The spiritual traveller

We had just come through Jammu, a city that we had all been looking forward to seeing, we had heard so much about it. This was the temple capital of Kashmir, no more than me as the landscape was starting to flatten out, which meant that I could get off this diesel smoke spewing highway that I have been following for a while now. What a disappointment as I got closer as the road wound down the valley, the horizon disappeared and turned into this black polluted haze, the most polluted city we had seen in the whole of Kashmir really chaotic and just a mayhem of traffic everywhere, long dusty streets wall to wall with people and the rest. I now know what I am going to be in for on this journey, I am going to have to find a way to black all of this out, focus on the beauty that I see and draw inspiration from that instead of letting the other side eat away at me. Taking this into consideration I decided to push on through Jammu and see what the other side of town has to offer.

The city was so sprawled down the valley, and I was struggling with my knee so we decided to find a site in the city, I was not going to make it out of this by night fall and a camp site was going to be a near impossibility. Ramveer, the crew driver, introduced us to a new side of India that we had not yet experienced, he managed to find an Ashram, a spiritual centre open to all, a safe haven and place to sleep. We were offered a place to pitch our tents and spend the evening.

Here I met Gurmeet, a master of chakras (a healer using the energy of the body), and a few other talents. It was a weird encounter, I was standing with a group of people and he walked straight into the group, looked in my direction and beckoned me to come over to him. It was so strange, we had never met, but there was just some reason that he wanted to talk to me.

We started to chat and by some strange coincidence in 2003 he had done a similar journey from the north to south of India over a period of 14 months. I said to him, “What a coincidence that we should meet up in this place by chance,” he said to me this was not by chance, it was meant to be. We continued to chat and he gave me lots of invaluable information and tips on what to do and where to go. The biggest thing that came out of this was that it’s going to be a very long hard and taxing run.

We then started to talk about other things, my children, where they are, what they do, my new grandson and so we dove into each others lives, and the questions began to flow. Then somehow we started to talk about the body and injury, this is where hi really came to life and shared with me how he was a master in the art of healing through the body’s natural energy fields. Then my knee problem came up – he beckoned me to sit down. He kneeled in front of me and held his hand above my knee, closed his eyes and said nothing, he then lowered his hand onto my knee – my whole body really felt weird as absolute silence fell round us, and no one said a word. He then quickly cupped his hand and drew it back – all he said to me was, “Its going to take a few days”.