moment. You had to keep moving to avoid being crushed by the incoming crowds. Despite the quick and chaotic pass-through, the temple vibe felt gentle and supportive, which surprised me, given the ferocity of the Goddesses.  I thought that was it. 

Later that morning, as my friend and I ate breakfast,  the tears dripped down our cheeks, and blissful waves moved gently through us. Neither of us had too many words. 

And when the light gets turned up, what happens? Anything that needs to be shown to me will be shown. A day later, another illness struck me that was unrelated to my food intake. It involved insomnia, nausea, and agitated vision. It was unlike any of the trauma healing or regular illnesses I have experienced. I am not going to share any further details because I don’t want to, but I just want to say that it shook me. It doesn’t matter to me too much what exactly happened; what matters is that I emerged from the experience with many new perspectives. I realized how permeable I am to harmful outside energies, and I am making adjustments.   It was a peculiar and terrifying sickness—a mystical meltdown, which I recovered from within a couple of days with the help of meditations and a temporary change of location. Should it surprise me,  in this city, home to giant bats the size of great horned owls? These bats with furry orange bodies that flap their massive wings at dusk against the overcast sky? Is it a surprise in this city where the occasional cat-sized rat with red eyes scurries across rain-soaked roads? Is it any surprise in this city, which is overseen by one of the fiercest, darkest, and most magnificent goddesses of them all?  It is also a city full of beauty, magic, luxury, gentleness, and the honey-sweetest of energies. It is the whole spectrum. I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth if I only shared about the pleasing aspects, which were also many.

India expanded my capacity to hold contradictions. One of those contradictions is that, although it involved challenging experiences, I am quite certain I am meant to return. I look forward to the day. For now, I'm happy to be back in Astoria, feeling the breeze and breathing the fresh ocean air, and shoring up my boundaries. 

When I arrived home, some dear friends, who knew very little about my trip, had left an array of welcome-home gifts on my front porch, one of which was a fig tree.