Crestone nearly over and out

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I have just over ONE week til graduation and then I will officially be certified to manually handle people for a living. Brilliant! I have had so many exams and tests and things to get my head round on this course my brain is still smarting. I also had to teach a kundalini yoga class this week as part of the course which really is a strange and painful experience. Actually, teaching it isn't as I found out – as the teacher I got to wear a turban, sit on a sheepskin on a raised platform at the front of the class and recite the instructions of my chosen kriya, never once breaking into a sweat because I am required to sit there and do nothing excpet that. All the poor buggers participating in the class have to hold strange postures whilst pumping their navels in and out for the breath of fire, or hold their hands above their heads with index fingers pointing to heaven for 18 minutes whilst shouting some kind of repetitive meditation and all the time fixing eye focus on the third eye or end of the nose. As the teacher I got to just sit there on the lovely sheepskin, surveying the pain I was inflicting on those in front of me, and flick through the iPod searching for suitable bonkers bhangra music or a prayer by Yoga Bhajan, with his voice from the grave interspliced onto inexplicably dated disco tracks. Who needs drugs?

Much as my time here has been incredibly educational, opening, positive, strengthening, connective and enlightening, cabin fever has inevitably set in. My dodgy attention span is now refusing to behave itself. I did so well to get into meditative mode when I first arrived back in February – after 2 months of being a beachbum in Mexico I was positively ready to knuckle down. Now my brain is struggling to concentrate on anything except rum, a Jamaican sunset backdrop and a dream soundtrack of Delroy Wilson classics. I am getting lax – even though I am trying to hold it together for the last week or so. I don't get my certificate til graduation on 26 April so I am keeping this in mind when my brain gives up after breakfast every day next week.

So I leave here on 26 April (hopefully with my certificate!) and head to Del Norte, (still in Colorado) for a night. My wonderful coursemate is taking me there to stay with her daughter who lives on a cattle ranch, and they are even going to let me loose on a horse. Western saddles have never been my forte so this is my chance to master the long loopy stirrup vibe and throw the reins around whilst screeching out loud for no reason. I am then heading to Santa Fe, New Mexico for a night or so, then over to Arizona to visit Sedona, where several energy vortexes are located and even more nutters per square inch than Crestone.

If I am not abducted by aliens and funds permit I will fly to San Francisco to meet Weston and Lee (get in touch if 1 May suits you?!!) and the next stop is Jamaica on 2nd May. I can't think past this latter point as I have already pointed out. My brain is fixating on material possessions and shallow behaviour and no amount of meditation is going to get me over this rum-pining hump more effectively than a large bottle of it. My body has been a temple for 3 months. It's time to level the playing field again and have the pendulum of equilibrium swing wildly in the opposite direction of self-control. As I advance in my years, I have learned to accept this as part of the Carnegie family lineage and something to be catered for, not restrained/fought against. Restraint nearly always results in much much more carnage than ever imagined possible. I have come to realise this by observing Father and his on/off relationship with chocolate caramel squares – denial leads to disaster for both objects of consumption and consumer (still M&S or maybe he's found another supplier since I've been gone...)