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Magic Mushrooms in Pai: That One Time I Lost My Individual Identity And Became One With the Universe

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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.

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2 Weeks of Mindful Living (and Mosquitoes) in a Northeast Thailand Forest

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So I’ve just emerged from 13 days in a forest in Northeast Thailand with 30 people around the world at the Mindfulness Project, a unique sort of experiment in community building, meditation, and self-sustainable natural living. If you know me, you probably know that I’ve been talking about doing something like this for a really long time, and now that’s it’s over, I’m struggling to figure out how to explain this experience. To recount the sights and sounds and feelings of it, to do it justice. It’s not something you can convey through a casual 10 minute conversation, let alone through a few Instagram photos or Facebook statuses.

I figured the most honest way to do it would be to just transcribe my personal journal entries from the past two weeks (elaborated a bit more here) as I sit in a Khon Kaen hotel room, in transition between adventures. I could try to summarize and neatly categorize my thoughts (“13 Things That Inevitably Happen When You Decide to Live Off The Grid”!) but this way is easier. Just a warning that it is a fairly long post, probably because I have an unusually long attention span after going without social media for two weeks. Hehe.

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My Travel Journey Intentions

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My solo travel adventure has officially begun, and I figured I should commemorate this moment with a blog post so you all know I am alive, but it won’t be very fancy or have any drawings because I’m typing this as fast as I can in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way at my hostel in Bangkok before I move accommodations where there may or may not be wifi. But it will be free! Thanks to a kind local I met yesterday who spontaneously offered their couch to me.

I’ve been in Southeast Asia for two days, and it’s hard to believe that I have sixty more ahead of me. And that for the next sixty days, I won’t see anyone I know. And that I will only don six-ish outfits, and that I won’t wear any makeup, and that I basically have no idea how things are going to turn out.

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From Anxiety to Intuition: Why I’m Leaving LA to Travel Southeast Asia

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Unemployment is a fascinating state of being. It’s taboo, really: in our society, it it seen as improper to exist as a jobless person for very long. It feels almost rebellious.

One thing I appreciate about unemployment is its confrontational nature: it forces me to be honest with myself and others. Back when I had a job, it was easy to pretend like my life was everything I wanted and intended it to be.

Now, it’s very difficult to delude myself and others around me into believing I am where I should be in life.

The confrontational nature of unemployment can cause a lot of anxiety. The last two times I was unemployed, this anxiety quickly spiraled into panic. My primitive fight-or-flight survival instinct from our ancestral prehistoric saber-tooth-tiger-battling days kicked in in full force and shrieked DANGER!!! so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything else.

Fear completely took over, and I acted out of that fear. I accepted the first job offer I received without really thinking seriously about alternatives.

I don’t regret my decisions, because I learned a ton from those experiences. But as I attempt to be more intentional this time around, I find myself experiencing the same anxiety as before. This time, it’s just a bit sneakier.

For a long time now, it’s been my dream to travel internationally by myself for an extended period of time. What better time than now to go fulfill that dream, while I have no real responsibilities or commitments? It seemed like such an easy decision to make, and yet as I mulled it over, I kept coming up with counter-arguments as to why I shouldn’t, or why I shouldn’t go for very long.

There was anxiety, anger, and fear. And most of all, there was the guilt. Guilt for being in such a privileged position in the first place where I have the ability to make this decision at all, when so many people can’t. Guilt for not just appreciating what I have here.

I spent a lot of days completely consumed by these thoughts and emotions. It was paralyzing and fairly exhausting.

I wish I could pinpoint an exact turning point when I figured my way out of it, but life hardly ever works that way. What I do know is that starting to explore spirituality was a huge part of beginning to find clarity.

What is this spirituality you speak of?

I’ve never really considered myself a very spiritual person. In fact, I’ve almost prided myself on not being religious in any way – for being a follower of facts. For those of us who aren’t well-versed in spiritual things, the concept of spirituality is sort of suspiciously abstract, like a tomato with legs. People tell you it exists, but you can’t see it, so it must not be real.

But I like reading books, and at the recommendation of a few friends I picked up a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. According to Wikipedia, it draws from “a variety of spiritual traditions”. There’s a lot of Buddhist philosophy in it. The stuff he talks about is so simple, yet so difficult to grasp at the same time. Bear with me as a I attempt to explain some of it without being too boring or abstract.

You Are Not Your Mind

You know that moment when you see an incredible sunset over the beach, or a shooting star framed against the Milky Way, or a double rainbow all the way across the sky? And it’s such a breathtakingly beautiful moment that you can’t speak and you don’t even think – you’re just existing in a brief state of joy and wonder and peace, taking in all that the present has to offer?

What if I told you that that’s actually our natural state of existence? That the only thing stopping us from existing in a state of peace and joy all the time is our mind?

Minds are useful tools, for sure. But over the last few thousand years, humans have come to completely identify ourselves with our minds. We can’t stop thinking.

You know the voice in your head that’s constantly reviving the past, imagining possible future scenarios, picturing how things can go wrong, judging, comparing, complaining, commenting? The voice that takes up so much of our present to dwell in the past and future? That’s not actually you. That’s the mind, and you can actually free yourself from it. By watching the thinker, listening to the voice and being a witness to it, you get a sense of your own presence beyond your mind. And you can start to use the mind, instead of it using you.

When I started to examine what the voice was actually saying, I realized something incredible: these thoughts I was having were kind of ridiculous, because they weren’t real. I just thought they were because I was so identified with my mind. I was the one giving them power, and I could take power away from them by letting them go.

And when I did that and let go of all the worry, fear and anxiety that was being self-imposed this whole time, what was left was my intuition.

Intuition

Intuition exists beyond the mind. It’s our deepest nature, our deepest self. It always knows what’s up, basically.

A few months ago, I made a confession to a friend over “drinks” (it was actually weed but that doesn’t feel socially normalized enough to say yet):

“I think I’m too comfortable.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I lived in the Bay, I was constantly growing. It was a totally new vibe up there. I didn’t know anyone so I forced myself to go out and meet people. I was navigating public transportation for the first time, stopping strangers on the street every day for my job… even the weather was different. Now, I’m living near all my best friends and family, at a chill ass job, I’m running, going out in the beautiful sunshine… It’s nice, but I don’t remember the last time I really felt challenged. There’s no adversity.”

He nodded. “Start taking the bus to work.”

All talks of public transit aside, life is trippy. Right? I can’t get over the fact that we have the power to decide what we want to do with our lives, and that can look completely different from person to person. And that there’s no “right” way to go about it. It’s just this huge free-for-all.

But so many people decide to take jobs they don’t like or be with people they don’t like because they’re listening to the survival voice and acting out of anxiety and fear. And it’s easy to do that. It would be comfortable to stay where I am and get a respectable job and find someone to marry and settle down and settle into a routine… and…

And my gut, my core, my intuition that exists beyond my mind and worry and anxiety is telling me with the conviction of a million suns that I don’t want to actually do that. At least not now. Not quite yet.

When I let go of my anxiety, my intuition tells me that I want to be challenged. I want to be in a place totally different from here. I want to learn how to rely on myself, how to survive on the essentials and let go of materialism. I want to explore the world and be surrounded by natural beauty and live a completely different way of life.

That vision speaks so deeply to my core that it gives me chills. Do the thing that makes you feel alive.

So, I’m going to listen to my intuition. I’m going to move out of my apartment in LA at the end of August and head to Southeast Asia for a few months, until I am called back for my best friends’ wedding in mid-November. SE Asia is a good place for solo adventurers: it’s safe, beautiful, and friendly for the most part. It’s also a place where my savings will last me quite a while – longer than they’d last here in LA. And then after that, who knows where I’ll go?

I won’t have any expectations, really: I just want to embrace whatever experiences come to me. And to live in the present as much as possible, because the present is the only thing that’s real. Not the past, not some forecasted future we make up in our minds.

And when we let go of our thoughts to embrace the moment we’re in and find that inner peace – that’s when we truly start living.

Kelly Gets Fired, Has an Identity Crisis and Almost Joins an Anti-Capitalist Experimental Rock Opera Caravan Ship

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I’ve been suspecting for a while now that I may not be cut out to be a very professional adult.

This suspicion was confirmed two weeks ago when I got fired from my job at a civil rights organization.

To be fair, I had known for a while that this breakup was basically inevitable. Aside from our ideological differences in how we viewed social change (a story for another time), I was just not very good at conforming to a culture of professionalism – my emails weren’t formal enough, my mannerisms weren’t careful enough, my methods of bringing people together weren’t conventional enough. And I wasn’t willing to stop being casual and upfront and unorthodox, because those are the things I like best about myself. (I’m also really good at putting on a pair of pants while driving, but that is a skill confined to a more specific situation.)

So when they broke the news to me, the emotion that immediately flooded my body was… relief. And then a kind of joy, which may also have stemmed from receiving a very nice severance package. But it also meant that I had a chance to start over – to do something new with my life. Something that nourishes my soul instead of crushing it.

But what is that next thing?

For the first time pretty much ever, I’m at a crossroads that splits off into seemingly infinite paths. People react very differently to the idea of the unknown, I think. Some people hate the unknown and do everything they can to avoid facing off with it.

Some people kind of thrive on it.

At first, I thought I would just take on another job in civic engagement, getting people to vote and engage in the political process. After all, that’s what I’ve been doing for all of my adult life, and there are some bad ass organizations out there whose political ideologies align closely with my own. Plus, we like each other. Plus, they would pay me a lot more. Plus, I could be myself, for the most part.

It was so tempting, and so easy to just continue down that path….

And yet.

Is that what I’m truly meant to do?

What do I really want?

It’s amazing how difficult it is for me to answer this question. It’s so simple, yet so utterly complicated.

I decided to take a crack at it.

The first challenge was to ignore what everyone else around me was doing – to let go of whatever kind of shiny image I want to convey to others of how successful and adult I am. There’s an enormous amount of societal influence that pervades all of our every day decision making:

I think a part of me was scared to not continue down the civic engagement route because I was worried about what people would think if I left it.

But the more I talked about my life path dilemma with people, the more I realized that the truth is that no one else really cares about what I decide to do with my life. Everyone just wants me to be happy / is too busy being concerned about their own life to judge mine. It’s a very nice realization to have – kind of like a warm, fuzzy blanket of security.

The second challenge was to resist the urge to jump on the first possible option I saw post-civic-engagement-rejection.

For me, that option happened to be being a tour manager for a traveling activist experimental rock opera caravan ship.

Occupy Wall Street meets Cirque Du Solei, the New York Times explained to me helpfully when I combed the Internet in search of a few more reference points.

My friend was a performer for the caravan a while back and told me about the position. 2 months of traveling and living with 20 other cast and crew on a pirate ship, spreading our artistic message up and down the coast of B.C. about climate change and cultural genocide.

So edgy. So cool. I interviewed with the captain of the ship and was about to pack my bags for Canada when a conversation with a friend gave me pause.

“Should I do it or not?” I asked him.

“It’s never a question of should you do something or should you not do it,” he replied. “There are always more options available to you.”

I thought for a bit. And thought some more.

“Why is it so hard to imagine the possibilities?” I said after a few moments of silence.

“Because when you’re hungry, the first food you see is like ‘this is the best food ever! But you have to treat it like an appetizer. There are more courses coming your way.”

So I did some more reflecting.

And I figured out that I want….

….to do more reflecting. I want to take some time to process everything that’s happened in the past year and a half. To think deeply about my values and my vision. To picture different scenarios of how my life could go from this point on and how I would feel in those various situations. It’s a huge privilege to be in this position where I can afford to be intentional, and you know what they say about privilege – use that shit for good.

I read this quote the other day in a book that seemed very relevant:

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

When I read that, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. For people who care about making the world better, it’s easy to get caught up in being completely driven by mission; by what we think is most needed in our current political climate (sorry, I know we reallllly need to retire that phrase – it’s like the least sexy/most boring way ever of saying how fucked we are). But we can’t help free other people until we free ourselves. When we do the thing that makes us feel alive, that’s when we’re at our most effective and inspiring and impactful. I hope this is the case, anyway.

So, I won’t be hopping on a pirate ship anytime in the near future, unfortunately. But that’s okay. I actually don’t even like ships all that much.

I do like writing, though. I think I’ll start posting more things, on here – hopefully we won’t have to wait until birthday number 28 for the next one!