What We Bring Into Ourselves
I hand-wrote elements of this as they arose as realizations, moments of insight crystallizing from peaceful lengths of silences, questions, confusions, closed-eyed appeals to clarity. Why eating and nourishment were such challenging aspects of daily life was beyond me, and I was constantly plagued with the twin feelings that “I don’t know what I need” and also that “I should know”. My weight would rise and fall, my needs and feelings were mysteries.
I kept looking around me, searching for what I needed to get, needed to know, while all this time what I needed to do was look within.
So what began as an inquiry into nourishment led a sometimes-stubborn exploration inwards, a journey in which I was pulled step by sullen step into a sweetness of being that I could never have envisioned at the outset. Even the sharing of this took its own time: most of what is written below was typed on Friday December 22, 2023. Nearly one year later, I’m wondering why these words are languishing in the darkness of my desktop.
May this story meet yours in a way that highlights the deep sense of wellness that each of us knows and loves naturally.
The beginning
Many of my love stories begin at the ending of a relationship.
I spent the last months of 2019 traveling, escaping New York winter and the sadness that welled up in me at any stop for stillness. Tears dried quickly while I focused on the journey that seemed to be rushing through me.
There was October in Copenhagen, then back to my newly-emptied home and heart for just a few days (unpack, laundry, repack), then to India for my first visit in ten years. A few weeks there, then Manhattan for some days, then Puerto Rico, New York, Puerto Rico, back to New York for what I thought would be a few days but became the lockdown. By then, I was knee deep in the things that opened within me while I was in India.
India
It was momentous to return to a place that was birthplace to every single one of my ancestors, but not to me. Familiar and unfamiliar, I stayed with my mother’s family in Kolkata, then went south to live briefly on a tea plantation in the hills of Kerala, flying back to stay with my father’s family in Kolkata, unprepared to realize just how different one side of my family is from the other, which is to say, startled by the differences living within myself.
On the flight home, I was exhausted, and thin, barely over 100 pounds. I fasted and slept the duration of each flight and after 24 hours of travel, when I arrived (majorly disoriented) back to my apartment in the East Village, I showered and unrolled my mat to practice Ashtanga Second Series before breaking fast. Meaning, I traversed time zones and customs and taxi cab conversations without hunger for anything other that two hours of the most intense yoga practice you could possibly imagine.
The only real thought that came to me during the duration of that return journey was this: at some point, I need to learn how to eat.
That was November-December 2019.
Pandemic
Did we all gain weight during the pandemic? There was nowhere I could run to; my mother was terrified for her health and so kept herself and her husband, my father, safely away from me in Manhattan, where the world very quickly unraveled into the kinds of scenes that belong in Batman’s Gotham City. I struggled in a quiet and smiling kind of way, steadily supporting my clients the best I could, turning to solaces like my private terraces, where I grew most of what I ate: kale and all kinds of squashes, strawberries and so many heirloom varieties of tomatoes, plus peppers, eggplants, many herbs, several varieties of bok choy, carrots… the list goes on. I spent a lot of time carrying buckets of water up the stairs, and most of my meals began with a lazy kind of wandering through vines of cherry tomatoes, pulling handfuls of sweet redness that would soon be wrapped by fresh basil leaves and eaten just like that, fresh and raw and under the night skies of New York City.
This is what I had wanted: to feel connected with food and with nature, and I suddenly had plenty of time to plant vegetable seeds, watch them blossom, and think about what ways I could better nourish my body, take great care of my health.
It was surprisingly easy to gain weight; it was surprisingly hard to like the way I looked and felt. My mind kept wandering back to the way that I was in Kerala, in Kolkata, in Puerto Rico. There were lessons I learned and longed to name aloud but kept slipping from me, like smooth streams of colored silk over the roughness of my too-dry, too-needy fingertips.
Longing became my way of life. I wished so much that the world would forget fear, would remember that we are all human beings experiencing a somewhat scary sickness, could feel the togetherness of it all. And I remember how alone I felt in these wishes. Anyone I spoke to was obsessed with statistics and politics: how many people were dying, and where; and what Trump was doing, and how ridiculous. Conversations bored me. I turned inwards. My yoga practice and my writing started taking on depths and dimensions that enveloped me wholly.
Human Condition
Something in me knew that gaining more weight was not the right result, was not about the pandemic, or about becoming older. When I told myself that I wanted to learn how to eat, I meant something that I did not then have the language to articulate. I couldn’t have told you then that what I really needed to learn was to recognize that most of a human being’s needs are invisible and easily met through loving energy. We don’t need protein the way that we need to be seen, appreciated, encouraged, valued, touched. We don’t need vitamin b12 the way that we need poetry, and sitting silently in the nature-orchestrated wonders of summer sunsets, hearing the visible shifts from sherbet pinks and oranges to the improbable pairings of dark orange and dusty dark blues. Yes, we need protein. Yes we need b12. And yet: what truly nourishes is smiles from strangers, spontaneous dancing in celebration of being alive, conversations that spark electric understandings.
What a human being needs more than food is fullness of breath, is love of life.
These were in short supply for me during the pandemic. Going deeply into the present was an increasingly sad endeavor, and I had so much to integrate from my travels that I went into long explorations of what happened in Kolkata before Kerala, what happened in Kerala, what happened in Kolkata after Kerala, what happened in Puerto Rico after all that time in India.
Now that I write of that time, I realize that didn’t think much at all about the relationship that had ended. I was whole heartedly looking into the relationships between disparate aspects of myself, holding with cupped hands the precious feelings of wonder, beauty, and health.
Back to the Beginning
I had stopped going to India for the same reason I had decided to return in 2019: something in me chose these choices, and that something was well beyond the reach of reason. Everyone was more glad for my return. Love was everywhere.
The first week I stayed with my mother’s side of the family, I was incessantly snacking, finicky, restless. I experienced peace in bookstores, which are one of the great treasures of the city.
Seemingly miles of beautifully bound books, everything colorful because it’s Kolkata, the paperbacks just as gorgeous to touch as the hardcovers. The smell of paper was different in different places: more crisp in the bigger stores well situated on large avenues and even larger malls, more dusty in the small shops. Those were the ones I loved most, the ones that got me dreaming, just seeing books stacked high without any shelves, the shops themselves tucked into winding alleys, nameless yet known to those who care to know.
Back in my grandmother’s home though, I couldn’t answer the question as to why I was writing instead of spending my time sitting and talking with family. If I knew then what I know now, I would have explained that I need pen and paper the way that any one of us needs water on hot, dry days. I thirst for words. I hunger for knowledge rising like tides of light from soft pages of old books. Instead of saying this, I silently felt awkward, both too large and too small for the space, and waited till my trip to Kerala, where I was without family for a week.
Here is the magical thing about India: no matter where you go, you will arrive in a place where people who really know how to prepare food will prepare food for you. Regular houses have cooks who came and take care of cooking. They are good. And when you go to a fancy place like where I stayed in Kerala, I had the luxury of exquisite food. I quickly became close with the kitchen staff, learned their stories, bridging cultures and languages to feel the feelings that transcend: the ambitions, the longings, and the contentment too.
I let myself run to the ground, creatively. I wrote and wrote. I took pictures, I hiked up and down a mountain every day, practiced yoga overlooking a startlingly beautiful valley. I stopped writing to eat and to move, and then went back to it. I got a little fat, too, forgetting to read much. The exhaustion that I took on willingly put me into a physical state of need, while in reality I was in the most comfortable of settings. Instead of resting, I ate, which is a mostly joyous mistake that I sometimes still make.
What I needed there, I received in full force back in Kolkata, staying this time with my father’s family. Oh, the freedom. Long hours of unsupervised reading and writing, peppered by trips for walks in gardens and more bookshops. I had the blissful sense that for the first time in weeks, no one was worried about my wellbeing, which translated to trust and respect for my innate capabilities to care for myself. My yoga practices there were the most incredible. I was interrupted only once, by my aunt who came out to the rooftop where I was meditating under the open skies, to tell me that if any monkeys came by, to just shout and she’d come. Then she smiled in a sweet kind of way and left. This delighted me.
In that week, I felt nearly no hunger. I became thinner and thinner, happier and more serene. I see now that fasting is a natural strength when our other needs are met. I had freedom to roam, freedom to stay. And the most nourishing element of all was the conversation: uncle and cousins would talk with me for hours about this idea and that, philosophies and abstractions that filled me with a feeling that I cannot name but know by the whole-body feeling of ‘yes’.
The End, The Present
It took years to understand all this and more. When I went to Puerto Rico in early 2020, I had these knowings inside me, and I lived in a very peaceful, light and uplifted way. I was alone and not alone, embraced by the ocean, the horizon, the sky full of stars and the air full of heat. My heart was at ease, relaxed, and full, so when things went awry in Manhattan during lockdown shortly after, I had these very recent touch points. I would look back again and again: what did I learn? What do I need?
Now I find it surprising to think of the past. The present is so rich, and the future so promising. I know well that the real trick has been to give myself this love that I love, quenching inner thirsts for freedom, conversation, good words, and even better silences. I know well that no amount of food will steady a restless spirit, nothing can replenish energy that I did not value at the time of spending it.
There is nothing more nourishing than respect for ourselves, no need greater than reaching for fulfilling our highest potential.
And when we begin all actions in this knowledge, then all that we do choose to bring in is but a gesture to the essence of what we truly are: beings born to love, laugh, and live lightly here, together, sharing the best of ourselves, giving ourselves wholly to this.
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