Dedication to truth and radical self care, says Aisha Salem, can hold this culture in the embrace of existence as heaven on earth. What does that mean?

Here I walk in the forest; dedicated to truth and self care. I’ve left all responsibilities, all needs to be something for someone, all housekeeping, all mobile media, to invisibly pace daily along this old-growth forest walk, chanting. Chanting a mantra.

Sustaining, Liberating, Enlightening, Infinite, Destroying, Creating, Nameless, Desireless.

“The Guru Gaitri mantra eliminates karmic blocks and past errors, balances brain hemispheres, purifies the magnetic field, and brings compassion and patience.”

Balance, purification, compassion, patience. That’s what it takes to live by truth and self care. These trees have been meditating maybe 400 years. All the time. They’re so grounded, their roots go deep, and so high, reaching towards a transcendental relation with the solar logos. Balanced, or they would fall.

Trees are my models of dedication to truth and self care. I become like a tree – radiating healthy greenness, allowing humans to pass me by insouciantly – so strong in my centred self am I.

This is my new radical self care practise, after so many years of getting shit for my dedication to truth. Aisha Salem’s revelation is not news to me. Somehow I’ve always known this as the path of a yogini – a dedication to truth which goes beyond the confused ego matrix, and an attention to care through diet, rest and yogic activity that is seen by this culture as radical.

I’ve been called many names for my dedication. Dirty hippy, dole-bludging single-mother, bitch, failure. Somehow my practise pulled me through. Now, in my forty fourth year of this dedication, I am feeling exhausted by relentless projections, so I have become like a tree.

Truth.

It is uncommon to speak our truth. We are so unaccustomed to this that we can take it personally. Then we get on the offensive. We were taught to do this at school. At school, “facts” are called truth and we argue scientifically. That science is as much a religion as paganism or christianity, has not been revealed to us – indeed, this is one very inconvenient truth, for it throws all “facts” into the realm of debatability.

Today, someone debating a “fact” becomes a heretic. I wish I could remember the title of that book I read at 11 … about heretics who persisted into the abyss of annihilation, and were rewarded by becoming the secret elders of the land. Because they could think free.

Freethinkers.

Now that attracts names like “dangerous to the status quo.” So now we know why dedication to truth creates Heaven on Earth, right? We journey beyond the dominant paradigm into realms where peace, love and personal power are manifest. Inner union, outer utopia.

And radical self care?

When we drop into what we really need – in each moment – we find that it is often not what the mind tells us we ought to be doing. What we think we ought to do is inextricably linked to a cultural program perpetuating falsehoods and procreating dystopias. So when we are able to drop the babble and deeply feel what nurtures our self, we begin acting in ways which go against the grain of dystopia.

We slow down, we eat organic, we spend time really listening, we create for joy not for money. And we do Yoga. We practise the union of soul and body, of inner masculine and feminine, sun and moon. Reconciliation.

This creation; footfall after footfall in a magical forest with a mantra.

This is a radical way to become whole.

My dedication to truth. My radical self care. My breath of sanity so I may return – through all the separation to inner union – face up and open hearted in the world.