Be and Become

“There comes a point where you must stop looking… stop searching… and just be still.”

His voice returned to her not as sound, but as sensation like mist at dawn, brushing past skin before the sun remembers its name. She didn’t know why those words came back to her now. She wasn’t looking for them. In fact, she had spent the last hour walking, thinking, unthinking, trying to spend the day just going with the flow. No agenda in her head. Only the soft rhythm of her own footsteps on the gravel path in Bishan-AMK park.

The music in her ears loud, pulsing, alternative rock drove her pace forward. The drums kept her feet in rhythm, the guitars filled the spaces where her thoughts would normally rush in. Yet, over the noise, the words rose, steady, insistent. And then, without warning, she felt it. That same strange pressure at the top of her head. The crown. Light, but unmistakable.

As if a cat’s paw had settled there, kneading gently, rhythmically, the way cats do when they make biscuits. Her steps slowed. She touched the crown of her head, half-expecting to feel fur or claws. Nothing. Empty and only air. And the sweat-soaked strands of her hair, damp against her fingers, clinging to her scalp.

The sensation was still there, though soft, insistent, like the pressing of unseen paws kneading into her crown. The body told her she was hot, tired, sticky from the walk, but something else pulsed above that, a rhythm she could not explain.

She remembered that day in Kuala Lumpur. Her guru beside her in the car, the city sliding past the windows, honks and motorcycles filling the streets. She had been at the wheel, focused on the traffic, when the sensation began. Soft, repetitive, like a cat at play, except it was inside her head or above it.

She hadn’t said a word but she knows he was sitting beside her observing her all the time.

Back home, he had asked, “Did you feel anything earlier?”

“Where?” she’d replied, startled.

“Something. You tell me.” And she’d laughed, embarrassed but curious.

“Yeah… I could feel something. Like a cat’s paw… making biscuits on top of my head.” And she shown him the location, the crown.

He’d thrown his head back and laughed, the kind of laugh that came from deep in the belly. He never explained. He didn’t need to.

Now, in the park, with the music raging in her ears and the gravel crunching under her shoes, she felt it again. The invisible paw pressing, kneading, a presence just above her. Guru Mandala, they called it the gathering of teachers, the transmission of something beyond words.

She closed her eyes briefly. The music kept playing, but another rhythm rose inside her, older, quieter, pressing against her crown. She wasn’t sure if it was memory, imagination, or something real. But she didn’t push it away. She let it knead, let it unfold.

And then, without even trying, an image surfaced, Blackie, one of her cats, paws kneading on her head, eyes half-shut in that slow, deliberate blink of feline affection. The thought made her smile. There was something so comforting about imagining it, as though the invisible paw above her was not some lofty mystery at all, but Blackie himself, quietly making biscuits on her crown. She found herself enjoying the sensation, almost wanting it to stay.

Maybe this was what he meant by stillness. Not stopping the noise, not silencing life, but standing open enough for the unseen paw to press through. The sensation reminded her of another time, years back at Cold Storage. She had been shopping for groceries, her daughter sitting cross-legged in the trolley, clutching a box of cereal like a treasure. The aisles smelled of fruit and detergent the PA system buzzed with an inoffensive pop song.

And then, in her head, without warning, the Guru mantra began to play. Not faintly. Loudly. Clear as if a temple speaker had been hidden between the rice and the canned goods. The words rose in Sanskrit, each syllable precise, unfolding in perfect harmony. She almost laughed at the absurdity of it here, in the middle of a grocery run, not during her meditation at home, not in the quiet of dawn, but now, between stacked tins and plastic-wrapped vegetables. What startled her most was the clarity. She had always stumbled over the Sanskrit, tripping over the consonants, worrying about her accent, the shape of her tongue, the rhythm of the chant.

She had told her guru this more than once: “What if I pronounce it wrongly?”

His answer had always been the same. “Let it be. Say what you can. You don’t have to be perfect.”

And yet here, in her head, the mantra flowed flawlessly. No hesitation, no error. A current of sound moving through her as if she were only the vessel. It would not stop. She tried, half-playfully, half-seriously, to silence it. Not now, please, I’m shopping. But the mantra went on, patient, insistent, looping itself in her mind like a river that had found its course.

She remembered thinking: Why is it that when I sit at home, cross-legged and trying to be still, the music never comes? When I’m trying so hard to listen, there’s only silence. But now, here, pushing a trolley between frozen fish and instant noodles it’s playing on its own.

Her guru’s laughter echoed in memory, as if he had always known this would amuse him.

Now, in the park, with the cat-paw pressure at her crown and alternative rock blaring in her ears, she almost smiled. Stillness, it seemed, wasn’t about where you sat or what you were doing. It arrived when it wanted, in its own time, whether you were meditating, driving through Kuala Lumpur, or comparing the price of milk.

“You create the sacred space. And it can be anything, anywhere. It doesn’t have to be in the pooja room, or in some grand hall filled with orange-robed priests chanting. Even while performing your wifely duties, there’s sacredness in those activities. Embrace it, and rejoice.”

She had resisted those words once, too. Sacredness, she thought, had to look a certain way candles lit, bells rung, incense spiralling into the air. But slowly, life itself had dismantled that idea. The cat’s paw at her crown while driving through Kuala Lumpur. The Guru Stotram echoing through her head in Cold Storage, louder than the piped-in music. The quiet revelations arriving not during her deliberate meditation at home, but in the middle of errands, chores, obligations.

Now, in the park, she understood more clearly what he had meant. The sacred was not a place she went to. It was what followed her, what pressed against her crown, what rose unbidden in the aisles between frozen food and cereal boxes. It was the sudden rush of clarity that made her stop, even while guitars raged in her headphones.

Sacredness was in the act of noticing. In being present to the moment, however ordinary. In washing dishes, in caring for a child, in walking a gravel path under the mid-day sun. It was never about escaping the world. It was about meeting the world as it was and finding, to her surprise, that it was already holy.

And she remembered once telling him about her husband’s insistence: if she was menstruating, she must not enter the pooja room. She had never been able to understand this whole idea of menstruation being “unclean.”

Growing up as a Muslim girl, she had already carried the weight of endless don’ts whispered into her ear every month: don’t fast, don’t pray, don’t touch the Qur’an. Those days had always felt like exile from the sacred. Offensive, she thought. To be a woman was to bleed it was part and parcel of life, of creation itself. How could that be rendered unclean?

Even later, when she stepped into Hindu spaces, she found the same idea repeated. At temple gates, in whispered instructions, in articles written by educated young men defending the practice: women in their cycle should stay away, should not do rituals, should not enter. She read their words carefully, but could not grasp them. Each explanation about purity, about energy, about tradition felt like another layer of silence imposed on women’s bodies.

When she finally told her guru about it, his reply had been so unexpected that she could only laugh.

“Then it’s okay,” he had said, lightly, almost dismissively. “Respect his tradition. Don’t go into the prayer room.” She had blinked, confused.

“Do your sadhana outside,” he continued, “in the balcony, together with your plants. Sacredness doesn’t have to be in the temple or the pooja room. You create your own sacred space. It can be anywhere even in the toilet.”

At that moment, something in her loosened. The heaviness of offence and resistance gave way to a kind of relief. The rules and prohibitions no longer mattered as much, because the sacred wasn’t theirs to gate-keep. It was hers to find, hers to create.

She remembered laughing then, a laugh that came from somewhere deep inside because the explanation was so simple, so freeing, and yet it felt like a doorway flung wide open.

And then he warned her. “You are a householder and a sadhika,” he said. “Even if you are in the midst of your practice even if your breath is steady, your mantra is flowing when your husband or your daughter call, you must stop. You must answer.”

At first, she could not grasp it. Why should I stop? Shouldn’t they be the ones not to disturb me? Shouldn’t they respect this sacred moment? It felt, in her early years, like an injustice. That she must sacrifice her practice at the altar of domestic duty. And yet, his words stayed with her, repeating themselves in quiet corners of her life.

“The householder’s family is her temple. Her abode of sacredness.”

Slowly, painfully, she began to see what he had meant. When she sat in her sadhana, she could get lost, intoxicated by the silence, by the mantra, by the inward pull. But what good was that if she neglected the call of her child? If she treated the needs of her home as interruptions rather than offerings?

Her family was not outside her practice. They were its living altar. She remembered sharing this teaching once with other fellow seekers. Their reaction had been one of horror. “Why should we stop our sadhana just because family calls? That is weakness!” they protested. To them, discipline was paramount, uninterrupted practice the measure of progress.

But years later, with reflection, with life’s demands shaping her more than any scripture could, she began to understand. Stopping was not weakness. It was surrender to love, to service, to the reality that spirituality is not a world apart from life but woven into its every demand. Answering her daughter’s voice, responding to her husband’s call, even when it pulled her from stillness that too was sadhana. Perhaps the most difficult kind.

Because in those moments, she was being pulled against attachment. To be a householder was to be tied to this world bound by love, by responsibility, by flesh and memory. And yet, the discipline was to remain unattached even within attachment. To enter fully, to give fully, but not to cling. It was like learning to breathe with both lungs: to attach and detach at the same time. To pour herself into the world without losing herself to it. That, she realized, was the razor’s edge her guru had been pointing to all along.


Her guru had once asked her, “Do you want to know what your previous life was before this one?”

And she had said quickly, almost sharply, “No. I don’t want to know. What good will it be?”

He had only nodded, letting it pass, never pursuing the question again.

But one day, much later, she had teased him, saying with a laugh, “Now I understand why I am a householder in this lifetime. I need to learn what a householder’s life really is, this dance between attachment and detachment. A householder cannot live in pure detachment, love and duty demand attachment. But neither can they drown in it. The discipline lies in moving between the two without clinging.”

She remembered his eyes glinting, the faintest smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, as though he recognized that she had finally caught the rhythm of what he had always been pointing to. Living, after all, was about dancing stepping in and stepping out, leaning close and letting go. The dance itself was the sadhana.

And she had told her guru once, almost in frustration, “I cannot find the meaning of sitting alone in the pooja room, repeating my sadhana. As I see it, the real sadhana is to be out there… with my family, with the community. When I am spending time with them, that itself feels like sadhana. When I am doing community work, that itself is an offering my time, my energy, my love.”

She had half-expected a rebuke, a reminder to return to the disciplines of breath and mantra. But he had only smiled that knowing smile, the one that was never agreement nor dismissal, but something larger. In the silence that followed, she realized that perhaps this was the point all along.

Sadhana in the pooja room was not the destination, only the training ground a way of steadying the mind, sharpening the heart. But the true test of her practice was not how long she could sit in stillness it was how she lived when she rose from that stillness.

To serve her family with patience. To offer her energy to the community without expectation. To meet each interruption, each chore, each human need as if it were a mantra in disguise. The pooja room, she realized, could never contain the whole of her life. But her life itself could become a pooja room every act a ritual, every gesture an offering, every day an unending cycle of practice.


And then she saw it, a small commotion in the grass pulled her gaze from the path. At that very instant, the cat’s paw at her crown seemed to pause as if it too were telling her: pay attention. Notice what stirs around you. Even the smallest ripple matters. She followed the sound and saw them: the rooster, feathers catching the light like flames, strutting with unapologetic grandeur the hen clucking softly, steady in her watchfulness and behind them, the scattered tumble of chicks, darting to keep up. She stood there, smiling at the scene. It felt absurd and holy at once as though her own body had been tapped awake, just so she wouldn’t miss this parade of ordinary wonder. The rooster tilted back its head and let out a call sharp, proud, echoing into the morning. She smiled at the audacity of it, a voice so certain, demanding to be heard by the trees, the clouds, perhaps the whole park. The sight fascinated her such ordinary creatures, and yet, in their colors and rhythms, something deeply alive. She lingered for a while, watching them weave in and out of the bushes, before her feet carried her forward again.

The path curved, and soon she found herself at the dog run. There were at least a dozen of them, dogs big and small chasing one another in mad zigzags across the grass. A golden retriever bounded after a scruffy terrier a corgi rolled belly-up in sheer delight a tiny poodle, impossibly serious, barked instructions that no one followed. Their owners leaned against the fence, chatting, but her eyes stayed with the dogs. It was such a beautiful scene that she could not help but sit on the bench nearby. To sit, and to watch. The way their bodies moved, pure energy, pure being made her wonder if this was what freedom looked like, stripped of questions and reasons. No hesitation, no explanations, only the joy of motion, of belonging in the moment. She felt something loosen in her chest, something that had been wound too tightly. For a long while, she let herself just be another quiet presence at the edge of the field, watching play unfold, as though the dogs themselves and the proud rooster before them were teaching her what it meant to live without searching.

“Stop searching. Stop looking. Just be still” these words came back again…

She could understand the need to be still. Every practice she knew meditation, prayer, even the rhythm of Japa beads clicking one by one between fingers was, in its essence, a call to still the mind. To pause the restless tide of thought, to let the waves settle until the depths became visible.

And yet, the words unsettled her. To stop searching felt like betrayal of something essential. Wasn’t searching the pulse of being human the yearning for more, the hunger for truth, the unrelenting drive to ask? Without the search, what was left : resignation?

She remembered resisting those words when he first said them. “But isn’t that dangerous?” she had asked back then. “I once heard a quote : ‘The stationary condition is the beginning of the end.’”

He had only smiled. Not in agreement, not in dismissal. Just… knowing.

And now, sitting on the bench beside a tree watching the dogs playing, she tried to reflect on those words again.

Then his voice, almost teasing: “Stop being a traveller.”

Did that mean she should stop being a seeker too? The question had been gnawing at her.

“What are you seeking?” he had asked once, his tone neither gentle nor stern, just steady.

“I’m looking for an understanding,” she had said.

“What do you want to understand?”

“Why Hanuman, Kali, and the others keep coming to my dreams,” she had blurted, laughing at the absurdity. “They come alive, moving and speaking, as if they’re right there! Even my own husband says, ‘I’ve worshipped them since I was young, and they never come to my dreams like that!’” She laughed again at the memory.

But beneath the laughter was a real question: what was she being shown? And why?


Still, she sensed that his words carried something beyond what she had feared. Does “stop searching” mean not giving up the journey but loosening the grip, stepping back from the fevered scramble for answers. To allow life to reveal itself, unforced, enchased. Like the rooster that had strutted without apology, like the dogs that had run with joy, untroubled by questions.

She wondered if stillness was not the opposite of seeking, but its completion. That when the mind ceased to claw at meaning, because could rise on its own like a reflection appearing in water once the ripples died away. Yet, she could not dismiss the other voice within her, the one that whispered of dangers in stillness. Stagnation, complacency, the dull weight of inertia. Was there a difference between stillness and paralysis? Between silence and emptiness?

She had been sitting long enough by then, watching the dogs race and tumble, their bodies caught in the ecstasy of motion. Slowly, her gaze drifted beyond the fence, beyond the blur of fur and tails, to the trees standing in quiet rows along the park. They stood in silence, unafraid of stillness, unhurried by time. Their roots clutched the earth with a kind of deep trust, as though they knew the ground would hold them. Their branches reached upward, yet never in haste, never scrambling for the sky.

She thought of her own restless search, the way her mind darted between questions, the way her steps had carried her through the park with music pounding in her ears. The trees, by contrast, seemed to live without hurry, without demand. They did not search. They did not seek. And yet, in their stillness, they grew. Perhaps this was the lesson. Growth did not always require movement. Strength did not always come from striving. To stand, to endure, to let seasons come and go without losing one’s place that, too, was a kind of wisdom.

The trees had been here long before her, and would remain long after. They had watched children stumble into adulthood, lovers fall into and out of each other’s arms, joggers chasing breath, the elderly pausing with their walking sticks. Generations passed in front of them, and still they stood patient witnesses, guardians of the ordinary sacred.

She wondered if this was what her guru had meant. Stop searching. Stop looking. Just be still. The trees were not inert. They were alive, pulsing with quiet growth. Stillness was not the opposite of life. It was life, in another form. A breeze stirred then, making the leaves tremble in soft applause, and she almost smiled. Perhaps the trees were answering her too. Perhaps this was what he had meant. Not the death of seeking, but the trust that seeking had already carried her far enough that she could, for a while, let the ground beneath her speak.

“Only if you confuse stillness with death. Stillness is not the end, it is the doorway. When you stop running, you hear. When you stop searching, you see.” Those had been his words. And now, sitting among the trees, she could almost hear them speaking the same truth wordless, but steady, rooted in silence.

Perhaps this was what he had meant. Not the death of seeking, but the trust that seeking had already carried her far enough that she could, for a while, let the ground beneath her speak.

And now, sitting among the trees, she began to understand: Be and Becoming. Stillness is not an endpoint. It is the crucible. It’s only when the seeking stops that transformation can happen. Stillness, when entered unconsciously, can become a spiritual plateau. Stillness, when entered with presence, can be the spark of emergence.

“Be and Becoming.” It’s not about acquiring more knowledge or finding some hidden treasure out there it’s about realizing what was always within, always here. The trees seemed to embody this truth. Rooted, unmoving, yet never stagnant.

In their stillness they were always becoming stretching toward the sun, drinking rain into their roots, bearing silent witness as seasons turned. His voice again: “This question sits at the very heart of Tantra. Do you dissolve, or do you arrive? Do you lose yourself or become what was always within you?”

“What are we supposed to become?” she had once asked. “Does this term, may you realise her, mean the same thing?”

And he had only smiled, then said, “You tell me… what do you understand by these two terms?”

“To become and to realise were not two different paths. They were the same unfolding. To “realise her” was not about reaching for something outside, but awakening to what had always been alive within. To become the Devi was to recognise that there was never separation to begin with. You once told me “Before you can worship the Devi, you must be the Devi. You must realise that the Devi and you are not separate but one. Only then can you truly appreciate what you are doing”


She hesitated at first, then spoke slowly, as if uncovering the meaning for herself. “So when you say one becomes Ganesha… it doesn’t mean you wear his form. It means you embody his attributes you become the remover of obstacles. Not just for others, but first for yourself, clearing the path of your own doubts, fears, and illusions. And to become the Devi… is to embrace the embodiment of the divine feminine. For example, to become Durga is not about her weapons or her lion, but about having the strength to rise above the mundane negativity, to fight with courage and firmness, and yet to keep compassion at the centre. Even beauty, when spoken of in this way, is not about physical beauty. It is spiritual beauty the radiance of clarity, the ability not to let yourself be clouded by anger or hatred, but to hold your dignity and grace even in the midst of struggle.”

“The image is but the focus point,” she said slowly, almost tasting the words as they formed. “It’s to still the mind. But then… you move beyond the image. You become the image itself.”

She wasn’t sure if she was reciting something she had once heard, or if the words were surfacing on their own. The guru said nothing. He only listened, his presence steady, the weight of his gaze letting her know she was being heard.

And then, as if called up by those very words, the keris resurfaced in her mind. What is the real purpose of this keris in my possession? she wondered. Is it a treasure? Or is it a reminder of what I must become?

The thought had barely formed when she saw it vividly in her mind’s eye: the keris, gleaming, spinning, flying toward her. Her hand lifted instinctively, catching it out of the air, holding it upright in her grip as though it had always belonged there.

She remembered those early days, the frustration tightening her chest as she told him, “I understand them here,” tapping her forehead. “But I’m stuck. There’s too much up here, and I can’t get it out in words.”

His response had been simple, almost casual: “Speak from the mind.”

And just like that, the words had poured out of her : clear, clean, certain. As if he had quietly reached inside her and untied every knot. Now, sitting here again, she felt the same uncoiling. No force, no struggle only words rising and flowing, as though the river inside her had found its course once more.

The guru said nothing. He didn’t need to. The silence was enough, the current already moving through her. But this time, he did not say anything. He only looked at her, his eyes steady, and in that gaze all the knowledge seemed to flow through her.

The words rose without effort, as though the knots had already been untied long ago. She was no longer trying to understand with her head she was simply speaking from the river that had always been there. He just smiled, nodding slightly, his silence more eloquent than a thousand instructions.

And in that moment he looked less like a teacher correcting his student and more like a father watching his daughter come into her own : proud, tender, quietly rejoicing in how far she had come, as if to say: Yes, you are beginning to see it for yourself.