No One Gets Away From Being Human: A Peek into My Life

The lotus is one of the most common spiritual symbols venerated for its purity and enlightenment. It is so pristine, floating perfectly above the murky water, refusing to be contaminated. How we hold the lotus on a pedestal! Mapping it to the ideal way of living life with ease, grace and serenity. However, I wish to give the lotus a lot more respect by being honest about its complete nature.

The problem many analogies face is contextual. The lotus is sacrosanct in representing our ultimate human potential: the unfoldment of our highest nature, which is inherently divine and pure, without trying to be. Yet, the lotus remains a symbol of a transcendent destination that always feels out of reach.

The framing of it can sometimes feel like a spiritual flex. The holy posturing almost makes us forget that the poor lotus fought its way up from the darkest, dirtiest places, anchoring its roots deep into the abyss in order to survive. It knows darkness intimately, yet chooses to push towards the light, without giving up. That’s the story we need to hear.

Don’t give me the noble lotus that proudly sits above the waters of human suffering, forgetting where it came from. I honour lotuses that get in the trench of worldly experience, get themselves dirty and bruised, and only then emerge victorious, throwing away even the paltry accolades of purity and enlightenment.

That’s a truly beautiful lotus worth admiring.

A peek into my childhood: my own slice of humble pie

It would be unfair to talk about owning the entire spectrum of human experience without offering just a taster of the sort of fun I had as a child. Everyone has their own share of suffering, as well as having to bear the brunt of collective human suffering. No one gets away from being human.

It feels too cold to simply state that all suffering has a purpose and meaning. Even though I’ve personally experienced this to be true for my own growth, I also know how it feels to be in the middle of despair and be told by numerous people I respect, including elders, mediums and spiritually evolved beings, that “everything will be okay, we aren’t worried about you”. It most certainly doesn’t feel that way at the time.

What I can honestly say from my own journey is that darkness is real. But so is Light. So is hope, compassion, love and all the many shimmering virtues of life. They are so overwhelmingly powerful that no amount of darkness can indefinitely hold up against them. Yet, if it weren’t for the darkness, how would we even see or comprehend what light even is?

How would we grow to realise what immense light resides within each and every one of us?

If all we ever saw was white, and it refused to partake in creation, how could we enjoy the many beautiful, vibrant colours we see around us?

If nothing but light could be perceived, the little sunflower has no reason to uplift itself.

I don’t know how few or many people will ever read this, but you need to know that the appalling circumstances our world currently faces are very real to us, but we are not in a downward spiral towards doom. The world is entering a period of healing and change, which can feel unnerving. For this to happen, old wounds need stitching up, which can sting. In more severe cases where negativity has turned cancerous, surgery may be required. The path may seem daunting, but it is a gradual process of healing. Healing of our selves, our humanity and our ecosystem.

And it starts now, not in some distant future. This is a message that gushes through my very being more and more in recent times.

Throughout my life, whenever I have faced challenges or suffering, life has taught me to turn inwards to find and draw strength and resilience from within. External support has been very important too, as I believe that no one is an island. I’m always grateful to the loving support I have had from my parents, spouse, every teacher who showed the way, and my beloved pets. What I eventually had to learn was that even with guidance, support and a comforting shoulder, each one of us has to make our individual journey to the surface, like a determined lotus.

Terrible twos indeed

There’s considerable research out there on the impact of maternal stress during pregnancy on an unborn child. My mother went through unimaginable pain during the time she was pregnant with me. I would often joke to her that if she felt I’m weird in any way, it could be down to this.

Even as a toddler, I had a rather fiery, direct nature. I was once on the rooftop terrace with my grandmother when she was hanging out clothes to dry and for some reason, I thought it would be fun to throw one of her clothes pegs off the roof. It was lost forever. She got mad at me and started chasing me around the roof top, scolding me. After a little running, I stopped and turned to her and indignantly asked her why she was so angry, making such a fuss over a single peg. I then ran downstairs to air my complaint to my grandfather. She still laughs about it to this day.

On other occasions, if my mother had a headache for instance, I would rub her forehead and order my grandmother to cook because mum’s unwell. This was no issue for me because it was innocent, honest and coming from a place of love. No one minds when it’s a 2 year old.

Physically, however, I had some difficulties. One of the problems with having a nurturing household is that sometimes, you can be too nurtured. I wouldn’t eat much as a baby and would often throw up whatever I was given. Out of real concern, my young parents were advised by elders in the family to continue feeding me more calorie dense, rich food, even after being repeatedly sick, to sustain me. I was sustained alright…all the way to being 26kg at 2 years old. I must make it clear that I blame no one for this, as intentions were in the right place. However, my body wasn’t so understanding of this and I did have to deal with metabolic complications later in life.

Was that hard? Absolutely. Would I change it if I could go back in time? No. I run a small family business which focuses on health, wellness and healing. It started out being oriented towards physical weight and metabolic conditions like diabetes, which made sense with my dad being a specialist doctor. I had an inside view into what people struggle with on a daily basis. Everything from difficulties in reading hunger signals, distorted body image, low self-confidence and facing judgement and shame.

How on earth could this possibly be seen as a gift? Well, to be honest, it would be a lie to say that during childhood I easily accepted all of this as a gift. What I did do though, was keep going. Sometimes slowly, sometimes taking a few steps backwards, sometimes just standing still to pause. This was only made possible because of a single quality that I permit myself to take pride in, which is that no matter how terrible the outer circumstances, I always found a way to keep re-opening my heart.

When adults cause intentional harm

Life taught me early on that bullying was never going to have an age limit.

Everyone makes mistakes in ignorance. In fact, all perpetrators of harm are blinded by some form of ignorance or another. When their actions seem inconceivable and cruel, we can’t stomach it and just label them as evil.

Bullying is something many of us have encountered, as children and as adults. I knew what it felt to be bullied as a child, by other children. By the time I was 7 or 8, many of the things I saw and heard broke the illusion of all children being unequivocally innocent angels. It wasn’t a given.

What did surprise me was the behaviour of many adults, as I naively believed that everyone inevitably grows into qualities like maturity, compassion and understanding. In Asian cultures we are naturally taught to respect all elders, no matter what they say or do. It’s an unspoken expectation, and you’ve likely already landed yourself in trouble if it ever needs to be spoken! For someone like me, who preferred to accept truth only where I really felt it, this conditioning caused a lot of internal friction. Yet, I knew how to behave myself and be a good girl. Most of the time.

A few incidents in my childhood stay with me not because the hurt remains today, but because of how it moved me at the time and what it revealed to me about human nature at such a young age.

A 2 year old witnesses violence for the first time

This is one of my earliest and most vivid memories, purely because of how deep an imprint it left on my psyche. Numerous years went by where I had complete amnesia about the event, and then one day it suddenly came back to the forefront of my mind. Having been one of the most jarring experiences of my childhood, I could never quite understand why the memory of it never brought back any of the old emotions along with it.

Before my parents and I moved to the UK when I was 3 years old, we lived with my paternal grandparents in an Indian Air Force residential quarters within the city of Chennai. At 2 years old, I was already getting bored with the monotony of toddler life at home, so my family decided that it wouldn’t be so bad for me to spend at least part of my day in a local kindergarten. There wasn’t much to the building, if I can even call it that. It felt more like an isolated portable cabin. I was the youngest child there, with the others being around 3 or 4 years old. Therefore, a unique exception was made for me so that my mother could drop in daily with a milk bottle for me.

Many people have heard the term, “spare the rod, spoil the child”. This kindergarten school took that message very seriously. There was an extremely unfair practice whereby if one child was naughty, the entire class would get wrapped around the knuckles with a ruler. For some reason, I was spared this brutality each time. Perhaps it was due to being the youngest, or the knowledge that my mother would drop in anytime, or maybe it was the pre-emptive scene I would make whenever I saw that ruler come out.

As I was about to find out, the ruler around the knuckles routine was actually pretty tame. On occasion, our teacher would be inspected by the principal, just to make sure everything was orderly and regimented…you know, as it should be with toddlers.

On one visit, things took a sharp and sinister turn. I can feel myself sitting in that classroom, aware of the other children around me and especially paying attention to my neighbour, a little girl with a shaved head. Now, I don’t really recall what was said or done, but something about this little girl had triggered the principal. He wanted to teach everyone a lesson.

I remember the little girl being picked up by the monster’s hand and physically thrown out onto the steps of the classroom. After that, the memory is over. I was told by my family that I came home crying to my grandfather, telling him what I had just witnessed. He promptly got on his bike, with me standing in the footwell like I was heading out to war, and rode over to give that principal a piece of his mind. It seems the guy was fired soon after, and the school apparently doesn’t even exist anymore.

The playground thief

Not every incident of adult cruelty would end with such swift justice.

I was 6 years old, happily playing with a penguin beanie baby at breaktime. Finding a quiet corner of the playground, I was content to just throw the little toy as high as I could, then catch it again. Each time it would soar a little higher, light and free, only to land back in the safety of my palm.

Little did the penguin know that its flight was about to come to an abrupt stop, by the hands of a school staff member. Out of nowhere, there was an older lady with a short auburn bob towering over me. She wasn’t someone I had spoken to before and I didn’t know what she was there for, since all the other kids were playing quite far away from me.

She looked at me very seriously and plucked the penguin out of my hands.

“How would you like it if I threw you up and down like that?”

With that, she stole a toy from a child and walked off without looking back.

I was mortified. For the rest of the break I sat on a bench sobbing, alone.

There were a multitude of emotions that passed through me. Fear, confusion, and at one point I genuinely believed that I was a terrible person who had “hurt” this penguin by carelessly throwing it around and was being punished for it. She was an adult, so she must have had her reasons for doing this, right?

When the bell rang, she returned and without saying a word, handed the penguin back to me and walked off.

Surprised this one didn’t put me off maths

At 8, I was already acquainted with the cruelty children are capable of inflicting on each other. No matter how tough I thought I was, it was never easy being targeted for religion, race and even just getting good grades or being liked by a teacher. Nothing really prepares a girl at that age for being physically pushed to the floor by a boy about 4 years older and much taller.

Even so, I recall a few gems who crossed my path. I won’t take any names, but there were some truly wonderful souls present at all stages of life. I made extra effort to look for them, so I always managed to find them and even stuck up for them when other kids got too rowdy.

What I couldn’t stick up for sadly, was myself, when I became the target of one male teacher. My mother was in the teaching profession at that time, and she had interacted with this man before. I understood that he had his reasons for not approving of my parents and she felt that clearly from some comments he had made to her. I didn’t know, however, that his dislike would be extended to an 8 year old.

I had the misfortune of being in his class for maths, and that’s where this incident took place. One day, he was away and we had a substitute teacher. This teacher talked a lot, for most of the class actually, and towards the end, just as the students were about to open their books, she asked me to do some errands around the classroom. By the time the bell rang, I had barely written the date in my workbook. Not my fault; she wouldn’t stop talking.

The next day, Mr. Grouch was back and he was in no mood. He sat on top of one of the desks, with one leg up on the chair, arms folded. Next to him was the pile of workbooks from our class. He started picking up the books and going through them one by one. Most of them had barely a handful of questions answered, due to the limited time we had. He didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he praised the other kids for a job well done.

He then found my workbook, and let everyone know that it was mine. Of course, being the substitute teacher’s helper elf, I didn’t get any sums answered and the sad looking date was all you could see. He almost looked gleeful as he spread the blank pages wide open and panned it around the room for all the kids to see.

That’s when he started ripping into me. He screamed at me in front of the entire class about how pathetic my efforts were, routinely picking up other students’ books to show me that at least they had the decency to complete even 2 questions. This tirade felt like it went on for hours, and like time had stood still to witness my humiliation. In reality, it was probably around 10 minutes before he realised his throat needed a break.

Injustice, shame, more fear and distrust of adults. They weren’t necessarily right, and it wasn’t always safe to listen to them. I knew that now for certain.

Funnily enough, Mr Grouch walked up to me on the playground a few weeks later, sour faced, in order to pass on the message that I was being moved up a grade as the faculty felt I wasn’t being challenged enough.

Craziness at the carnival

Okay, so carnival might be a stretch. It was more like a small fair happening in my local town centre. Nothing much ever happened there, so this was exciting. I would routinely walk down into town with my mother, trail behind her into various shops with the ulterior motive of demanding a treat from her before we return. It always worked.

On one of the carnival days, they had a new bouncy castle up. It wasn’t too big but looked really intriguing. Kids would climb in through one side, have their adventure making their way through the castle and then exit from the other side.

My mum needed to go to a shop just metres away, so she paid the lady who was operating the castle for my ticket, and left me to it.

I stepped inside with so much anticipation. Along with other kids, I crawled through some very awkward spaces that seemed to change in size around me. It felt a little like being inside the white rabbit’s house. Feeling deflated, I moved quickly and too soon, I found myself at the exit.

What was this? It felt like a scam. Why did they charge for this when I hadn’t had any fun? Maybe I didn’t do it right. Thinking I needed to go back and see what I had missed, to really get the most out of this experience, I stepped back inside the exit. The only motive was childlike curiosity.

The employee managing the bouncy castle was not having it. She barked at me to get out immediately and continued to shout at me in front of the gathered crowd of parents and children. She treated me not as a child who had made an innocent mistake, but as a seasoned criminal with a history of plundering bouncy castles.

At this point, my mum had left the shop and I ran to her as soon as I saw her, instinctively using her body as shelter. I have no idea what the other parents there thought of me because I was full to the brim with embarrassment.

Although I was not much older since my encounter with Mr Grouch, something shifted inside me and the response that welled up took on a different nature this time. I felt shame and fear, yes, but another more visceral feeling was surging through me. Anger. Anger at the injustice, anger at not even being able to defend myself and my poverty of words, anger at this total stranger who might have made my mother look like she didn’t raise her daughter right, in front of other strangers. I walked away, holding my mothers arm, glaring at this woman. Only one of the many faces of unkindness I have encountered in life.

What a complex, unpalatable mixture of feelings for any 8 year old to process. And yet, so many children have to go through this, silently, and without being able to speak about it. Then they grow up and that unhealed child within them still cries, because they never got to be heard even though the body matured. Even some of the most well-intentioned self-help and particularly spiritual self-help teachings tend to demarcate emotions as being healthy vs unhealthy, conducive to spiritual growth vs causing suffering, positive and negative.

It is true that certain qualities support your own peace and healing more than others, but we must be very careful not to inadvertently send the message that people aren’t allowed to feel their fear, their shame or their anger. If this leads to repression, it can unexpectedly manifest itself in more dangerous ways than if we had allowed it some space in the first place.

A lot of emotional and even spiritual pain is linked to the nervous system, embedding itself deep into the body and leading one to feel unsafe. This cannot simply be thought or willed away, and neither can it be healed with some instagrammable positive thinking quotes. We can, however, learn to manage this type of pain in a healthier way, with boundaries and forgiveness, and even transmute it through various practices: spiritual, breathwork, somatic…whatever we wish to name them. For me, personally, anything that heals us and takes us towards the light and our higher nature is innately spiritual.

And so on…

For those still reading, thank you for staying with me. There is so much more that I choose not to share, at least for now, because it would make this article a truly unpleasant read. This is about enough for now, so I will fast-forward the rest.

The years that followed were both beautiful and painful, full of wonder and despair, light and dark. I was someone who grew up struggling deeply with social graces, was highly sensitive to sensory stimuli, especially sounds, and for a time was not even able to understand the point of basic things like sarcasm, which came easily to most. With a very introverted nature, I did my best to belong, often failing at it and settling for loneliness.

Not in spite of, but because of this, I learnt to embrace polarity and start dancing along to the tune of life.

I encountered a variety of “isms”, as many of us do, and passed through a period of severe depression at university from which I thought I would never emerge. Not just my mental health, but my studies also suffered badly at one point. I hesitate to use the word miraculous, but at the time it really did feel that way when I progressed, within the span of one year, from almost flunking out of my course at The London School of Economics — to getting first class marks in my final year and even getting the highest mark in my favourite subject. I am highly amused now to think that, back then, 19-20-year-old me would have found failing at school the most world-ending calamity I could ever face.

The turnaround came from my steadfast and natural anchoring to my Divine Mother and a best friend I had throughout my life: Krishna. The same inner Divine source that goes by many names, across many religions and traditions. Nothing inaccessible to anyone. I never asked for help at that time, because I thought I didn’t deserve it, but help grabbed me by the scruff of the neck like a protective mother lion and plucked me out of the dark.

And again after that.

And again.

And still.

Why am I even sharing all this? Because I know at least one or two people who read this in future will recognise themselves in these words, and possibly feel heard.

Kiruthika Rajeswaran