For many years this postcard reminded me of my feeling of longing for the country of India and its atmosphere.
(Temple bath outside the Vishnu temple in Varkala)
Third meeting with India
The following year, 1990, I travelled to India together with my boyfriend, and stayed for three months, visiting Mumbay, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. This was one of the happiest times of my life, and I loved being in India. It was like coming home. Life felt so easy and simple, and anything seemed possible, especially the spiritual life that i had been missing in Europe.
The main purpose of the trip for me, apart from visiting friends and see the country, was to study yoga and become a yoga teacher. Unfortunately the yoga teacher training was fully booked, so we visited different yoga teachers and gurus, searching for the right path and the meaning of life.
We visited Sai Baba in Puttapatti and Amma in Amritapuri amongst others. Sivananda Ashram in Neyyar Dam was a very beautiful place we stayed at, and the founder Swami Vishnu Devananda was there at the time, just on the way to leave his body. He was white haired with radiant eyes and sat in his wheelchair in his orange robes.
Second meeting with India
My second meeting with India happened in the UK. After graduating from acting school my first job was a main role in an Indian film. “Princess from Katmandu”. A film team from Mumbai came to England, and we stayed together for a whole Summer, making that film. I enjoyed it very much, and after quite a lot of suffering at the theatre school, I now enjoyed life much more.
I was the only westerner, staying together with a bunch of Indians, eating Indian food and getting to know their way of life and work. Some of the actors in the film were Prem Chopra, Gulshan Grover and Goga Kapur. Goga Kapur was very health couscious, and I still remember how he talked about the three “C”s, Capsicum, Cucumber and Celery, that were very important to include in one´s daily diet.
England and theatre-studies
After finishing high school, I went to England to work as an an au pair in beautiful Cornwall in the South West. Being an au pair meant staying with a family, looking after their children for a small salary and learning the English language for one year. I always preferred the country side and its nature rather than city-life.
In Cornwall some significant things happened, which would have great impact on my continued life journey. Apart from practising English with the family I stayed with, I went to evening classes in English and took art classes, learning about how to mix colour and the foundation of painting. I joined an amateur theatre company and fought my shyness of being in the centre of attention by going on stage. It was full of fear and at the same time very attracted to the theatre at the same time.
As if I needed this to come out of my shell. My passion for the theatre was so strong that there was nothing else i wanted to do in life except theatre work. In 1986 I started studying theatre and acting in London. It was a hard training for three years of method acting, meaning that you imagine being the character you play, and research everything about the historical period and the kind of life that person would live, and live it to learn and become the person on stage. I kept pushing myself, and kept being tense in my body, but learning a lot on the way.
First meeting with yoga
Early on i became a seeker, wondering about the meaning of this life. My body was unusually stiff. A teacher in physical exercise told me he had never seen such a stiff back on a ten year old before. At the age of twelve I once visited the library and found a book about yoga. I began to try out the different positions suggested in the book, and noticed a remarkable change, and that I became less stiff after practising. “ Yoga day by day”, was the name of the book, and it helped me to open up and let go of some of my tensions.
People around me thought I was behaving in a very strange way, since yoga was something which “normal” people did not do in Sweden back in those days. I had to practise yoga and meditation where nobody could see me, since it was very important in our society to blend in with the rest. As I grew up, I always knew that yoga was my thing, and that i would visit India one day in the future.
me and my mother
First meeting with India
My nine year younger sister was adopted and arrived at the airport with an orange Air India blanket and a small suitcase. In those days the flight attendants looked after the children during the flights, and the new families would meet up at the airport to collect their new family member. My sisters suitcase had an interesting smell of incense and exotic-ness. I was ten years old and an only child. My parents wanted more children and weren’t able to conceive. At this moment, in 1974 in the airport, my life changed, and a new world opened. A world so different from the ordinary Swedish everyday life.
In my childhood I was loved and cared for, and my family was rather “normal”. I was quite a shy child, often dreaming of travelling to other countries. A longing to visit the exotic place where my sister had come from, arose in me. Over the following years, we had visitors coming from India, to see how my sister was doing i her new home country, and they were very kind to me too. My best friend, who also had an adopted sister from India, and I used to pretend that we traveled to India.
Intro – why this blogg?
In this blog I will write about my love for India, yoga and my own life and adventures in Sweden, India and the rest of the world on the outside, and the inner worlds.
It started in Copenhagen in July 1974, or perhaps even long before that in other lives. My meeting with Mother India, a lifelong love affair.
This is an old video in Swedish, just for testing my new blogg
Hello! Testing (This is an old video in swedish, just for testing. This channel will be in english and will be part of my new blogg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgZFkLOGNOKVByDNehLpYjQ