What's With The Women?
When you travel around India, quite often you wonder where are all the women? The men stand by the side of the road shooting the breeze, watching the world go by… drawn like moths to the TV watching the cricket… watching a hole being dug… whatever you do or whatever is being done in India pretty much comes with a ready-made audience of men.
But having said that in tiny piazzas in Italy it's the same, collecting together over espresso or a game of chess… and again you wonder where are the women? Well, yes, naturally often doing all the work! Gathering in circles to wash laundry, chop vegetables, pound spices and grains… and maybe a little gossiping.
When I was recently exploring the labyrinthine old streets of Varanasi, a city which seems older than time itself, a woman called out from a doorway and as I peered in to inspect, a circle of women sat together engaged in the cottage industry of sticking bindis to cards for sale.
It was beautiful for an almost unexplainable reason, being let into someone's secret world. Bindis come on cards… I hadn't really thought about the process of bindis being stuck to cards by women sitting on the floor of their bright turquoise house while the grandma of the group stirred food on the stove behind and toddlers crawled around.
Feeling The Community
Seeing into women's lives here in India is always a gift. Sitting together working, cooking, eating, caring for children - people do things together here, they live communally… They share their lives naturally through sheer numbers and close proximity to each other, but with an intimacy that I believe really has been lost in the west.
Here in my little village of Goa where the population swells with westerners each season, we are trying to create community. We seek it out. When I was in London in the summer I had to call to schedule friends for dinner a month in advance and if it was a big group of women it was nigh on impossible to get them all in the same room at the same time. Here we make it a priority to gather.
We speak to our neighbours, we take time out for each other. Because we choose to live here, we choose to live like this and this is what life is all about. Community is what it's all about. We can attain a spiritual understanding of the world through meditating solo, through vipassana… but in the world, there are people and 99% of us live within community and we can choose to interact with that community or not.
Here's an example of how our community is knitted together. Yesterday I received the same text from three different people and had two friends come to my door...a woman had been involved in a terrible bike accident and needed rare blood right away. Almost all the village was informed, blood was found, money raised, meditations and prayer circles happened and even though most of us had never met the woman from the accident together we actually managed to really help her.
A Female Only Gathering
Last week my friend decided to host a women's evening - no men allowed (although a couple of the young boys under five managed to slip through the net!) We had no common language but we all understood each other. And really you do not need words. Once I marched to a lake high in the Himalayas, accompanied for a short while by a Punjabi woman, and we just held hands and chanted together.
At this particular gathering there were a few uncomfortable silences, but really we were all happy to be there together. Watching over the children (their children admittedly - all the mothers younger than us and all with a couple of children apiece, while us Western girls have as yet produced no offspring), eating together, dancing together, actually you do not need words.
Now they did not actually eat the risotto from the Italian host or the fish and coconut stew from her Brazilian housemate… but surprisingly, a couple of these beautiful Hindu women had a little glass of beer, much to the amusement of the others… and there was some dancing…
So last night I was in another circle of women, sitting in my garden under the palm and cashew nut trees. I teach women's workshops and I decided to host a special dinner and meditation session.
Now this time, the group were all westerners, some who live in Goa throughout the season with feathers and dreads, some in kurtas and some who had just wandered into my yoga class and this chance invitation that very morning. Spanning the globe from Germany to Australia and Israel to Iceland, we sat together to share a beautiful women's meditation with chanting and arm movements which celebrates the archetypes of the goddess (maiden and mother, warrior and crone wisdom).
Adi Shakti! Seraba Shakti! Pritham Bhagwati! Kundalini Mata Shakti! We chanted together. I'm finding that for me it is increasingly important to gather together and share these mantras celebrating the goddess life force, the kundalini-shakti energy.
I think in the middle of chanting such sacred empowering mantras, you travel from knowledge to wisdom. Something awakens inside you.
Now you can chant this mantra anywhere, but sitting in my garden in the middle of India, with the history of yoga rooting you into the ground, and the spark of the divine goddess in every flower, seed and breeze is like magic to me. The goddess resonates throughout the universe and has a sacred history in every country, but it is still living and breathing in India.