The Mountain Logs Day 7 - Crossing The Threshold

The Char Dham means “The Four Stations”. Why “The Four Stations” is because it is not just a reference to the four places in Geography. It is also a reference to the four stations of artha, kama, dharma and moksha. The four stations of a well lived life namely acquiring of prosperity or means, fulfillment of desires and passions, living a life of coherence with Nature, Nature out there and one’s own nature, and finally the station of transcendence where you get established in your own sense of being. 

On this pilgrimage, the four geographical stations of Gangotrti, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, the pilgrimage seeks to get insight into the truth of these four stations of life through a combination of physical and mental effort, emotional aliveness, openness to the spirit and surrender to Nature. 

It’s quite beautiful, profound, intense and transforming. It’s unique as a pilgrimage, as an experience and breathtaking in its conception. 

In the following Episodes, Dr. Bharat Thakur takes you along this pilgrimage over 10 days, sharing the daily logs and some insightful blogs that will have you want to experience the Yatra for yourself.  

Transcript

Crossing The Threshold

We have heard of a story:

A group of street acrobats were performing in a small town. Their famous old leader had retired ten years ago. On hearing jokes that the old man had gone past his prime, he decided to perform the grand finale himself.

The packed audience waited with bated breath as the aging star started walking on a rope tied between two tall towers balancing a long stick in his hands with his five year old grandson on his shoulders.

Should he lose his balance? It would mean sure death for him as well as the child.

As he slowly reached the end of the rope to the opposite tower everyone cheered him. They clapped, they whistled.

He said from above, “Do you all think I can walk back to that side?”.  

The crowd roared, “yes .. yes .. you can. We are ready to bet on you”.

He laughed, “ready to bet on me, then can any one  come up and sit on my shoulders?”.

There was only silence. The offer had no takers.

The old acrobat said, “you all say you believe, but you don’t trust. For trust you need total surrender, like my little boy has”.

A JOURNEY - FROM FAITH TO TRUST

We often feel a gap between what we know will make us happy and our ability to live by it. Maybe unhappiness is just the experience of this gap because we wish we could say, yes I will sit on your shoulders”.

The Yoga Sutras recommend an affirmative action to work towards achieving this. It is said, “by doing self study, we can be the deity we adore and by surrender, we can achieve lasting peace and happiness”.

The deity here is that quality of the five year old child which made him say ‘yes’.

Today, let’s do a little self study. Let’s look at what is this fear when we say ‘surrender’ and let’s see what does it take to move from faith to trust.

5:15 AM. Those traveling by the chopper to Kedarnath leave for the helipad. The trek to Kedarnath, 18 kms will not be easy because there will be many steep climbs and as we go higher, oxygen levels will drop.

We will have to walk smartly, conserve energy and replenish ourselves.

7:30 AM, spoke about meditation, getting into a meditative zone will be crucial today. It will help us negotiate all the changes that occur in our physical bodies well, especially in regulating the heart.

11:30 AM, after a quick breakfast en route, we are at SonPrayag. Some have to get their biometrics done. Let's keep some horses and porters for bags and in case someone is not able to walk further.

The walk is the catalyst. It’s a challenging one. When you have run hundred meters in 11 seconds in practise and you know that you have to do it in 10.9 seconds to win the race and you did 10.93 seconds.

The real achievement is that you breached your threshold of 11 seconds.

We need to walk well. So that we can experience the challenge because only when we are prepared, we will be able to reach our threshold and reaching the threshold is what this walk is all about. Let’s understand the factors involved in walking well.

AEROBIC AND ANAEROBIC MODES

Our muscles derive energy in two different modes; the aerobic and the anaerobic modes. In the anaerobic mode, metabolism happens in the absence of high levels of oxygen and the fuel comes from burning fat.

This happens when there is a steady demand of energy because fat metabolism takes a little time. It’s like how an oil lamp burns. It picks up slowly compared to say camphor and has a bright and steady flame. This is ideal for the segments of our trek where the incline is not steep. Keep the body steady, breathe in a rhythm and the body gets into fat burn.

When we hit a steep incline, the body needs more energy and quickly, we start breathing harder. The heart rate goes up, the body switches to the aerobic mode where glucose metabolism happens in the presence of oxygen. Here the energy comes rapidly.

During the trek, we will lose salts due to sweating to avoid dehydration we have to keep drinking liquids with salts.

There comes a point when our carbohydrate reserves stored in the liver for instant release gets used up. Even to metabolize fat, we need a little amount of carbs, so we need to keep consuming some light carbs along the way.

Let's take care of these basics.

Because how we use our energies depends a lot on the cues we give our nervous system. If we are calm, we breathe rhythmically and that allows our body to switch gears between a flat stretch and a steep climb.

AT THE HEART OF A GOOD CLIMB, IS A MEDITATIVE SPACE

Physiologists say that this switching of gears is a measure of the health of our heart. After an intense climb, when we hit a straight patch, if our heart rate slows down fast, it means the heart is healthy.

Let us understand this as it will help us walk better and enjoy the climb.

A healthy heart beat has many natural irregularities. If for example, your heart beats 60 times in a minute, if you counted the pulse in the wrist, it will not beat at the rate of one beat per second like a clock. It will be irregular. Our heart rate is a little slower during exhalation and faster during inhalation. ‘Heart Rate Variability’ is the difference between the two rates. Great athletes and healthy people have very good Heart Rate Variability.

Our autonomic nervous system along with the vagus nerve, regulate a lot of our basic bodily functions like digestion, respiration and heartbeat. The autonomic nervous system has two parts; the parasympathetic nervous system promotes rest and relaxation and it is active during exhalation. It helps the heart rate come down when we breathe out and the other part of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system is responsible for our action mode. It makes the heart beat faster when we breathe in.

In a paper titled “Vagal determinants of exercise capacity” by Asif Machhada and colleagues of the University College London , it was reported from experimental data that, “top athletes have higher parasympathetic drive and tone of the vagus nerve and this gives them greater cardiovascular endurance as well as a high tolerance for intense exercise regimes”.

Can we do something to improve this response of our nervous system, so that we can have greater energy for the climb and greater pain tolerance?

In a paper on mindfulness meditation published in 2019 by a group of researchers including 

Dr. Mark Whitman, Damisela Linares and others of the institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology, Frieburg, Germany, it was seen in a study which included 94 participants, that meditation increased heart-rate variability and improved the response of the parasympathetic nervous system.

So as we trek, if we are in a meditative space, we can achieve greater Heart Rate Variability which means that when we relax even for couple of minutes or when we are able to have a good relaxation response during our exhalation and we can bring the heart rate relay low. This will help the heart to pump more forcefully when it contracts. We need our hearts to do this when we are on a steep incline. It also means that we have a greater ability to switch between the aerobic and anaerobic modes which is what we need to do today.

2:30 PM. That was a good start we made. The walkers were quiet, they hit a nice rhythm. Let's stop for some hot Jalebis now, the carbs will help.

EXPERIENCING OUR THRESHOLDS

Dr. Whitman, Linares and others found in the same study that meditators experienced time dilation. It means that their ‘present moment’ expanded. During the meditation, one minute seemed to last much longer psychologically. It means that they had more time. In cricket, they say that a great batsman has more time to play his strokes.

If we can get into that space, we have more time to experience things and to do things.

This sense of having more time allows us to be at ease in challenging periods of our trek. It also allows us to experience our threshold.

Long distance runners in the beginning stages of their training, will be familiar with reaching a point where the body seems to hit a wall. Where you feel you can’t go any further. It means they have reached their ‘threshold’. It is experienced as extreme pain in the muscles, the heart pounds rapidly. It feels like the lungs will burst.

As an athlete, you train to ignore this pain and get past this threshold and in our own professions,  we do the same in different ways; like a surgeon has to get past his disgust for dealing with cut up bodies, tumours, blood and cadavers.

A ‘threshold’ is a point where a barrier, a limit is reached and we experience it as pain where we feel we can’t go any further.

As we climb, most of us will experience more than just physical symptoms. We will feel many emotions; from anger to sadness, the physical barrier seems to trigger deeper responses.

So a threshold is not purely physical. The physical part may be the challenge but the limitation is experienced at deeper levels. The important thing to remember is that firstly when you feel you can’t remember the child who said ‘yes’, it is just your current threshold that you are experiencing, reaching here itself is a personal milestone. It is from here the inner journey begins.

Imagine, a door frame in space that is your threshold, sighting it is a success in itself, people don’t even reach here. 

And secondly, to reach your threshold, a seemingly impossible challenge has to be accepted; what happens once you say yes, is your personal journey.

The renowned historian, David Christian, distinguished professor at Macquarie University, Australia has spoken of ‘thresholds’ of evolution from the beginning of time, where the cosmos took leaps in its evolution by breaching thresholds and we too as a species have made many jumps to have evolved to who we are today.

In a long distance run or in this trek for that matter, when you reach a threshold  and you continue, the body gets what is called the ‘second wind’. It produces hormones called ‘endorphins’ which are happy hormones. They are also painkillers. You stop feeling pain, the body gets back into a steady state, we get happy and this further increases our pain tolerance and more importantly, the heart gets more power to pump blood to your muscles and brain.

So the first observation we are making in this study is that crossing a threshold makes us happy. Happiness does not seem to be about reaching the goal but about breaking our thresholds or limits along the way and this seems to be an inbuilt drive.

8:30 PM. It has gotten really cold, it's raining here but we can see just a few meters up it’s snowing. The stream here is frozen. Here it feels quite primal like we are in a different epoch just looking at the rocks; one is transported to a different time.

THE CREATIVE FORCE 

Human beings are the only species that seems to be concerned about laughing, music, romance, peace about being happy. We can also cry.

We alone walk on two legs. We have a super large cerebral cortex in the brain, no animal’s brain comes even close.

But what really seems to distinguish us is that we have the ability to be aware of ourselves and existence itself. We are conscious. For a frog, pain from an injured leg lasts till it lasts but for a human being, the pain is partly subjective. We can laugh about it, we can sing about it, we can do things psychologically that actually can negate the pain. This is what an athlete does.

The goal of evolution for us doesn’t seem to be survival. What is it then? Could it be happiness?

The second law of thermodynamics says that there is a general movement of the universe from order to lack of order or chaos and this principle is called entropy. For example, we can make juice out of an orange but not an orange which is more ordered out of juice which is less ordered.

But if we look at ourselves, the way we have evolved from the atom to the rock, to the single cellular organism, to the tree, to the ant and to the human being. It seems that there is a creative force that works against this law.

Let’s look at the story of our evolution because we are the story. There have been many thresholds that we needed to cross to get to being here today and the thresholds were moments of creation and destruction.

FROM OUR BEGINNING AS TIME 

If you are listening to this blog, in this segment, you can just sit comfortably or lie down on your back and close your eyes and go on this journey in time because this is a journey which we keep reliving, in our mother’s womb we have lived this journey. The Kedarnath trek is also about relieving this journey.

We started 13.7 billion years back.

All around us is black and in the sea of darkness, we are born smaller than an atom.

One second later, the speck has expanded and it now has different forces operating including electromagnetism and gravity. Matter emerges in the form of subatomic particles.

In the next 9 billion years, we become a huge cloud, in which the first atoms appear; hydrogen and helium.

Due to gravity, very high temperatures are created and stars are formed.

We expand all through the universe.

Some stars begin to die, in the process huge temperatures are created and  all the remaining elements are created.

4.5 billion years ago, we became the sun and around this particular star. Our solar system forms, Earth has a lot of water.

A huge asteroid crashes into Earth and in the violent explosion, a chunk of Earth is scooped out. It becomes our moon.

4 billion years ago, we are in the Pre-Cambrian era on Earth. The first geological plate structures being to appear on the surface.

We also have an abundance of water and in the water and heat from the core of the earth, atoms easily combine to form complex molecules, proteins.

We become a molecule called the DNA. As DNA, we have the ability to contain information, copy ourselves. We scatter our copies all over the ocean. One in a billion copies has an error, so that new genes are formed.

In the next two billion years, the first photosynthesis happens. Oxygen is pumped into the ecosystem. Our surface is moist and hospitable.

From DNAs we become organisms. We can die and reproduce. We are now very different from anything that has so far existed because we seem to have a little bit of creation in us. We emerge as the first single celled organisms and then multicellular organisms.

600 million years ago, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere became sufficient to form the ozone layer which means life is more habitable. We explode into many life forms. This is called the Cambrian explosion. We become more complex as life forms. We become abundant algae. We colonize land as fungi, plants and animals, then we evolve into amphibians, many diverse forms of bony fish and insects.

360 million years ago, we evolved into reptiles and then the Permian mass extinction occurs. 83% of all plants and animals become extinct.

240 million years ago, we emerged as frogs and turtles and later, As dinosaurs we dominate the earth for a long time in what is called the Jurassic period.

65 million years ago, a 10 km wide asteroid hits the earth, wiping out 75% of all species as dinosaurs. We become extinct, but in those cave spaces over the next 60 million years, we flourish as  rats, then rabbits, then horses, dogs, cats, camels.

5 million years back, we became our first human ancestors. 

2 million years back, we became the Homo Sapiens.

Around 800,000 years ago, we began to cook our food. Our brains begin to grow with a whole different kind of nutrition.

60 thousand years back, our cerebral cortex has become huge. We begin to create language, we begin to expand all over and dominate all species.

We have now created the internet. We live extremely complex lives, we explore other planets, we enquire about our origins and like the forces of evolution, we have developed the capacity to create as well as destroy, we call ourselves the modern man.

COMING TO OUR CURRENT THRESHOLD    

When as a child we utter our first words, grip a spoon, walk each step has been a threshold on our evolutionary timeline over a time span of around 7 million years.

Once we were on all fours, to be able to change to walking erect, it took us hundreds of thousands of years to do this. We do it in a matter of six to eight months as babies to be able to move from making sounds and signs to speaking in a language. It took us millions of years. We do it now in two to three years to be able to grip instruments, we needed dexterous fingers. Our ancestors took three to four million years to get there, we develop it in a year.

But the story of our evolution has also been about the abilities we lost. Our dexterity with our fingers meant that they are not anymore suitable to climb trees.

A few hundreds of thousands of years back, it would have been unthinkable to have so little hair on the body but today it would be unthinkable to have it.

Getting here has been a combination of Nature’s creative force as well as its destructive force.

Is the fear we feel coming from a negation of the destructive force.

DESTRUCTION - A FORCE OF EVOLUTION

But for three mass extinctions, we would have not been here. We had to let go of our very existence as a dinosaur, even our near ancestors called the hominins are all gone. The Neanderthals were around just forty thousand years ago.

Along with all the creation, the threshold seems to also be a field of destruction.

Could it be that the fear we feel in taking up the acrobat’s challenge is that we are resisting the destructive force.

Why do we need to prepare well for the walk, the right shoes, the hydration, intake of salts, of carbs is because if we are comfortable, we are not distracted with these things. Walking at a comfortable pace, a nice rhythm gets established. We are then well placed to experience whatever there is to be experienced.

This ‘comfort zone is called ‘asana’.

In many stretches, the effort we would be putting would be way beyond our normal limits, yet, because of the comfort we have created for ourselves, that effort is relaxed.

Relaxed effort is the way to asana. Then the effort too doesn’t demand constant attention. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are in a nice balance. We become present, we become aware of all that is happening, all that we are feeling.

When the heart beat goes beyond 140-150  beats per minute where the aerobic respiration is not enough to supply the energy, we take a break till heart rate comes to normal.

This is how we bridge the gap between effort and effortlessness. And this is a form of starvation. It is a starvation of effort, of striving, of pushing yourself by skilfully getting our body and breath into auto mode. We have evolved the mechanics of effortlessness.

The operating force here is the destructive force.

In Yamunotri we enjoyed dipping in the hot water spring. It was relaxing, healing, just a few degrees hotter and the water would have killed us. The very earthquakes that have made the Himalayas possible have also destroyed entire settlements.

When a huge mass of rock hit the earth, it was destructive but the moon got created because of that destructive event. Seventy-five percent of the species got wiped out when the asteroid hit the earth but it is only because the dinosaurs were also decimated in that catastrophe that we could evolve.

Every force that operates in us including our physical, emotional, mental forces and psychic forces have creative and destructive modes.

Nature seems to employ the creative and the destructive as per need, should we then resist the destructive? Isn’t that as much part of our nature?

As conscious beings, we are the one species who seem to be happy letting the creation process prevail. What about learning to harness the other force?

The Kedarnath leg of the trek is about reclaiming our intimacy with the force of annihilation. It is through owning this force that we can find it in us to cut down on our excessive food intake and rein in other forms of excess.

Yoga Sutra calls the things that need to be pruned as kleshas or the fundamental pain points, ignorance, identity, attachment, repulsion, fear of death. The force that is employed in the process of pruning of these pain points is what Kedarnath is dedicated to, what we are trying to understand in this walk.

We have seen that the brain creates billions of new connections between the neurons called synapses in a phase called the ‘critical period’. This is employment of the creative force and then the critical period closes and is followed by a phase of pruning where many synapses which were created in the learning phase are mercilessly chopped off. All that learning is destroyed, this is nature.

When we practice pranayama, we starve ourselves of mental movement. Every step of the ashtanga protocol of Yoga can be seen as employing a form of starvation and through that invoking the force of annihilation.

In the process, we are actually learning to play both the hands of life, creation and annihilation.

The Kedarnath leg of the trek is about reclaiming our intimacy with the force of annihilation. It is through owning this force that we can find it in us to surrender completely to both hands of Nature.

Faith is a celebration of only the creative hand and therefore, the destructive hand lurks in our unconscious as a shadow. It keeps us in the grip of fear of what we are suppressing.

In a pack of dogs, the weakest does not live in constant fear of the strongest because it has no problem in putting its tail down in the presence of a stronger dog.

Human beings have both the animal and consciousness embodied in the same entity. It is like the roar of the lion and the angelic voice are to come from the same throat at the same time. This is our threshold. We need to be present as both the animal and the man whereas figuratively speaking, in faith, we do avoid fasting in its real sense. We overdose on the object of our adoration, we adore a divinity and fear its opposite.

The Yoga Sutra says, ’Asana’ is, takes you beyond duality. The lion and the angel are in the same voice, that’s how you become present in the threshold.

A DOOR FRAME IN SPACE

The elephant, the eagle, the whale, the crow, the centipede, trees, fungi, mountains, minerals, atoms, space, darkness. We have been all of them before we evolved into human beings as much as we are their evolved forms. They are our primal forms, we do need to go back sometimes to draw from their energy, presence and their power. We can depend on them to provide us our turning points because, since the dawn of time, we have been in it together.

Our source is everywhere, outside and inside, but if we do need a structure to park ourselves in, it is the threshold we can visualize it as a door frame in space, that’s Kedarnath.

21:30. It is pouring and is bitterly cold. One of those moments when you feel overwhelmed by Nature as if to say, don’t bother with your surrender. I don’t need that from you. I who made stars out of nothing and nothing out of the things I made, I am always there for the next stop, enjoy the break.

Here is a small shed. Let's get in quickly everyone, never mind we are packed like we used to be in the beehive, it will keep us warm. 

The sound of the rain drops on the tin roof, on the foliage, trying to imagine a form of the mountains from just the sounds.

Oh! One of us has just fainted. She is in her early twenties, our on-board Doctor is checking her pulse. She says that it could be because of the cold but cannot confirm until a thorough check up is done. She has asked people to make her warm. We are praying, no time for thought. These are the mountains.

Pray, trust.

She has been in a good space since Rishikesh. She seemed a little low coming in to the Yatra but she seems to have enjoyed it from the first day, saw her spend hours by the river, singing to herself, been observing her. She has a huge appetite for the mountains.

She took it on herself to walk a little ahead and organize Jalebis for all, great spirit. Kedarnath in particular seems to have enthused her enormously.

She begins to stir and recovers quite quickly. She can’t remember a thing. We are all ready to leave. A fresh energy has filled everyone. The little rest seems to have helped, it is bitterly cold outside.

Was it the prayer, was it just the warmth or did she walk through the door frame in space.

She looks fresh, glowing and says she feels lighter and raring to go.

It’s a journey, a very old one.

We resume.

12:30 AM. Walking towards our dwelling in Kedarnath 

We feel, maybe the acrobat’s story could now have a twist.

“Do you all think I can walk back to that side” 

The crowed roared, “yes, yes, you can. We are ready to bet on you”.

The old acrobat laughed, “ready to bet on me, then can any one come up and sit on my shoulders”.

More cheering. This time for those who were ready to sit on the acrobat’s shoulders. They were quite a few.

Ahh they made me walk on the tight rope so many times.

Lots of love

Bharat Thakur