Purging

The Sunday before Thanksgiving.
One year ago today, I was launched into a spiritual cleansing journey. Without realizing, one by one I was forced to start purging my life of negativity.

It started with me cutting ties with two former close friends on November 19, 2017 after an argument left me feeling very hurt and violated of my respect. While they are still in my life, which is why I will not name them, I keep a distance and only talk to them when I see them.

These two girls made me feel bad for being who I am, an overenthusiastic girl. They teamed up and went to each other to talk about me instead of coming directly to me about whatever problem they had with me. But the biggest thing that really hurt me was this: they accused me of something and demanded an apology without even asking for my side of the story. What friend does that?

Anyone who knows me knows I'm generally a very fun person. I let things slide very easily, and it takes a lot to really upset me. But on that day, these two girls crossed way too many lines, and all at once, and I realized they weren't people I wanted in my life. I was angry. And I decided that I don't need that kind of negativity in my life, so I cut them off. In fact one of them went from best friend to stranger in a matter of a day.

I also became more intuitive from then on about what kind of people I knew I won't get along with. Last fall, I participated in an event called Jhankaar. While the event itself was great, the backstage drama in the weeks leading up to the event was very messy. I was with people I felt alone with. I was taken back to feelings I felt throughout most of my school life, the kind where you feel invisible or worse, unwanted, among a crowd of people laughing and smiling and seemingly nice but absolutely cold to you. I can say I made only one or two actual friends during that time. What's more, I knew my feelings weren't off the mark when I heard that people were actually talking about me behind my back. In fact, Jhankaar was such a bad experience for me last year that I concluded that most, if not all, Indians in the US are assholes.

Once more, I found myself feeling like I didn't have any friends at all. But that didn't last long.

In January 2018, I made a new friend, Lorena, who told me something I remember to this day and even tell other people. We were discussing something when she said, "Project your energy, and the people who reciprocate will come to you." I realized that what she was talking about can be applied to finding friends. I just have to be myself. Be unapologetically me. The right friends who reciprocate my energy will stick around. And they're the ones who are my real friends. The others don't matter!

And in the spring semester, I realized I had all the friends I needed in Japanese class. I suppose until I lost my two Indian former best friends, I never really made much of an effort to hang out with people here in college. Partly because I lived off campus, and partly because any free time I DID have I spent with either or both of those two girls.

But losing them meant I now had time to make an effort to connect with and make friends with people who went on to become my closest friends here. The people I have met in my Japanese class are a mix and match of all kinds of people who all somehow fit together in our love for Japanese and, let's be honest, utter weirdness. We're a tight-knit class who've survived the horrors and joys of studying Japanese together here at ASU. We show up 2 hours before class starts just to watch random videos on the projector, sing and dance, laugh, study and panic about our quizzes and exams.

Of the girls I made friends with, Angelica, Abbie and Karilee are the most notable. One of the things I will always be thankful to them for is how they helped me achieve body confidence. We constantly reassure each other of their beauty and how bomb their outfits are. We take photos for each other, sometimes insisting on it even if the person doesn't ask. We find locations and that fit the aesthetic and pose them and click away. And in the end we are left with pictures to post on our social media, usually Instagram.

By posting regularly in my insta story, I slowly came to believe that perhaps I am pretty. Perhaps I do look good, if only at least at the right angle and in the perfect lighting. But that gave me enough confidence. And that was important.

In July, I realized that I'm on a spiritual path to enlightenment. I talked to a psychic, and received two other messages through the universe, and I felt like I have a reason to work on myself. I didn't realize at the time that the purging had already began. So in order to help myself, I did some research on Quora and came across chakra meditation. Something inside me said it wouldn't hurt to try it, so I began doing chakra meditation in my sleep through chakra meditation music off YouTube that would play throughout the night. I started with a 3hr one that went through all the chakras every night, and then about a week and a half later, on a Monday, I decided to concentrate on one chakra each night and then play the 3hr video I was already listening to at the end. 7 chakras, 7 days of the week. I rarely miss a night of lulling myself to sleep to chakra healing/cleansing/awakening music.

Interestingly enough, while I didn't feel like much had changed, my friend Abbie told me at the start of the semester that I seemed much more put together. This was only a couple weeks since I started chakra meditation - less than a month, and it was already making a difference.

I felt the need to be able to channel the spiritual energy and receive advice when I needed it. I remembered back in June when I saw a deck of tarot cards in a book store and wanted to buy it, but didn't because I didn't have the money for it. I knew what tarot cards were thanks to a very close online friend Valerie in Germany. (Yes, I've never met her but I've known her for years and we are best friends.)

But I felt like now was the time to buy tarot cards. To my surprise, I found the very same tarot deck I saw in the bookstore in India on Amazon. The Sacred Indian Tarot, a  deck of 22 major arcana cards (so it's not a FULL tarot deck). And in the process of obtaining that deck, I ended up buying a deck of Ganesha Oracle cards, which arrived first - almost as if Ganapthi, who I am an ardent devotee of, wanted to give me his blessings by being the inauguration to my psychic beginnings.

Within two weeks, I also felt a very strong urge to buy the Rumi Oracle deck. It felt like the cards were calling to me, almost like there was an urgent message for me in the cards. Interestingly enough, the reviews for the deck on Amazon said that this deck will call to you when you are ready to receive the deep messages from it. I didn't intend to buy it immediately and was going to put off buying it for six months, since I am just beginning to read cards and I'm not a professional or anything so why would I need multiple decks? But one thing lead to another and I ended up buying it within two weeks of obtaining my first two decks.

I now do psychic readings both for myself as well as for friends, and I do the readings for free. The way I see it, I just want to be able to help people with the advice I give them through my readings. And people have told me they feel very calm and peaceful after I do readings for them. One friend, Mia, said she feels the strong positive energy radiating from my Ganesha Oracle cards. It's also uncanny and never ceases to amaze me when I'll be doing a reading and the cards I draw, even if they're all from different decks, seem connected and spot on when answering the questions I ask.

But I also mainly use my cards for personal, spiritual advice regarding my journey and my next steps. I definitely feel like I am being guided, like I have always been guided throughout my life. I am being steered toward something I am meant to do. Eventually, I will find myself exactly where I am meant to be.

Another constant negative influence in my life was someone I never realized would be one. Or at least I hoped so. Without going into detail, this was a person I have known for 2.5 years now, and someone I spent time with at least once a week for the past 2. But we never seemed to click and I always thought it was my fault, or that maybe she didn't want to be friends with me, or something like that. We had been having communication problems with something we were both working on together, and she finally decided to break away a couple weeks ago.

I didn't realize until recently that this tension between us was negative energy in both of our lives. As much as we both wanted it to work, it just wasn't happening. As she put it, we're both different people with different energies.

And this is important to mention here because I realized that not all good people are necessarily good influences in your life. That was the lesson here. Someone could be an absolutely wonderful person but still bring negativity in some way into your life.

So perhaps the two friends I lost this time last year actually are still good people. Perhaps this will help me forgive them, because I see that I need to work on that.

One year of purging. But I don't think I'm done yet.