Thursday 16th April

 

I haven’t quite sobered up yet but feel it’s the right time to share this experience. My head’s still reeling, my mind incredulous, but something very real and very significant has happened. And I want to tell you.

 

During lockdown, many people have felt frustrated, caged in. That simply hasn’t happened to me. I’ve left the building literally twice since 16th March and both times were with some reluctance.

 

Was I being cautious not to get infected? Yes. Acting out of concern for my fellow citizens? Yes. But there was also something more. Something much more compelling, pulling me somewhere, making sure I would take proper advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in isolation for a month. Yes, it’s a full month today!

 

All of my “outward” activity – my “work” – has been fully focused on Yoga: how to get Sadhguru’s precious teachings to benefit the most people. “Fully” means to the point that I admit I’ve neglected things I probably should have done, if I had been more sensible.

 

I’ve also made my life more “complicated” than I needed to with my meal preparation, because I insisted on staying home and managing with the food I already had. I didn’t want to break out of the cocoon because I may not be able to crawl back in again. I just wanted to intensely engage with THIS experience and see where it would lead.

 

Today, the surge came forth.

 

I feel very clumsy trying to express what was in my awareness. I hope the picture will help. Trying to use analogy to help describe something beyond words.

 

I didn’t know what was really happening, as it started. Not realizing how intense it was going to become, I even tried to sit and describe it to the friend I’d been chatting to but after a while I gave in and just let it take over.

 

Something happened as I simply sat quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the joke my friend had just made by WhatsApp. It was just a little joke, but a joke that couldn’t have been shared with anyone else. Only because of our shared knowledge of certain situations and a certain history we’ve experienced together could this joke exist and be enjoyed by two friends on opposite sides of the globe, during lockdown.

 

In a way, there was a prelude last night. I was on the phone to a very dear friend, and he just kept stopping and saying, “Michelle,” taking his time to say my name and then pausing. And in that pause was a sharing of energy. Silent and exquisite overlap of just being. Just a pause. Just a sharing of a moment. Recognition of a connection that once created, always exists, without needing our constant acknowledgement. We just took a moment out from the small work we were involved in to just be. To bask in each other’s light.

 

All the more beautiful because neither of us needed it. He’s also said how he felt perfectly fine in confinement. Happy, stable. No issues. Me too. We didn’t “need” each other, but we were together and happy to be so. That conscious overlap was so delicately intense!

 

Today again, I felt such pleasure. With this friend, there is such a small overlap of our worlds, but where it happens, it creates new colour.

I guess confinement times are helping me to experience this, because there’s no “accidental” invasion of my space these days. I don’t have unconscious interaction, as I did when I was circulating normally, seeing so many people, not really aware of the impact each of them was having on me.

 

Now the people I’m interacting with are by conscious choice with so much space and time in between interactions, that I can really feel how each one impacts me.

 

It’s like each time I really connect with someone, a little of their colour smudges into mine, and creates a new colour. So that on all sides, my defined boundary becomes a subtler and subtler gradation of colours. And as that happens, who I am, who and what I identify with, becomes that much more hazy.

 

Even as I was starting to become aware of this, and the images were entering my head, I decided to let more in. More people, more love, more oneness – and it surged through me and started to make me dissolve.

 

It was the kind of ecstasy the body struggles to contain without spilling tears. And laughter! All mixed up!

 

My tears helped the colours smudge and create new shades. It grew and it grew and I gave in.

 

I suppose if I can go to the extent that Sadhguru did, where he could even experience the rock and the air as part of himself, my shirt would also be soaked. As it is, it’s already a tearful ecstasy. If I can keep flushing off my accumulated identities, maybe I will one day become colourless.

 

This reminded me of what Sadhguru says about Vairagya.

 

“’Vairagya’ literally means ‘transparent.’ Just as clear flowing water in the river acquires the colour of the soil beneath, one who is transparent has no colour of his own. Colour is a product of the breaking up of light, the basis of our ability to see. Vairagya is an unbroken “free-of-all-distortion” state that can light the world.

 

It is only in a state of vairagya one can see life as it is. Essentially, vairagya means to be as the Creator intended – not bound to any particular aspect of life, the only bond with the Beyond, the source of Creation.”

 

Sadhguru has said that his goal is to bring spiritual experience down from the mountains and into the street but I never imagined I could be experiencing something as blissful as the way I am now, in lockdown inside a block of flats in Ferney-Voltaire!

 

Michelle Mayes