One of our guides in India had very good English. He knew Jap Ji prayers and he joined in when we said them that morning in the bus and broke into song as the prayer finished up. I engaged with him over his singing and I had the nerve to ask him to massage my feet as he told me his life story on the back seat of the bus.
He told me he wants to be married and when his parents found someone for him to consider, he interviewed her, to see if she would be someone he could marry. He felt she did not smile enough and did not follow up with her.
As he massaged my feet, he said that when he found his new wife, he would massage her from top to bottom and he indeed had a light sensual touch as he went over my feet, my ankles and half way up my calves, as far as my tight leggings would allow.
As we talked I became the priest, hearing his sins, the things he withholds about himself from his parents, when he drinks alcohol and meet women on tour. He noted that he knew educated men who have wives and maintained an alternative life with other women, when they can.
By this time I had drawn a picture of him as he talked and in my drawing fish appeared on his head and beside him a tiger. I had a question for him about his relationship with God and how his prayers play into this. The tiger, as metaphor for the passions, was pulled around between us and the need for him to sit on his tiger rested there in the air. The fish as symbol of love was kept high above his head, that which would be required if he ever is to have a happy marriage. He said that I had become too serious and did not take the picture I had drawn, as he would “just loose it.”
Then he promptly fell asleep, with his arms defending him across his chest over a rounding out stomach. I was the last off the bus as I gathered my things scattered on the back seat. He stood in front of me adjusting his big buckled belt and said, “We do not have to get off the bus with the others.” I made gestures, a face that caused him to step aside. Then I took the hand of the driver offered to me to help me down the steps, to join the others.
It is always good to remember that one can smile and smile and be a villain whether the villain is a new wife to be considered or a friendly white haired woman on the bus dragging fish and tigers into the air.
Follow up to the story:
When he woke up, light came into his eyes, and he knew in his dreams that he had fallen in love with the questions about his prayers and his fellowship with God and that the Divine Feminine had come true in the picture of the fish and tiger. I managed to be listening and engaged while I drew and got out of the way as the picture appeared. That is my offering.Now I look at his offer as the great compliment it is – to be that person embodying the feminine, who came though me, and accosted the block, insisted on the questions, out onto paper, never the same again. And he, not knowing what to do with it, that need to join with this inner light of the feminine in himself, projected onto me and made his offer. I am thankful.
And now when I look back on that magnificent trip to India, and think of that early morning bus ride, I smile and smile…
May all love surround all guides both inner and outer.
Also please check out a short video of our tour group chanting by the River of Nanak’s Enlightenment,
Sat Katar, River Bien.
Rose Longworth Counseling 
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