pull towards source

The Arabian flows, and the truth of a lifelong disconnect surfaces. It is a raw discontent, visible even in the early photographs: an angry, tight-jawed child orchestrating her own exile, removing the branch from the root. I lived as though vulnerability were a contagion, constructing a life of sterile distances. I was the commander of a hollow empire, treating my own heart for twenty years as a fortification.

Now, the river reveals its nature. A desperate, beautiful pull toward the source. I feel that ancient, aching gravity - a return to the spring, to the Shiva-like stillness within the cave of my own anatomy.

I have been performing in a seventeen-roomed house. Eight - the number of repetitive dramas - while the real work remained unacknowledged in the silence.

Then the Asian Fairy-bluebird arrives. A saturated, brilliant sliver of the divine cutting through the fog of my projections. It asks for nothing; it simply is. It is a fragment of the psyche I was too terrified to claim, dancing in the space where I usually project my demons.

For decades, I asked: Who is the block? Who stands in my way? I sought to tear down obstacles, to clear the path to peace. But looking at the Mansarovar of my own soul - the deep, still lake buried within the mountain of my chest - I see that the block is merely a mirror.

Every delay, every pushed-away hand, every “not yet” was a construction of my own refusal to simply be.

I watch these fragments drift by - the anger, the resentment, the bossy, armor-plated ego and I no longer attempt to arrest them. Resistance is just another delay. Acceptance is the return.

I sit in the shadow of my own Kailash, waiting for the smile that forgives the projection. I am finished with the war against my own nature. I want to dip into the lake of my heart and emerge clean, unburdened by the hierarchy, the disdain, the performance of “leadership.” The bird moves, the leaves shiver, the river pushes toward the sea; I am finally, unreservedly, turning back. The commander fades. The pilgrim remains. I am returning to the cave.

Sat chit ananda. The billions. Harmony. The nectar.

The breath was my first hostage. I lived in suspended animation, convinced that a deep inhalation would constitute a theft of a world not mine to have.

A constant, low-grade panic - a physical hoarding of oxygen - lest the room empty, the connection sever, and I be left in the hollow silence I had so carefully curated.

I begged for life while I was the one severing the supply.

The intervention was a slow, agonizing dismantling of that refusal.

My lungs were trained to reject the air; my feet were trained to recoil from the ground. I sought an external collision - a bang, a shock - to justify my existence.

But the present is quiet. Dangerously quiet. There is no thunder, only the rhythm of air moving in and out, unearned and un-optimized. The “healing” reveals itself as the mundane, terrifying act of dropping the block. The block was the need for a spectacle.

I release the blandness. It was never the life that was bland; it was the filter of my own anxiety. The panic evaporates because I am no longer feeding it the fantasy of separation. I am simply here. The lungs open. The weight of twenty years dissolves - the seventeen rooms, the play. It mirrors Bala’s - the child Swaroop of Lalitha Devi, the Goddess of Play.

Why fear the energy of Varahi? Chid Agni Kunda - she rose from the ashes. Deva karya samudyata. The kundalini rises; the deva karyam is the ascent to the crown.

There is no anxiety. There is only the breath. It is the most radical act of my life.

I wanted to be held. I wanted the grace I denied myself to be poured over me, to soften the sharpness of my own edges. I needed that respect - the kind that acknowledges the Shakti in the elements - but I lacked the vocabulary to ask, the capacity to receive.

So, I hated.

I hated the soft. I hated the bird for being vibrant; the river for being unburdened; the sun for shining on my self-imposed penance. I carried a volcanic, indiscriminate hatred - a dark energy from a basement I had boarded up since birth.

That hatred was my armor, a defense for the hunger.

I told myself I was the boss, but it was a lie to mask the starvation. The resentment in those childhood photos? The beginning of the famine.

A child protecting her flickering Shakti from a world she assumed was a thief.

But no one stole it. I threw it away. I dissolved the connection myself, brick by brick, out of a terrifying, misguided pride.

And now, the hate is exhausted. It leaves not because I “fixed” it, but because there is nothing left to burn. I sit here, feeling the heat on my skin, and the Shakti I tried so hard to cage rushes back.

I am not the boss of the water. I am the vessel that receives it. I am no longer the block; I am the space where grace lands.

To that girl, she who carried her resentment like a sharpened stone - I have nothing to say. Words are just another room in the house, another performance. I touch her shoulder, not to comfort, but to acknowledge the exhaustion. It is a heavy, sacred thing to have been that cold for that long.

The taste of salt, the sharp clarity of the calamari - this is a resurrection.

The world is finally permitted to exist without my permission. I spent twenty six years policing the borders of my skin, afraid that if I allowed a single sensation in - the sea, the air, the bird - I would lose the jagged shape of my defence.

God is the grit of the salt. She is the hair whipping against the face in the wind. She is the realization that the river is not a metaphor - it is wet, it is moving, and it is indifferent to my pain. That indifference is the greatest mercy.

To the woman who held her breath: your lungs were not failing; they were waiting. The resentment was not a defect; it was a compass pointing toward this exact moment.

I am eating. I am feeling. I am here.

The “I” that sits in this chair is no longer a project to be managed. It is a mystery to be inhabited. I do not look for the cave; I am inside of it. The darkness I feared was never a void - it was the deep, quiet womb. I have learned to breathe in the dark.

It is enough. To be here, tasting the ocean, watching the river pass, without asking the universe if it recognizes me. It does not have to.

Am I living in my throat, my third eye, or my belly? The inherited fear, the resentment - is it mine? No fear could exist then. I gave away my power. I walk away. I do seva. I be larger.

If you see it - look at yourself.