At the opening ceremony of my Yoga Teacher Training at Sampoorna Yoga a red string was tied around everyone’s wrists. Good intentions were passed to us by the person tying it, before we embarked on the terrifying, hard, exhilarating and genuinely magical journey that was to come. A month later (or 200 hours later, but who was counting?) at our closing ceremony, a second string was tied around the other wrist.
Across religions the red string has a multitude of meanings. In Hinduism it is tied around wrists at ceremonies, showing unity in the faith, and importantly, in my context, in community. The red colour is a symbol of purity, divine, bravery and generosity; all attributes that we would hold dearly through the teacher training, and long after into our lives.
Over time I came to associate many other meanings with these strings. Red is the colour of the root chakra, the chakra associated with fear. My teacher training was just the beginning of upheaving my life and moving to the other side of the world, and I was building a life where living in fear was only holding me back from doing this. I even taught my final flow during my YTTC focusing on the theme of fear. It is also the colour of good luck, and red strings have also been associated with protection from evil. All things that have had an important place in my life.
I associated these strings with my journey, my accomplishments, my sense of pride in myself; as a symbol to remember how I felt during the training: changed, optimistic, free. I looked at them often, they were very much a part of me.
The second string actually came off first, not long after I arrived in Amsterdam and was first beginning to settle after months of playing nomad. I thought to myself, my luck is coming up now, I am settling into a new path, beginning the life I had been wanting to live for many years. So I took it onboard, I was a nomad beginning to settle and saw it as peeling a layer off, letting the wanderer lay dormant for a while, and let the new journey take hold.
Several months later, the first string finally came off, 358 days after it was first tied on.
In the last few months life hasn’t always been so easy. I’ve had some of the best moments of my life and some of the hardest. I returned home briefly, and realised my journey is still not directed towards home, and yet my mind has been wondering almost daily back to who I was, and where I was a year ago. I keep thinking I need to pack it all in, put my backpack back on and wander again, awaken the sleeping beast so to speak. But then this string came off. I wondered what was the intention set behind it when it was tied on my wrist? I’ll never know and that’s OK. I asked myself what the significance of the date means? I mused over many thoughts, considered what the future will hold now. I’ve no idea, and I am OK with that too (or at least I am working on being OK with it!). I cleansed myself with Palo Santo, smiled to myself, and remembered that I’m very much at a crossroads right now, and this is the sign that the clear path to stray down will soon be making itself known to me.
I read that once the string falls off you should bury it under a tree. Let the intentions and protection spread down into the earth and the roots, to be passed on to generations to come. The string coming off is a sign to me that a change is coming, at a moment when I am the most nostalgic.
So I threw it in a canal. In the Amstel river in fact. Because I am afraid of water, yet often in awe of it. The string might sink to the bottom, or it might float on, winding through the city, and somehow, sometime out to sea. It reminded me that life isn’t stagnant, and I am not built for a stagnant life.
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