What “the Dream” can mean for an Australian transplant who describes her many roles in helping to build and support Auroville, including with international centers and neighboring villages.
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Written May 2023
My name is Kathy Walkling and I moved to Auroville from Australia – half my life ago – back in 1997. Before coming to Auroville, I had a satisfactory life working as an Occupational Therapist and fulfilling the roles that were expected of me. While on the surface it looked as though I functioned well and fit in, on the inside, I felt alienated and lived with the gnawing feeling that there must be more to life. At an early age, I began searching for that more.
Discovering Auroville while traveling the world as part of that search marked the birth of what I feel to be my True Life. When I read The Dream, something inside me lit up and I instinctively knew I had found my home. I yearned for that “… place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment.” The fact that a place with such a dream not only existed, but had reached a certain maturity and was evidently pulsing with the energy of creative evolutionaries who had also given their lives for such a call, was electrifying to me. I leapt!
Over the last 26 years, I have participated in many different ways in helping to build Auroville. I started with community building, tasting something of the pioneering experience as I joined a group of passionate newcomers to build up Adventure community on land that Auroville had recently acquired in the greenbelt, right next to Edayanchavady Village. There I learned and engaged with the foundational work of germinating seeds and planting trees along with the more difficult challenge of learning to get along with people who came from such different cultural backgrounds from my own. During the 10 years I lived there, I also engaged in various community projects including joining the housing service and helping to kick start a new residential community (“Creativity”), working on preparing the SAIIER development proposal which became a channel for major Government funding to flow into Auroville to help accelerate many high impact projects including Savitri Bhavan and Botanical Gardens, and developing the Visitors Centre to be a gateway for introducing visitors to the multiple layers of Auroville life.
At some point in my journey I became the Auroville representative for the Auroville International Centres providing an interface between Auroville and the world. Continuing this trajectory, I also helped facilitate a number of study abroad programs that enabled foreign students, e.g. from the California Institute of Integral Studies, to visit and engage with Auroville and the Integral Yoga. Everything I did here for these first 10 years emerged from an external invitation to serve and I did so as my skills and capacities enabled me to. It was my joy and privilege to serve Auroville without an agenda. The whole time, I continued to pursue inner growth and deepen my knowledge of Integral Yoga and understanding of what it means to be a True Aurovilian which in essence I understood to mean dissolving the strong grip of ego and becoming more transparent to serve The Divine’s consciousness.
In about 2016 my focus shifted and various experiences and challenges led me to start to look more locally at the relationship between Auroville and our neighboring villages. I felt a strong impulse from within to work with women and children in the villages and this led to the birth of Thamarai community centre in our neighboring village of Edayanchavady. This experience was deeply transformational and gave me a direct experience of a work which I feel is at the heart of one of Auroville’s major challenges – to work with and integrate different worldviews into a harmonious unity. This work has been part of a journey which has continued to this day – a journey which asks me to widen inside to, lean in to and accommodate different perspectives, needs and motivations. This led me to engage more closely with the work of Auroville Village Action Group which in turn culminated in the birth of the project which now occupies most of my time – Eco Femme.
Eco Femme is a global women’s empowerment initiative which has had impact across India and around the world. We introduced cloth washable menstrual pads into the India marketplace as a sustainable alternative to plastic sanitary pads and have been instrumental in reframing menstruation as an experience that can be healthy, dignified and rooted in our indivisibility from nature – nothing short of a worldview shift in terms of how menstruation has been typically perceived across cultures. I attribute the vast impact that this project has had in India and beyond entirely to Auroville – for it is through my immersion and deep engagement here over so many years that I have had such a worldview shift in myself that has enabled me to bridge global perspectives with local realities.
I am profoundly grateful for every experience, every obstacle and every opportunity that has come my way since living in Auroville. I understand experientially that my life – as does every life – matters enormously to the unfolding of consciousness on the planet and Auroville has been the crucible that has made this realisation possible. It has also been the enabler. The field of Auroville – the flexibility that allows individuals to experiment, the explore, try things out, stretch and contribute – is of inestimable value in a world where, evidently, opportunities like this become increasingly confined due to the crushing pressures of capitalism, not to mention the constraints in vision and imagination that emerge in societies which limit most people to small domains of influence. Auroville is such a fertile place to inspire and be inspired by visionaries who, like me, deeply believe the world can be an adventure playground where there is a vast untapped human potential that needs certain freedoms and conditions for the spirit to soar and thrive.
It is my deepest hope and prayer that in all the churning that is happening here in Auroville, this open space is not lost but can be preserved so that each, like me, can find a place to BE, to HEAL from what has bruised us all in a world that has not recognised, let alone honoured our unique individuality seeking instead to control and homogenize, and ultimately to ACTUALISE their deepest potential on behalf of Life itself. For this is what I understand Auroville is truly meant to be – a living laboratory for a new way of living, to foster the birth of a new human that is rooted in the knowledge of our intrinsic unity with all life. This, in my understanding, is our destiny and I believe space and the opportunity to participate from a place of free will is a prerequisite for this new human to unfold its full potential and help build the city the Earth urgently needs.
By Kathy Walkling
April 9 2023