An image from today: Taken on this day in 2019. Komang Sukerni, who is very well known in Bali as a fantastic yoga instructor and energy healer. It was an honour and a privilege to be involved with what she was doing at https://pranahealingyoga.com/ and we were both very disappointed about a month after this photo was taken, when I had to leave Bali. In hindsight, there might have been options for me to return there sooner and continue. At the time, I just didn’t think I was ready. This was a painful lesson, through which I lost connection to someone with whom I had become very close very quickly. We can’t always tell what’s coming, but we can be self-aware enough to make things easier to deal with when they happen. I have great appreciation and will always remain thankful for Komang.
Sunday 8th March 2020
Today is Sunday and the date, the 8th March 2020, marks 13 months to the day since I left England for Bali.
Before I left, I had for years tried to keep writing, among other things, a journal. Whilst away, I made several attempts to diarise the exciting and unpredictable experience, using pictures and videos on social media sites and making notes in various forms. I was consistently inconsistent in this endeavour whilst travelling, as I had been for so long. This seemed at the time to be a fair reflection of how life had generally been for as long as I could remember; inconsistent.
I can now see that I have since put myself in a position that will allow me to keep adding to such a project regularly. Whilst I was in Thailand about six months ago, I bought a domain name with the intention of setting up a blog. Being so preoccupied with wrestling inner demons at the time meant that higher purposes proved difficult to focus on. I even joined an online course to help me to reconcile the different parts of my being, as a continuation of the personal development path I had been building almost unconsciously for my entire adult life. I started doing yoga and meditation habitually.
Leaving the UK was something I wanted to do a long time before I actually did it. Like a lot of people, I had travelled a little and wanted more, but had repeatedly found it difficult to break away. Selling most of my material possessions reflects the metaphorical or, perhaps more accurately, metaphysical, letting go I had been trying to allow myself to do for so long. The word “metaphorical” here is intended to convey that it is non-tangible, or unquantifiable with empirical measures. However, that doesn’t make it any less real or relevant. What I was “carrying around” in terms of my psycho-spiritual heaviness had very tangible effects on me and those with whom I interacted. I had to put down this burden, but I didn’t realise that I knew how.
I realise now that I always knew how to shed this weight but had learned through programming to carry it. All the guilt, blame, shame, resentment, paranoia, melancholy, depression, self-torture… there are so many words for suffering. Not long before I left England, I met a wonderful “soul” (at the time I would have referred to them as a “person”) who could see their own struggle in what I was presenting. They donated a book to a cause that, at the time, I would have referred to as lost.
That book is “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Alan Singer. Its premise is really quite simple: none of us is merely the physical body in which we reside; nor are any of us limited to the mind in which we are encouraged to contain our rationalisation of existence, which could be considered our best attempts to describe life in words.
Accepting that set me free.
A track from today: The Avalanches – Since I left You
This happy little track always brought a smile, but its repetition of the line “since I left you, I’ve found the world so new” represents the freedom that can be felt by being fully present in the moment, rather than being lost in the mind. I consider the “you” who is being left to be the ego. This shows how easily we can reframe what could be considered a nostalgic sentiment, which could for some be associated with experiences perceived as negative, in a way that helps to alleviate the fear and increase the love that we are feeling. This will generally serve to improve the situation in which we find ourselves. This doesn’t mean trivialising experiences and events that have undeniable effects, it means learning to feel these emotions and then objectifying them, instead of identifying with them, so that we can let them go.
The full Sunny This Position playlist can be found on the Guerrilla Nature YouTube channel, which can be found at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/@GuerrillaNature
And on Spotify at the following link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VHLzupQ2vvR9xMfcIxyZC?si=T-SjjKOfSPiDRS31HBSeRA&utm_source=copy-link
Today’s video: Alan Watts (mentioned in the entry for this date, above) – Being Honest About Our Feelings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O219t16U4Qg
This day’s Featured Creator: Komang Sukerni is the founder of Prana Healing Yoga Bali. She has been a practicing yogi for nearly a decade. Like Nidal from yesterday’s entry, she has made a double contribution to the genetic pool and like him she has contributed to the bringing into the world of one female and one male child. As if learning and teaching yoga whilst looking after two children were not enough of a challenge, she has made it her business to find her own clients and set her rates according to her standards. Instead of getting paid by someone to do a class, Komang finds venues with whom she might be able to negotiate a fair cut of the class fees to make a deal with them. She has attracted a very dedicated group of followers, even finding a way to get her own teaching courses set up and help her friends, such as Agung Putrawan (tomorrow’s featured creator). In this way, she has managed to make doing asana with a really good instructor an accessible experience for those locals who might not otherwise be able to attend classes. These efforts have also yielded several private clients who promote her to their friends, which is helping her to expand her network and widen her reach. Komang’s passion for what she does shows in her approach to it and the success she has made of it. Pranahealingyoga offer yoga classes and teacher training courses in Bali. It is highly recommended that readers visit Komang’s website using the link below.
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Lower image: Komang with student, colleague and friend Tety, at Canggu beach, Bali
A quote for this day: “You are not your thoughts; you are aware of your thoughts. You are not your emotions; you feel your emotions. You are not your body; you look at it in the mirror and experience this world though its eyes and ears. You are the conscious being who is aware that you are aware of all these inner and outer things.” Michael Alan Singer – The Untethered Soul.
Above: Sunny This Position blog entry 2020-03-08 (first entry in this blog)
Below: following entry or back to prose
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