Stuck in the Tracks

I'm back here again. I'm 27, on my second career, and still trying to get an A in life.

I've found my way onto another pre-career track (medicine) and my days are spent memorizing facts I will assuredly forget, stressing about "the curve," worry if what I've done will be enough to get me into med school. And then what? What will be different?

The grooves of the tracks I've laid in my mind are deep. I've read things, experienced things that have made me more conscious and aware. But I'm still here, toiling away after security, prestige, perfection. I can't get off the track.

How do I stop this madness? How do I stop kidding myself into thinking peace and fulfillment lies around the next corner, after the next diploma? How do I gather the courage (and the money) to live the way I want: creatively, honestly, intuitively?

I want to be a truth-teller, live without a mask and an undefended heart, keep no secrets. Meet those souls who vibrate at that frequency in the clearing of truth because I've dug deep and found the courage to go there myself. I suppose I'll start here.

Coming Down

Everything is already OK.

Everything is already OK.

Everything is already OK.

I tumble over these words in my mind like a river rushing over rocks as I walk the dirt path around the park near my home. I skim their surface but my mind is too fast, too unsteady to grasp their meaning. I turn the corner, veering off on the road that leads home and lose them again, charging on anxiously towards the unrealized future.

At home---my parents' home, to be exact---everything is not OK. I am an unemployed 26-year-old living at home without a "shtick." You know---that little, digestible spiel about who we are, where we're going and what we're about that we all serve up at holiday parties and family gatherings. These days, I am certifiably "shtick-less."

And reasonably so. For a year, I didn't need one. For a year, I was "Anna Alive," solo world traveler accountable to no one, tethered by nothing.

I settle in at the computer, trying to prioritize my ever-growing to-do list. My savings are dwindling, my options endless. And I haven't seen a dentist almost two years.

Somehow it was easier to be "free"---high-minded and philosophical in the ways I like to think I am---while wandering mountain-scapes in the Himalayas or meditating in Thai Buddhist temples than back here, navigating the low-cost healthcare marketplace.

I fling myself at the mountain for a while: shooting off job applications, looking over potential graduate programs, sifting through the encyclopedia of reading material my bank and healthcare provider sent me in my absence. Each peak reveals another valley to cross, another mountain looming on the other side.

By three o'clock, I'm weary and despondent, no further along than when I started. I feel the despair starting to close in.

So I stop, and I meditate. Because that is what I know to do. It is what I went to Asia to learn about. And it is the only thing that keeps me sane on this winding odyssey that I can't anticipate and can't prepare for and can't control.

I turn off the lights in the living room, grab a cushion, and settle myself cross-legged on the floor. My resolve isn't strong today so I turn to Tara Brach, one of my favorite meditation teachers, for help.

In a 20-minute, guided recording, Tara invites me to drop the to-do list for a while, set down my mentally-accumulated load. She takes my attention to the aliveness in my fingers and toes, the quiet spaciousness before my closed eyes.

And the dust starts to settle. Slowly, breath by breath, I sink down, down, out of my head-space and into a deep inner space that my mind doesn't know, can't understand. From this place, Tara draws a prayer:

May I be filled with loving presence, held in loving presence.

May I accept myself just as I am.

May I know the natural joy of being alive.

May I touch great and deep peace.

May I awaken and be free.

The words bring tears to my eyes. I repeat them again and again and, this time, they start to sink in, warming my being from within. And I remember...

Everything is already OK. No matter what I choose to do or not do. Everything was OK before I got here and everything will continue to be OK long after I'm gone. I'm here---only a short while---to witness this life, admire and appreciate it in all its diversity. Enjoy the ride.

I open my eyes and slowly start to uncross my legs. They have fallen asleep, so I stretch them out long on the floor in front of me and let them tingle and swirl with forgotten energy. I lean back, resting against the wall behind me. Outside, the afternoon sun is low, stretching its long, glowing fingers almost horizontally across the canyon, bathing everything it touches in a warm, golden light. I try to remember if it looked this way twenty minutes ago.

Downstairs, my mountain awaits, tall as ever, but I linger here, pulling up a chair on the patio to watch the sunset. Who knows, truly, how many more of these I will enjoy in my lifetime. Right now, I am alive, I am here, and everything is OK.

Spiritual Cross-Fit in India (Plus my Brief Stint as a Tibetan Buddhist Nun)

India has always been the inspiration for and the end-goal of this trip of mine. It was during a long meditation session at a yoga retreat, after all, that I first got the idea. I knew it would be tough, but I wanted the challenge. And so potent, so spiritually transformative were the ancient spiritual philosophies born here---Yoga, Tantra, Hinduism and Buddhism, I felt there was no way I could come and not be transformed by immersion.

I am being transformed alright, but not in the ways I would have liked or consciously chosen. India is hard for tourists---even, or perhaps especially for "spiritual tourists"---and I am proving no match for its chaos. In the past seven days, I've been scammed, food-poisoned, followed, honked and stared at, lost and reduced to tears more than I thought possible in that amount of time. My inflated traveler ego, built up over the past 9 months, has been completely decimated by one week in Uttar Pradesh, India.

It's not that I didnt expect this coming in. I had studied the guidebooks, talked to veteran travelers, and tried to prepare myself accordingly...I even cut off all my hair to be somewhat more androgynous (and I hoped, less hassled). But the sheer scale of this place is so beyond anything I could have imagined, no haircut or amount of prior research could have prepared me for it.

The plan was to avoid the toughest parts of traveling solo in India by packing my trip with as many insular, "spiritual" experiences as I could find---ashram and temple stays, meditation and Ayurvedic retreats---sheltered places where I could learn from Indian spiritual philosophy without struggling against mainstream Indian culture. But even these insular experiences are turning out to be less "spiritual" than I had hoped.

Take my first attempt: a month-long stay at a Tibetan Buddhist convent in the Indian Himalayas. I found the convent, called Jujik Shel, through a very small US-based organization that sends volunteers to underfunded convents in the region to teach English. Long-fascinated with peaceful, Tibetan Buddhism, I thought I'd spend a few hours a day teaching the nuns and the rest of my time studying the Dharma, practicing deep meditation, and wandering the crumbling mountainsides of the majestic Zanskar Valley.

Majestic Zanskar Valley. View from the convent

This turned out very quicky not to be the case. It was September, and the harsh Zanskari winter was on fast approach. The nuns spent most of their days in preparation: gathering grass and dung from the surrounding fields, hauling it up the steep, rocky hillsides, and piling it high on the flat rooftops of the shabby convent. Spiritual practice was limited to a few hours of 'puja' (prayer/chanting) in the morning and 45 minutes of Dharma study (in the local language of Ladhaki) in the evening, though the nuns were too tired most nights for this second bit.

One of the younger nuns sounding the conk shell call to morning puja.

By my second day at the convent, it had become clear that the nuns would have no time or energy to learn English.

I taught at the convent school for local village children instead. This was a whole different ball-game....15 students, ages 3-7, all in one tiny, low-ceilinged classroom for 5 hours a day. What this amounted to---as I'm sure any primary educators out there already know---was total. unbridled. chaos. Sometimes I managed to pull off a simple English or Math exercise or game. Most of the time, I was pulling children off the rafters, wiping glistening ropes of snot, dirt and god-knows-what-else from their eyes and noses, confiscating colored pencils just in time to prevent an eye-gauging. It was an exercise in crowd control and, without a doubt, the hardest job I've ever done. I spent the two hours after school let out every day flat on my back in the gravel about a mile from the convent grounds, too exhausted to move, let alone meditate.

(See sorry attempts at crowd control, *cough*--English-teaching below).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zapB24Fm9s8

As much as I wanted to write about how "spiritually transformative" or "enlightening" my stay at the convent was, it just wouldn't be true. Most of the time, Jujik Shel felt more like a remote, all-female, subsistence farming-collective than a Tibetan Buddhist convent... the women just happened to have shaved heads and wear crimson robes. I know my experience was much more about navigating a difficult language barrier, trying to find ways to be helpful in a subsistence-farming community, and staying sane in the chaos of the classroom than it was about reaching any new heights in my private, esoteric practice. In the toughest moments, it was about doing everything I could not to scream at other people's children.

Tired nuns (and village orphans) at dinnertime.

I am learning, like I'm sure many "spiritual tourists" have before me, that spiritually transformative experiences don't come on demand...even in India.

But that doesn't mean they don't come at all. No, I'm not achieving nirvana on a mountaintop in Zanskar. And no, I haven't escaped samsara by attaining some perfect yogic pretzel at an ashram in Rishikesh. But India is still offering me plenty of opportunities to grow and change. They're just the breaking-down kind of change---that challenging, humbling, what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger type of "spiritual transformation"... more like, spiritual cross-fit. And I have a choice.

I can wallow in self-pity and regret, constantly fighting against my reality and mourning the experiences I think I should be having. Or I can start learning from the experiences I'm actually having, difficult as they may be.

That means accepting everything that comes into my path as perfect, every experience I have as the one I needed, whether I wanted it or not. Even the scams. Even the antibiotic-resistant intestinal infections (that happened). All of it.

Because it is possible that my soul needed all of this challenging and humbling more than it needed another yoga course or meditation retreat. It is possible that I'm having the exact experience I'm supposed to have, whether I like it or not.

I have no proof of this. It's just a choice---a cognitive shift in the way I choose to process my unfolding experience that makes it that much more manageable, that much more liveable. And right now, it's the only way I know how to go on with this journey, however long it may last.

Making the most of it with the kiddos at Jujik Shel.

Pried Open

I woke up this morning feeling groggy and hungover---the product of going shot-for-shot with a Russian last night. My mind told me to get up, haul myself to the nearest internet cafe, flood my brain with caffeine, and lose myself in the interwebs. My body told me to go for a walk, climb the steps to the nearby Shanti Stupa and meditate (I'm in Leh, Ladakh).

By some impulse of momentary wisdom, I chose the latter. I wiped my eyes, threw on some dirty clothes and headed out to the foot of the mountain. I started up the steps heavily, slowly, counting in my mind as I linked up my breath with my steps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.... Pretty soon I had lost count as my mind slowed and my body rose slowly up the barren mountain. As I rounded the last flight of steps, I was apprehended by a monk sweeping the steps to the meditation hall.

"Where you from?" he called out warmly.

Yanked out of my mindspace, I whirled around, checking to make sure he was talking to me.

"California," I eeked out awkwardly, wiping a smile on my face to try and match his good-natured demeanor.

"Ah," he replied with a playful grin. "Hollywood-land."

"Kind of," I conceded, leaking out a now-genuine smile.

He asked where I was going and I told him of my plans to meditate in front of the stupa.

"Come to my room for tea on your way down," he said, ushering to his tiny quarters just around the corner from the meditation hall.

"I will," I replied, not at all sure that I actually would. My head was ringing, and the intoxicating image of my morning coffee beckoned irresistibly from the dark recesses of my habitual psyche.

The platform around the massive stupa was completely empty and, after three clockwise laps around the monument, I sat at the foot of one of the pillars, facing the rising sun and meditated. Rising, falling, sitting. Rising, falling, sitting.

With each breath, my body softened. The drops of rising sunlight on my skin melted my inner resistance, and I started to wake with clarity to the beauty and immediacy of this new day.

After a good twenty minutes and a few sun salutations to boot, I headed down to the monk's tiny room.

"Come in, come in!" he called through the open window. Inside, incense was burning and fresh 'cha ngarmo' (milk tea) boiled on the stove. He gestured to the cushions near the open window, looking out at Stok Kangri and the beautiful snowcapped mountains of the Ladhaki Range. I took my seat.

He started out asking about my family and my travels---how long I planned to stay in Ladakh, what I had been doing here, etc. I explained that I had been teaching English at a Buddhist convent in the Zanskar Valley, just south of Leh, and was back in Leh on my way down to Delhi. I thought our conversation would hover here at the surface, all politeness and niceties, but he quickly dove into topics more meaningful...my interest in Buddhism, the importance of education and reduction of "ignorance" (one of the three "poisons" of Buddhism) in the area. He thanked me for my "service" and laughed and joked with me about my height and 'chomo' or nun-like haircut.

Before I left, he asked for my contact info and gave me his. "We Buddhists," he explained, "don't think of ourselves as separate or different from anyone else. Everyone suffers and everyone wants to be happy. We all just try and learn." He went on to explain (in very broken English) that anyone who studies and understands what the Buddha taught is a 'Buddhist', though the term is non essential, greatly reducing the distance between us. He wrapped me in a warm hug and sent me off.

On my way down the steps, I came across an older, British woman resting against a rock. Energized by my exchange with the monk, I stopped to talk to her. She was 72 and on her 9th trip to Leh. "It's my happy place," she explained and pointed out her favorite spots in the area from our lofty vantage point. We bonded over travel stories and love of the Himalayan landscape, finding common ground where age and culture may have normally prevented. I left her with a promise to meet again the following morning for a hike to the surrounding mountains and agricultural areas.

Had I followed my habitual instincts, this morning might have been a gray slug-fest against irritation and sleep-deprivation, survivable at best. Instead, it turned out to be magical. Serendipity and connection renewed me, pulled me out of myself and forced me to see and experience the world around me.

Though it's not always like this, travel has, on the whole, pried me open in this way---made me just lost, just lonely, just out-of-sorts enough to say yes to new people, new situations, new experiences. I lent a stranger $700 in Thailand, shared a room with a man I had just met in Ladakh for a week... things I never would have done back at home. The effect is a broadening one, vaporizing the walls I built years ago to shut people out and the armour I've worn since to keep them away.

I don't know if I'll be able to stay so open when my travels come to an end and I pick up my life back at home, but I am most certainly going to try.

Shanti Stupa, Leh, Ladakh

Living with Myself

There are the travel moments I write about and post pictures of on Facebook and those that I don't.

Getting barred from exiting Thailand at airport immigrations on my way to Myanmar is definitely one of the latter.

Why was I trying to get to Myanmar? No reason, really, other than to escape the discomfort of inaction, the ever-present background fear that I may not be "accomplishing" anything on this trip of mine.

Most of the time, I'm able to keep the fear at bay with a task manager app I have called Google Keep. It's just a series of colorful boxes---mostly notes and to-do lists---where I deposit all of my mental noise: projects and goals, places to see and things to do, etc. I get an incredible, perverse satisfaction from crossing things off of these lists. But it is a very, very short-lived satisfaction.

Take the to-do list that brought me back to Bangkok:

Within 24 hours of landing, I had successfully compiled all of my visa application materials (no small feat) and submitted them along with my US passport at the Indian Embassy downtown. For about 20 minutes, I felt relief---that very short-lived satisfaction. Then, the background fear, only temporarily obscured, crept back in... Now what?

My Indian visa and US passport wouldn't be ready for pick-up for another week or so. My flight to India wasn't until another week and a half after that. I had already spent nearly a month in various places around Thailand this year, and it was my third visit to Bangkok. What can you possibly "accomplish" by being here? asked my little insecure traveler ego. What will you have to "show" for these next 20 days at the end of your trip?

I turned to Google Keep. Myanmar was still on my destination list. It was a new country and much harder to get into and around than Thailand. Yes, Myanmar would make a fine new addition to my "traveler resume." OK, Google Keep:

Armed with my Mastercard and new, shiny-blue to-do list, I started shooting down my fear one check-box bullet at a time: $50 for Myanmar e-visa---check. $150 round-trip flight---check. $30 for first three nights accommodation---check. In a matter of hours, I was approved, booked and scheduled for a 10-day trip to Myanmar.

Fast-forward to two days later as I, pleading with an unsympathetic Thai immigrations officer, am led out of the immigrations area and back to the departure terminal to collect my already checked-to-Myanmar bag. The problem? I had entered Thailand on my US passport, and the little blue booklet, with its critical Thai entry stamp, was still sitting at the Indian embassy in downtown Bangkok. Leaving the country on my un-stamped Danish passport was a no-go.

Anger, embarrassment and then...the blinking return of consciousness as I slowly awoke from my fear-driven Google Keep bender. Nothing left to do. No one else to blame. I picked up my bag, returned to my hostel, and crashed out for the next 12 hours.

When I awoke the next morning, the fear was still there, stronger---if anything---than it had been three days before. But this time, I didn't try to do anything about it, bury it under a fresh crop of multi-colored, Google Keep checkbox lists. Today, I took all my fear, discomfort, and anxiety up to the rooftop terrace of my Bangkok hostel and, for a good half hour, I just sat with it.

Nothing terribly fantastic happened. For the first ten minutes or so, it just splashed around in my mind like an angry cat trying to escape its monthly bath. Then, finding nothing to struggle against, it slowly started to wear itself out, tiring of its futile thrashing. After 20 minutes, it lay spent at the bottom of my gut, resigned to the silence. After another ten, I couldn't feel it at all, just the quiet hum of energy swirling through my body.

It's not like I got rid of my background fear/discomfort/anxiety for good. I just temporarily softened it under the spotlight of my attention. By sitting with it, looking at it, I stopped resisting it. And it stopped resisting me.

I'm going to Khao Yai National Park in central Thailand today instead, but honestly...who cares? I've travelled long enough now to know that it doesn't really matter whether I do X, Y, or Z... see this temple or that UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Google Search Images are almost always more stunning than the actual thing, and I forget most of the details of the experience in a matter of months. You---my friends, and family and "followers"---don't really care as long as I'm happy and safe. I know this, and yet I have to keep reminding myself again and again: Google Keep conquering the world one checkbox at a time is not what I'm out here to do.

Learning how to live with myself is...especially in these uncomfortable moments when my forward momentum slows or stops entirely. And that means learning how to sit with my fear/discomfort/anxiety---watch how it operates within me---rather than letting it unconsciously control my movements. It means continuing to use all the tools I've amassed---meditation, yoga, Qi Gong, Lojong---to train my mind to be calm and compassionate, rather than fearful and competitive.

Because here's the truth: my untrained mind will never be fully satisfied with my present moment reality---whether I'm stuck in Thailand waiting for a visa, or back at home winning an Oscar. It will always try to postpone my happiness and inner peace to some future date, hinge it on the accomplishment of the next arbitrary goal or project. And a deeper part of me knows that learning how to live with myself---or rather, at peace with my unconscious mind---is quite possibly the most important thing I could be doing with my life right now, even if it doesn't come with a salary, a massive following or a high-five from Oprah. Part of me knows that this repetitive, unsexy practice of mind-training might be my only real shot at being happy in the world, regardless of where I am or what I'm doing.

So Myanmar Schmyanmar. I can meditate just as well there as I can here, or in Khao Yai, or back at home. What matters is not where I go or what I do, but how I do it. And if I can learn to live at peace with myself and my present-moment reality, the rest will follow.

“Don’t move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move.” — Osho

Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow (Rinse & Repeat)

I am not in control of my life.

I was intimately reminded of this unsettling truth yesterday, when my flight to Bali was postponed indefinitely due to a cloud of volcanic ash hanging over Denpasar, rendering all of my preliminary travel arrangements instantly useless.

My initial reaction was, of course, total panic. Volcanic ash? Several days...maybe more? What am I supposed to do in Sydney for several days? What if I'm stuck here longer? What about all the plans and arrangements I had made? What if I don't get to do all the things I wanted to? The little self-righteous fear-mongerer in my own head strutted circles around my brain-stage, indulging in its diva-meltdown monologue.

Slowly, patiently, another voice entered the scene: This is your new reality, Anna. The task now, as always, is to see how quickly you can accept it, drop your inner resistance, and open up to new experiences... different and possibly better than those you could have planned. The tide has changed, it went on, calm and steady. How quickly can you pick your feet up off the bottom of the river and go with this new flow?

Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth. With each exhale, I felt a softening in the muscles around my eyes and jaw, a draining sensation at the back of my neck and down through the tops of my shoulders. I opened my eyes and looked around at the now nearly-empty baggage claim. I've never been to Sydney, I thought, never seen the opera house. This could be good. I felt an unraveling in my gut, decreased pressure in the atmosphere around me. Yes, this could be very good. I picked up my bag and went on through customs.

Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow... Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. Rinse and repeat. This seems to be the skill I'm out here to master, traveling by myself with everything in constant, unpredictable flux. The particulars of the various travel "crises" I find myself in vary, but the way out of them--Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow--remains the same.

The "crisis" that brought me to Queenstown, New Zealand--and then kept me there for four months--was more of an internal one. I was barely two months into my self-proclaimed "year of travel" and had come to New Zealand with the intention of staying only two weeks--just long enough to visit my sister, an aspiring sommelier working a Sauvignon Blanc harvest in Marlborough. I planned to travel on at the end of those two weeks and declared my intentions of doing so through various public mediums, including this blog.

When the end of my two weeks rolled around, however, something had changed and, this time, it was me. Despite all my talk of "staying in the slipstream," I was tired. Tired of sleepless nights and dusty bus rides and constant digestive turmoil. Of fast food and cold showers and friendships that lasted no longer than a few hours or days. My inner ego/diva balked and screamed, demanding that I "put my money where my mouth is" and "finish what I started." But underneath the screams, I could just make out that second voice, calm and steady, asking quietly, patiently for something else.

It took courage to admit it to myself at the time, just as it takes courage to admit to you now. After just two months of "adventure travel," I needed stability and routine, homemade food and potable tap water, connection and intimacy. I listened to Joni Mitchell's album Hejira on repeat, finding something in her conflicted wanderlust, her isolated freedom I could relate to more than I wanted to.

Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. Slowly, reluctantly I began to face my changed reality, acknowledge my real, human needs and let go of my declared travel plans. I opened up to the idea of stationary adventures, the lessons I could learn starting over in a new place. I picked Queenstown on a hunch, bought a one-way bus ticket, and started flowing towards the unknown. Per usual, the current carried me much further than any of my own plans could have.

Though I would have been happy working at a café, I was able to land two jobs that actually interested me: one selling Patagonia and Merrell goods at an outdoor store and the other, teaching yoga and meditation at the local wellness center. Though I expected to just pay a long-term, weekly rate at a hostel, I was able to find a shared living situation that felt more like a home than any place I'd stayed since leaving California. Though I had assumed all the meaningful

One of those jaw-droppingly beautiful Queenstown hilltops

meditation learning experiences in the world took place in Bali or Thailand or India, I found a local Buddhist center that led weekly, guided sessions of somatic meditation, a modality I had not yet experienced. Though I figured I'd just practice yoga on my own, in my room or on one of the many jaw-droppingly beautiful hilltops around Queenstown, I was offered unlimited, free classes at the wellness center, and absorbed tons of knowledge from my fellow, more-experienced teachers. Though I would have been fine with just a few familiar faces, I got two new close friends, a mentor, and a love interest.

It wasn't what I had planned; it wasn't even what I thought I wanted, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. After four challenging, stimulating and restorative months in Queenstown, I was finally ready to travel on this past week...on a day that also happened to be my 25th birthday.

At the bar where my little expat family gathered to celebrate my birthday/send-off, I received a lot of sympathetic nods and toasts to the tune of: "Another year older, eh? My condolences." I guess I've reached an age where birthdays are more of a funeral for the expiration of my youth than a celebration of the years ahead. I accepted it all with a smile, raising my glass and downing my drinks.

The thing is, I'm not at all sad about getting older. Every year of my life has been infinitely more enjoyable, more liveable than those that preceded it. Why? Because every year, I get a little better at this simple process: Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. Every year, I soften my grip on needing to plan and control the events of my life--force things to happen when and how I want them to, and get that much better at letting life live me. I'm no master at it yet, but my reaction times are getting quicker.

I meditated in front of the Sydney Opera House this morning. I wish I could convey with words what it felt like, sitting there...something like what a seabird must feel like when it stops flapping its wings, catches the updraft of the wind, and just glides.

I'm not in control of my life, and it's a beautiful thing...because I couldn't come up with this stuff even if I tried.

Queenstown Beach

"I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you're going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you." --C. Joybell C.