So this is the Thailand everyone was talking about....

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I've just arrived in Bangkok a few hours ago. I am waiting for Jess to get in later on this afternoon and we take off for Cambodia tomorrow. Only the promise of Van Garsse could have dragged me away from Koh Phangnan, which is now one of my favorite places on earth. I've spent the last five days at the Sanctuary, a yoga and detox resort on Haad Tien in Koh Phangan, which is a tiny little beach on a secluded part of the island. I ran into some friends from Tefl and the Sanctuary and spent a great few days with these girls just relaxing and doing yoga. I went straight there after finishing eight days in a silent meditation retreat in Surat Thani. This place has a backpacker commune type vibe that is by far the most comforting and inviting thing i've felt since being in Thailand. It was the perfect place for my mental detox from the previous week. I finished teaching almost three weeks ago. I came straight down to Koh Phangnan and spent a week doing yoga on the Southwest part of the islands. The beaches are spectacular here. The perfect white sand and palm trees type stuff that you look at in magazines and dream about. I had a private yoga sessions in tiny bungalow overlooking the jungle for ten dollars. It was exactly what I needed after teaching and prior to entering into the retreat at the monastery. The only unfortunate thing was that the guy I rented my motorcycle from charged me $250 dollars for the crash, which was basically three small scratches. He said he had to replace all the parts because he couldn't paint them over. I couldn't believe it. I was sobbing handing him the money. In talking to people, apparantly that's how they make there money because they take your passport as a deposit so there is nothing you can do but pay. I came back to my little bungalow to where the thai owner was giving me a ride. Seeing my face and hearing the story she told me "Is good you go to monastery. You think about that man and something bad happen to him. Is karma. I buddha (i.e. buddhist) I know."

I'm not sure how to start describing my time at Suan Mokk Hermitage. It was one of the most intense and personally necessary experiences i'm sure i'll ever have in my life. To paint a picture, the monastery is built about two kilometres back into the coconut groves. About eighty people came to join the retreat. It's a beautiful setting with the open air meditation hall looking out onto a pond surrounded by palm trees. The point of the retreat is a type of introduction to buddhism and meditation. Fully silent except for personal interviews with the monks and nuns, it's meant to be a time to look inside your self and clear out the mental clutter. Every day we got up at four a.m., which is surprisingly easy as you sleep on concrete beds with a wooden pillow (no joke). The mornings were the times I loved the best. You all gather under the stars in the hall lit by candles and listen to a morning reading then meditate for a half hour. You then do yoga for an hour and half as the sun comes up before the first dharma talk of the day. Breakfast follows at 8am then on to chores. I had sweeping meditation hall three. Then comes time for the hot spring, which is a natural one by the dorms. It reminded me of that scene in O'Brother Where Art Thou, as it's ten women in sarongs laying and sitting peacefully on the rocks. A totally surreal scene. At 10am was another dharma talk and walking and sitting meditation before lunch. An hour of free time before another talk and mediatation session. Tea at 6pm and hot springs. This time lit by the lanterns and the moon. We didn't eat in between after noon and before dawn as the monks did, but it was surprisingly easy. In knowing there is no option of food and slowing the mental functions down through meditation, I wasn't actually hungry, which I know for me is astonishing. The meals are also all vegetarian and for the week prior, I also ate no meat or seafood at the yoga retreat. I've never felt better actually and am going to see how long i'll go with this. I'm not totally dedicated to the idea, but for now the idea of meat holds no appeal. That said, the idea of not having Thanksgiving turkey is a sick joke so there is a definite end point in the future. I also haven't had alcohol or caffeine for three weeks and counting. I'm sure all of you are now not believing any of this given my track record, but it's true. Back to the retreat, after dinner was an hour and half of meditation, which was one hour of sitting and a half hour of group walking around the pond. I normally skipped the last hour of this as eight hours of meditation a day was pushing it for me. Going from zero to 2000 was a little intense.

Now onto my experience in this strange world. I met a few people in a hostel two nights before the retreat started and we headed over early because you could stay there for free to pre-register. On the day before the retreat began, everyone who was participating came to register. Such a cool mix and so refreshing after not meeting a lot or the kind of people I was hoping to meet after the past few months. I couldn't talk to enough of them fast enough. It was like jumping into a giant waterfall after months in the desert. I literally wanted to drink them up, which was a tease at the silence began at 7pm that night, but going into it together started it off on a really good note. From then on however, everyone starts on their own journey. It's strange to be around so many people in relatively close quarters and have no real contact with anyone. The first three days were emotionally incredibly volatile. Being in your own mind and completely focusing on your thoughts brings up a lot of stuff you've tried to ignore for a long time. Meditation starts to clear out the cobwebs which is scary and wonderful. I felt really alive and began to see the ways in which i've kept myself in a hold pattern for a long time. At the same time that you are realizing a lot of things you want to change or strengthen in your life, the dharma talks were teaching about the buddhist way of life. It was really interesting to see how I could interpret a lot of the buddhist ideology into a productive strategy for my life, but overall I was surprised at how negative I thought the view of true teravada buddhism is. The concept is basically that all of life is suffering (dukkha). Allowing yourself to attach to emotions, people or things will only bring pain as desire either brings a lack of attainment or depression after the attainment. I see a lot of truth in this but in strict buddhist terms this means detaching to the point of maintaining a total neutral state. Reality should be seen in unobjective terms. Life is just a process that if we allow ourselves to jump onto will only hurt us in the end. I couldn't totally drink the kool-aid on this idea. I took to heart the notion that past mental debts have been paid and that you are only hurting yourself by attaching to the past or future, but I can't imagine my life without my heart in my relations, both familial and friendships. Buddhists advocate loving everyone equally, with closer bonds formed to your family out of "duty." What really got me was one of the monks response to the idea of falling in love in that you don't. You have a physiological reaction which is lust and you form a partnership. I understand this in the theoretical, but I can't give up the idea of being in love, be it with a partner, my friends or my family. If that means deluding myself as to the reality of life, then i'm okay with that.

As the days went on and we got deeper into the buddhist structure, it was strange to be listening to how the monks and nuns live thier lives within this framework. I began to see such parallels between buddhism and christianity and religions in general. Heaven and Hell as we know it in christian terms exists in buddhism, but on earth in the karma of your actions. You are the heir to them: bad brings bad and good brings good, which I agree with. The fanatical aspect is there as well. They described how one should look at pictures of dead corpses in order to be turned off of sexual feelings or imagining excrement in order to break addiction to food. Pretty intense stuff. I think a lot of people who say they "identify with buddhism," don't have a full concept of what the basis of the religion is. It is the idea of universal love of all beings, but in a detached fashion. It is the letting go of believing in the world as we know it and seeking to exist on a peripheral plane, so as not to feel the pain that life brings. The kind of happiness and bliss that is said to be attained once this point is reached is more profound than anything we know of earthly love. I respect this concept, but have no desire to seek it out. A slight lessening of the concept that I took to heart was to use your loved ones as pillars: there to lean on for enjoyment or when you are too tired to stand, but not to lean too hard lest you forget how to be on your own two feet. Another concept that I disagreed with about the idea of deattaching from the world meant deattaching from what's going on around the world. It was explained that it is your duty to help people if you can, but that only applied to when the need was in front of you. The head monk told us that we should not concern ourselves with wars and violence against communities as we could do nothing to change it and it would only cause suffering in our own hearts. I was actually really shocked and disturbed to hear this. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do with my life and who I want to be at the retreat and i've realized that i've spent so much time thinking on such a big picture and feeling so overwhelmed by how amazing other people are and what they do for themselves and for the world that I forgot to realize that it takes small steps to get to the big ones. I've wanted to skip all of the steps, take on the galaxy rather than the constellations, and that has only led to doing nothing from a feeling of futility in the effort. It helped a lot to bring it all into perspective and to think about work on oneself and within one's social sphere and community is good enough and is a contribution. If that leads to bigger things then great, but one is no better or worse than the other as long as its done with the same intention. As a focus grows, so the does the scope of the community that you can effect. For some reason coming to that realization and really understanding it after hearing it so many times has been more impactful than anything else. I feel a lot more at peace with where I am in life and timeframes, or lack thereof, now. I read this quote that the teacher can't teach anything that the student isn't ready to learn and I understand that now. I don't think I was really ready to think about a lot of this stuff until now. However, all that said, I still believe in being informed and being aware of the world community at large. Everyone can do something to effect change, whether it be large or small. To advocate turning a blind eye because you can't "fix" a situation is just wrong in my eyes. For a philosophy which advocates letting go of the ego in order to be enlightened, it seems like a selfish concept to me. I just watched the documentary by Micheal Franti (of Spearhead) called "I know i'm not alone" - go rent this. It's really impactful.

I went through some pretty high highs in which I looked around and saw where I was and everyone I was surrounded with as the an unbelieveably high form of beauty. I felt clearheaded and more calm than I ever had in my life. I also went through times where I looked around and it seemd like we were in an insane asylum and that we were just robots, all sitting down and shutting off to give our batteries a rest. The insane part came during the walking meditation mostly. They teach you to be present and aware of your steps and the feeling of the ground beneath your feet in order to connect with the earth. Some people took this very literally and were slowly "lifting, raising, pressing" like it was brain science. To see eighty people doing this in silence around a pond makes you wonder either a. where the video cameras are because you are clearly on Punk'd or b.that you've completely gone off the deep end. You weren't supposed to read or write during the stay, but I broke that on day three. I only read a book on Buddhism and "Be Here Now," which my dad gave me as one of his favorite books from the seventies. I just needed a lot more clarity and explanation than I was getting in the talks and i'm glad I did it. It helped me sort through a lot of the stuff going on in my head. I had read "Be Here Now" before, but I definitely didn't understand or absorb it until now. It was the interpretation that I could believe in: The concept that when you get to the core of all religions, you realize that they are the same and that the main concept is to explore the spirituality in yourself. To open yourself to see life in all its full beautiful colors.

The best part of the experience was by far the loving, kindness meditation. This is where a wonderful little thai woman came and gave us really sweet and uplifting talks about the ability to fill your heart with love for the world around you and projecting that love through meditation. It might sound really hokey but it works. I realized that today when I took an eight hour trip on three buses and a ferry to get to koh phangnan and didn't get annoyed or angry once. This is a giant aberration from my normal response to traveling in Thailand. I've realized how much of my life i've spent tense or annoyed when things aren't in accordance with how I want them to go. It seems so silly to waste that time anymore. During the meditation, i thought about the carebears. I don't know how many people remember them, but they are the cartoon bears from when we were kids. They used to fight evil with the "carebear stare" where they shone love from their hearts and it overcame everything. Couldn't get the image out of my head and it always made me laugh thinking about all these people slowly walking and carebear staring.

It's funny that going to a buddhist retreat has made me less religious, but I think it has in the way that the concept of "God" now seems more to me as a general idea of hope. Each religion might have a different creation myth or philosophy behind it, but I think that the same concept pervades that people want to believe in something. I like the idea of seeing God around you and in you, in nature and yourself. Becoming one with this God means finding the balance in life where the person you are, the work and things that you do and the way you treat others in is harmony with the world as a whole. It makes this whole life thing a whole lot less overwhelming. I've had this idea in my head for so long that i've been so confused and seemingly directionless because i've been searching for something...a something that I had no clue what it was, but would make everything fit and make sense finally. That ii'd have this kind of "aha" moment that would just say go and my life would make sense. I've realized that the fact is that we are who we are, we are in control of the lives we lead and every day is a step toward the next. If you live the one you're in well enough then the next will work itself out. Worrying about days gone by or days to come is pointless when you've got the day you're in on your plate to deal with.

So, for those of you who've made it through this massive diatribe, I hope a little has made sense. It makes sense to me, but then again, I just spent over a week sitting on a pillow for eight hours a day so my line of thinking is probably slightly off kilter.

Will try to get to computer and say a joint hello with the illustrious ms. jess. I am so excited to see her and start on our adventure...

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