Something In The Air
The text on my phone read… "Bangkok Airport under siege… Taj Hotel on fire… they attack Bombay from the sea."
Tears brewed up in my eyes and I felt sick to my stomach, for the second time in twelve hours…
Fourteen hours before I had bumped into two friends - who walk with a foot in both the physical world and the spiritual realms. They are in tune with the universe and this day they felt something was definitely going on.
"Do you feel it?" said Ganesh. "There is a very strange energy - very dark, very confusing," said Ori. I did feel it. There was a heaviness in this little Goan village by the sea, where all should be playful and light under the palm trees. I put it down to the dark moon.
The Storm Comes
One hour later I found out a good friend of mine had died that morning giving birth. I felt literally gutted by the news.
Two hours later the attack on Bombay began…
I had felt it. The energy was heavy, unsupportive, bleak. Tapping into the collective unconscious, something was going adrift.
Obviously the news reports came thick and fast - first there was the 'Chinese whispers' of living in a small village - then the local newspapers - then the voice of the BBC.
With each report, each picture, with the front page pictures of the Taj Hotel on fire and grinning gunmen with AK47s, you could feel people recoil in fear.
The message from the Indian Army was "Jai Hind… To forgive a terrorist is left to God, but fixing his appointment with God is our responsibility."
Then the conspiracy theories came - it's the CIA, it's funded by the Americans, it's Pakistan, it's a war on India, the terrorists injected cocaine and LSD before the attacks… ad nauseum.
In The Eye Of Fear
Shock and grief are soon replaced by fear. Fear and grief have the same roots in vulnerability. Fear is easy to fuel. Your family might get hurt. You might get hurt. Your business might suffer. There is fear for our own survival - both at the hands of a gunmen, or at the hands of the economy.
This attack on Mumbai happened 500km from my house, but I was certainly feeling the tremors way down the coast in the tourist hub of Goa.
Fear is a sharp intake of breath. It is painful. As much as you feel fear deep in your belly - like a punch to the gut, it is fuelled by the mind. Fuelled by stories, the ones we make up ourselves and the ones we feed on from the media or our friends. Nothing moves as fast as gossip, except maybe fear. And within 24 hours of these attacks, both were moving with supreme speed.
I felt fear. I wondered what the hell was going on in the world. A friend of mine taken in a moment of beauty giving birth and my adopted country being under attack.
I felt exhausted by it all, wondering what the point was… again the gossip around my friend dying was immense. I heard so many conflicting stories, that eventually I had to close my ears.
Many people asked me what had happened and I had to say, "Until I hear the true story I'm not passing on all of these rumours and opinions."
Open Mind, Open Heart
How do you not get sucked in to all the talk and fear when such disasters happen? Fear makes us feel small, helpless and vulnerable. It feeds our insecurities, our negative perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. It feeds our victim nature.
I believe we have to keep an open mind as well as an open heart. If we stay in tune with the universe, receptive to the cosmos, fear has a hard time taking hold. You find that when something terrible happens, people like to talk, it brings people together, but sometimes it can be harmful.
Love helps us grow. Love, however vulnerable it might make us feel, makes us receptive and open.
As fellow columnist Amoda Maa Jeevan says "Ultimately it's a choice between love and fear. It's a choice between tightening into familiar shapes that constrict you and opening softly into what is really happening. By choosing the latter - even though it feels scary or uncomfortable - you transform your monsters into allies."
"When you have the courage to lose your self," says Amoda. "You gain the world. Instead of small me getting lost inside the Big World, the vastness of the world is contained within you."
I scrolled on my phone to the last text from my friend Beatrice, one she sent me just day before she died. It read "...Love Bea - Be Love."