Dosa Disaster

I really love when the universe really takes time to spell it out for me. When I have an experience that is so blatantly obvious that I can’t ignore the lesson. I had an experience like this recently and as frustrating as it was in the moment, a few days later, I can see the beauty in it clearly.

I am currently staying at a beautiful yoga retreat center in Guatemala. I am here as a karma yogi meaning I serve the community by working in exchange for room and board. It has been quite the experience to live in community and serve in this way. I will have a lot more to say about this experience but now is not the time.

Once a week, we have a kitchen shift where a group of us have to prepare a meal for around 30 people. Last week I was on the dinner shift. I was feeling confident and decided I would make dosas for everyone. Dosas are simple lentil and rice crepes that are eaten in India.

From the very beginning, I knew it was a bad idea. I had a strong knowing that it was not going to work out. Because the bit of stubbornness within and perhaps a large dash of lack of trust in my knowing, I persevered. I pushed through the obvious resistance of the no because I wanted to prove myself. To who!? Good question.

It all started when I didn’t start the process early enough. The rice and lentils require at least six hours to soak. I started soaking them three hours before I needed to start cooking. Wise little me decided to short cut the process and heat the water with them in it. My attention drifted and I found myself with a pot of cooked rice and lentils…

That was my first tap on the shoulder. The first sign that I should turn around and let go of this mission. But I decided it wouldn’t make that big of a difference. So I started to blend them up into the batter and adding spices. The consistency was horribly wrong and I knew it. But the batter was delicious so I made excuses to myself and persevered. That was my second tap on the shoulder that I refused to turn around for.

Finally, time to cook up some dosas. After finding the perfect pan, I heated it up and poured some batter in. Immediately I knew it would not work…but of course I tried it three more times. The tapping on my shoulder was getting more persistent yet I still didn’t want to turn around.

My next solution was to add flour, then add some chia seeds, then add some baking soda. Tap, tap, tap. Ignore, ignore, ignore.

My final brilliant idea was to pour the batter in a pan and make a dosa cake. Again, the batter was delicious so why waste it. And also, there were thirty people waiting for this to be part of the meal. I’ve made it this far, I can’t turn back now.

For a second, I thought I had finally rescued the unrescuable mission but then I went to switch the pans to a different shelf in the oven and disaster struck. The shelf fell off one side and two pans of batter began pouring into the bottom of the oven. This felt like a slap in the face. My inner knowing was so sick of me ignoring the tapping, it had no other option.

I finally turned off the oven, felt my heart sink and admitted defeat. I felt like a failure, which if you know me, is as close to playing with fire as I like to get. I felt quite raw the rest of the night. Part of me knew immediately that this was a lesson in listening to my knowing. But admitting that to myself felt too hard in real time.

I can reflect back, a few days removed and laugh at how light and inconsequential of an example this is. And also how so many people, myself included, who have struggled with people pleasing or rescuer mentalities, will relate deeply to this.

It is so easy to ignore the tapping. To believe because people are expecting something of me and the batter tastes good, that it is my job to provide what I intended. That I failed if I don’t. But really all it does is break trust with myself. Every time I push past my knowing, thinking my ego can fix anything, a little trust is lost.

As I am coming home to more and more of that precious trust, I am learning how valuable of a resource it is. I truly believe that self trust is the root of nearly all the work I have done. After a life of ignoring the tapping on my shoulder because I thought it made me a stronger person to do so, I am seeing clearly the repercussions of my ways.

Because I challenged my knowing, I ended up having to clean an oven that likely hasn’t been that clean in years! I gave myself so much more work and unnecessary stress that night. If only I would have seen that pot of cooked lentils and rice and turned around with the tapping. I could have made a lovely side dish with just as good of a flavor. Just imagining myself doing that now and my body took a sigh of relief.

That’s the beautiful thing about finding trust in yourself again. It is never too late to recover. Reflecting on past experiences, seeing the taps and sometimes the slaps and honoring them as your knowing doing the best it can, is healing. It doesn’t always feel great, because to me, it feels easier to call it a failure and walk away. But if I keep abandoning myself, how can trust ever find me?!

Perhaps it was a lesson for me to remember that just because I didn’t reach the expected conclusion of dosas, at one point I had a beautiful pot of cooked lentils and rice and maybe that is all I needed. If I let go of expectations and stayed with my knowing, I would have felt much more satisfied with myself. And the thirty people who were dosa-less might have been a little happier too by consequence.

Life is an experience giver. These little moments that teach me are everything. I’d rather reinforce this lesson in a kitchen in Guatemala over many other scenarios I’ve stumbled into in the past. But perhaps it’s time to mine those scenarios for a bit of gold. Return to them to find the pot of cooked lentils and rice and feel how content my knowing can be when I stop there.

Listening to my knowing. Learning to cultivate trust within myself. It will be my work in this lifetime. I am grateful I get to meet myself with a little more trust every day.