Thanksgiving - Vishnu's unseen hand

In the USA, “giving thanks” goes back to when the European pilgrims arrived in what was a wild and untamed land. They created the celebration at Harvest season, symbol of abundance, to express gratefulness for surviving through the first harsh winter that decimated many of them.

I feel very grateful for my parents, for my ancestors, and for those pilgrims who gave us the example of overcoming their fears to make new lives in unchartered territories. It resonates in a special way as Kamala and I pursue our Journey. I feel deeply grateful for the elements that so generously allow us to thrive on earth. And I am grateful for being given this precious, beautiful and rich experience of human life.

Our species has this unique ability to live life consciously and reflect on it; to have a conscious, spiritual experience of our existence. The flipside is that this same mind that provides our ability to reflect also traps us in our ego, to the detriment of our emotional and transcendental experience of life. This craving ego tends to develop the mundane and materialistic aspects of life as though they should occupy the center stage of our entire time here.

But to live life at its full capacity we can also explore and nourish the sublime and subtle reality of existence. It happens inevitably to all of us, every time we encounter loss, when we put our lives into perspective, whether for a few seconds or entire years. We reassess the importance and meaning of our lives, and feel more appreciative of the blessings we are granted. We also often have a better sense of our emotional being.

Landing and railing I fell over

For the past few days I’ve been thinking along these lines, while staying at Arya Vaidya Sala Kottakkal (http://www.aryavaidyasala.com/), a 100 year old Ayurvedic institution in Kerala, for a one month treatment mainly focused on my back.

On Saturday November 22nd 2008, 7:04 am could have very well been the last minute of my life.

View from the railing to the floor below

As I was waiting with fellow students for yoga class on the 7th floor, at 7:05 I made a 15 foot backward free fall from the low railing I was leaning against, and landed on the marble staircase one story below. Passing out before falling, I fell like a bag, soft and flexible, and survived without bone breakage, brain or vertebral damage whatsoever.

Panoramic of fall trajectory

With some 25 stitches on my head, a couple on my right elbow and a minuscule hairpin fracture and stitches on my left knee -not to mention three very small bruises for my entire body- no one here understands how I survived with so little injury, let alone having avoided paralysis and death. In India, where the presence of the divine accompanies every step of life, people naturally understand the Mystery and name it; but we have all been surprised at how unmistakably it manifested itself in this case.

Heading out in the ambulance

Would there be a parallel between the abandonment of my unconscious body, dropping uncontrolled on the marble steps 5 yards below, coming out practically unharmed, and the power of Surrender? Would surrendering generally be a safer course of action than our typical control-driven behaviors? In this tangible example, is there any doubt that I would have been broken in several pieces had I reacted consciously to the plunge, stiffening myself in an instinctive though totally irrelevant attempt to control the fall?

How do these same principles affect our beliefs and behaviors, our ability to attain our goals and realize our dreams? Could we apply this notion of Surrender to areas of our life where doubts and fears may be driving our agitated and anxious need to control? Would just setting the course and pursuing the required actions, while at the same time faithfully abandoning ourselves be more effective to produce results?

What unknown and unexpected dynamics would unfold, should I adopt such a trusting attitude as the one my body took, deprived of any intervention of the conscious mind and willful ego? What is the bottom-line productivity of effort, compared to that of the path of least resistance? So many questions are arising, as though the doors to an ignored and hidden world of elemental wisdom and knowledge had opened; from this one, concrete experience: that my body could have snapped into pieces and barely got bruised.

Wheeled across the hospital grounds, moved to CIT scan

After getting dressed for yoga practice I headed up the two flights of stairs to our early morning class, finding other people waiting on the landing in front of the classroom. Other mornings I would wait standing but that day I felt I needed to sit down. The few chairs were occupied and when I contemplated the 2 ½ foot high railing, a discreet inner voice clearly said “don’t do that”. But my mind ignored it. Listening to that soft voice of my intuition is something I can still work on… As I leaned my rear on the railing, I said to myself “I need to take a good, deep breath”, which I did. Just before passing out.

Kamala was in our room on the 5th floor and heard a big crash, thinking it was demolition work that had been going on for a few days on our floor. She looked into the hallway; someone else was poking their head out to see if it was on the 5th floor, but not seeing or hearing anything, both went back to their occupations. Minutes later Katharina, a German friend, came to get her.

We spent the day and night at the nearby Almas hospital, going from ER to X-Ray, to CIT brain and vertebral column scan, from there back to ER for stitching, to MRI neck scan, before heading to a room four hours after arriving, finally drinking a couple of the best cups of hot chai I’ve had in my life!

Finally in a room and on a bed, my first cup of chai!
~~~~
Since then I've been slowly recovering, sitting in bed with a straightened left leg and a good dose of upper back and neck pain. Though my very good physical condition has played a role in my body's response to the fall, I feel I have been intimately touched by the grace of the divine. In my other accidents, that each could have been far worse than they were, I felt grateful with a renewed appetite for living. This time I have felt as held in the hands of life’s own mystery, with the realization of how life as such can be amazingly preserved.

People believe in protections, from ancestors, from talismans, from good deeds, prayers or rituals; above these rests a universal force enabling for life to be sustained. We often see the catastrophes rather than the protecting hand behind the daily survival of so many.

In the Hindu pantheon, the trinity is represented by Brahman -the creator, Vishnu -the preserver and Shiva -the destructor/regenerator. How the universal power of preservation, symbolized by Vishnu, is able to maintain healthy human life in circumstances like mine is part of the great Mystery. When I extrapolate this situation to the world at large, I realize how life is actually able to be sustained on earth in so many ways despite many opportunities for it to cease.

Seventi Sebastian, ER nurse, Kamala and room nurses

I was surrounded by staff from the Kottakkal Ayurvedic center; two of the massage therapists, JayKrishnanan and PramodKumar, as well as one of the senior managers, Ravi, accompanied every step of the emergency process, making sure everything was tended to, helping to move my body from one stretcher to another or just staying by our side to assist in every possible way. This friendly, warm support meant a great deal to Kamala and I and they were providing it so naturally, spontaneously, efficiently, without hyper-sensitivity, pity, pretense or agitation.

Kamala monitoring move, Dr RajanPrashant

After spending the night and next morning in observation, I was released. We were both relieved to get back to Arya Vaidya Sala and our room, that Kamala had customized the day after we arrived with the various lightweight cotton cloths we had purchased since January for exactly this purpose. She had hung and laid on different surfaces the colorful checkered sarongs from Thailand, sheer dotti from Chennai and Rajpur, “rickshaw driver” towels from Varanasi, small block print sheets from the Khadi shop in Mylapore and a sheer handloom sari from Haridwar that we flung over the mosquito net frame above our beds, making it look and feel like a canopy.

On our return many of the patients we had briefly met in the 5 days prior to the accident checked in on me and have since been coming to visit us regularly. We now have made friends with Germans, Austrians and a number of Indians who live here in India, in the UK, Canada or the US. As the clientele is mainly middle-upper class, we have the opportunity to get acquainted with educated, English speaking Indians of similar social classes to ours, conversely to most of the Indians we’ve made friends with while travelling: chai or ironing shop owners, waiters, tailors or rickshaw drivers.



It has also been very comforting to feel the presence and care of the staff. Even P.K. Warrier himself, chief physician and managing trustee since 1954, and nephew of the founder, has come to visit a couple of times. Though my main treatment has been interrupted to allow time for initial recovery, today I received my first hot herbal oil application to reduce upper- back and neck pain.

30 hours after the fall, waiting to get back "home"

In my last blog I wrote: “…Perhaps is it time for a deeper journey… one that confronts us with our deeper selves, with our desires and our fears….a time to integrate our philosophical and spiritual learning, by putting equanimity, perspective, insight and clarity into practice. On the spot….” ...watch out what you write for!

At some point during our journey, I had also thought of possibly shaving my head , perhaps after some meaningful spiritual experience should it present itself…
Little did I know it would come to me in this form... On the spot!

I decided to cut my curly locks two days ago and Kamala proceeded to give me a new look. It’s more aesthetic than a shaved top slowly growing back with longer hair in the back and on the sides! As she proceeded, I realized it was purifying me, cleansing me of some past, perhaps out-moded identities, reactualizing my relationship to my Self.

As this experience has been coming to my awareness through deep and silent emotions, it tells me this is beyond the mental constructs we humans tend to create to surround ourselves with representations and meaning. It has been a direct and tangible insight into the potential one on one union with the divine that we will experience the day we die. I feel reborn, with a renewed perspective on the amazing possibilities of life.

To be alive and healthy after this and to experience this direct relationship with the Mystery is the blessing of my very, very special Thanksgiving 2008.
Grateful, alive and unbroken


I feel grateful for the people I love, for my wonderful family and for my amazing partner, Kamala.

I am grateful for the life that has not only been given to me but has been preserved right here in front of my eyes, an ultimate lesson of living.

As I sit on my bed, recovering and in relative pain, I feel a fresh sense of being bubble up through my senses and my mind. I feel like making this life as beautiful and meaningful as it can be.

And the recipe may be to simply surrender to it, as my body-Teacher taught me a few days ago.
Wishing you a true Thanks Giving,

At the foot of Arunachala, the red mountain

Towards the end of October, as we were preparing to leave Chennai after 2 months of studying yoga, a sense of open, undefined space surfaced. It was the first time in 9 months that we were without any plans or definite destinations. We were heading south and wanted to experience ashram life during the winter. I knew above anything else that we needed a place to settle down and just have time to ourselves.

We now had to integrate all the learning of the past 6 months. Integrate by creating a complete, daily, personal yoga practice. Integrate by having time to read reference texts and add to the notes from our classes, taking time to reflect and time to write. To attain any depth and to shape long lasting habits, these activities require stability, space, focused time and regularity.

A challenge when you are working and under time pressure, which was a good reason to do this now that we actually had the luxury of time, but equally difficult to accomplish if you’re traveling around. Using our time to settle somewhere and concentrate was clearly the next “right thing” to do. We had been consistently selecting our experiences based on the purpose of our journey formulated last December, “… to put our lives into perspective, claim our spiritual aspirations through learning and practice…” and we firmly intended to maintain this direction.

But our travel budget was expiring with an end-date mid January, extending to mid March if we reduced our expense rate 50% that was feasible only if we stayed in low cost locations for a few months. In order to replenish our travel budget, I had initiated networking contacts in September for potential consulting work in Bangalore that at first gave several promising responses. With the impact of the US financial meltdown on corporate expenses and the challenge of remaining on people’s minds when so far from the US, things slowly came to a standstill. What to do? You can’t force networking; you can only keep at it…

It took a day to make our way to Pondicherry, several hours of which we waited at mid point, on the side of the road, in the beating sun. Our challenge was to get a bus to stop, be it with standing room only but that would also have room for our luggage...

When we arrived at the Swades guesthouse in Pondicherry, we were welcomed by Ilyas, the owner of this charming 5 room home stay http://www.swades-guesthouse.com/. Ilyas is Pondicherry native –it was French at the time of his birth- and left for France as a kid. He lived there 30 years before coming back to the family house a couple of years ago to improve his family’s quality of life. His story reminded me of my own, leaving Ohio for France at age 9 and returning to my mother land 33 years later... Ilyas was a source of warmth, attentive care and peacefulness during our stay, half of which we spent sick in bed with a flu virus we had brought from Chennai.

For a long time Pondicherry http://www.pondicherryonline.in/Profile/History/ was one of the few French colonies in India, until it was handed back over to India in 1956 . The French Quarter that lines the waterfront spreading inland for several blocks is designed as a grid of tree bordered, stone paved avenues, lined with 100 to 300 year old colonial houses and mansions with lush green tropical courtyards, fountains and grand staircases leading to roofed terraces above colonnades.


The atmosphere is quiet and relaxed, the streets clean and well paved, all of which are rare in India. It’s a lightly populated part of town with a good deal of the real estate belonging to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. We fully indulged in several of the French restaurants there, as a change from months of daily Indian meals. French families still own property there that has been passed down from one generation to the other. And many current owners have never seen the property they inherited, that is often going to wrack and ruin.

I was feeling at home in this islet of French history and culture; it reminded me of one of my favorite cities in the world, Aix en Provence. But my mind was struggling with our travel issues. Our visas are due to expire in January and we’ll need to leave the country to get new ones. We still don’t know where the optimal place to go is or for how long new visas will be issued, despite my research on the topic... We were also hoping to attend an intensive yoga program in February for which we needed funding, and had put aside the idea of spending a month at an Ayurveda center in Kerala for the same budgeting reasons.

Kamala and I were getting tired of packing and unpacking, moving every several weeks or days. I was feeling anxious with the open-endedness, needing more direction and control on our life.
I needed some longer-term plans that would direct the coming months. Along with my networking for short term consulting in Bangalore, I had been contemplating starting a fully-fledged consulting business here and was researching legal status and administrative procedures. I was feeling the urge to locate and design our future life and my next professional venture.

Not one single question we faced had a straightforward answer. The buildup of interdependent issues and timelines was drastically changing our experience of the trip from the preceding 9 months. All the actions I had initiated on any of these moving targets had been fleeing, at best. How any of this would play out was unknown.

Here we were, again treading the curves of the great labyrinth (see Jan ’08 blog in the archives).

Pondicherry was a sharp turn in my outlook on our journey. Kamala and I both loved the place and I started feeling that we could actually live there. Ilyas explained to me that Pondicherry had specific, simplified procedures for business creation and how the network of French entrepreneurs there could be a support system to my endeavor. Kamala and I visited the Sri Aurobindo hand made paper manufacture and before I knew it I ended up with freshly printed business cards including my India cell phone number and the name of a company to be.

We headed inland after 10 days in Pondicherry, fully recovered from our Chennai virus. The idea of creating a company and visions of a life in India were growing and getting me more and more excited every day. The idea of having my own business to manage –just like during the first 10 years of my professional life– and the prospect of being in a unique position, as an American-French global management consultant based in India felt like a great adventure to shift into!

Then we arrived in Thiruvannamalai to stay at the Ramana Maharshi ashram. The town is one of the major holy Shiva sites in India, at the base of mount Arunachala, the red mountain, where Ramana Maharshi spent more than 20 years in meditation in the early 1900's. His main teaching is about finding the divine essence of who we are through the path of self inquiry.

On our second day here, all of our questions and wonderings clashed.
Our trip was actually hitting a wall.

Kamala was feeling empty and out of energy for the first time in 9 months; I was clutching to my latest idea, like to a buoy that would save us from the deep, dark waters around us. Then, I understood that my excitement around creating the future was in fact my best answer to close the open-endedness of our unresolved situation and regain the sense of control of our trip and of our life.

Thiruvannamalai leads to drastic readjustments; several people have told us how empty and aimless they felt for the first days after arriving. It is as though there was some cleansing power to the place itself. This could be associated to Shiva, the god who destroys illusions and ignorance through the devastating fire of divine truth. The same friends explained that their vision became clearer after their initial helplessness and that they found new direction thereafter. In our case we could see it happening; we were here at a very special point in our trip.

For all I know, our “productive” travel may be accomplished at this point. Perhaps is it time for a deeper journey, one that extends beyond the uplifting learning experiences, yoga classes and travels; one that confronts us with our deeper selves, with our desires and our fears. This could be a time to integrate our philosophical and spiritual learning, by putting equanimity, perspective, insight and clarity into practice.
On the spot.

A time to see how we can actually deal with the challenges we have created for ourselves.
A time to learn to surrender to the process we’ve generated and maintain faith in the outcome.

We are smack in the midst of what Bill Bridges’ calls the “Neutral zone” of personal transitions.
The Past is over, with a point of no return.
The Future remains to be created, completely undefined yet inevitable.
Everything is in flux, unpredictable and with an uncertain outcome; insecurity can paralyze the ability to move forward.
People don’t like being in this uncomfortable phase and try to get out of it as quickly as possible.

A few years ago Bill told me that because so much is happening at the subconscious level, the neutral zone is the richest period of development for individuals and organizations. It’s actually a time of gestation and profound transformation, where new, unexpected ideas can sprout and grow, where learning from the past and fresh insights on one’s self foster creativity and renewal.

The past week here in Thiruvannamalai has illustrated typical behaviors of such a period. We have each been going through ups and downs, ranging from confusion and emptiness to acceptance and excitement. We have been processing, reflecting alone in silence or talking together, about limitations, possibilities, what-ifs, yes-buts, about our expectations and our doubts. Two days ago we actually spent the entire day in our ashram room, without setting a foot outside. We did not want to go out into the world, were needing solitude and retreat. And no decisions or actions were coming out of any of this.

We have since felt more centered, ready to take each day for what it is. We are settling down here to work on our learning and practice for a few weeks, avoiding hasty decisions and allowing the future to shape itself during this period. And creating a business may be in plan, or not. With the inner work, we will delve deeper and with time create a new life.

A major requirement of the Neutral zone is to let go. Let go of control, let go of the past, let go of needing the future to be definite and reassuring. Only at this condition will the future actually bear the rich possibilities of transformation and renewal.

Yesterday, November 6th 2008, our return flight to San Francisco left Bangkok at 6:50 am. Without us.

We are here to allow our process to unfold.