Hippie Stuff the One Things That Go Down and Up and Down Again
I t'south a sunny afternoon and I'm sitting cross-legged with my eyes airtight, introducing myself to my womb. "Hello, womb," I say, inwardly, and await for a reply. Seven other women are in a circle with me, doing the same as a Spotify playlist of chimey chillout music plays in the background and incense burns. We are in Chloe Isidora'southward house, taking up her living room. Isidora, a quondam way editor turned spiritual practitioner, is leading a "womb wisdom circle". Nosotros are all hither for different reasons, mine beingness a mixture of curiosity (my womb and I accept not been, shall we say, getting along) and a desire to discover more most what I've come to remember of, in the past couple of years, as the "neo-hippy".
When I was growing up, it was desperately uncool to exist a hippy. I wouldn't say my parents were hippies exactly, but they were certainly influenced past some of their ideas. I spent my early on childhood living in cooperatives. My mother would purify the house with sage, did yoga, visited reiki healers and read tarot cards (earlier she stopped, from fear she was allowing in too much "negative energy"). And last time I saw my dad, he was wearing a tie-dye Grateful Dead T-shirt.
Compared with some of my friends' parents, who took function in drumming circles and grew their own weed, they were small fry. One friend grew up in a Buddhist community in Italy and has witnessed the exact moment she crowned via the medium of her parents' birthing video. Another, a Californian, knew children who had chosen their own names, such as Windsong and Skyraven. I'm friends with people who have been on Ayahuasca retreats. Still, my parents were "bohemian" enough: in that location were all those times I opened my lunchbox at school and was mortified to find hummus instead of Cheestrings.
These days, my parents would be right on trend. Many aspects of the hippy lifestyle you thought had died a death, save for a hardcore of originals in Somerset and the mountains of north Wales, are back with a vengeance. There'southward the fashion, apparently: women in floral maxi dresses with tumbling locks topped with flower crowns, men with beards and "man buns". There's the make clean-eating phenomenon: making your ain raw chocolate avocado flourless brownies, snacking on nuts and berries, stewing your own overnight oats. Meditation apps are enormously pop, as is 5Rhythms trip the light fantastic toe (the movement and then brilliantly satirised by Peep Show in the form of "rainbow rhythms"). The neo-hippy trend manifests itself in everything from natural family planning to polyamory, to houses total of terrariums, spider plants and Moroccan rugs. The resurgence of feminism has intersected with hippydom and seen a renewed involvement in womb worship, most notably in the form of the Spirit Weavers Gathering, an all-female Californian camp dubbed "the globe's chicest cult".
All of this is, of class, eminently Instagrammable. The Spirit Weavers' account is full of filtered snapshots of women continuing naked in circles, their hands raised towards the sky. Meanwhile, many travel bloggers are in on the action: it's all yoga poses at dusk, temples and beautiful women in peasant dresses standing at the edge of canyons, giving the impression of a carefree, nomadic lifestyle that is in fact enjoyed at luxury hotels. That'due south the thing about the neo-hippy: all these hobbies and interests can appear somewhat divorced from the ethics – it's veganism without reference to an exploitative dairy industry; meditation without the Buddhism; £40 scented candles, and a very expensive flight to Goa. An old hippy would probably say that the commodification of the counterculture was complete.
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And maybe that'southward fine. Simply it is slightly jarring to notice that the stuff you lot always institute hideously embarrassing is back in mode.
My friend Nell, who says last year'south Helm Fantastic was basically a Hollywood moving picture about her dad, and who once wrote an commodity headlined 27 Signs Yous Were The Victim Of British Hippy Parents (with which I heavily identify), is equally bemused. "There's a big disconnect between people having an alternative harmonious image and how they actually live their lives," she says. "Being a real hippy is crap."
Like me, she was embarrassed by her school packed lunch. "Cold, sloppy vegetable curry. And then a loose handful of raisins. Oh God. I remember the day when I unwrapped my sandwich and thought, 'I might also die.'"
But that was the bespeak, she argues. "Everything y'all had was a bit shit: my wearing apparel from jumble sales; the fact that we cleaned our loo with Ecover or vinegar meant that it didn't smell like a fresh swimming puddle; and the fact that we had to castor our teeth with toothpaste pulverization." As she says this, I get a flashback to the fennel toothpaste and crystal deodorants my mother used to buy. "It was not very nice," Nell says. "Merely in that location was an agreement that you had to sacrifice a certain level of luxury for a higher ideal."
Now there is an unwillingness to make sacrifices in pursuit of those ideals. Meditation apps are a prime example of the modern manner. "That whitewashing of Buddhism takes out all the stuff almost having to look after each other," Nell points out. "It's nearly you, and looking afterwards yourself."
Sarah and Lucy (not their real names) are twins who spent seven years of their babyhood in a Tibetan Buddhist eye. "It was the real bargain," Sarah says. "It was run by a Tibetan tulku and populated by a serious, studious group of generally Europeans, actively engaged in academic and religious study. We were not quite self-sufficient, but grew most of what we ate. Every developed was allocated a task, from gardener to candle-maker, and everything we did was clearly rooted in a conventionalities arrangement, and then our childhood felt structured and calm in many ways. Nosotros were both busy and free, dipping in and out of all the workshops: cheese-making, carpet-weaving, woodwork."
Sarah was conscious from a young age that they were different from other children. "Nosotros went to the local primary schoolhouse, which had a few of united states of america 'hippy' kids alongside the local children who lived in bodily houses furnished, I imagined, with carpet. Meanwhile, we lived in caravans, or in rooms within shared houses." Naturally, they were vegetarian. "I appreciate that the earth has since caught up, but at the time all I wanted was a Fray Bentos pie from a tin can. Merely despite the desperate childish want to fit in, I knew it was amazing and beautiful, even while nosotros were living it."
Lucy didn't experience the same want to fit in. Information technology wasn't until afterward they had left the customs that she realised they had been viewed as different. "Integrating into a more mainstream social structure felt like a baptism of fire, and somewhat heartbreaking, too," she says. "Boyfriend citizens prioritising loving kindness and compassion, no thing how clumsy or messy, could no longer be taken for granted. That'due south what I remember most vividly."
How exercise they experience well-nigh the rising of the neo-hippy? "It is a surprise to reach adulthood and suddenly find that growing upward in a Buddhist centre carries social cache. I am loth to cash in on it; that feels like the antithesis of everything our babyhood instilled in me."
Nell echoes that: "Of course it'south proficient to clothing natural fabrics, it is good to eat organic nutrient, only the reason my parents did all those things was because they were worried about the impact on other people."
You could contend that the ascension of the neo-hippy is simply a reflection of the narcissistic "me, me, me" globe of social media. Erstwhile hippies believed in living economically and communally, bulk-buying wholefoods and sharing the childcare; Nell says that if your bag of lentils fits into your paw, then y'all are definitely not a hippy.
Some neo-hippies are also surprisingly intolerant of other people's lifestyles. My friend Carly experienced this when she moved into a houseshare: "I'm ever being made to feel bad for using a razor or enjoying an egg," she says. She was accused of being insensitive for leaving a non-vegan chocolate cake, a gift from her 87-twelvemonth-old grandmother, out in the kitchen. "I've as well been lectured for being in a monogamous human relationship, instead of enjoying the benefits of polyamory.
"A lot of my family unit are from Cumbria and brand a living building paths and doing farm work. In my optics, they are the best kind of hippies, even if they don't have the hippy signifiers of my housemates – the posters and the dreads. They share resources with their neighbours and are open-minded and welcoming. For many people, beingness a hippy has go more than a badge of honour than a fashion of life. And when y'all're on the wrong terminate of it, it tin can experience less like peace and beloved and more like snobbery."
There's a heavy dollop of image-consciousness thrown in there, besides. I doubtable many neo-hippies wouldn't exist seen dead at Womad, where my mother took me and which Nell attended every twelvemonth – "standing in a field next to your dad, wearing a bumbag and thinking, 'Oh, I've seen enough men from Republic of kazakhstan playing fiddles'". The cultural cribbing attribute grates, too: flaunting a Native American headdress at Burning Man, greeting people with "namaste", calling people and things your "spirit animal".
Simply perhaps I am falling victim to rose-tinted nostalgia for a hippiedom that never was. Millennials are certainly decumbent to idealising their parents' generation: listening to their vinyl and whacking retro filters on their iPhone photographs. Possibly there never was a gilt age. The historian Dominic Sandbrook, author of Country Of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974 seems to think not. "The number of people, certainly in Uk, who genuinely dropped out, lived in communes, slaughtered their own birds – full-on hippies, if y'all like, was pretty small," he tells me. "It was a reasonably center-class, university-educated thing to exercise. This is a massive generalisation, but how many hippies were there in Rotherham in 1970? My guess is, not many. Whereas in Cambridge, Oxford, a lot of people would probably accept identified themselves as hippies."
He argues that today's neo-hippies are not and then dissimilar. "About from the offset, beingness a hippy was virtually an aesthetic, and information technology's an artful that's defined by what you're carrying, what yous're wearing, the decor of your flat, the food y'all're cooking. Everyone's got the same hair, everyone's got the same clothes. I remember information technology'south besides tempting to recall, 'Oh, this is a terrible and commercialised relic of what was one time a pristine and beautiful thing.'"
But didn't they want to modify the world? I asked my mum'due south friend Rose, who dropped out of university in 1969 to go on the hippy trail to Bharat. "Nosotros were idealistic, so yes. We were anti-materialistic and very much seeking out eastern philosophy and ideas. I had been disappointed by my philosophy course at university – information technology was all very dry out and logic-based. This was an explosion of new ideas: Buddhism, Jungian psychology, RD Laing," she explains. "But we didn't do much. Nosotros took likewise many drugs, listened to lots of amazing music and hung out – people from so many different places: Australians, Europeans from all over, Canadians, Americans, including quite a few US typhoon dodgers." Would she concord with Sandbrook that it was a relatively privileged group of people? "On the whole, it was middle class young people who had the luxury of dropping out. It was a precursor to the whole gap yr affair."
Sandbrook argues that it was an inherently elitist motility. "It was about changing the earth through withdrawing from it. That's quite a monastic attitude: the world is decadent so nosotros volition prepare up our own little earth in which nosotros tin alive organically and ethically and claiming capitalism." That involved the kind of material sacrifices Nell talked about; merely as Sandbrook points out, there was much less money effectually in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A lot of people had no central heating. Dropping out involved a level of sacrifice lower than information technology might today.
You could ask: if practising a hippy lifestyle makes people calmer and happier, where's the damage? Many of the younger generation now drawn to it live in stressful urban environments and work in demanding jobs. This was precisely the reason my womb guru Chloe Isidora establish shamanism: because she was burned out and unhappy. "It's about people wanting to feel a sense of purpose, like they are doing something with their life," she tells me. "I felt like there was something huge missing. The word hippy doesn't carp me at all. You lot don't have to be on a spiritual path; you can only have this yearning for fulfilment – that'south what it's really about."
Certainly she's correct that y'all don't have to be a hippy to nourish her womb circle. They are a diverse bunch – four white women, four women of colour, all from different walks of life, and all friendly and keen to find a greater connection to their own bodies. Where's the harm? Isidora says she's thrilled it's fashionable again. "It needs to exist for people to plug in and say, 'Really I desire to do this, and it's not embarrassing, or I experience weird or the odd one out.'"
Despite the scars of her hippy upbringing, Nell agrees. "I don't want to sound likewise cynical," she says. "Womb wisdom is probably really healthy, and to have time to become outside and be in nature is incredibly important. If you need to dress it up, then at least y'all're doing it. It'south then piece of cake for me to be snide because it's kind of old hat to me."
Dropping out completely isn't a popular pick in Britain – not just because of our insane rents and crazy working hours, but because of our climate. "The hippy stronghold was ever California," Sandbrook explains. "This will audio and so banal, but I think it's true: it'southward partly a question of the weather. Information technology's very easy to exist a hippy and alive in a commune if yous're living in sparkling sunshine. If yous're in northward Wales and information technology's pouring with pelting it's a slightly different matter."
Tell me about it.
I think the children of hippies will always struggle to fully embrace the revival, perhaps because so many of us have rebelled in the only way nosotros know how: by becoming desperately conventional. We walk among yous, but we are in disguise.
"When I think of the children of the hippies I know," says Nell, "they ascribe to all the ethics, they volunteer, they get the railroad train instead of flying curt distances, and all that stuff. Just they are wearing clean, smart clothes they bought from a shop, getting married before they have a babe, and buying a firm – people whose parents believed all property is theft."
And conventional though I may be, I confess I enjoyed the womb wisdom circle. I liked Isidora, and when she gave me a little bundle of sage to purify my house, information technology brought dorsum fond memories. In a weird kind of fashion, information technology felt like coming home. Possibly my mum'south incense called-for, and those times she fabricated me exercise yogic chanting, have paid off. Not that long ago I got and so high with my dad that I near – about – could run across what he sees in the Grateful Expressionless. And of course, I piece of work for the Guardian. I'm still waiting for my uterus to go back to me, though.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/18/hippy-back-instagram-not-so-cool-remember-first-time-round
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