Hello wonderful friends,
It has no been three months since I last updated you. What a hectic three months it has been! Writing about everything that happened in this update would be both disjointed and far too long. Instead I will finish sharing my time in Thailand, talking about Songkran week and my two meditation retreats. The next time I find the energy to write again (hopefully sooner than later) I will fill you in on the rest.
Songkran and Friends
My last update was a bit of a downer. Nothing was clicking into place and I felt pulled in too many directions. I ended the update with two wishes for myself: to have fun and connect with friends during Songkran, and to have the time to look inside and learn about myself while at the temples. I'm glad to say both of these endeavors were fairly successful.
Songkran, for those who don't know or remember, is a giant new years water festival celebrated in Thailand. Chiang Mai is known for having some of the most intense Songkran festivities in the country. The entire inner part of the city shuts down and is filled with people who roam around and throw water at each other. Throughout the city the streets are lined with folks who will throw water on bicycles, motorbikes, and cars and they drive by, so one stays wet the entire week. It is one huge long party. Not exactly my scene, but I found my own way to have fun amid the chaos. I didn't take any pictures during Songkran because everything was so wet, but there are many on facebook.
More important for me than the actual Songkran celebration were the connections I was able to make that week. Everyone had time off of work, all normal schedules were off kilter, and I had just finished or given up on pretty much all projects that I had been working on up until then. All of the sudden I began connecting with a few people, all from the frisbee community, in a way that I hadn't succeeded in connecting before. I was developing meaningful relationships, ones that did not exist only on the basis of the circumstance of being in Chiang Mai at the same time, but which I could see myself carrying forward after neither of us were in Thailand. I also began to have much more meaningful and fulfilling conversations with these friends. Conversations that explored topics that interest me on a deeper level, that allowed me to open up, that allowed them to open up, to really share. These exchanges were aided by the fact that some of my friends were going through some emotional breakdowns, and on top of that most of their other friends left town. We all really needed each other. But the circumstances are ultimately somewhat irrelevant, because the authenticity of the bond formed was still genuine. I was also able to spend more time and reconnect with Ellen now that both of us had slightly clearer mental spaces. I felt a huge sense of relief at rediscovering intense interpersonal interactions after several months of semi-connected loneliness.
Doi Suthep
Just as I began having so much fun spending time with friends, I left for my first meditation retreat. This retreat was fairly typical as far as what one finds in Thailand, though I should note for you meditating folks that it was very different from a Goenka retreat. The vipassana retreat is advertised as a meditation course. I went up for ten days. In this course it is expected that one will not speak, read or listen to music. The vast majority of attendees are foreigners (I think about 20-30 people came through while I was there and two were Thai). The day consists of a morning Dharma talk, two meals, an evening chanting session, and a short daily meeting with the teacher to ask questions and receive further instruction. The rest of the day is for independent practice and taking care of other needs. The flexibility means that everyone is there on their own schedule. Most people come for only four days, a handful stay some number between 4-10, and a few do a full 21 day course which ends with a determination. Doi Suthep is a hill that over looks Chiang Mai and the Wat is built right on the hill, with beautiful forest and views all around (see pictures below).
I found the meditation fairly difficult. My greatest challenge was physical. I am not very flexible and have weak muscles for supporting my back so that sitting cross-legged for much of the day led to agonizing pain. The meditation exhausted me physically and mentally. I had not done much meditation in a long time so I found calming my mind very difficult. The teacher was not particularly helpful in answering questions or in providing anything but the most rudimentary instruction. Also his dharma talks were painfully uninspiring. But he was encouraging, and often I think that is the most important thing in a meditation context. My meditation did improve and I often found myself leaving a session with a mixture of calm and bliss that I do not often experience.
I spent time observing the ways my thoughts developed and the directions they took. I had nearly 10 days with almost no external stimuli. I was in a consistent familiar setting, no reading material, no interaction with other people. It led my thoughts to wander deeper and deeper into me. Although I would attempt to not attach myself to my thoughts during mediation, I often gave myself a break and let myself explore the thoughts in between practice sessions. Here are some of the things that came up for me.
Why Meditate?
There are many reasons to mediate, and there are many forms to meditation. During the first few days I asked myself several times why I was up at Doi Suthep and what was inspiring me to meditate in the first place. I also had some friends in Chiang Mai who had never meditated and could not understand the purpose, so I spent some time exploring this question. The teacher at Doi Suthep often referred to meditation as a process of cleaning the mind, and I really enjoyed this idea and began building on it with an analogy to cleaning dishes. Why do we clean dishes? If we are going to use them again, put food on them again, why bother cleaning them out every time? I think most people can answer that question easily. If dishes are not cleaned, food can build up, dry, and become difficult to remove. Certain food remnants can grow mold or rot, rendering other food that comes in contact with them unhealthy, and they can even begin eroding the pot they are attached to. Even if the remnants are still edible, reusing the plate without washing it can lead to all sorts of flavors mixed together which may not actually mix well.
All the same things could be said of our thoughts and emotions contained in our minds. If we simply let them sit and do not clean them up on occasion, they can become very difficult to remove. Certain thoughts and emotions, such as feelings of anger or grief, can taint others that may come in, so that we may be unable to enjoy positive experiences while they are festering in our minds. Even thoughts that are all positive and are not bad to entertain on their own, such as a bike trip I want to go on, a job I want to apply for, a friend I want to see, may develop in unsavory ways and be difficult to work with unless I can think through them one at a time. Unfortunately scrubbing the mind clean is not as straight forward or simple and scrubbing a pot clean, but the results are marvelous, so I am determined to continue to attempt to clear my mind on a regular basis.
Hunger and Fulfillment
I have very strange eating habits that border on disordered eating. I am willing to eat almost anything, I have an obsession with mitigating food waste, and I can eat massive quantities of food. The massive quantities is in part related to problems with stopping. I can be so full that I am in pain, but if there is still food on the table, I instinctively reach for more and have to consciously stop myself. The interesting thing is, I am not an abnormally hungry person. Most of the time, if there is not much food available, I am perfectly content. But if the food is there I don't stop eating it. I bring this up because I think it reflects a different hunger that I have regarding life in general. I am perfectly happy being alone, have spent long stretches of time alone without getting bored, and yet if there are people around who I would like to see I hunger for their company. I am perfectly happy with a small group of friends, and enjoying seeing them day after day, but if I meet new people I hunger for new friendships. I have been in many countries and would love to deepen my knowledge of the places I have already been, but I hunger for new places. I can speak five languages and want to improve my capability in those languages, and yet I hunger to learn more. The difference is, with food, I can usually consult my stomach and determine that the hunger is misplaced. In these other instances, determining the correct balance is more complicated.
I began having a strange phenomenon a few days after arriving at Doi Suthep. While doing my walking meditation, I would begin to shake, my skin would become flush and warm, my eyes would get wet. My body was reacting to fear. Fear? In the middle of a meditation hall, what was I afraid of? I ignored it at first but as it persisted I asked myself "What are you afraid of?" The response I got: "What do you want?" I thought a lot about that question. What do I want? The path and form of the answer which emerged went through many permutations, but eventually I came to a realization. I want fulfillment. I want something to dull the hunger I have for everything around me, to be driven by determination and not by desperation. The next logical question was, how do I achieve this? I spent a lot of time reflecting on my life, trying to pinpoint spans of time in the past when this hunger was less acute. I found a pattern. Whenever I was fully committed to something, fully invested, really loved whatever I was committed to, the hunger subsided. This does not mean I was not motivated to pursue other things, but I pursued them with determination and not desperation, metaphorically, I ate because I was hungry and not because the food was there. I have been able to commit in such a way in romantic relationships, while working with Food not Bombs in Boston, and working for theater when I first started high school, to give a few examples.
This seemed to solve all the problems. I just needed to pick something and commit to it! But two questions arose. The first, if the answer is so easy, why have I lived my life so spread out, across fields of interest, across space, between different people? And what should I chose to actually commit to if I only chose one thing? I realized that I am highly attracted to new and different. It is like the delicious cake with a serving of ice cream or some other delectable dessert. Committing to one thing is like a nutritious main course. The new activities tempt me constantly, but ultimately do not leave me full or feeling all that great, while the commitment may be less dazzling but leaves me feeling healthier and satisfied. As for what to commit to, I'm not in a rush to decide, I think simply focusing on deepening when the opportunity arises is enough. The second question that arose is what to do with my wanderings. In many ways I have my life trained on a path that does not allow for commitments, or at least makes them much more difficult. If I have discovered that commitment is the most important thing for me, why am I putting up as many blocks as possible against it? Should I simply abandon my wanderings and try to settle so that I can commit to something? In the close to two years of wandering, I don't think I have ever been closer to putting down the backpack. But upon further thought I decided that I had made a commitment to this adventure, that I had come up with some kind of minimum framework of what I want to accomplish, and that following through and respecting my commitments should begin with following through on my commitment to this adventure. Maybe, if I can view my wanderings as an experience that stands on its own, my full commitment to that experience can provide me the fulfillment I seek.
People in my Life
One of the wonderful effects of not having external stimuli is that I began going deeper into the past. Usually my thoughts are filled with the people and interactions I have had in the last chunk of time, but the time spent not interacting with people led me to explore my relationships stretching all the way back to early childhood. I was repeatedly overwhelmed with a warm feeling of love from the great friends I have been lucky to have throughout my life. It was a pleasant and consistent reminder of the beautiful interactions I have, and I resolved to be more aware when they happen, and to feel the love as it is being given.
Wat Pa Tam Wua
My second monastery experience was very different from the first. Whereas the meditation center at Wat Doi Suthep is set up with the intent of teaching mostly foreigners how to meditate, Wat Pa Tam Wua is a forest monastery that functions first and for most as a place for meditation and practice for the half dozen monks that live there. The abbot has decided to open it up to other practitioners, so there are usually anywhere from 15-30 people there practicing meditation. The majority are foreigners, but a fair number of Thais come through, and large groups of Thais come in on an irregular basis for a short stay. Life in the monastery does not follow that of a meditation course. We had two meals, two group meditation sessions, and an evening chanting that would be followed by a meditation session. We also had a designated work meditation time. We could chose to practice individually the rest of the time, but there were also many other things to do. Helping clean or work in the kitchen was not expected but highly appreciated, and while some meditators chose to observe silence during their stay or for parts of their stay, most did not and so there was almost always someone interesting to talk to. I frequently found that I was "busy". Because the environment created a much more easily adaptable lifestyle, many people who were there were staying long term. There were some who came in for only a few days, but most would stay at least a week, and about half a dozen were staying for a few months. The monastery had its own small community.
It was fascinating for me to observe the way interpersonal interaction stuck with me through the meditation sessions. The thoughts that would flow through me, whether I succeeded in letting them flow through or became attached to them, were often repetitions or interpretations of the interactions I had in the last few days. While in Doi Suthep I explored deep into myself and my past, in Wat Tam Wua I was steeped in the day to day and meaningless fantasy. And yet life was very pleasant and peaceful. One advantage of this experience is that I got to think more deeply about my social interactions. Having conversations that did not always go smoothly, that occasionally led to conflict, and being able to then spend hours clearing my mind, rinsing myself of the negative or hostile emotions that the interaction created, and evaluating it again, led to some new realizations. There were a number of times where someone was upset or dissatisfied at the end of a conversation I would have with her or him. In those situations, my first reaction was usually to think about how overly sensitive or emotionally immature this person was. After taking the time to meditate and then reflect back on the situation, it was always clear that I had acted inappropriately at some point in the interaction, that I was at least as responsible, if not chiefly responsible, for the negative outcomes. That maybe I am actually the least emotionally mature in the equation. While I have not had the same sort of time and space to analyze every interaction since leaving the Wat, this understanding has stuck with me, and I am much more careful in assessing conflicts with others, much quicker to observe my own actions and reactions.
Perhaps the most exciting moment happened on my way back to Chiang Mai. Wat Pa Tam Wua is 35 kms from Mae Hong Son, a 5-6 hours drive from Chiang Mai along a road that is infamous for its curves. On the way there, I got a seat on a small van as per the recommendation from a friend of mine. Luckily I am over the car sickness I used to suffer from as a kid and so I didn't have any problem on the road. Coming back, there is no station to buy a ticket for a van, so catching one is only possible if there is an open seat, which hardly ever happens. The options are hitchhiking or flagging down the chicken bus the comes by in the morning. I went an hour early before the bus was scheduled and tried to hitchhike but there were few cars and all were going somewhere close, so when the bus came by I hopped on. As I had been warned, the bus was so full that I did not have a seat, so I could alternate between standing and sitting on my bags that I laid down in the isles. The four fans on the bus would sometimes work, and sometimes not, as the temperatures crawled on past 90. While I still had no problems with the bends in the road, others did. There was one woman who managed to vomit for 4 hours straight! The stench of vomit mixed with the scent rising from dozens of tightly squeezed sweaty people, the fumes from the bus, and whatever sweet sticky food someone nearby was eating, combined to create a spectrum of peculiar and ever shifting odors. Occasionally I had to stand up and lift up my bags as some unidentified dark liquid would ooze down the isle from somewhere at the front of the bus.
I felt wonderful.
I was so filled with happiness that I could barely contain myself. Not everyone would picture this as the circumstance that would make one feel wonderful, but I was on an unbeatable high. And I finally realized why. I finally understood why I put myself through these grueling adventures again and again. I am young, I am healthy, I am strong, I am confident, and I want to push my limits. I am a wanderer, and I want to push my limits. I felt so great for the same reason that runners who finish a marathon may feel great, or why climbers who climb a mountain might feel great. There is an exhilaration in pushing oneself further, in trying something that should feel uncomfortable, and realizing that it is really ok. I am not a runner, I am not that interested in how far I can run. Even if I ran some impressive distance I would not feel that same sense of exhilaration. But right now I identify with wandering. As a result hitchhiking in a country where I don't speak the language when it's below freezing, or sleeping at a gas station, or standing on the chicken bus while the woman two seats up vomits for 4 hours straight gives me that high of pushing my boundaries, of going further than I have before. I'm excited to see what sort of adventures I will find next.
What I Have Been and Will Be Doing
I will make an effort to catch up to the present soon, but so far I have not always been so good at that. Until then, here is a brief timeline of what I have done and what the near future looks like.
After coming back from Wat Pa Tam Wua I left Thailand. I landed in LA and roadtripped with my sister to Portland where I spent a week and a half. Then I caught a ride across the country and spent about three weeks in Michigan, after which I drove back to Portland where I am now.
I'll be here through July. August I will spend in the Adirondacks as a logistics leader for Kalamazoo College's LandSea program. Mid-September I will leave for Europe, first going to Germany and visiting my brother in Aachen, and then I'll head to southern France where I'll stay for a few months. Everything after is less certain.
Hope to see you along the way,
It has no been three months since I last updated you. What a hectic three months it has been! Writing about everything that happened in this update would be both disjointed and far too long. Instead I will finish sharing my time in Thailand, talking about Songkran week and my two meditation retreats. The next time I find the energy to write again (hopefully sooner than later) I will fill you in on the rest.
Songkran and Friends
My last update was a bit of a downer. Nothing was clicking into place and I felt pulled in too many directions. I ended the update with two wishes for myself: to have fun and connect with friends during Songkran, and to have the time to look inside and learn about myself while at the temples. I'm glad to say both of these endeavors were fairly successful.
Songkran, for those who don't know or remember, is a giant new years water festival celebrated in Thailand. Chiang Mai is known for having some of the most intense Songkran festivities in the country. The entire inner part of the city shuts down and is filled with people who roam around and throw water at each other. Throughout the city the streets are lined with folks who will throw water on bicycles, motorbikes, and cars and they drive by, so one stays wet the entire week. It is one huge long party. Not exactly my scene, but I found my own way to have fun amid the chaos. I didn't take any pictures during Songkran because everything was so wet, but there are many on facebook.
More important for me than the actual Songkran celebration were the connections I was able to make that week. Everyone had time off of work, all normal schedules were off kilter, and I had just finished or given up on pretty much all projects that I had been working on up until then. All of the sudden I began connecting with a few people, all from the frisbee community, in a way that I hadn't succeeded in connecting before. I was developing meaningful relationships, ones that did not exist only on the basis of the circumstance of being in Chiang Mai at the same time, but which I could see myself carrying forward after neither of us were in Thailand. I also began to have much more meaningful and fulfilling conversations with these friends. Conversations that explored topics that interest me on a deeper level, that allowed me to open up, that allowed them to open up, to really share. These exchanges were aided by the fact that some of my friends were going through some emotional breakdowns, and on top of that most of their other friends left town. We all really needed each other. But the circumstances are ultimately somewhat irrelevant, because the authenticity of the bond formed was still genuine. I was also able to spend more time and reconnect with Ellen now that both of us had slightly clearer mental spaces. I felt a huge sense of relief at rediscovering intense interpersonal interactions after several months of semi-connected loneliness.
Doi Suthep
Just as I began having so much fun spending time with friends, I left for my first meditation retreat. This retreat was fairly typical as far as what one finds in Thailand, though I should note for you meditating folks that it was very different from a Goenka retreat. The vipassana retreat is advertised as a meditation course. I went up for ten days. In this course it is expected that one will not speak, read or listen to music. The vast majority of attendees are foreigners (I think about 20-30 people came through while I was there and two were Thai). The day consists of a morning Dharma talk, two meals, an evening chanting session, and a short daily meeting with the teacher to ask questions and receive further instruction. The rest of the day is for independent practice and taking care of other needs. The flexibility means that everyone is there on their own schedule. Most people come for only four days, a handful stay some number between 4-10, and a few do a full 21 day course which ends with a determination. Doi Suthep is a hill that over looks Chiang Mai and the Wat is built right on the hill, with beautiful forest and views all around (see pictures below).
I found the meditation fairly difficult. My greatest challenge was physical. I am not very flexible and have weak muscles for supporting my back so that sitting cross-legged for much of the day led to agonizing pain. The meditation exhausted me physically and mentally. I had not done much meditation in a long time so I found calming my mind very difficult. The teacher was not particularly helpful in answering questions or in providing anything but the most rudimentary instruction. Also his dharma talks were painfully uninspiring. But he was encouraging, and often I think that is the most important thing in a meditation context. My meditation did improve and I often found myself leaving a session with a mixture of calm and bliss that I do not often experience.
I spent time observing the ways my thoughts developed and the directions they took. I had nearly 10 days with almost no external stimuli. I was in a consistent familiar setting, no reading material, no interaction with other people. It led my thoughts to wander deeper and deeper into me. Although I would attempt to not attach myself to my thoughts during mediation, I often gave myself a break and let myself explore the thoughts in between practice sessions. Here are some of the things that came up for me.
Why Meditate?
There are many reasons to mediate, and there are many forms to meditation. During the first few days I asked myself several times why I was up at Doi Suthep and what was inspiring me to meditate in the first place. I also had some friends in Chiang Mai who had never meditated and could not understand the purpose, so I spent some time exploring this question. The teacher at Doi Suthep often referred to meditation as a process of cleaning the mind, and I really enjoyed this idea and began building on it with an analogy to cleaning dishes. Why do we clean dishes? If we are going to use them again, put food on them again, why bother cleaning them out every time? I think most people can answer that question easily. If dishes are not cleaned, food can build up, dry, and become difficult to remove. Certain food remnants can grow mold or rot, rendering other food that comes in contact with them unhealthy, and they can even begin eroding the pot they are attached to. Even if the remnants are still edible, reusing the plate without washing it can lead to all sorts of flavors mixed together which may not actually mix well.
All the same things could be said of our thoughts and emotions contained in our minds. If we simply let them sit and do not clean them up on occasion, they can become very difficult to remove. Certain thoughts and emotions, such as feelings of anger or grief, can taint others that may come in, so that we may be unable to enjoy positive experiences while they are festering in our minds. Even thoughts that are all positive and are not bad to entertain on their own, such as a bike trip I want to go on, a job I want to apply for, a friend I want to see, may develop in unsavory ways and be difficult to work with unless I can think through them one at a time. Unfortunately scrubbing the mind clean is not as straight forward or simple and scrubbing a pot clean, but the results are marvelous, so I am determined to continue to attempt to clear my mind on a regular basis.
Hunger and Fulfillment
I have very strange eating habits that border on disordered eating. I am willing to eat almost anything, I have an obsession with mitigating food waste, and I can eat massive quantities of food. The massive quantities is in part related to problems with stopping. I can be so full that I am in pain, but if there is still food on the table, I instinctively reach for more and have to consciously stop myself. The interesting thing is, I am not an abnormally hungry person. Most of the time, if there is not much food available, I am perfectly content. But if the food is there I don't stop eating it. I bring this up because I think it reflects a different hunger that I have regarding life in general. I am perfectly happy being alone, have spent long stretches of time alone without getting bored, and yet if there are people around who I would like to see I hunger for their company. I am perfectly happy with a small group of friends, and enjoying seeing them day after day, but if I meet new people I hunger for new friendships. I have been in many countries and would love to deepen my knowledge of the places I have already been, but I hunger for new places. I can speak five languages and want to improve my capability in those languages, and yet I hunger to learn more. The difference is, with food, I can usually consult my stomach and determine that the hunger is misplaced. In these other instances, determining the correct balance is more complicated.
I began having a strange phenomenon a few days after arriving at Doi Suthep. While doing my walking meditation, I would begin to shake, my skin would become flush and warm, my eyes would get wet. My body was reacting to fear. Fear? In the middle of a meditation hall, what was I afraid of? I ignored it at first but as it persisted I asked myself "What are you afraid of?" The response I got: "What do you want?" I thought a lot about that question. What do I want? The path and form of the answer which emerged went through many permutations, but eventually I came to a realization. I want fulfillment. I want something to dull the hunger I have for everything around me, to be driven by determination and not by desperation. The next logical question was, how do I achieve this? I spent a lot of time reflecting on my life, trying to pinpoint spans of time in the past when this hunger was less acute. I found a pattern. Whenever I was fully committed to something, fully invested, really loved whatever I was committed to, the hunger subsided. This does not mean I was not motivated to pursue other things, but I pursued them with determination and not desperation, metaphorically, I ate because I was hungry and not because the food was there. I have been able to commit in such a way in romantic relationships, while working with Food not Bombs in Boston, and working for theater when I first started high school, to give a few examples.
This seemed to solve all the problems. I just needed to pick something and commit to it! But two questions arose. The first, if the answer is so easy, why have I lived my life so spread out, across fields of interest, across space, between different people? And what should I chose to actually commit to if I only chose one thing? I realized that I am highly attracted to new and different. It is like the delicious cake with a serving of ice cream or some other delectable dessert. Committing to one thing is like a nutritious main course. The new activities tempt me constantly, but ultimately do not leave me full or feeling all that great, while the commitment may be less dazzling but leaves me feeling healthier and satisfied. As for what to commit to, I'm not in a rush to decide, I think simply focusing on deepening when the opportunity arises is enough. The second question that arose is what to do with my wanderings. In many ways I have my life trained on a path that does not allow for commitments, or at least makes them much more difficult. If I have discovered that commitment is the most important thing for me, why am I putting up as many blocks as possible against it? Should I simply abandon my wanderings and try to settle so that I can commit to something? In the close to two years of wandering, I don't think I have ever been closer to putting down the backpack. But upon further thought I decided that I had made a commitment to this adventure, that I had come up with some kind of minimum framework of what I want to accomplish, and that following through and respecting my commitments should begin with following through on my commitment to this adventure. Maybe, if I can view my wanderings as an experience that stands on its own, my full commitment to that experience can provide me the fulfillment I seek.
People in my Life
One of the wonderful effects of not having external stimuli is that I began going deeper into the past. Usually my thoughts are filled with the people and interactions I have had in the last chunk of time, but the time spent not interacting with people led me to explore my relationships stretching all the way back to early childhood. I was repeatedly overwhelmed with a warm feeling of love from the great friends I have been lucky to have throughout my life. It was a pleasant and consistent reminder of the beautiful interactions I have, and I resolved to be more aware when they happen, and to feel the love as it is being given.
Wat Pa Tam Wua
My second monastery experience was very different from the first. Whereas the meditation center at Wat Doi Suthep is set up with the intent of teaching mostly foreigners how to meditate, Wat Pa Tam Wua is a forest monastery that functions first and for most as a place for meditation and practice for the half dozen monks that live there. The abbot has decided to open it up to other practitioners, so there are usually anywhere from 15-30 people there practicing meditation. The majority are foreigners, but a fair number of Thais come through, and large groups of Thais come in on an irregular basis for a short stay. Life in the monastery does not follow that of a meditation course. We had two meals, two group meditation sessions, and an evening chanting that would be followed by a meditation session. We also had a designated work meditation time. We could chose to practice individually the rest of the time, but there were also many other things to do. Helping clean or work in the kitchen was not expected but highly appreciated, and while some meditators chose to observe silence during their stay or for parts of their stay, most did not and so there was almost always someone interesting to talk to. I frequently found that I was "busy". Because the environment created a much more easily adaptable lifestyle, many people who were there were staying long term. There were some who came in for only a few days, but most would stay at least a week, and about half a dozen were staying for a few months. The monastery had its own small community.
It was fascinating for me to observe the way interpersonal interaction stuck with me through the meditation sessions. The thoughts that would flow through me, whether I succeeded in letting them flow through or became attached to them, were often repetitions or interpretations of the interactions I had in the last few days. While in Doi Suthep I explored deep into myself and my past, in Wat Tam Wua I was steeped in the day to day and meaningless fantasy. And yet life was very pleasant and peaceful. One advantage of this experience is that I got to think more deeply about my social interactions. Having conversations that did not always go smoothly, that occasionally led to conflict, and being able to then spend hours clearing my mind, rinsing myself of the negative or hostile emotions that the interaction created, and evaluating it again, led to some new realizations. There were a number of times where someone was upset or dissatisfied at the end of a conversation I would have with her or him. In those situations, my first reaction was usually to think about how overly sensitive or emotionally immature this person was. After taking the time to meditate and then reflect back on the situation, it was always clear that I had acted inappropriately at some point in the interaction, that I was at least as responsible, if not chiefly responsible, for the negative outcomes. That maybe I am actually the least emotionally mature in the equation. While I have not had the same sort of time and space to analyze every interaction since leaving the Wat, this understanding has stuck with me, and I am much more careful in assessing conflicts with others, much quicker to observe my own actions and reactions.
Perhaps the most exciting moment happened on my way back to Chiang Mai. Wat Pa Tam Wua is 35 kms from Mae Hong Son, a 5-6 hours drive from Chiang Mai along a road that is infamous for its curves. On the way there, I got a seat on a small van as per the recommendation from a friend of mine. Luckily I am over the car sickness I used to suffer from as a kid and so I didn't have any problem on the road. Coming back, there is no station to buy a ticket for a van, so catching one is only possible if there is an open seat, which hardly ever happens. The options are hitchhiking or flagging down the chicken bus the comes by in the morning. I went an hour early before the bus was scheduled and tried to hitchhike but there were few cars and all were going somewhere close, so when the bus came by I hopped on. As I had been warned, the bus was so full that I did not have a seat, so I could alternate between standing and sitting on my bags that I laid down in the isles. The four fans on the bus would sometimes work, and sometimes not, as the temperatures crawled on past 90. While I still had no problems with the bends in the road, others did. There was one woman who managed to vomit for 4 hours straight! The stench of vomit mixed with the scent rising from dozens of tightly squeezed sweaty people, the fumes from the bus, and whatever sweet sticky food someone nearby was eating, combined to create a spectrum of peculiar and ever shifting odors. Occasionally I had to stand up and lift up my bags as some unidentified dark liquid would ooze down the isle from somewhere at the front of the bus.
I felt wonderful.
I was so filled with happiness that I could barely contain myself. Not everyone would picture this as the circumstance that would make one feel wonderful, but I was on an unbeatable high. And I finally realized why. I finally understood why I put myself through these grueling adventures again and again. I am young, I am healthy, I am strong, I am confident, and I want to push my limits. I am a wanderer, and I want to push my limits. I felt so great for the same reason that runners who finish a marathon may feel great, or why climbers who climb a mountain might feel great. There is an exhilaration in pushing oneself further, in trying something that should feel uncomfortable, and realizing that it is really ok. I am not a runner, I am not that interested in how far I can run. Even if I ran some impressive distance I would not feel that same sense of exhilaration. But right now I identify with wandering. As a result hitchhiking in a country where I don't speak the language when it's below freezing, or sleeping at a gas station, or standing on the chicken bus while the woman two seats up vomits for 4 hours straight gives me that high of pushing my boundaries, of going further than I have before. I'm excited to see what sort of adventures I will find next.
What I Have Been and Will Be Doing
I will make an effort to catch up to the present soon, but so far I have not always been so good at that. Until then, here is a brief timeline of what I have done and what the near future looks like.
After coming back from Wat Pa Tam Wua I left Thailand. I landed in LA and roadtripped with my sister to Portland where I spent a week and a half. Then I caught a ride across the country and spent about three weeks in Michigan, after which I drove back to Portland where I am now.
I'll be here through July. August I will spend in the Adirondacks as a logistics leader for Kalamazoo College's LandSea program. Mid-September I will leave for Europe, first going to Germany and visiting my brother in Aachen, and then I'll head to southern France where I'll stay for a few months. Everything after is less certain.
Hope to see you along the way,
Doi Suthep - My room
Doi Suthep - Meditation hall
Doi Suthep - view of the retreat area
Wat Pa Tam Wua
Wat Pa Tam Wua - working meditation
Wat Pa Tam Wua - on the trail up the mountain
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