“Yoga works”

The pressure to be “adequate”, in whatever manner authority defined it, set me to wander since I was a small child.

Since I was 3 years old I displayed a strong instinctive nature. My parents tried hard to domesticate me and I was labelled as wrongheaded and improper since I was little.

The wildish nature shows up early. I longed to see the sunsets from the top of my mango tree; race my bike; play with the earth and swing all day and night long. I was curious, alive. My early exile started when negativity around me asked me (even violently) to stop moving and be quiet. I started to believe I was wrong to be so full of energy and saw myself as weird and unacceptable.

As the eldest daughter in my family, I was expected to be a role model. I had to become a certain type of person: someone híper responsible, accountable not only for my own things but also for my little sister and brother.

I was only 5 years old.

My family expected me to share their ways but since very young  I knew going to mass on Sunday was a poor way of compensating for all the lying, emotional violence and senseless drama. Anyways, I was expected to be a good catholic girl and I ended up despising church and all the rituals that seemed superficial and repetitive.

My dream was to become a profesional pianist and to travel the world giving concerts in huge Steinway grand pianos. My dream was shattered by the condemnation of an artistic career and I chose Law basically because it was advised to me at 16 years old since there was no lawyer in our family.

Later, my dream mutated and became a trip to Paris to study History of Art at La Sorbonne. I prepared my French for 5 years to have the level to access it, but the fantasy was shattered by a husband who had no intention of supporting any of my growing.

As women, we have to endure so many attempts of psychic surgery, especially if we are born wildish.  Though our soul requires seeing, the culture around us requires sightlessness.

Though my soul wished to speak the truth,  I was pressured to be silenced- even violently, even until blood dripped from my mouth. .. the reality was those around me could not take the truth.

So I started wandering.

I started traveling and moving away from those who wanted me silent and still.  My culture narrowly defines success in a woman if she is married to the right guy and has children.  By looking a certain way and having a little intelligence- not too much because that is considered rude. Being too assertive is frowned upon. Women should be elegantly quiet- otherwise they become politically incorrect.

Now i understand why I never fitted into this game.  Even with all the obstacles around me: parents, husbands, mothers in law, teachers, bosses, girlfriends-even with their negative judgments,  I decided I would develop my strength.

The strength to be myself no matter what.

I knew I belonged somewhere else but I had no idea where. I knew I could not ask anyone around me for their advice because  their minds were narrow and barely intelligible to themselves. I was to open my own path with my bare hands and feet.  I had the passion to bloom or otherwise die buried in a society where women like me are ostracised by the common ignorance.

I started my awakening  when I started traveling to the other part of the world. My month away in India gave me juice to endure 11 months in my country.

Seventeen years, twenty five trips.

I was labelled as a bad mother for leaving my children one month per year to listen to my heart and understand who I was.  I was split  between trying to belong to a place I did not feel my own and traveling to a country were I was supremely happy and free.  The ambivalence grew day by day, night by night.

My next dream was to live in India for good and die in that beauty, unknown to so many and judged by the same narrow minded beings.

I lived most of my adult life divided emotionally.  I was too different, too weird, too deep to even try to have a conversation.  I was a ghost surrounded by those who could not accept my longing for true love and a way out of so much hypocrisy. I was living buried alive since I had no idea how in the world I would achieve my dream. Yet, I was trying my best to be happy in a place I didn’t belong.

And then the door opened. Two years in India working and living here. I was torn. I knew my plead had been answered, yet I was scared to feel all the changes coming my way.

To go against a mean spirited culture is fighting a battle excruciatingly painful. I was born in the most destructive cultural conditions for a femenine psyche: they insist on obedience with no regard for one’s soul.

Forcing a woman between soul and society;  punishing her creativity and curiosity instead of rewarding it; not recognising her as a being in its own right has two posible outcomes:

1. She gives up too easily.  She is afraid to take a stand or demand respect; assert herself and her right to do it.

2. She lives her life in her own way. For this she must have fierce qualities: fearlessness, vehemence and fearsomeness.

Getting out of the mainstream culture demands some heroic qualities. The woman must be ready to find and obtain this qualities even if they are not allowed, shelter them, own them and then unleash them at the right time.

Stand for herself and what she believes in.

I have to say there is no way to make oneself ready for this. I just know I took all my courage and acted. I left a place where my ethical integrity was “brutallyattacked”. I left a country where social ambivalence collapsed the life I had built and took my heart out senselessly.

Before a woman collapses psychologically, when we can no longer stand the harassment, before she loses herself,  her instinct tells her to act and protect life.  Confusion disappears the moment the right action becomes clear.

There is something so horrendously cruel about a culture that forces a mother to choose between her own children and herself. A culture that does this is a very sick culture indeed.

Today, away from a place that caused me so much pain, I understand I needed this bitter experience to find the culture I belong to. I needed to be expulsed like a rocket back to my beloved India. Do I miss anything? Not really. Except for my children, I can say I am a free spirit in a free land. I’m waiting for them and they will come in due time.

Moksha or liberation is the ultimate goal of yoga. I see my life and I can say

“Yoga works”.