Becoming Letters #7

Slowing down for a cycle with karma yoga, communal dishes, and becoming more grounded

I’m writing this post from Kenthurst, the traditional lands of the Darug people, specifically the Bidjigal and Cattai mobs. Today is a day of leaving—leaving the home I’ve built up over this past lunar cycle. Today I leave Swami’s Yoga Retreat. To talk about the leaving, we must first talk about the arrival and the becoming.

What I’ve been up to

One month ago, the flower moon cycle began for me in Sydney, in a week of city noise and crowds, before heading to the hills of Kenthurst. The highlight of that week was a visit to the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, where I joined an Aboriginal Bush Tucker Tour led by an Aboriginal man named Yarram. I wrote about it in depth over in What the Garden Holds—worth a read if you want to sit inside that afternoon with me.

The noise quickly slinked away in an hour’s drive outside of the city, where I found Swami’s.

Swami’s Yoga Retreat is a living legacy. It was founded by Swami Sarasvati, who brought yoga from India to Australia decades ago, and is now tended by her son Sanjay and kept alive in no small part by the rotating cast of karmic yogis. I profess to not knowing what this meant before I joined. What I learned, is that Swami’s runs on Seva Yoga, the Sanskrit word meaning “selfless service” or acting for the greater good without expecting anything in return. It is the living expression of Karma Yoga, which leads you to perform duties with awareness, detachment, and love, rather than attachment to the results, e.g. work is not a burden, but a spiritual meditation. Put good in, get good out.

Photos from top left to right: 1. Standing on Swami’s Rock, where Swami meditated every morning; 2. Mural that says “if you deeply observe, everything is your teacher”; 3. Learning to play the harpsichord; 4. Painting of Swami; 5. Sign that says “be here and now”; 6. Chalk board writing in the main yoga room that says “inhale lots of love in… exhale lots of love out”; 7. Swami’s Recipe Book; 8. Steph (Mountain and Moon Healing) preparing to teach a workshop; 9. Me holding a little fortune that says “the universe supports your authentic self expression”

In play, this means that Swami’s is operated by volunteers who work in exchange for accommodation, meals, and immersion in the practice. I was one of ten or so volunteers during my time there, and together we ran the whole thing: the kitchen, the grounds, the guest experience, the endless dishes.

Let me tell you: there is something quietly radical about ten people from around the world singing along to 80s pop while scrubbing pots after a communal meal. About learning someone’s whole personality through the way they chop vegetables. About spending time in the reading room (my favorite place on the property), where I could slip away from the hum of the collective and just breathe, book in hand, the afternoon sun dipping softly around me. I read more this month than I have in a long time. As a non-meditator, I meditated nearly every evening. I ate simple, nourishing vegan food and felt my body remember what it’s like to be taken care of.

I spent as much time as I could in the reading room, even building my first fireplace fire here!

I was part of something larger than myself again. And I hadn’t realized how much I’d been missing that.

Three weeks of seva, the selfless service, is so much more than doing dishes and bringing guests extra blankets. It’s being present when presence is what’s needed. Swami’s gave me the conditions to practice selfless service and I get to carry it forward now.

The bittersweet part is that the little family we built there is already dissolving, volunteers coming and going as they’ve always done. There is something profoundly beautiful knowing that the particular constellation of people that made this month what it was won’t exist again. That’s the nature of intentional community: it’s real and it’s temporary and both of those things are entirely true at once.

Most of the squad, from left to right: Juliano from Brazil, Megane from the French-speaking part of Canada, Saloumé from France, Michael from Australia, Milla from Finland, Cara from Wales, Tabitha from Canada, Josiah from Australia, Franco from Argentina, Patty from Thailand, me, Steph from the USA, and Ama from the USA (missing: Michael from England and Caroline from Germany)

I’m heading now to Forster, on the Mid North Coast, for six weeks of housesitting. Catch me in a canal house with a tiny elderly dog, and the precise quiet of a borrowed life on loan. A very different kind of settling.

Not much physical movement this month, traveling from Wollongong to Sydney to Kenthurst in the light blue color marked #7.

Lunar Cycle

I spent a full lunar cycle at Swami’s. I arrived just before the new Flower Moon and I’m leaving as it ends, ushering in the Strawberry Moon, named by northeastern Indigenous peoples for the brief, sweet season of wild strawberry ripening that arrives now in the northern summer. The strawberry isn’t ripe yet. This new moon is just the beginning of that cycle, a seed of sweetness not yet tasted.

In the yogic and Hindu tradition that underlies so much of what I’ve been living this month, the new moon is called Amavasya. It is considered the most inward of all lunar days, a time when prana (life force) is said to move downward and within. Many practitioners fast on Amavasya, or soften their practice, or turn toward their ancestors. It is not a day for launching or beginning; it is a day for stillness, for releasing, for honoring what has passed through you.

From left to right: our neighborhood spider building their web yet again, a mural that says “sometimes the only constant we have is having the same moon and stars above us”, and the sky darkening to night

I find it quietly perfect that I’m leaving a yoga retreat on Amavasya. The tradition I’ve been living inside is asking me, on this very day, to go still. To let the container open without rushing to fill it with something new.

The strawberry moon cycle is just beginning. Whatever ripens in it… I don’t know yet. Six weeks in a borrowed house on a canal, a small dog at my feet, the delightful quality of winter light on water. Something will ripen. I’ve just got to cultivate it.

A parting question for you…

When the structure falls away—the routine, the community, the container that gave your days their shape—where does the sense of purpose go? And how do you tend it while you wait for the next one to form?