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 …
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perspective
The first few days of living outside the Sri Ramanasramam at our new apartment felt a bit like I’d been pushed out of the nest or kicked out of heaven and rudely thrown back into regular life despite my wishes. Immediately on reconnecting to my clients I learned that two of my projects had gone into a bit of a crisis mode that’ll keep me working heavily at the computer through most of December, cutting back drastically on my available time for meditation, self-inquiry, blogging, and exploring Tiruvannamalai. And nice and new as our apartment is, a new construction site …
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. …
Tonight is my last night in Bali; tomorrow we fly to Chennai, then on Wednesday we’ll head to Sri Ramanasramam in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu for a week before finding an apartment and settling in for a few months. The last few days have been pretty trying. I spent most of the week trying to hunker down on work, since I’ll be on retreat next week, and was looking forward to seeing some more of Bali over the weekend, possibly taking a few nights overnight up north and seeing a non-touristy part of the island. Saturday I woke up feeling really …
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. …