It started with our Summer vacation to Turkey getting
cancelled as a contagious virus was doing its rounds , and very soon domestic
flights got cancelled and even getting out of our own houses to take a walk
around the neighbourhood was fraught with dangers of contracting Covid 19.
Since all roads leading outwards were closed, I decided to
take my wanderlust to the next level, I decided to take the Journey Within. I
had heard marvellous tales of how it looked, the galaxies of the soul, the
ocean of treasures waiting to be discovered. I was excited!
But how does one take that journey within? There wasn’t a
flight or a train schedule I could refer to. There were, however, multiple
travel agents, waiting to take me on this wondrous journey.
First I tried the easiest route to self discovery; sleep. It
was a journey I had taken many times before, and with a few expert tips from
the sleep experts via Ted Talks and articles on the ‘power of sleep’, I was
sure to unlock the secrets of the soul through sleep. The secret, they said,
lay in the deep sleep, and the slow spindle sleep, and the REM sleep, and it
was a matter of tapping into the Theta and Delta waves, to ride the journey to
Neverland. So, I started sleeping with Binaural beats. Binaural means related
to both ears. when music of two different frequencies is played in either ear,
for example a 200 hz, and a 210 hz, a new frequency is created within the
inferior colliculus , at 10 Hz. This frequency is not actually heard in the
music, but is created within the body and the brain, due to the disparity in
the frequency. Binaural beats are supposed to cure everything from anxiety to
insomnia, and promote a sense of bliss.
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| the journey within, quarantined travel blogger |
Youtube, my preferred travel planner, next suggested, I try
Chakra healing.Chakras are the centers of life force or energy within the body .We
have 7 Chakras in our body, starting from the root chakra meant for grounding
and safety, to the highest chakra which was a direct connection to the
universal spirit. There were multiple ways of balancing the Chakras, from
guided meditation, to visualising the colours red, orange, yellow, green, sky
blue and purple for each of the chakras, to listening to singing bowls and
meditating with crystals, and intentional chanting. Words like ‘I am safe, I am
life, I am will, I am compassion, I am creation, I am awake and I am .’ Chakra
meditations on Youtube were as short as 7 minutes with 1 minute for each
chakra, to ones which were 7 hours long with 1 hour each for each Chakra. I
found the 35 minutes a day, spending 5 minutes per chakra was the most
sustainable practice for me.
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| colourful vistas, on my journey within |
From a journey which required me to sleep, to a journey
within which required me to sit still, I then moved to a soul-travel option
which required me to actually move.
The idea was to move from your mind and brain to a more
visceral, more intuitive energy, which required the body to take over. Shamanic
shaking ,or quaking was the exact opposite of thecalm relaxation of the previous
two,, here words like ‘ecstatic expression’ and ‘heightened arousal’ were used.
It was more difficult than the others, I realised, since here, it expected me
to do something. I saw that my mind wandered less. There was no scope of the
mid to wander, when your arms were flapping like a bird, your hips gyrating and
your feet stomping to a primal African beat. I pranced like a monkey on sugar
high, and all things considered , while I am not sure what insights I got about
me, I felt elated.More reading suggested that shaking has been a form of
connecting with a higher being, among Oshoites, Caribbean shakers, bushmen,
shamans, Australian aborigines, Japanese Seiki Jutsu.
From the ancient Indian wisdom of balancing Chakras, I
decided to try the ancient Chinese wisdom of balancing my masculine and
feminine energies, namely my Yin and Yang. Yin the feminine powers and the Yang
,masculine powers, reside in each one of us. it is a dynamic equilibrium, never
still, sometimes we are the receiver, sometimes the giver, sometimes the
intuitive , other times the logical. I relised, just like the chakras, if the
Yin Yang energies are not in balance, then it leads to discord in the physical
and mental state of the person, but also discord in the relationships with the outside
world. Balancing yin yang meant doing a lot of internal questioning,
journaling, some qigong exercises, and nutrition.
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| balancing the masculine and feminine |
I know at this point you are wondering if I found my Moksha
in the times of Covid 19 quarantine. What I do realise is that going on a
spiritual journey, is about the actual practice. Just the way you cannot travel
to Italy, via a food and travel show on Tv, or via scrolling through your
instagram. In the same way, your journey within, will look and feel different
from the journey of other holistic healers.
From all of these I also realised , that the journey within,
like all other travels, is not about the destination, it is about the journey.
With no end goal, infact with no idea what the final destination looked like, I
had merely decided to try various lanes, and tracks and wooded pathways ; all
leading inwards. How much deeper could I go? Which path seemed the best one?
Which one would take me there? How would the outside world look once I reached
my final destination of soul searching? I didn’t know all the answers, and
maybe tour guides in the form of gurus and masters might help me get there
faster, but to find your own path, as Robert Frost said, might make all the
difference. One thing is for sure, there is not just one way to the
destination, and the journey too is as beautiful as the destination.
Which ones do I still do now? I do them all, I have found that each of
the different meditative states, whether it is sitting in stillness, or
listening to music beats, chants, or movement based meditation, or even
meditation in sleep, each of them brought either calm, or insight or elation or
relaxation. And each have a place in my life. Also, we are still in lockdown
phase, and I have decided to keep searching for new eclectic pathways to the
Journey within.
