If you had told my teenage self that in ten years, given the option of going literally anywhere in the world and doing anything I would choose to live at a Buddhist monastery in the forest and meditate in silence for five hours a day, I would have laughed at you. Yet that’s exactly what I ended up doing for four days of my Southeast Asia travels.
[Read more…] about What I Learned From 4 Days of Meditation at a Monastery in Thailand
Traveling for an extended period of time by yourself without a set plan is like the ultimate experiment in following your intuition. Every moment of every day – where to go, what to do, who to hang out with – is completely up to your heart’s desire. And ideally, because you’re making so many decisions based on intuition, you get better and better at listening to your inner voice and understanding what it is you actually want.
After the Mindfulness Project I initially thought I wanted to go straight to a monastery to practice meditation for a few days. But upon arriving in Chiang Mai at 4:35 AM after a grueling twelve hour bus ride from the Northeast (and a few hours of failed hitchhiking with some people from the Project – long story), I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to buy a bus ticket to disciplined sober silent solitude right away. No, I wanted to chill out for a while. I wanted to go to Pai.