Last dusk of 2011.

Two weeks ago, I settled back into my favourite Keralan hammock after breakfast and I thought hard. What is it that I want to achieve in 2012? To mediate everyday, to listen to my body, to complete 100 hours of yoga, to speak with care... there weren't many resolutions that came to mind after I spent a long time staring at the page and listening to the dancing breeze.

The truth is, I'm not great at making – and keeping – resolutions. I'm not sure if tangibilising a year's worth of abstract "I should do this" notions will actually spur me out of the rut that I settle into ever so comfortably as the next year progresses. Most of us have the freedom to remake our choices and relive our lives anytime. Why then do so many of us wait till the very last moments, right before the turning of a year, to search our souls and ask ourselves what it is that we really want? Do we, and will we, ever know what we want?

For a long time now, I feel like I've been living in waiting. It's almost like the many moments in my life have been orchestrated as a lead up to something, something that will make sense of all the choices I have made and lived by so far. A greater truth, if I may call it that, though not quite in the religious sense of things. Spiritual maybe.

So until the answer to life's great mystery weaves its way around to me, here's to you 2011. And 2012, I really hope the Mayans were wrong. I've got too much living left to do.

India calling.

Four Decembers ago, I took off to Ahmedabad with trepidation in my veins, wondering if I'd possibly made the worst decision of my life. Even though I didn't quite become the vegan yogi I'd envisioned, I returned half a year later an entirely changed person. India was the best thing I'd done for myself.

It's been a long time coming, but I'm finally going back, to the country that amazed even as it baffled and frustrated me.

You

I stand suspended
in your center
In a limbo
I linger

The unobtrusive voyeur
in your kaleidoscope
Impassive glances
upon your hazy throes

I reach out seeking
beyond the mad
for your spirit
one single thread

My fingers slipped through
your smudged translucence
And I returned untouched
A virgin maiden.

I wrote that during my first month, when I was bubbling over with an intoxicating combination of insatiable curiosity, bright-eyed wonder and homesickness in Delhi.

My itinerary's all mapped out, but before the road tripping begins, I'll be spending the first couple of days on my own in an Ayurvedic retreat. I'm looking forward to the quiet and solitude. The lack of everything may just prove conducive for meditating on life's great questions.

And though I know exactly where I'm going and who I'll be meeting, I haven't got a clue what awaits me the minute I step out of the plane tomorrow night. There they are... the first stirrings of wonder and, dare I hope, magic?

Rethinking yoga.

In recent months, watching a good friend drag her determined behind out of bed for 7am hot yoga lessons got me thinking of my forgotten fervour with the practice. A fervour that, rather ironically, died out upon my return from India almost four years ago. I'd sought to reconnect with the practice by seeking out new instructors, but I couldn't quite find in them the connection I had with the slightly eccentric Sunil, nor could I find in the studios the oasis of calm I found in Whatever.

Oh how I miss that calm. That bubble of deep breathing and chanting bells that insulated me against the craziness that is the world. The closest I get to that these days is zoning out on quiet mornings to Rodney Yee's Yoga for Energy DVD. "Feel the pause of the earth. Be that pause... Simple inhalation, simple exhalation. No effort, no restriction. Surrender completely."

Need to try another studio...