The Heat is my teacher, and would do Pema Chodron proud. There is no more convincing guru from whom to learn the Wisdom of No Escape, for there are so many times when there is NO remedy, NO way out but through. In such times one is shown so clearly the difference between pain and suffering - the one, unavoidable, the other, an opinion and a choice. In such times, surrender and mindful observation are the only workable options; to accept the sensation of one’s blood being brought to boil, to be curious about the rivulets of sweat that trickle from high places to low, to just give up fighting and Be…hot. very, very hot. Here one lives very close to Nature. Not, perhaps, in the sense of truly belonging in it, as I found on retreat in Thailand last January, but certainly a close co-existence with all things “natural”. I love that I share my room with a frog, and entertain geckos each evening, that a trip to the shop in town can regularly involve a water buffalo encounter, or an elephant or crocodile sighting. I even like the squirrel that comes into the bathroom and eats the bar of soap. I’ll admit that I still do not love the gnats, mosquitoes, ants and fleas - I am covered in bites again and have nightly fantasies about amputating the toe that the ant/spider bit - red and swollen from toe’s tip to foot’s arch, with a purple blistering epicenter, it burns and itches in a nerve-splitting manner. I flinch and flick fewer flies away though. knowing they will just alight again within seconds. I am also receiving some invaluable lessons about grasping, and feel that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I am learning to love in the present. My past is largely irrelevant here (by which I mean the “self” and identity I created and identified with - choreographer, artist, healer, teacher, whatever), and I am not projecting onto this loving a vision of the future. I seem to be just loving. Here and Now. It is a small but significant personal revolution, even if it has more to do with a reasoned pragmatism than any real spiritual development on my part! I’ve been thinking lately about the term “culture shock”… “shock” implies to me something sudden and violent, something one is hit with. I think, however, that the phenomenon has a far more subtle and insidious kind of creeping aspect to it. Perhaps this is just a deeper level, concomitant with entering more deeply into relationship with the culture through time spent and engaging in an intimate relationship with a Sri Lankan. There are vast differences between Dinesh and I in terms of age and class and education and cultural underpinnings, and we barely even speak the same language… I marvel that we do as well as we do! To be honest I marvel I do as well as I do, given that I don’t understand WTF is going on around me half of the time, I rarely have the food and personal maintenance practices that make me feel healthy and grounded, and I only know one person in the whole dang country!!!…etc etc etc blah blah blah (already covered in earlier post, nehe?) A cross-cultural relationship offers up no end of opportunities to examine one’s own foundations, really. I was raised with a pretty inflexible code of manners, set-in-stone scripts for all occasions, behavioral do’s & don’ts that were trained with unquestioning certainty. Now, all that was implicit slowly becomes explicit, laid bare and somewhat up for grabs. While I do indeed appreciate the perspective, I do not mean to suggest that this is easy - it is bewildering and thoroughly disorienting at times, and can be a real source of friction between D and I at times. How liberating, though, to observe myself reacting to some “infraction” - what strikes me in my hardwires as bad manners, etc - to see how I personalize it, but then also have the space to ask myself “how important IS this, really? What does it mean?” And if it is not part of someone else’s social code and does not mean rudeness or disrespect under that code, then it is a choice to perceive it as such. I don’t know if I’m being clear here, but I am loving that all the interpersonal edifices I have been raised under and then built myself, over a lifetime, are now exposed as very relative structures. More importantly, the situation offers up a paradoxical opportunity to “depersonalize the interpersonal” - this particular baggage I come by genetically, my maternal inheritance, and it is my life’s dream to heave it off the train and be free of it. This new clarity seems a hopeful first step.
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