Bad Ass in the Shed

This week I’ve started getting up at 5 a.m. and going to the shed to meditate, pray, read, affirm and (incidentally) listen to my neighbour hawk-up a night-sponge of phlegm. Every other article on Medium extolls the virtues of the 5 a.m. start so I thought I’d give it a go.

In the shed, I’m reading Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass at Making Money and yesterday in Chapter 7, I had to list 5 reasons why I had faith in the Universe.

This was a deeply uncomfortable exercise for me because, basically, I had to put to one side all the very many reasons (and evidence) why I believe the opposite is true. You have to make yourself vulnerable to do this because the risk of things not turning out and you looking like a prize tosser is hefty and significant. I’m not sure if I can bear another failure so I’m holding back.

But I did the exercise anyway.

As the day pass, I find myself worrying over the enormity of the task I’ve set myself – of going from Stinker to Finca in 999 days (more like 980 now).

I’ve irons in the fire, you see but not, by any means, a clear-cut super-highway to wealth and artistic fulfilment.

I know that in moments of doubt such as these, I need my little faith mantra. Specifically faith that;

• everything will fall into place as it’s meant to,
• I don’t need to know exactly how, and,
• it’s not down to me alone but that I’ll be supported by a benevolent and self-organising universe

It’s that last one that I have some issues with as yesterday’s exercise revealed. I’ve certainly felt the relief that comes from genuinely believing that I’m not alone in all this. That there is some mystical power, a gulf-stream of grace with which I can align myself and my endeavours.

But I’ve also felt, in moments of deep pain, that I am alone. And in those moments, I feel ashamed of allowing myself to believe that it was ever otherwise.

Gullible.

Foolish.

I told you (me) so.

Onto these feelings cynicism grafts itself, calcifying hope.

Have I got the strength to hope again?

I don’t know.

In the shed this morning, swamped with doubt, I repeated my little faith mantra from above. It was hard so I started doing the tapping that D taught me on Saturday in an attempt to disrupt those encrusted neural pathways of despair and “I can’t!”

When the realisation that “I can’t do this alone,” collided with the determination that “I can’t let myself trust again,” I started to cry.

In the shed.

At 5:40 am.

With the sound of my neighbour’s hawked-up phlegm and the flapping of wood-pigeon wings all around me.

God is big in India.

At a month-long yoga teacher training course in the jungles of Kerala I felt his presence palpably. Where were you when my suffering was at its worst, I asked mostly rhetorically feeling him oozing around me as I stood outside a temple at 5 a.m.

“Where the hell do you think I was?” came the instant reply, loud and dogged.

It shocked me because I didn’t think the voice of God would sound so “street,” and also because I wasn’t really expecting an answer.

By 6:30 a.m. it had started to rain, so I left the shed and bought the washing in.

And was reminded of the voice of God.

In Kerala

At 5 a.m.