Lost in RAK

In September something happened to change the dynamic of our group. I was laying on the gravel outside, alone, daydreaming as always about D. About the future.

It was more a meditation than a daydream. Every single day for close to 2 years I did it – visualise the moment when I would walk out and walk right into his atmosphere. It was bright, buoyant; otherworldly. Almost heaven like. But that’s how things happened here - in my mind. In the scene we would fall into each other like our first time together and we would spend hours exploring the pain; the whys and hows, whos and whats we were never able to discuss in letters because they were always moderated by authorities. The same authorities who were building a prosecution case against us.

I did the meditation lying down, the precursor to sleep, either in the morning after counting, or in the evening, after counting. As soon as I and every other girl in the place had stood up and been accounted for. "Australi? Heidi?"
"Na'am."‘Yes, I’m here, not escaped. Yes, I tally with your tally.’ Then I would roll myself back into the dreamscape. Time to DreamEscape. Who would have thought that Reiki study as a young, green, confused expat brat, would find such a profoundly perfect outlet. Let’s levitate out of this one shall we?

Reiki is focus and feeling. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. It’s also connection to the subject. That subject may be you, or it may be the person you are healing. Sometimes you and the person you are healing are the same, sometimes you are oceans apart. For me it was an act of visualisation, and it invariably invoked the same cast – me, D, my mum and dad. Whatever it was, it was my only way out. Different to the escape dreams, because they always required dhows and passports and beatings. And they ended where they started, waking up in this place. Reiki was the perfect escape. The resolution. But unlike the dreams, it would only come with intense and entirely conscious focus.

I would start with the orb of white light; a slow burner that sparked in my toes and made its way up my body like a probing masseuse. ‘Have I hit the spot? Are we connected? Should I go on or do we need to work harder here?’ Toes to legs to thighs to root chakra, taking it slower and deeper at the hungriest cells, dragging the warming healing buzz on invisible strings linking mind and body. My stomach and head needed the most work – the solar plexus and pituitary chakras – both were twisted, sluggish and tormented. On and up through the chest, throat, lips, nose, eyes and up to the crown of my skull, back down my neck and shoulders, then charging down my arms and out through my fingertips. The same routine every day, always leading to the same outcome. It was here, when the energy had explored every molecule, that I would allow the visualisation to occur. The reward. The reunion. It might have been fantasy, but it was well imagined: a coming together fitted out with location, wardrobe, words and people. The most important people. My parents, and D.

We had passed around a book called The Power of Positive Thinking; about people who had won lottery, cured cancer, or beat the impossible through visualisation, affirmations, and thinking ‘positive’. Unfortunately no one in the book could tell us exactly how long it would take to think your way out of jail.

Laying back in the steaming sun, watching a different reality in my mind, I passed hundreds of days. On the day of the eleventh of September, I was wearing my favourite kandora. It was soft white cotton with heavy embroidery around the sleeves, neck line and straight down the centre. A going away gift from a Sri Lankan girl, the dress was well worn, probably from her days as a housemaid. I was literally swimming in its Arabian proportions but it felt airy when I walked and there was something pure in the way it brushed against my skin. You could say it was spring floral that smattering of orange, yellow and pink flowers. And even though I constantly felt sweaty and dirty in this place, the smell of the freshly washed kandora as it slipped over my head had the power to change that.

The Bengali girl interrupted right near the end, D was lifting the hair off my shoulders with both hands, kissing my neck as he let go and it fell in a mess around our faces. “I love to see the sunlight in your hair...”
I was grabbed on the arm and pulled. “Yalla, yalla come. Quickly! Amerika! Amerika! Quickly come!” I had never seen her before. What does she want with me? There was something so spectacularly urgent in her voice that I moved in the direction she was pulling. To the television. There was an Indian girl sitting there alone. There was a building on fire. There was a plane. Oh fuck. There was a plane in the side of a building. There was an Indian girl, a Bengali girl, and an Australian girl.

I ran to get the others...

Which way is up?

There is a fairly basic school of thought here. Look where your feet are, look directly ahead of them, let your eyes follow a line across the floor and up any perpendicular object in your path, then keep following your eyes skyward until you establish the position of up.

It all works fine unless you are a) under water, struggling to find the surface amid a choking whitewash of bubbles, or b) in the middle of a philosophic maelstrom, struggling to make sense of your ‘direction’.

I guess the reason Eckhart Tolle was so successful with The Power of Now, was his concept empowered people to not actually think about their direction. “Sshh, just be” he said. “The direction will naturally follow.” Guess that’s also why the Dalai Lama is so popular; what with all that Buddism jazz. And while Eckhart gets first billing here, it in no way reflects my personal preference. The latter is Great for spreading his much deeper philosophy about being; the former is probably his number one plagiarist who lucked onto a marketing machine.

But how does this all help in the current conundrum? Don’t think about it, just be – while immaculate in theory because you have to do diddly squat – is not entirely realistic. I mean, I work in marketing. If I trained myself to not think ahead, I’d be out of a job. “Heidi, where’s that media plan?” “Oh, I figured it’s best not to think about it, if we just be the client will approve this ridiculously inflated budget and the media will book itself.” Yes I have days like that, but it’s never going to become standard operating procedure. Is it? So what about the alternative? The ‘putting it out to the universe’ theory?

Has anyone in the room tried to live by Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking? Hands up all of you who have chanted positive affirmations every waking day of a particularly needy period? What about chanting those good old affirmations internally, for 700 days straight, driven by the god-awful fear of failing at what seems life’s simplest and most successful wishing game? Failure here is just preposterous. I mean, all those testimonials shouted success. And so easy! Just spend five minutes every day visualising winning the lottery, and get five bucks on the tenth scratchie. Half an hour mixed with a round of chemotherapy and you can beat cancer. Look in the mirror and tell it you deserve more, and, fuck me, the award wage goes up in your state. Who wouldn’t believe it? But let me tell you, this pathway to health, wealth and happiness is not without its horror stories. What happens when you miss a day? Not through any fault of your own, but your designated ‘positive’ time has been usurped. Like you get dragged to court unexpectedly. Or you can hear the girls in the next room being flogged senseless. You can’t very well continue can you? What about when there is simply not enough space to think because 12 Russian prostitutes, one prostitute’s son, and all their dramas and dilemmas have been dumped in your cell – a cell that once housed only you and your co-accused? Maybe if Norman had taught you about contingencies you would have made it. But throw any of these interruptions into the mix when you haven’t yet mastered the art of pause and resume on your supercharged, bound to succeed, reiki-slash-power-of­-positive-thinking combo routine, and I tell you, there is going to be some internal horror. Like ‘Shit, will this hiccup run interference with the broader plan? Will my departure from Positive Thinking impact the Grand Scheme of Things?’

Ok, I digress. But you’re seeing the psychological bridge right?

So if not thinking is out. And thinking is out. How else are you supposed to work out which way is up? Just do it, I suppose...Is that what you were going to say? Awesome.

Suffice to say, I’m still thinking. I’ll let you know when I get my bearings.