Wellmania
Page 26
On that last day on retreat in Bali, I looked around my fellow retreaters (who I loved so much at the time, then never saw again) and wondered: how many of their prayer beads and string bracelets would survive the journey home? How many totems and amulets would be shoved to the back of a drawer? At home there may be no community waiting, no place to visit to get that sense of higher meaning, no one willing to dive below the surface with you, and so you go back to that empty feeling, until you go online and book another retreat – and the cycle starts anew.
Back in 2005 when I was going to evangelical churches in Sydney, many of the young people I interviewed weren’t so much interested in God as they were in community and boundaries (real, not virtual communities, and moral boundaries) – two of the things missing in modern life. They were living in an individualistic world of moral relativism and were casting around for something, anything, that bound them together and fenced them in. The young evangelicals (who did three- or four-year stretches at their churches until their virginity bored them, or they became jaded and moved on, or that particular framework of meaning no longer fitted them) were easy to mock, but I understood them. You can have too much freedom and too much choice. Finding, establishing and maintaining a spiritual practice that has elements of introspection, whether it be prayer or meditation – I’m not saying it will lead to permanent happiness, but it can lead to serenity. And maybe that’s the only pure, reliable form of happiness, because it is not reliant on external things: a hot boyfriend, a great job, lots of money in the bank. Those things come and go.
*
One of the awesome results of being unhooked from an ancestral religious tradition is that we are now free, perhaps freer than ever before, to forge our own path. It’s one of the great miracles of our age that I could find myself deep in the Sri Lankan jungle in some moist mud hut, wrapped in a sheet while a quart of oil dripped from the ceiling (drip-drip-drip-drip) onto my third eye, following some ancient Ayurvedic healing tradition. Or practise Sufi meditation on the roof of a temple in Bali, or cloister myself with Benedictine monks in the wheat fields of Western Australia. What a time to be alive!
But, as I found, you can try all these spiritual traditions in the search for serenity, but trying ain’t the same as living it. You cannot thin-slice faith. The serenity won’t last.
Serenity is needed more than ever, but is harder to find. It’s no surprise one of the hottest consumer products is noise-cancelling headphones. The noise isn’t going to stop, so we have to create a product that prevents us from hearing – which seems the wrong way round. Blocking things rather than opening up: masking, masking, masking – it’s all we can do. But we live in a world that conspires against stillness and silence, the very things needed to drop us down and into a state of serenity.
The neoliberal agenda is not conducive to serenity: closing down the public libraries, getting us all onto private, user-pays health care, selling off housing stock to cashed-up foreign investors, starving public schools of money, raping the environment for private profit, weakening unions, removing penalty rates … the list goes on. But no matter! In your contract job, which might go for six weeks or might get extended (a job that doesn’t provide any protections such as sick leave or holiday pay), there’s this great initiative. They have mindfulness classes at lunchtime that are really great for chilling everyone out, because everyone’s really stressed at the moment … because no one knows if their contracts are going to be renewed. This time round mindfulness and self-care have been given to us by the market so we can comfort and lull ourselves into a non-panicked space, where we can soothe ourselves that these rough seas we ride on will not be the death of us.
In his book Evil Paradises, Mike Davis talks about the dreamworlds of neoliberalism, the physical spaces that money and globalisation have thrown up. The book describes these ‘phantasmagoric but real places – alternate realities being constructed as “utopias” in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation’. Canggu in Bali is one of those places. I went there last year. Yoga studios and coffee shops have sprung up in the small seaside community seemingly overnight. Locals said that in the last two or three years there had been a massive wellness-related building boom. It looked like the good life, it looked like a well life; Melbourne-style flat whites at a cafe called Little Flinders in the morning after your ninety-minute vinyasa class in the soaring, cathedral-like bamboo yoga shala, followed by a swim or a surf, then an organic juice.
But some of the locals I met weren’t so pleased. The boom was so intense that that corner of Bali was expected to run out of water within five years. There had been no plans made for this possibility. The spectre of environmental collapse was all around. Cranes crowded the skyline along the beach; Westerners on mopeds with surfboard racks clogged the unpaved roads to the beach and yoga studios. Huge concrete hotels were being built, with construction work going seven days a week and into the night. We want wellness and we want it now! I pondered the madness of this: in our search for inner peace and serenity we are prepared to rip up the planet. And, as a consumer of this stuff, I was a part of the problem.
*
In this age of anxiety, no wonder wellness holds such allure. In the yoga studio you can retreat from the harsh world out there and focus on your own body – its strengths and its limitations. In the wellness industry the personal isn’t political any more, it is just purely personal. It’s a different sort of border control. It is the borders that stop at your skin. In the name of wellness, you can hide from all the horror in plain sight, disguise your stasis with movement on the floor. The meditation in the morning will calm you down and keep you centred; the yoga class is not only a great workout but also has a spiritual lineage going back thousands of years that tethers you to something deeper than the weightless, flowing data that enthrals us and chains us to our smart phones. The organic food and detoxes and juices are a way of signalling that even though the world is going to shit, you still have control over what you put into your body. Control when there is no control over anything else, when ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
When the great ideological and global projects appear to fail, there is still the Project of Self. The world is sick; the natural environment is dying – coral turning white before our eyes, like a cancer metastasising too fast to treat. No wonder we seek to bury ourselves in wholefoods, wellness memes, yoga classes and meditation apps.
The wellness industry can help us get clean and lean and serene, but the things that we have lost – the collective and the community, compassion and generosity – these are part of the great project too. There’s no point reaching the beautiful summit, where we look good, feel great and are at peace, if we’re there alone. Somewhere along the line when we were talking about the struggle, it turned lethally inwards. We could only see ourselves; others ceased to exist. The narcissism and solipsism were total. We became the women walking around their clotheslines, around and around in circles, treading the same ground until it wore a groove that we couldn’t get out of, obsessed to the point of mania with our own bodies, our individual glow.
The time has come to look up, to step out of this worn path. The struggle has to mean something else now, something involving others, lifting others up. I sense something changing. There is a whiff of a return to the spirit of collectivism. You see it in the women’s marches and the protests around Trump’s Muslim ban. We’ve had years of looking after ourselves. Now it’s time to look after each other.
AFTER
Over the past twelve years I’ve tried lots and lots of the products and offerings from the wellness industry. Some things have worked, some have been snake oil, and some were neutral – as in, they were fine, but didn’t effect much real or lasting change.
Detoxes are fascinating and gruelling but can be risky. Ultimately they are seeking to do what the body already does with its lungs and kidneys and liver – filter out ‘toxins’. You can do a detox and see some amazing results (like
I did) – but with any rapid weight loss, it has been scientifically proven again and again that the weight will return (as it did with me).
I tried yoga for years without much improvement until I started doing it every day – then I saw many positive changes in my body, including improved strength and muscle tone, a ‘glow’ that comes with regular exercise, and increased stamina and energy. But once I moved away from the studio, when I started travelling a lot, the practice fell away. My body immediately started to feel locked up and stiff again. As I’ve spent long hours crunched over writing this book in a country town far from my favourite yoga studios, I’ve developed a real nostalgia for Namaste Dudes and the feeling I had after a great session.
Of course, other exercise regimes can deliver great benefits, but yoga gets you in touch with the more subtle energy systems in your body. And as for the nuggets of truth – in this secular world (where in the last couple of years, politically, environmentally and socially we appear to be in a state of decline, not progress), sometimes we need some wisdom or moral teaching, even if it is delivered when we are on our knees, in our ath-leisure gear, sweating in a semi-darkened studio. But it’s a privilege to be able to practise every day – to be close to a good studio and have the time and money to do it. It is increasingly becoming a rich person’s practice. A casual class at my studio of choice (not a fancy studio) is around twenty-seven dollars.
If you do one thing from this book, I would recommend shooting for serenity. Nothing has stuck for me quite like Vedic meditation. I do it most days. It works. But every teacher and every experience has been really helpful. Aruna was a revelation, turning my mind to a new way of being – that is, being in the present moment is the only thing that matters. The past is a graveyard, the future doesn’t exist. It made me stand at one remove from my mind and notice how it races ahead, freaking me out. Mindfulness has been corrupted by market forces, but that doesn’t diminish its fundamental value and purpose, which is to create a pocket of stillness and calm in your body and mind. We are in the age of distraction – we need an antidote.
But as I found time and time again, getting the knowledge is only the start. Next you have to apply it. Then you have to integrate it. Then you have to build it into your daily routine. Otherwise the improvements are temporary, and you go back to the easy comforts, the numbness or anxiety, the stiff, aching body. It’s ongoing. Each day we must make ourselves anew.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My editor, Jo Rosenberg, plus Kelly Fagan and Emma Schwarcz, and my agent, Pippa Masson.
Friends who read bits and helped me tease out and refine ideas: Erik Jensen, Jemma Birrell, Jackie Dent, Jenny Valentish, Lee Glendinning, Tom Dobson, Gareth Hutchens, Adam Brereton, Julia Leigh, Bridie Jabour, Michael Safi, Zoe Beech Coyle, Joh Leggatt and Sharon Verghis.
My editors at Guardian Australia: Emily Wilson, Will Woodward and Gabrielle Jackson
My editors at Sunday Life: Danielle Teutsch (who started this whole ball rolling with the fast), Kate Cox and Pat Ingram.
My generous interview subjects: Adam Whiting, Phoebe Loomes, Matt Ringrose, Samved Dass and Alima Cameron.
My parents: Jim and Mary Delaney, and the Bundanon Trust for a residency, which was both peaceful and productive.
Plus – all those wonderful, curious, excellent and eccentric people I met along the wellness way. From all of you I learnt something.
Brigid Delaney is a senior writer for Guardian Australia. She has previously worked as a lawyer and journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald, the Telegraph (London), ninemsn and CNN. She is the author of two other books, This Restless Life and Wild Things.