Tiruvannamalai attracts all types, from serious Indian pilgrims who will go for days without sleep to walk around a holy mountain, to ecstatic Western hippies with their chakras vibrating perhaps a little too high on the Richter scale. It’s a stunning array of characters, many of whom could inspire entire whole new definitions in the DSM. I think this week we may have met a reincarnation of Rasputin. Matthew had been invited to some guy’s satsang (spiritual gathering) by a French woman he’d chatted with, and she hadn’t said much more than “he helps you get rid of your beliefs about…
Category:
Mind
Matthew and I have been staying at ashram housing since we arrived in Tiruvannamalai. It’s in high demand, and is by donation, so you can only stay a limited stretch; we’ve been allowed a week, which is pretty good, partly because we’ve also both volunteered to help with the website a little while we’re here. We’re given three meals a day (plus tea, of course). We have a little room, sparse and bare, with two fairly hard single beds and a small desk, in the most desirable section of ashram housing; private, closest to the mountain, furthest from the street.…
There’s a good article on Matador Network that came out last month, titled “We need to stop pretending travel will fix all of our problems”, with some very valid points. The article looks at, first of all, the motivation behind world travel: We Millennials grew during an explosion of American consumerism, and we saw that acquiring more and more things did not make people happier. So we decided instead to acquire experiences. There’s some research that this will, in fact, make us happier… But traveling more has not meant that millennials are not still consumers like their parents. It just means they consume different things.…
Ubud is considered one of the yoga hotspots of Southeast Asia. I stopped by the Yoga Barn, which seemed to be the best-known yoga studio in the area, and found that their name is a drastic understatement: it’s more of a yoga industrial complex, with “six yoga studios, a ten room Guest House, a Healing Center with cleansing and colonics, an Ayurvedic Massage & Treatment Center, a branch of the Bali Yoga Shop, an outdoor amphitheater with a Juice Bar as well as the garden branch of Ubud’s local restaurant gem, Kafe”, all according to their website. It’s massive and…
The month at the Krishnamurti Educational Centre is almost over. It’s back to Vancouver soon for two weeks, probably hectic weeks of trying to get everything done before traveling (including, quite possibly, rearranging most of my travel bookings thus far). I have no idea what this is going to be like for my brain, after a month of relative isolation and the vastness of the sky and sea and moments of intense inner turmoil along with intense inner stillness. I feel like this place is a refuge, in its own special timezone, and I’m so grateful to the people who…