India Initiations Part 3
I’d known I was going to return to Rishikesh. When I left the last time because of that whole Amma business, the land had made a deal with me that I could come back, there was more to be done. And anyway, I’d left the dresses I’d bought in Bali at the hotel because I’d been carrying them around for months and they were completely impractical but I was getting really emotional about having to ditch them. Ditching them felt like surrendering any hope of a normal life where I wasn’t just a knotty-haired nomad and I wasn’t having it.
As I boarded the flight from Kathmandu, I could feel the mountains and a cave calling me. I’d done a quick reconnaissance of the viability of meditating in a cave and popped into a travel agency previously, and knew that was the place I had to go back to to sort it out. I pictured myself finding some remote cave in the mountains, tended to by Sadhus, and having the chance to spend a series of nights there in isolation. It felt like what was needed.
The timing of my trip was interesting because Holi festival was about to start and the city was even more bustling with tourists both local and western in anticipation of this much beloved day. I squeezed my way into my hotel and braced myself for an onslaught of mandatory joy, celebration and colour which I wasn’t really emotionally resourced for.
Once that had all settled, I went back to the travel agency. There were two options, and we could start with the first by going two hours up the Ganga to a cave that’s not exactly secret, but has an ashram connected with it and they might be able to sort something out. Despite it not fitting the image I had in my mind, it felt right. Also, it felt urgent. There was an eclipse coming up and suddenly I realised I was supposed to be there for it. As I hopped on the back of my guide’s scooter and drove over the bridge, I could see all around me a multidimensional expression of the Vedic calendar, holographic layers of space and time, and a sense of a timeline adjustment happening at a very deep level of existence – mine and the collective’s. I asked him to be quick as I had to also buy some offerings for Sadhus.
We drove along a beautiful road through with the regal mountains around us and the sparkling Ganga guiding us along. We came to Vashishta Gufa cave – a Shiva cave named after the renowned sage who meditated there. The head Sadhu comes over and we try to explain in reasonable language that a crazy white girl had a hunch and now she wants to come and stay with them and sit in their cave on her own. It didn’t go down well and the Sadhu didn’t make even the slightest attempt at politeness about it. Anyway it was closed. Hmm. Then, giving in a little, he gestured to the other side, indicating another cave tucked away on the other side of the cliff. ‘That’s the one you want’.
We go round and my driver leaves me to do my thing. I didn’t know anything about this other cave but there were four locals already there, praying very intently, and an idol of what felt like Durga, or at least Durga was very much present with me there. After a while the others left and I was on my own there. It was like something locked into place cosmologically. A Rubik’s cube aligning. I found out afterwards that this is Arundhati Cave, Vashishta’s wife, and that Arundhati is the celestial, stellar, guiding aspect of the feminine principle, the star that points the way.
The eclipse passed and we headed back. The compulsion I felt towards sitting in caves had dissipated, at least for now, and I couldn’t see any more point in sitting with a bunch of tourists in Rishikesh. That’s when I felt a familiar sensation come back to me.
Dharamshala
A couple of times at random moments on flights or in a tuk-tuk I’d felt a high-level human presence connect with me. It was a serious spiritual Master from the Himalayas. His presence had felt like a promise. Even before Varanasi the energy was something like, ‘you’re going to do all this stuff and then you will connect with me’. Of course my PM brain loved this – maybe I could live in the Himalayas and train with him and finally have a spiritual lineage too. I’d no longer be the spiritual orphan I was struggling so much to be. I felt it again as I was talking to a friend who I’d met at the Yoga Barn in Bali who’d ended up basing himself in Dharamshala. I’d heard great things about the place and wanted to see him so I got a night bus and arrived early the following morning.
Dharamshala has a normal modern city component to it, and then it has a separate section which is much older and more charming, which is again unofficially split in two with a Buddhist half and a Hindu half. The Buddhist half is where many of the refugees from Tibet now live and it’s where His Holiness the Dalai Lama lives as well. After settling in and catching up, the next day I arranged to meet my friend and go to the monastery. It felt a little like being in a boarding school or university campus. A couple of the rooms and idols in there were incredibly powerful and my Kundalini reacted in turn with spontaneous mudras and mantras that must have raised a few eyebrows. I was used to it but, here was something else.
Then the mysterious presence I’d been sensing finally made itself known: it was the Dalai Lama! He was telepathically playing with me and it was hilarious. He greeted me and my friend, welcomed us to Dharamshala, and then he was playing a game of telepathic hide and seek with me for a while which cracked me up and dissolved any sense of being an outsider there. What was also wonderful about it was that my PM brain had absolutely nothing it could latch on to around it. Unless I wanted to learn Tibetan and give up my life I was not going to be training with the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala so I could relax and go and get a nice bowl of thukpa with my friend.
The other thing that wanted to happen was a trip to a Shiva temple. I’d been researching temples in the area and part of me wanted to go just wandering the land from temple to temple but there was one that stood out and my friend was to come with me. So I convinced him to join for the trip and we drove for over two hours along a really boring bumpy road and I started to feel a little guilty for bringing him. We stopped off at a couple of incredible temples along the way though, but the main draw was this smaller one in a local village dedicated to Mahakal. Actually, I think I may have even made a mistake because I’d wanted to go to the larger Baijnath temple and we’d driven all that way but got confused and ended up at Mahakal. Anyway, it was clearly where we needed to be as I was getting all these Doctor Who style downloads about time and space and how my friend and I had worked together in previous lifetimes in that capacity. As I meditated with Mahakal I could feel him coming through me and saying to my friend ‘are you ready to become a timelord?’. His reply was a solemn ‘yes’. His soul knew.
Back at base, a most peculiar and disconcerting thing started to happen to me. I started having visions of the UK. Particularly, supermarkets, and my aversion to them. And an area of land in Devon. I’d had hints of this at Nagarkot already and chosen to put it out of my mind. The dissonance with my nomad life in India was too strong and I’d had absolutely no intention to return to the UK. But as the next few days progressed it was clear: I was being asked to go back. Perhaps my dreams of a stable home, a healing practise, a partner, a community were going to be filled back on UK soil of all places. I supposed I could live in Devon, with the right support. But my year in Asia was at an end.
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