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Published: August 15th 2006
Arghhh I spent so long typing out my last blog and so I thought you were all up to date... and then I get all these emails saying that it was cut off midsentence! Sigh. And now I'm not even in Ko Tao anymore so everything will have lost its freshness. Oh, well. I'll try again.
And about the meditation retreat blog... I keep adding to it and changing it and then I get fed up and think "This is impossible to describe!" But there is still so much more to tell! So if you would to know more about it, you can ask me and I'm sure I'll be able to give you a clearer idea of what everything was like. I know you're all thinking, "What? Dawn? Able to express herself more clearly with speaking than with writing? Impossible!" But it's true. I guess I'm turning over a new leaf 😊
So here goes, starting with what I already wrote, and then changing tenses after about the third paragraph:
Maybe if I follow my resolution made during the meditation retreat to live up to my name more, I will become more graceful and less clumsy. My situation at the present moment reminds me of last summer when I sprained my ankle just before getting to Venice, ironic because it was a walking city and I couldn't walk. Venice is still on my list of places to go because I don't feel like I really saw the city much at all. And now I think Ko Tao will stay on that list as well. Ironically, I am on Ko Tao, one of the world's foremost scuba diving sites... and I can't go in the water!
I'll back up a little...
I arrived at this tiny tropical paradise on Saturday afternoon. Most of the bungalows on the island were full, so I had to share with 2 Austrian girls -- which was fine with me since then we could split the 200B three ways, making it about $2 each per night! Right down a little trail from our bungalow up on the hill (on stilts) is a rocky beach with warm warm water where you can sit in the water and see the fish swimming around you. Wonderful fish, colourful fish, tropical fish! Parrotfish of every size and colour combination (my favorite), triggerfish, every fish you can imagine. A little private Hanauma Bay. It is truly a paradise. Now to where it went wrong...
After the meditation retreat, I was no sure whether I wanted to break the peace by diving, a highly self-centred activity. So I had researched other things on the island as well -- a yoga class, some hiking in the interior jungle, reading on the beach. I read in my guidebook about a lookout point called Two View where you could see the entire island spreading around you... I knew I could have great fun even without diving, and possibly be more relaxed.
(Now here I am in the future looking back) This decision not to dive vanished the instant I first put my face into the water snorkelling in front of my bungalow. I remembered the magic of the underwater world and within seconds my mind was whirling with thoughts of taking my Advanced Open Water Diver course here, then planning a vacation next summer where I could do all the first aid training, and then the next summer in Indonesia to take my Divemaster course and then be able to work on one of these islands leading dives!! (I tend to be a bit extreme with my ambitions).
I'm also a bit stubborn... and so even though I had decided to spend the majority of my days underwater, I was determined to do that hike up to Two View. That was Saturday night. I planned to wake up early on Sunday, do the hike in the morning, work up an appetite going up and eat at the mountaintop cafe, and then hike down to a different village and spend the afternoon searching out a good dive school, then back to the bungalow for more snorkelling in the evening. A perfect, action-packed day. Meditating seemed to be in the very distant past.
But maybe my subconscious, or my body, or fate, or God didn't want me to lose my peace because everything about this hike seemed to go wrong! First I asked at the reception place how to get to the trailhead and they told me it was impossible to walk there; I had to take the taxi from the hotel. I didn't really believe that it was impossible, but I conceded and waited for the first taxi, at 8:30am (I had been planning to start the hike at 6:00!). The taxi was late and didn't come until 9:00 and the driver didn't speak English at all so I had to try to explain in Thai that I wanted to do this hike. First he told me that this taxi only went straight to town, but I knew from talking to the others that it DID go past the trailhead, so I insisted.
He grumpily agreed and maybe out of spite, or maybe because he really didn't understand me, he dropped me off in the middle of nowhere. I couldn't see the trailhead anywhere, so when an Italian couple on a motorcyle drove by, I waved them down and asked them to show me where I was on the map. By this time it was getting quite hot and I had forgotten my hat (another bad sign, and I ended up with a sunburn after) so I agreed when the woman offered to get off and wait at the side of the road as her husband drove me up to the trailhead.
As I was getting on the motorcycle (oh, so carelessly!), I slightly touched my leg to the muffler. It hurt, but I pulled it away instantly and bit my lip, not saying anything to the man. After all, he was being nice enough to drive me to the trail -- I didn't want to start complaining! So I practiced the skills I learned at the meditation retreat for separating the mind from bodily pain, since making the mind suffer in addition to the body by thinking, "Oh it hurts!" or "Poor me!" just doubles the suffering!
He drove me to what looked like the start of a trail so I got off and started walking. As I walked, the mind-focussing skills made me almost completely forgot about my leg and I was soon glad that I had decided to do the hike because it was shady and cool in the rainforest and there were some spectacular views of the island.
But I kept walking and it got hotter and hotter and I couldn't see the restaurant anywhere. At a certain point the trail just sort of... trailed off into nothing. So I stubbornly started to bushwhack. After about a half hour of bushwhacking and not finding even the semblance of another trail, I stopped to consider my options. As I was considering, I looked down at my leg. It was bubbling and looked absolutely disgusting. The burn was bigger than I had previously thought it was and my whole leg seemed to be throbbing. This was shock enough, but then a HUGE snake crossed the trail in front of me.
I don't consider myself to be particularly afraid of snakes, but that was just the final straw for me. I turned around and whacked my way back in the direction I had come. Many, many scratches and mosquito bites later, I found the main trail and fairly ran back down to the road. By this time it was VERY hot and my leg was looking worse and worse. It didn't hurt much, but it looked bad.
When I got back down to the main road, a Spanish guy on a motorcycle stopped to see if I needed a ride (people are just so friendly!) but he didn't speak English, Thai, or Italian, and I didn't speak Spanish. So I just pointed to my leg and got on, hoping he would understand that I needed a doctor. Luckily he did, and he dropped me off at the pharmacy.
I tried to go in casually so the doctor wouldn't overreact (Thais tend to worry a lot about little things), but it didn't work. She saw my leg and immediately made me lie down and started to work on it, shaking her head and looked very worried. After she had cleaned it and bandaged everything up, sold me all the supplies I would need to clean and bandage it myself and then told me sternly, "No water touch leg. No swim. No sand. No dive. Clean two times day. Tomorrow come back."
I looked at her incredulously, but I don't think I really believed her. I went to a few dive shops and when I found what looked like a good one, I asked all the information and was just about to pay for the course when I remembered the leg (I had forgotten it already) and asked them if there was anything they could do to waterproof it for me while I dived. They looked at me as if I was crazy, and I soon understood that in tropical countries, infection can occur very easily and if it got infected, I might have a terrible scar forever. They also said that the fish love healing tissue and if I went diving I would have a million little fish nibbling away at my leg, making it impossible to heal.
I left that shop and was truly devastated. I walked down the road trying my hardest not to wallow in self-pity, but it wasn't working. As I stumbled aimlessly along the road from one village to the next, the sun beating mercilessly down, I saw a small wooden sign with the white-painted letters: YOGA. My feet turned into the walkway without my mind really noticing, and soon I was at the door peering in at a woman sitting on the floor making jewellry.
As I stood there, I saw a little tiny sign on the door advertising: Unlimited Yoga! Accomodation! Personal guidance! Ask Mira!
So when she came to the door, I said, "Are you Mira?" and she answered that yes, she was. She was a tiny blonde woman, smiling and muscular (I found out later that she was from Holland and had lived on the island for 3 years and was not allowed back into Holland because of tax evasion). I asked her about the sign on the door and she looked at me sternly. "I do NOT offer accomodation alone. That is a very intense program. It's a week of immersion in yoga." I told her, disappointed, that I only had four days left on the island but that I had burned my leg and couldn't go in the water and had just finished a meditation retreat and would love to learn more about yoga and meditation. She thought for a moment and seemed to approve. The next class was in five minutes (good timing!) so she asked me if I wanted to come in to try it out. I wasn't wearing the right clothes for doing yoga but she handed me some of hers to wear without batting an eye.
Her style of teaching was so different from the yoga classes I have been to before, in gyms with fluoresent lights and lots of sweaty people trying to get a workout. She took a very spiritual approach, with a lot of focus on energy and union of body and mind. The school was lit very discreetly and she lit incense. She did some chanting and a lot of breathing. It was great.
And so it was that the next morning I was packing my gear from the bungalow into the loft of the yoga school, my outlook on the leg situation highly improved. The room was fabulous! It had a balcony with a nice big hammock looking out over the beach, a window seat in one corner, a huge bed, yoga mats on the floor, and meditation cushions in every corner. Mira didn't even stay in the studio at night because she had a house in the valley further away, so after the last class of the day, I had the entire house to myself, with a key so I could come and go as I wanted. It was amazing!
So the next four days, I barely knew I was on a tropical island. It rained a lot, so I wouldn't have been able to do any beach-going anyways, but with Mira there was never a moment of rest! The first class of the day was from 8 until 10. Then she would take me to a cafe for tea, fruit, and yoghurt, or to the Indian restaurant down the road for Chai. She would bring along her big yoga books and teach me about the benefits of the postures, the history of yoga and meditation, the five points to a yogic lifestyle (proper exercise, proper breathing, proper relaxation, proper diet, and positive thinking and meditation), meditation techniques, Hinduism, her yoga experience, her travel experience, her life experience... anything, really! I just tried to absorb as much as possible.
Then she would take me back to the school for the 12:00 until 2:00 class, which was usually the most intense one of the day. After that she would take me to one of her favourite restaurants for lunch and if she had any errands to do, she would take me along as well, talking all the while! She was a fabulous teacher -- all I had to do was ask one tiny question and soon I would have all the information I wanted about that and anything related to that. If she didn't have anything to do in town, we would just sit in the yoga school and practice or do breathing exercises together or just sit on the floor reading books about yoga.
Back to the school for the 4 to 6 class, and then sometimes she would take me on the beach or for dinner somewhere to continue the lessons. Other days she would go home and I would have the evening to myself to find dinner and walk along the beach. She always told me which postures to practice before the next class, but I was so exhausted from all the yoga that I usually fell asleep while I was trying to practice the lying-down postures.
She was very excited that I was a musician because she could teach me all the Sanskrit chants that they learned in India where she did her yoga teacher training. She told me so much about this school that by the end, I was convinced that I wanted to go to India to become a yoga teacher (I still am, actually. Who says I can't be a yoga teacher and a singer? I think they go well together). When nobody else showed up for the classes (which happened often), I got a private lesson that was usually focussed more on breathing than the other classes were. She said that other students often got bored and annoyed when they came for a workout and ended up sitting and breathing for 45 minutes of the class, but she loved to do the breathing exercises and I thought they were incredibly useful for both meditation and singing.
I can't believe how lucky I was to come upon this opportunity... I never could get really excited about the yoga I've done before, because I am slightly competitive (as some of you may know...) and in yoga classes I was never one of the more flexible ones. But here, having three classes a day, I couldn't help but to improve! By the second day, even, she was saying, "Okay Dawn, you can go ahead and do the next step while I help the others with alignment," or "If you're ready you can try the full bind," and more often than not, I felt ready! It was amazing!
I kept thinking back to grade 9 Phys Ed when we had a "flexibility test." It was the first thing I had ever failed in my entire life... I think I got four out of ten. I was hysterical, asking the teacher if she was going to count it on our report cards and when I found out that she was, I was so upset! I thought, "You can't grade someone on their flexibility! They can't help that!" Now, though, I know that you CAN help that! I never dreamed that I could do some of the things that she gently coaxed me into, and now I am effectively addicted. The breathing exercises (pranayama) in particular are incredible. After doing 45 minutes (and you don't even notice the time passing!) it's like an energy zing for the rest of the day.
Living with Mira, I felt like a local on the island, separate from all the tourists that were everywhere shopping and diving and sunbathing. She took me to cafes and restaurants where only the locals went, her favorite shops, and everywhere I rode on the back of her little scooter. I think I grew at least an inch taller after all my shoulderstands and with her as an inspiration, I continued my meditation practice and became ever more convinced that I can do whatever I set my mind to do!
Even more, I believe fully that certain things are meant to happen. On the second day I was there, my watch quit. So I wore a beaded bracelet instead and found I didn't need to know what time it was. On my last day I said to her, "Oh, I wish that I could have caught that night boat when I came to Ko Tao so I could have had one day longer to do yoga!" And she said, "You would never have found me if you had caught that night boat. You would never have burned your leg." And I realized that it was true! Even if I had done exactly the same things as I did and made the same decisions one day earlier, that Italian couple would not have come along on their motorcycle and everything would have been different! Life is crazy.
Here is a poem that Mira gave to me as inspiration:
"I Am Already" by Danna Faulds
One flow of
energy and breath
connects the full
depth and breadth
of consciousness.
There is nowhere to
go but here, no time
but now, no why or
how or maybe -- just
the knowing, simple
and complete, that I
am already what I
thought I had to seek.
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Grandma
non-member comment
Diving
You sure are some brave kid (adult) that retreat sounded soooo difficult.Hope you are enjoying your time in Koh Tao and if you can by all means go diving. You are in the best place in the world. Looking foreward to seeing your pretty little face when you get home. Love Grandma