Circle spirals

Three weeks of early mornings, full days, palapa-roofed afternoons and lake-mirrored moons.

My first class leaves me limp with relaxation at the sound of my voice transformed. My students sit silently, unwilling to break the peace.

I feel as if I've done this forever. Knowledge speaks from somewhere deep. Intuition ferments it into gradually strengthening wisdom.

Before I have a chance to let my ego panic, I am a teacher.

They hand me my final certificate in a circle of candles, the same circle we've been sitting in for weeks. I look around at my new family of sisters, faces made even more compelling in the flickering light.

We drum with our eyes closed, pulsing with the music. Ten new teachers beat out an undulating tale of discovery. I don't even know how to drum, but the noises coming from this instrument are rhythmic and transporting.

I have been writing this blog for eighteen months. Eighteen months, constantly turning corners, uncovering new vistas.

Except that these are the corners of a circle, the only geometric shape that has no corners.

I perpetually slip and perpetually discover, but am never halted by the punctuation of a real edge.

A circle is the strongest protection and the purest link. It unites and forges.

It takes you away and away and then loops you back round to where you began.

You send something out and you receive it back. It surprises and convolutes but guarantees you resolve.

It has neither a beginning nor an end.

For eighteen months my writing has been stamped with circular references. Looping, curling, hooping, round, curvatures and revolvatures, swirling and whirling. Ringing a point, creating a centre. In every spinning tale I've included at least one reference to this symbol of wholeness, however tenuous.

All that time devoted to the centrifugal forces within my life. All that time writing about each infinite corner of my perpetual circle. All that time spent within the glittering scoop of my hula hoop, spinning like a dervish, swirling in my moving meditation.

In all that time, my story has been like the geometric flower of life, a series of perfectly connected circles in one ever-flowing net.

But for three weeks I've stopped slipping, and have been instead still, a vital bond in this perfect shape. For the first time, I feel like I have found my hole.

And it is only on the last day of this, my yoga teacher training, a culmination of at least a few circles of life, that I notice the formation we've been sitting in.

And I realise that, morning, noon, night; before and after and during every lesson, every meal, every evening drum session, I've been literally sitting in a circle. This new family, my surrogate sisters, arc around me on either side, every hour of every day, embracing me in the strongest circle of all.

Destiny giggles...from a smoothly rounded corner.

The drowsy fantasy moment of every lonely dawn...

I roll over to the 5:30 alarm clock, eyes stuck together, head reacting to the sound like a cat being lowered into a bath.

As I roll over, I catch a glimpse of the morning sky through the giant window in front of me. It is grey, streaked with the bold creationist's strokes of dawn, mere suggestions of the paint to come. Mist curls threads of ideas around bamboo huts and slinks heavily over the still lake surface.

Even at this time, the light hold secrets. It dances on the lake in rounded ripples, winking.

All my life I've been a bed-monster, struggling from its warm folds, battling negativity from the moment I open my eyes. The duvet has been my protector for as long as I can remember, and unrolling myself from it has been like giving birth to myself, complete with blood, tears and the cool punch of morning air.

I've grown accustomed to my introvert self, waking up in the prison of my skull and wrestling with Day for the keys.

But in my twenty seventh year, I have all of a sudden eased into life in a way that makes me, for the first time, want to rise early. In the same way that I prefer the 'getting ready' to the actual night out, in the same way planning a holiday can be more entertaining than the real thing, the anticipation of the unknown fuels me.

Sheer potential hangs with the mist, evaporating with the hours.

Alongside it, the silence purifies me in a way the day rarely can. For that lonely hour, I own my space. I hold in my hands blank potential, pausing, blinking, before the day is apportioned in sweet slices to the rising crowds.

As I sit down to breakfast at nine, having already meditated, jogged and practised yoga, I think perhaps my drive comes from this sense of achievement. Most likely it is the tasks I set myself. I love what I do. I feel my body pliable, under control, as I fold myself up and eat cross-legged on a palapa mat.

On the lake, it is light before we see the sun. The volcanoes shield him behind strong, pointed fingers, until he becomes too strong and peeps blindingly between.

Until then, things pause. The silence before the shift. Everything intense.

I've fallen in love with Early.

My eyes shiver in half-open ecstasy as I flow through my practise like water. I bask in the space within my head. My mind explores that other world with sticky octopus fingers, contracting swiftly at my command, to re-enter myself from a new door.

Who am I?

She sits across from me, cross-legged, knee to knee on the uneven planks of the dock. Below us the water shifts restlessly. My skin prickles under the sun, soothed by the breeze.

They tell me to look into my partners eyes. My gaze slides off her face, as if we're opposite poles of a magnet.

We begin with the words, "I am."

Our teachers encourage us to talk in a stream of consciousness, all the time keeping the gaze to draw out the truth from the other's face. We are the channel; a straw to our deeper selves, pouring.

I falter.

How can I define myself? How can I describe the complexities of myself with mere words? How can I speak for seven minutes about me, only me. I feel mortified.

This is the point our teachers are trying to make. Words are never enough. Finding oneself lies far away from reason and analysis, the twin culprits of a false path.

Unintentionally, we all begin with facts. We keep them positive, reaffirming our belief in ourselves.

I am a sister. I am a daughter. I am a friend. I am a lover. I am blue haired. I am smiley. I am beautiful to some. I am British and American and Central European. I am twenty-six years old.

I am a woman.

I am a child.

I am a student. I am a teacher. I am a carer. I am a dancer. I am a cook. I am a yogi. I am a writer.

I am an observer. I am a creator.

I am a healer.


Subtley the flow of words carries us on. The ego's perceptions of itself and traditional compartmentalising of the persona blends with emerging acceptance of darkness beneath.


I am blind. I am whole. I am wise. I am loud. I am in love. I am in hate. I am broken. I am confident. I am naïve. I am burning. I am excited. I am scared. I am happy.

I am peaceful. I am cold. I am nervous. I am clean. I am lost. I am magnetic.

I am hiding. I am emerging. I am gentle. I am angry. I am mean. I am argumentative. I am kind. I am generous. I am insecure. I am compassionate.

I am strong. I am weak. I am running away. I am running towards.

I am transient. I am pure.

I am completely unique.

The calm envelops as we talk out loud. I am staring straight into my partner's eyes now, the veil lifted, my muscles relaxed. The sun pierces my retina but I don't close my eyelids.


I am a million different people from one day to the next. I am new for every person I meet. I am an amalgamation of everything I've ever done.

I am smaller than the simplest particle. I am nothing. I am a speck in time.

I am overwhelming. I am insignificant. I am supremely powerful.

I am a bubble. I am a bubble on the surface of an enormous cauldron of simmering Everything, elements fusing with other elements to make new entities. A perfect model of the sun. My rainbow-coloured surface reflects what is around me. I am full of nothing.


I exist momentarily in my unique state, formed from the whole, hovering above the ever-moving sea of existence, before I explode into nothing, my remains sucked back into the swirling potion, to be fused with Everything once again.

The teacher winds a stick around a gold singing bowl, its clear note vibrating through us to signal the end of the lesson. We sit in stunning calm, our words falling down around us on the lakeside dock like confetti.

I am the universe. I am love. I am everything.

The wild contrasts between statements leaps out at me. Each phrase has an opposite. Inner duality is something about myself that has bothered me for a long time. Now I realise we are all made of it. I can not just be strong. I am weak as well. I can not just be lost. I am found. I am neither and I am both.

I, like everything else in this world, exist in duality. As they say, fear is the same sensation as excitement, only perceived differently. We are all trying to fit together two ends of one spectrum, circles of definition stacked one on another to form the entities that we are. A giant spiral.

What she said about herself is an exact description of myself. What I am is what she is. As they say in sanskrit, om tat sat. It is what it is. Everyone else has the same experience as us. We all just are.

I am left with an overwhelming feeling of oneness.

The question "Who am I?" becomes ridiculous. We are all the same; not just in a figurative sense but in a real, palpable, pinch-able sense.

I get the feeling that if we'd been given endless time we would have repeated every possible attribute to each other, finding a little of everything within us, before finally returning to the only truth:

"I am."

Centred

Rid myself of purpose, in order to find my purpose.



This, in essence, was the purpose.


People ask me what I've been doing with myself, incredulous that I've spent so long not earning any money.

As if I was being offensively indulgent.

I want to tell them what I've learnt. I did write a list, but it is too long to be interesting to an outside eye.

Very few of the items would be in place on a CV. Sometimes this makes it difficult to communicate, people often needing things put in terms of 'doing' words.


A lot of the learning comes through meditation, often in combination with stunning natural beauty or ancient sites. I am often reluctant to dwell too much on this, for fear of what people might think. In doing so I am being untrue to myself and of course ignoring what I've learnt, for it seems this path has become my purpose.

****


Back in August I spent a month at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, during which time I was led, by a series of synchronous events, to La Finca de Yoga Mistica.


At the time it was a community in the making, deserted during the rainy season. Empty garden beds lay sodden from the rain, several small pelapa huts hunched dripping and empty, one large rancho semi-finished, smelling of fresh-cut wood.


It was the cleanest kind of peace.


I was a guest of my new friend Randi, who consolidated my daily yoga practise with calm words and dedicated sentiment. Every morning was ignited with meditation on the small dock, mist hanging heavy over the lake, the only noise the soft paddling of early fishermen in dugout canoes.

I fell in love with everything then; the lake, yoga, sitting still. Myself.


I left the farm calmer than I'd ever been, the clear water flowing through my veins. I knew I'd be back.


In the months following, there came an exchange of emails with the farm's coordinators, which resulted in an agreement. I was to receive a yoga and spiritual teacher training in exchange for time working on the farm.


One day I woke up to my soul's autopilot and realised I'd found something I not only really wanted, but had, almost without realising, made happen.


There, crystallising from a long, heavy mist, appeared the Purpose.


It was so simple. Yoga is the synthesis of body, mind and soul, with the ultimate goal of inner stillness. Far more than the commonly perceived 'stretching,' it was designed purely as a moving meditation to sink one deeper into other worlds.

Although I had practised on and off for five years, I had never considered it more than just a beautiful activity. It is still unbelievable that I took so long to realise this could be a life choice.

The more I did, the more the lines blurred between the physical and the perceived. I sank easily into postures, my mind settling like a sudden dropping of the wind.

Without movement of air, there is no wind. Without thought, there is no mind.

Now, early March, I find myself for the first time on a timescale. I pass through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala at speed, like a fly, darting randomly in seemingly useless directions but somehow making it to my goal with time to spare.

I ride a speedboat across the lake, swaying up and down with the rhythms of the waves, rushing into the unknown. Volcanoes tower over me on all sides and I realise the entire lake must be one supervolcano.

I am in the centre.