In which I have a large stone removed from a yurt in my belly and discover a universe inside

I went to Middle Piccadilly at the weekend.  It’s a place that’s been floating around my aura for decades. One of the old school retreat places.  I’ve always wanted to go but somehow never did.  When I had the dosh, I didn’t have the time and when I had the time, I didn’t have the dosh.  Anyhow…I was asked to review it, so off I went. 

It’s a curious place – not quite the serene middle-of-nowhere spa I’d expected.  To be honest, it’s caught in a bit of a time-warp – part seventies hippyshake, part eighties pinefest.  I itched to give it a makeover, to pull out a powerhose and to fill a few skips.  The raw food was amazing though (that might merit an entire separate post, come to nibble it) but what really blew me sideways were the treatments.

Now then. Some (good) places have one or two amazing therapists.  Most have okay ones.  And some (often the big anonymous hotel spas and day spas) have pretty mediocre ones. You know the type I mean –their hands might be busy on your body but their minds are necking cider or having a snog with someone else’s boyfriend.  Anyhow, I think MP has bagged an almost rudely unfair share of the seriously awesome ones.  

I had been prescribed three sessions by co-owner Lisa and first up was one of the best therapeutic massages I’ve had – serious deep fascial work, delving down into pressure points, hitting the ‘ouch’ button (in a good way).  Angela read my body like an orienteerer and went for the icky bits like an All Black making a dump tackle.  Then, while my physical body was still sighing with relief, caught quite unawares, I had my energy body opened up by Claire. While Angela was all no-nonsense, down-to-earth and practical, Claire was an earth mother, soothing, nourishing, comforting and…so tender.  She performed a lovely chakra-balancing nurturing treatment called Hand on Heart (using organic products from the fabulous Cornish company Spiezia.  Check them out, I’d forgotten how good they are). 

‘So, what’s the verdict?’ I asked at the end.

‘Your feminine side is very depleted,’ she said. I nodded.  That made sense.

‘Your throat is closed.  I wonder what it is you’re not saying?’  I remained silent.  J

‘Your heart and solar plexus are out of sync.  Oh, and your crown is fuzzy.’ 

‘Right. So basically, the only bits that are okay are my bottom bits and my third eye?’

‘Pretty much.’  And she shhhed me and took me next door to my bedroom and wrapped me up in bed with a mug of chamomile tea.  ‘Rest.’ 

‘Yes, Mum.’

And I did.  I slept. And slept.

But really, these were just the (very fine) support acts for my final treatment, a shamanic healing session with the wonderfully named Maya.  Now, I’ve done a fair amount of shamanism in the past – I’ve had healing sessions and I’ve done workshops and trainings.  So I thought I knew what was coming.  Wrong.

I’ve often wondered about my shamanic experiences.  They’ve been powerful but cerebral somehow.  Just more mind games?  Just vivid imagination?  Sometimes it feels that way.  So I went into the session feeling, not sceptical but without huge expectations. 

But the sage smudge was heady and the drum beat was soft, rhythmic, mesmerising.  Maya called up guardians, spirits, call them what you will, to guard the space and I waited, my energy body tingling with anticipation.  As she took me down the tunnel to the lower world I felt my third eye convulse.  I strained for ‘seeing’ but Maya caught the trick.  ‘Not in your head,’ she said.  ‘Feel it in your body.  Feel where you’re holding.’

My hands crept to my solar plexus.  I couldn’t deny the feeling – as if I had a huge stone lodged in my belly. 

‘Go inside it,’ she said.  ‘What do you see?’

It was a large space, like the inside of a vast yurt, a domed ceiling, a floor made of dry compacted earth, the air thick with dust. 

‘Is anyone there?’

‘No. I’m alone.’

‘What’s there?’

And the ceiling began to crack, like an egg, and the floor started to crumble away and pinpricks of light appeared and I was caught in the dance of stars. The entire universe inside my belly and me twirling and tumbling like an acrobat.

‘Now blow it all out into the fire beneath your feet,’ said Maya.  And I panted out the stone, my body convulsing like I was giving birth to a black hole.  And it moved, from my solar plexus to my womb and a wave of regret swept over me, for the neglect of my feminine (both earthly and divine), and I wept, big heaving sobs, tears streaming down my face.  And then it went altogether, leaving a lightness in my body, a space. 

And other things happened (she removed bits I didn’t need and put back bits I’d lost, some made perfect sense and others were well weird), but I think I’m stretching you too far anyhow, already.  You’ll either roll your eyes and go ‘yeah yeah’ and move on (and I wouldn’t remotely blame you), or you’ll go ‘Yeah’ in which case I’d say, go, go… try it yourself.  J

Everything is not so bad

‘Everything is not so bad,’ said Daniel at Kaliyoga France.  Ostensibly he’s an osteopath and a reflexologist (whole body though, not just feet) but I suspect he’s a fair bit more than that – definitely a healer, maybe a bit of a shaman.  And, oh those eyes!  Those young/old wide open palest blue eyes.  He’d checked me over and found all the old kinks, even dug around in my abdomen and found the same gut quirk that had surfaced in Austria.  He adjusted a little here, a little there and then paused.

‘It’s here,’ he said, gently tapping my breastbone. ‘You’re locked right here... in the heart.’

Ah.  My poor heart.  It’s ever been thus.  For our bodies try, dear souls/hearts, to protect us, don’t they?  They build up a carapace; they armour us with wrenched tight twisted fascia.  And our minds play sidekick, quickly jumping in, alert to hurt, watching for a reason to doubt, to suspect, to withdraw.  And Body is more protective of Heart than it is of anything or anywhere else. 

‘People hurt you,’ whimpers Body.

‘Keep ‘em out,’ advises Mind.

‘Might be best,’ agrees Body.

‘Definitely,’ says Mind with a profound sigh of relief.

Yet at Kaliyoga everything was conspiring to open me up again, to blast away heart/mind/body’s carefully constructed defences. 

A series of yoga postures – opening, exposing, baring.  And I felt a giving somehow, a loosening. A silent tear or two.  And then chanting which, again, was all about opening, being, letting go of doubt and fear because, really (at heart), whether doubt and fear are true or not, they are not helpful.  Om Tare, Tuttare, Ture, Soha... The Green Tara mantra which protects against doubt and delusion, the wrong thinking that traps your heart. And Tayata Om, the healing mantra of the Medicine Buddha.  Gate gate, Paragate - passing the threshold, evolving into fearlessness.

Once you know something, you cannot unknow it.  You can never go back; you can never change back into something you once were. And change is not just inevitable, it is safe. It must be.  No matter what happens on the other side of the gate, on the other side of change.

‘Do you really believe that?’ said Mind.

‘Hell no!’ replied Body.

‘Give it a chance,’ whispered Heart.  

My stereotypical Swiss room-mate

So, I was all excited about going to Kaliyoga in Spain when I suddenly had a bad thought.  A big bad thought. You know how I am about sharing rooms with people on detox?  Well, to be honest, it goes beyond a dislike into downright phobia.  And it’s not just while detoxing; it’s sharing in general.  It’s not that I’m anti-social per se; it's just that I really really like my own space. Okay, so I’m kinda weird about my aura. 

So I checked and…aaaghhh.  I was sharing.  But, but, but…I spluttered.  In fact I begged, I whined, I prostrated myself on the floor and kicked my heels but they said, sorry, the retreat was full, there was no choice.  I nearly said I’d sleep in a field or up a tree but then remembered that Spain gets things like mosquitoes and wotnot so discretion was the better part of valor and so I just…fretted.

‘She’s a 47 year old Swiss woman,’ they said.  As if that would made everything okay.  When I shared this particular bit of information with my kettlebell group, they all looked a bit nonplussed. 

‘What are the Swiss like?’ asked someone. We debated it (while swinging into clean and snatch and hoisting ourselves into Turkish get-ups) and swiftly realized that our knowledge of the Swiss national characteristics was meagre.  Watches, skiing, banks, cuckoo clocks, mountains were suggested.  Toblerone got an honourable mention. Muesli came up. Cheese waved a flag.  What was the Swiss flag for pity’s sake?  Who were famous Swiss? 

‘Wasn’t Heidi Swiss?’ said someone else.  At which point I’m ashamed to say the whole class started yodeling and waving pretend pigtails at me.

‘How am I supposed to face this poor woman now?’ I said.

‘Wave a cow bell?’ someone suggested helpfully.  I despair, I really do. How we stereotype huh?

Anyhow, they got it all wrong.  My room-mate was actually an American (who just happened to be living in Switzerland at that particular moment in time) and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone looking less like Heidi.  She was absolutely lovely and, thank the gods of yodelling, the ideal room-mate.  Within the confines of our room, we passed one another like cautious ghosts, spectacularly polite and considerate. 

But, I don’t know about you but when I hear the word ‘retreat’ I suppose uppermost in my mind is going away somewhere a bit cut off, to be thoughtful, meditative, contemplative, or whatever.  All the retreats I’ve done have been solo; most have been either totally or majorly silent. So, quite apart from the room-sharing thingy, how come I spent my entire week at Kaliyoga talking and laughing my head off? Have retreats gone soft? Have I gone soft?

However, as the week progressed, I gradually realized that, actually, this was probably just what I needed.  I have been so isolated, so solitary (entirely of my own making, I should add) that all this interaction was probably good therapy.  Listening to people and their ‘issues’ and ‘challenges’ puts your own stuff into perspective.  Laughing gets the endorphins going.  And, as Lelly, our yoga teacher said on the first day: ‘Sometimes your yoga won’t be vinyasas in the yoga shala. Sometimes your yoga will be resting or sunbathing.’  And my yoga was all of that with an added dose of snorting.  

And yes, I was still able to slope off by myself when I needed to.  Okay, so not to my room (my usual place of refuge) but to a hammock or the wild flower meadow or to a squashy sofa in the boho living room.  I was often the first up and the last to bed, so found my privacy at the corners of the day.  And, standing under the stars, with the orange blossom heady in the dell, my senses reeled and I found myself tumbling out into everything, and everything tumbling into me…and the entire concept of being alone and separate felt suddenly suddenly quite quite …amusing.  

Four questions?

Ah, apologies, my sweet companions of the road. I have left you high and dry. All these bank holidays have befuddled and confaddled me. I am juggling a lot right now and Time is playing tricksy.


But fear not, the Pact remains and the Journey is starting. Who is coming along? Well, every kind of person, I suspect. I love those who trust, so much – the ones who just launched in and waved their hands eagerly in the air - without having a clue where we're going or what we're doing: Louise Nash, Vivienne Tuffnell, Sessha Batto, Mud in the City spring to mind. But then again, I love those who question and those who doubt too. Will every person be sweetness and light? I hope not. There is room for the tricksters and the plain awkward squad as well as the sweet honeys (cos you can’t make pearls without grit).

Must every person be an artist and a bleeding heart? Hell, no. We need someone to make the sandwiches; someone to pitch the tents; someone to tell us when we’re going just too far, going way too bonkers, and that playing hopscotch in the storm in metal gumboots isn’t the brightest idea. Fire alone burns too bright, too fast; Earth alone gets mired in the mud; Water alone seeps and evaporates; Air alone gets spread too thin. We need one another. We need the contrasts.

My lovely niece Sophie (wise Water) came to stay for the weekend and we talked books and music, life and love, spirit and soul. But above all we talked about people and assumptions and generalisations and about jumping to conclusions. We’re so quick to judge, to condemn. Someone on Twitter said he could never countenance talking to a royalist or anyone who wasn’t a socialist. Another said she was going to unfollow anyone who had tweeted about the royal wedding. It’s interesting what pushes our buttons; what makes us decide a person is okay or not.

I’m seeing it again today on Twitter as the world erupts with fevered excitement over the death of Osama bin Laden. It’s that tribal ‘you’re with us or against us’ thing and I confess it puzzles me. I hate terrorism, I really do but I can’t punch the air at a man’s death; no, not even his death. Hate the acts, not the person, surely?

Anyhow. I told Sophie how one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had was going on silent retreat for a week. I hadn’t a clue what people did ‘for a living’ or any of the mundane facts about their lives. I just got a sense of them from – what? – intuition? A feeling? Heart?  Soul?  I snatched clues too from their images – some of us painted (obsessively in my case) in the studio. At the end of the week I felt extremely close to a few people. When we talked, I found my favourite people were, variously, a psychiatrist, a surgeon, a nun, unemployed. All titles that come laden with preconceptions.  Halleluyah - we’d by-passed all that crap.  We knew one another as people, as fellow 'pilgrims'.

‘We ask the wrong questions,’ I said to Sophie.
‘I hate that we’re defined by what we do,’ she replied.
‘It’s always the same four questions, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘What do you do? Where do you live/come from? Are you single/partnered? Have you got children?’ I suppose we’re trying to pin people down – to fit them in boxes?
‘What are the questions we should ask,’ I pondered. ‘If we really want to know what makes a person tick at a deeper level?’
‘Questions that open up stories, I think,’ said Sophie. ‘Questions that stir emotions.’

We debated this for so long we lost track of time and Sophie nearly missed her train. We didn’t really come up with any concrete answers either. But we sort of roughed out these for starters...

• Which is your favourite sense? If you could only experience the world through one sense which would it be?
• Which piece of art (music, book, poem, film, TV show, performance etc) most rocked your world?
• Your house is on fire – all people, animals and vital documents are safe – what one thing do you rescue?
• If you were a god/dess, which one would you be?

Did we pick good questions? What would you pick? What are your answers to these four?