I stepped off the bus into the warm night air. Despite the humidity and unfamiliar territory, being grounded outside after rattling in the unstable public transport vehicle for eight hours was refreshing. Eight hours, with one stop for a diarrhea-ridden bathroom break. Plenty of time for my cracked iPhone’s battery to die. At least I had a phone. Being in India has allowed me to count blessings that I didn’t even know I had. Toilet paper was one of them.
Realizing that my phone was dead, however, was not. Not in the least. It’s amazing how attached we are to our phones, and it just becomes so much more obvious when we are relying on it for maps or travel notes on guesthouses and places to stay.
I think I knew that we had arrived to my destination, although there was no signs or confirmations in any way, just an abrupt halt to our bumpy ride in a dusty parking lot that apparently was the bus station of Rishikesh. The bus driver and the few remaining locals who’d made it this far from our original boarding in New Delhi shuffled off the bus with satisfying grunts. It was hard to tell but I was pretty sure we had made it, to Rishikesh that is.
Nestled at the base of the Himalayan foothills, this small city in the northern part of India was supposed to be my final stop in the pilgrimage I’d been swept along by life. I say it was “supposed to be” because, as life has its curve balls, there is always more to the story. And I say “pilgrimage” because, in a way, that is what this global circuit I was finding myself on had become. How did I even end up in India in the first place?
Starting in Costa Rica, I had canceled my return flight and backpacked south through Central America before ending up on a plane from Panama to India, which is also a story for a different time (don't worry - it's coming!). The one thing I was holding onto, that inspired me to cancel my return ticket in the first place, was that there seemed to be a bigger, grander version of life than one I was familiar with. A heavenly realm that I was occasionally privy to. I kept catching glimpses of this heaven arriving right smack in front of me whenever I would soften my grip and expectations on life enough to see it clearly. And I had quickly concluded through this experiment of life that to spend more time here in Heaven, I had to do the things on Earth that scared me. As if arriving to Heaven is not something we wait for, but rather a re-membering of our own aliveness. An aliveness that we experience for ourselves whenever we move forward with courage and faith. To strike out into the unknown. To be fully alive and aware. I want(ed) that.
It was obvious to me by the time I had arrived to that bus stop, especially when I looked up and saw the full moon peering assuredly down at me from a clear night sky, that something bigger was moving the pieces to this puzzle we call life. That what originally was planned as a two week vacation in Costa Rica, became an unending quest to understand why it was that when I put absolute faith and trust in life itself, it would continue to provide to me a greater reward than I could conceive of on my own. It appeared that doing things on my own had only gotten me so far, but by doing things in partnership with the entire Universe seemed to create the perfect outcomes. I think I was creating, or maybe just re-membering, the lack of distinction between me and the outside world. That I was not separate from the whole, as much as I tried to think I was. This journey that I had landed myself on seemed to me to be a maddened search by my limited identity to disprove the power of putting myself into the Hands of God. My egoic mind was running out of options because at this point, I had intentionally cornered it into one end of the world.
I was stuck in an ancient city known for birthing and housing many saints and sages since the times of old, who had all claimed to have figured out how this shit really works to begin with anyways. By “this shit” I mean, well, everything. The Universe. The Sun. The Moon. Life and what it was all about. If there was such thing as ‘God’ and what that really meant. And I knew it wasn’t what the books claimed, because that was their story. So here is the paradoxical attempt by me to capture it in my own story. These are just the Stories of a Yogi.