I am a rooted person, and by this I mean not only that I like to spend most of my time deepening my relationship with one place, but also that doing so is something of a political and ecological position for me.  For decades I have tended to believe, along with Gary Snyder, that if we want to help, we should stay home.

Engaging with the Feldenkrais work has taught me that even “good” habits impose certain limitations.  Indeed, taking the Feldenkrais work seriously has helped me to recognize that virtually every habit has, or had at one time, some good in it—habits always arise as functional responses to some situation, some demand from the internal and/or external environment.  Still, if we are closed to the possibility of experiencing alternatives to our habits, they become prisons; excessive commitment to our habits, even “good” ones, can interfere with needed flexibility or transformation.   From here, exactly a month into my trip, it seems like my commitment to my “if you want to help, stay home,” philosophy blinded me to some of the learning potential inherent in travel.

In Feldenkrais lessons, we talk often about learning to distinguish the habitual from the truly comfortable.   We tend to experience the habitual as “comfortable” simply because it is familiar, and yet, once we taste alternatives, we often find that our habitual is not genuinely pleasing to us—that it does not express our desire for ease, pleasure, and freedom in our lives.  In this way, traveling—especially in a country radically different from home—is essentially a 24/7 Feldenkrais lesson.  Every day presents hundreds of opportunities to notice the habits of home, and to ask which ones are truly comfortable, and which ones are familiar but stultifying or even harmful.

There are lots of things about the life I’m leading here that are far more comfortable than the life I lead at home.  Squat toilets, for instance, make great sense to me.  I like riding the motorcycle out of Pondicherry, a city of one million people, and being on dirt roads, then dirt tracks through fields, in ten minutes.  I like seeing great big bags of rice piled in the train stations, ready to be loaded on the same trains that carry passengers, I like to see goats and cows roaming through the streets of villages, towns and cities; in a strange way, I even like seeing garbage everywhere.  The average Indian produces so much less garbage than the average American, but we bury ours in landfills or burn it in incinerators and thus allow ourselves to pretend that our consumption doesn’t exact a hideous cost, or that bearing that cost is someone else’s problem.  The cost of consumption is evident here; it is hard to pretend that hard work, dirt, garbage and shit aren’t necessary parts of life.  There is a way in which life here feels more real than life at home.

The people here seem more alive, too.  When you stop at the Indian equivalent of a highway rest stop, you don’t find a bunch of glaze-eyed, puffy-faced, utterly expressionless people buying or serving food or drink.  People in American airports and other public spaces so often seem anesthetized—often I feel like I’ve wandered onto the set of a zombie movie and I can’t find my way out.  In villages and cities here I generally feel like I have no idea what is going on and know that any number of the people around me are hoping to profit from my vast ignorance; it’s not exactly wonderful to know that the brilliant wide smiles people shower on me always come with the hope and often with the expectation that I’ll hand over a bunch of rupees—but I still prefer this to dealing with automatons.

Life in Auroville—presents some particularly interesting challenges to my habits.  I can’t yet used to not needing to carry money everywhere I go, for instance.  Nor can I quite get used to the feeling of going out to lunch with a friend of Peter’s on a “work day” and finding that the length of the lunch is limited only by our energy for conversation—not by the necessity of getting back to work.

Auroville aims to be a cashless society—it doesn’t quite work that way, and the economy within the community is quite different for people from the local Tamil villages than for the Westerners—but still…Every Aurovillian can receive a monthly allotment of about $5,000 rupees—about $125.   For $3200 rupees per month, you can be enrolled in a program called Prosperity which entitles you to food, clothing, health care, and utilities, as well as a fund to cover emergencies (for example, needing to travel to care for a sick relative).  You don’t have to pay for housing from this monthly maintenance budget, housing has already been taken care of (Westerners generally contribute equity to “buy” houses or apartments, while people from the local Tamil population generally have housing provided for them).   Education for children also comes with being and Aurovillian.

Aurovillians who take advantage of the monthly maintenance budget are expected to work about 35 hours per week, but in many jobs, a great deal of flexibility is built in.  Because Auroville is centered on a yoga of surrendering oneself to Divine, taking time away from work for meditation retreat or to care for ailing family or community members is expected.  Aurovillians who don’t need the monthly maintenance—and many Westerners have adequate income from other sources to live without it—work on a voluntary basis.

 I have always railed against and resented our economic organization, I have always claimed that a more humane approach would do much to bring out human potential—but I could not have imagined what it actually feels like to live in a situation like this, where everyone’s life is not utterly dominated by the need to make money and the fear of not having enough to meet one’s basic needs.  The sense of ease and relaxation is palpable, almost intoxicating. 

I have been working on a few people here and noticing how flexible, experimental, and creative I feel, how much I enjoy myself, and what a pleasure it is to tell someone that I think we should work twice a week and know that we will be able to do so for as long as I am here or as long as it is productive.   I imagine what working in Auroville would be like, what it would be like to see only as many people as I truly had energy for and to know that their access to me would never be determined by their ability to pay.  (Aurovillians offer such services to other Aurovillians without charging; this mutual gifting is part of what makes the dream of a cashless economy somewhat real.)  It makes me feel like crying.  When I stopped eating wheat after eating it at every meal for my whole life, I discovered that I wasn’t inherently an irritable person.  Here I am finding out that the tightness and anxiety that are such features of my daily experience at home are not intrinsic to my personality, but rather are my habitual response to the fear that arises in response to the lack of human caring our social and economic relations so blatantly express.   

Although Feldenkrais uses ease and comfort as means to learning, we never promise that coming to recognize the limitations imposed by habits will be pleasant or painless.  This trip is providing me with a painful opportunity to recognize the contradiction between the way I habitually work with the intent of the work itself.  I do work that says that we can only learn and develop our full potential by working from a place of gentleness and joy—and yet I habitually work more hours every day and week than are comfortable for me.  Feldenkrais work shows us that when it comes to organic learning and transformation, the ends definitely do not justify the means; in the context of integrated living systems like the human body (or family, community, or ecosystem) one cannot meaningfully separate the ends from the means.   There is no way for me to justify overworking, and yet I have not been able to find a better means to the end of providing myself with adequate housing, healthy food, health care, and transportation…

The culture of the U.S. tells me that overwork is ennobling.  If I were a really good person, I’d enjoy it!  If I can’t, if I feel persistently unhappy with the economic conditions of my life, that is my individual problem.  Even in the progressive community, most of us can only envision individual/familial solutions to this pervasive cultural difficulty—we imagine that we can and should improve matters by practicing “voluntary” or “radical simplicity.”  Nothing wrong with that, it’s a great and necessary practice—but it leaves untouched the looming question of collective caring and responsibility

Last week Peter had a severe allergic reaction to an insect bite—within half an hour, he had broken out in hives and his lips and tongue were beginning to swell.  He took some homeopathic remedies, but the reaction continued to intensify, so I gave him a couple of Benadryl and accompanied him to the Auroville health center.  There they got him in with the doctor as soon as the doctor arrived (total wait time approximately 10 minutes).  The  M.D. gave him an intramuscular shot of anti-histamine and dexamethasone (a steroid anti-inflammatory) and prescribed him time-release anti-histamines to take for the next three nights.  The drugs cost about $.75, and the total cost of the visit, including the taxi we took to the health center, the drugs and the vitamin C we chose to buy was about $4.  Last summer I cut my leg on some barbed wire as I walked through the woods, and went to the clinic in Bellows Falls for a tetanus booster.  I waited for more than two hours, spent about 4 minutes with the nurse and the physicians’ assistant, and the total cost was about $75.  I fail to see how we will address problems like corporate profiteering in health care and other essential services by practicing voluntary simplicity at an individual or familial level.

Feldenkrais work shows us that we have to be able to imagine and experience genuine alternatives in order to change our habitual ways of moving through the world.  Travel is giving me a chance to experience alternative ways of living in my body, living in this world.  Every day I can see, hear, smell, and feel alternatives to my habits.  I could not have received such a powerful, multi-dimensional experience by reading books or watching movies about India or Auroville.  I needed to have this physical, whole-self experience. 

Is the learning “worth” the carbon dioxide I’ve “spent” to get here?  I don’t know how to reckon that cost.  Will I be able to integrate what I’ve learned into my habitual daily life at home?  I don’t know.  All I know is that I am immeasurably grateful for this transformative opportunity and I pray every day that I will be able to return its gifts to my human community, and to all my relations.