Hippiedom

Well I've spent the last few days down in Dorset at the Great British Kundalini Yoga Festival at the Osho Leela Centre in Gillingham. A perfectly beautiful and relaxing place to be. I've been busying myself with meditation, massage, gong baths, yoga, various workshops, dance and cleaning. Yes, cleaning. Toilets and showers, to be precise. They practice 'seva' - kind of like meditation through serving others and it was actually very good fun. Honestly.

I also got up for 5am sessions twice. Twice! I cannot quite believe I did this, but I did and very proud of myself I am too. I feel cleansed, detoxed, strong, powerful, calm and truly zenned-out. Definitely an option for next year and a wonderful space for kids. Bit too much emphasis on the Sikh aspects for me, but it's easy to avoid those once you know where they are to be found.

One thing I found particularly valuable out of the whole thing was something I heard in a women's workshop I attended. They gave the analogy of men being like the sun - they get up every day and go down every evening, the same always, day in, day out. Consistent, no change. Women however are like the moon - every single day of every single month we change, no consistency, no sameness. As a result we struggle to find a consistent sense of self, a sense of who we are, because we change so much. It is hard to find security and stability when we have none within our behaviour. We feel insecure, unsure of who we are. We tend to migrate to and fixate on men, to provide us with this security and stability we crave so much. We need to find the stability elsewhere however, because it is not healthy to rely on a man for this, or anyone for that matter - dependence in this way is not good. Activities such as meditation and yoga help us to find this core sense of self that is stable, underneath the hormones and other things that change us from day to day. The good thing about our daily metamorphosis however is that we can change: we are flexible. Spiritual and psychological evolution is easy for us because we are used to changing. Change in the world is easy for us to cope with and to facilitate and so, perhaps, it is our responsibility as women.

Of course, this is generalising, but it did seem to strike a chord with many of the women present. We do change. We are fickle. We are unpredictable. We are irrational. However, we are flexible and we bend with the winds of change that blow around us and so we are strong and powerful too. We do not break easily. We can cope with anything and everything that the universe throws in our path.