Darwin Chakra-ad

Andaal realized something had changed the day the rains returned.

Not externally. Goa had always done this dramatic seasonal rebranding where everything suddenly looked greener, calmer, spiritually employed. But this time she noticed the change inside herself too. The noise in her mind had reduced just enough for her to hear her own thoughts clearly, which honestly was both healing and concerning.

For months, she had been trying to “fix herself.”
New routines. Journaling. Breathwork. Random YouTube therapists. One alarming week of celery juice.

Nothing had produced enlightenment.

But standing near the window watching the rain, she suddenly understood something about healing that felt embarrassingly obvious in retrospect: healing was not returning to an old version of herself. It was accepting that reality had changed and learning how to function inside the new one.

And strangely, that thought reminded her of Darwin.

People always quoted “survival of the fittest” like it was about dominance. As if evolution was won by the loudest organism in the room. But Darwin was really talking about adaptation. Species survive because they adjust to changing conditions. The environment changes first. Survival comes later.

That hit her hard.

Because she had spent months emotionally negotiating with reality like customer support might reverse the update if she complained politely enough.

But life had already changed.

Relationships changed. Identity changed. Energy changed. Even her inner responses had changed. And maybe suffering came from insisting everything vibrate at frequencies that no longer existed.

That was when she began thinking about chakras differently.

Earlier, chakras had felt like abstract spiritual vocabulary people used before selling expensive workshops. But now they started making practical sense to her.

Her root chakra had clearly lost signal. No stability, no grounding, constant low-grade panic about the future.

The sacral chakra was reacting next — emotions everywhere, creativity disappearing and returning unpredictably, attachment issues behaving like unpaid interns creating chaos.

The solar plexus had taken a direct hit too. Confidence? Missing. Personal power? Temporarily outsourced to external validation and caffeine.

Then came the heart chakra. That one was complicated. Apparently the heart does not become wiser after pain. It becomes suspicious first. Wisdom comes later, after enough emotional stretching.

Her throat chakra mainly expressed itself through conversations she rehearsed in the shower and never actually had.

The third eye brought pattern recognition, which was useful except for the unfortunate side effect of overthinking literally everything.

And the crown chakra? That seemed to activate only when she became exhausted enough to stop trying to control outcomes.

The more she observed herself this way, the more she realized healing was probably just the nervous system adjusting to a different internal frequency. Not becoming someone new. Just reorganizing around a new reality.

Oddly enough, this made her kinder to herself.

Evolution, she thought, probably looks very graceful in textbooks. In real life, it looks like sitting in oversized clothes during monsoon season wondering why personal growth feels emotionally underfunded.

Still, something inside her was stabilizing.

Not because life had become easier.
But because she had stopped arguing with the fact that it had changed.

And somewhere between the rain, the silence, and her mildly dysfunctional chakra audit, one question stayed with her:

“ನಾನು ಮಾಯೆಯೋಳಗೊ ಮಾಯೆಯು ನನ್ನೋಳಗೊ?”

Am I inside the illusion, or is the illusion inside me?

At this point, she suspected the answer was probably both.