2015 has been an intensely challenging and at times, ridiculously stressful year for me.  It has also been like a teacher offering difficult lessons from which to grow and learn.  Interestingly enough, the year and its lessons have been mostly in India and I’m sure to my core that there is no coincidence in this.  The most trying and intense period was when I was up in the Himalayas, above Dharamshala and close to the home of the Dalai Lama and the exiled Tibetan community.

I stayed a 30 minute hike up-hill from the busy, noisy town of MacLeod Ganj, staying in a family home-stay between Bhagsu and Dharamkot, nestled in the bosom of the great mountains that stretched around either side of me.  To get anywhere required treks through rough, earthen paths and an abundance of natural landscape devoid of cars, pollution or general chaos.  Trees, animals and fresh air soothed my senses for seven weeks, providing moments of solace and comfort.

It is also no coincidence to me that this was the place where I began my regular, morning Mysore-style Ashtanga yoga practice at last.  After three years of patchy on/off yoga and a deep yearning to establish a yoga routine as my daily Sadhana (or spiritual practice) it was in India, in the powerful energy of it’s awe-inspiring mountains, that I finally did it.

For the previous three and a half months, I had been writing my book consistently, but not doing a lot of journalling.  While in the mountains however, I poured my heart and soul into my diary each day.  And it carried me through my stress like a buoy keeps you afloat in a turbulent sea.

When I reflect back on that period and remember the tears and the sadness, the heavy weariness that visited me each morning upon waking, the confusion and anxiety of my incomprehensible inner world… I remember also the three things that eased my hardship and connected me to a source of strength and support throughout it all – my three saviours that stood by my side like close friends.

Yoga.  Writing.  The Mountains.

Three is the magic number.  There’s no doubt about it that these three things had a potent, inexplicable effect on me.  The yoga and the writing were what I did myself to provide my own support and healing.  The mountains however, were what held me in it all, like a massive, compassionate, tangible force of love and support – while I was there I felt myself deeply nourished and comforted while simultaneously experiencing raw, painful emotions bigger than any I’d previously known.

I felt torn apart and ready to disintegrate yet never abandoned or completely defeated.  It seemed sometimes I was being pushed through a clothes-wringer, a new and different Liz being squeezed out the other side.  Something huge was being processed inside of me and it hurt.  It felt as if hurricanes and cyclones were visiting my inner landscape, day after day, battering my inner world and leaving me limp and bruised in its aftermath.  And there was little I could do other than wait it out, hoping fervently that it would some day pass, that life would not always be this impossibly shit.

There is no other place in the world that I can imagine could hold me so powerfully through such an intense period of painful stress as Dharamshala and its sacred mountains.  I now know why there are so many stories of yogis and sadhus and holy monks living and meditating in the mighty Himalayas… I believe they hold a subtle yet potent energy that can connect you to a force much grander and bigger than our delicate little humanness.  A force that so many people around the world call God, Allah, Shiva, Great Spirit, Grace….

Words and doctrines tear you away from this force and I have rarely before experienced any sense of a God in my life.  But I realize, as I look back, that there could be no better example of an experience of connecting to Grace.  I felt it as the energy of the mountains.  I recognize it now as the energy of the Great Spirit.  It is my experience that God does not take away your suffering or your pain… What God does is to hold you, to comfort and support and love you through it all, if you can but connect with that divine, sacred energy.

I feel blessed and humbled by what I experienced this year.  And of course, vastly changed internally.  So I will end this piece now with a small bow of my head in reverential respect and gratitude to the Great Spirit for all I received and send you all a heartfelt wish that should you ever meet a time of intense difficulty, you too can find a connection to your God, to your own divine source of support, strength, grace and love.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti.

Ellie