A Postcard from Singapore
thoughts on belonging, home and building a life that nourishes
Hello everyone. I’ve just returned from a weeklong trip to Singapore, my former home. Given this trip was momentous for me on many levels, I wanted to share some images and thoughts from it with you. (We will return to my series on grief and heartbreak after this.)
As ever, travel seems to remind me that nothing is at it seems, or as I expect it to be. Despite decades of familiarity with Singapore, I found myself discovering it anew, as a visitor to a place I once called home. Many people have a certain image of Singapore—it’s clean and strict, hot and humid; the food, the shopping, the parks, the travel… but even when I lived there, that was not the Singapore I knew and loved.
Despite its many limitations, Singapore gave me just enough freedom to discover and create the kind of life I wanted to live there: a life defined by walks in the forest, long swims, sunshine and birds, cloud-gazing, hours spent in local libraries, and the simple pleasures of food and friendship.
Most importantly, it was the epicenter of my spiritual path—the place where I did my first solitary retreat and my first yoga teacher training, where I encountered nearly all of my spiritual teachers, and where I began my career as a yoga and somatics teacher. To those who have never experienced this side of the place, it seems incongruous. But beneath the shopping and the picture-perfect streets, there is another force that lives in the land, quietly calling to those who will listen: wake up. step into the fullness of your life. there is more to this than what you see.
I am reminded, as I return to my life in India, that as valuable as it is to adapt to what the outside world asks of you, it is equally valuable to step back and say: “No. I will take my own path. I will carve my own kind of life from the materials you are offering me. And it will be a life I live on my own terms.”
There is a strange melancholy to the act of returning home, alongside all the celebrations and the rekindling of past joys. At bottom, it’s the fact that we change when we leave home, and it is our fundamental alteration that strikes us again and again when we try to return to what we knew and inhabited so comfortably before.
Coming home is being confronted by the rawness of time, the tension between what remains steady and will outlast us, and our own ever-mutable nature. I am not the same woman that left those shores over a year ago, despite how openly they welcome me back now.
One of the terrible gifts of growing up the way I did (cross-culturally) is an abiding sense of rootlessness. As a child, it was spun to me as: you may not have a home, but you can be at home anywhere and everywhere. And yes, to a certain degree there is truth in this—many of us ‘third culture’ kids have the uncanny ability to connect with others across cultures, languages and borders. Our nervous systems have (at least in theory) adapted to be comfortable with more movement in a few early years than most people will experience in a lifetime.
But as I grow older, I’ve realised that there is a trade-off to the globalised lifestyle. In my case, it is never fully fitting in to any place, or community, or group of people. Being alone on some fundamental level that you can always sense. Recognizing that your internal place setting is zoomed out so far that you’re like a traveler through your own life. Constantly confronted by the rarity of finding people who share your experience, so you end up parceling yourself out in parts to others, based on what you know they can relate to rather than what you truly want to express.
I know, deep down, this is why I am so attracted to bodywork—because inside my own skin is the one place I know I can be at home. When I connect to my body, I get to zoom back in again. And from in there, I can feel my connection to the lands I live on and the place around me, even if it isn’t my own.
After more than a decade of somatic work, the idea of being alienated from my body now disturbs me more than the idea of never finding a place in the outer world to call home. So in some way, perhaps I did internalise what I was told as a child—that my true home is within me, or, more accurately, in the ongoing conversation between me and the world.
Who knows? Maybe home is more about belonging in time than space. A dawning conviction that I’m in the right place at the right time, for me and the unfolding of my life, or for what I’m here to do. It may not be a steady kind of home, but it is there nonetheless, as a presence I can feel and a pull I can align to.
Damn this piece hit. The weird bitter sweet feeling of nostalgia, the cross-cultural-never-quite-fitting-in….and tying it all back to body-as-home! 🤌
"Coming home is being confronted by the rawness of time, the tension between what remains steady and will outlast us, and our own ever-mutable nature. I am not the same woman that left those shores over a year ago, despite how openly they welcome me back now."
What a beautifully crafted and evocative piece, Vaishali. I resonated with it deeply. Earlier this year, I travelled to Manchester where I had spent half a decade of my life. It was the place where I began my explorations on spirituality, faith, and kincentricism. I returned to the place that housed and fed my soul only to realise that it has changed. And so have I. Change is glorious and heartbreaking at the same time. Your words and writing always ground me in my body, reminding me that I (we) are capable to holding joy and grief in the same breath.