From a newsletter, September 2021.
Dear everybody,
I would like to share something with you to do with TRUST and FAITH.
It’s personal.
People would say, when I went to India alone on a one way ticket back in 2000 that I was courageous. I don’t think I thought of that, or felt it. I just did what I knew I had to do. Which didn’t make it easy. Or romantic. I felt desperately lonely alot of the time. But I just knew I had to do it.
There was a sense in me at that time, of “now it has to be one way". It has to be a no turning back situation.” No return loops. No safe forays and then back to the familiar. No. It had to be new ground.
So I sold and gave away almost all of my things and bought a backpack and a one way ticket to India.
Wandering India in an unorthodox way, getting lost so many times that I eventually lost all sense of concern about it and realised I’m as lost or found anywhere in the world really, regardless, I started to find a deeper something in me. A sense of being at home in me. By the end of 9 months in India I felt totally at home in that crazy, confronting yet incredibly peace-giving, satisfying land.
Letting go of the familiar is what was needed to be available. Without knowing what I was looking for, but knowing that it was out there, what I was seeking was also seeking me. By a series of incredible synchronicities that only the natural intelligence and the dead set accuracy of the soul’s navigation system could possibly manoeuvre into being, I met my life partner to be. Through him I met my Teacher. I met Kundalini Yoga. Karam Kriya. And these have been my pole stars ever since. My reference.
What has this to do with trust and faith? Obviously alot! Through putting myself into a series of situations in which nothing was there for me for company and comfort but my own inner sense of Okayness, my abiding Self, I learnt to trust that. Every time I trusted an inkling, followed a yearning, a sign, a knowing, it always turned out to be something true. And when I didn’t know, was blind, groping, falling into empty space, there was something catching me. Much bigger than me personally, a big Plan. A vast poetic, magical logic. I have been shown so many times that this is so that how could I still not be surrendering 100% in every moment?
I must admit I’m having a few little tears writing this. They are truth tears. When the truth barometer is vibrating, sometimes tears come out. Truth barometer has its own language and expression. What happens in you when you know something is true?
To gain trust in you, let go of looking to others or to the familiar. Put it to the test. To experience faith, think of the times in your life you just knew something. Let’s let this sense in us grow. We are going to need to navigate by the sixth sense in the future. More and more.
Love
Jai Ram
PS: The picture above is me with some Tibetan refugees on one of the most hair raising parts of the adventure, into Spitti Valley for the Dalai Lama. These are not my life partner and teacher, just to avoid any confusion!