THOUGHTS FROM BARI...
I am writing this as I sit in a café in Sjenica, Serbia, the sun beating down hard on the window through which I can see a bunch of "big kids" playing on the playground equipment. It's the first day of school. In one hour, our host from last night will teach his first P.E. class of the school year.
This post has a little bit of everything, telling perhaps more about my inner journey than about people, places and events. From dealing with unwanted male attention to designing the "future me"; from food attachment/deattchment and followers of Amma in an Italian eco-village, to Sai Baba, collapsable houses and Laughter Yoga.... Enjoy!
This post has a little bit of everything, telling perhaps more about my inner journey than about people, places and events. From dealing with unwanted male attention to designing the "future me"; from food attachment/deattchment and followers of Amma in an Italian eco-village, to Sai Baba, collapsable houses and Laughter Yoga.... Enjoy!
Thoughts from Bari
I'm on the bus from Bari to Rome and by midnight I'll be in Barcelona. The sky's been a heavy grey as we cross the mountains and it's just now starting to rain, just enough to fill the big front windshield with tiny droplets. The clock reads 15:37, 24ºC, a nice change from the 40º+ heat wave we've been having along the southern coast.
I managed to successfully fend off the romantic efforts of Claudio, a Marozzi buslines employee and a true Don Juan. At first I didn't think anything of his over-friendliness. Traveling with a male partner, I rarely have to deal with or even think about dealing with unwanted male attention. But when he told me to take a seat near the top of the stairs and he'd "join me later", a dusty apparatus in my single-woman toolkit turned on its red warning light. I didn't sit where he had suggested, filled the seat beside me with my bags of food and spent the next half-hour or so sleeping or appearing to sleep to avoid having to talk to him. I watched as he tried his charm with every young attractive woman that boarded and exited the bus with little success. But I didn't exactly want to spend 5 more hours avoiding him. I wanted to read, write, eat, and most importantly relax! He inevitably caught me staring out the window and sat down in the seat in front of me. I've never really known how to act towards these men. It didn't seem to matter whether I was nice or mean, they always persisted long after I thought I had made it clear that I wanted nothing to do with them. What were other women doing to fend them off that I wasn't doing? This time, I was neither nice nor mean. Just firm. I set boundaries and stuck to them, genuinely indifferent to his perception of me. No, I don't want to give you my phone number. Nor my facebook. I don't want to talk to you over the internet or over the phone. It makes no sense. I'll most likely never see you again in my life. And I didn't just say it, I meant it. He left me alone for the rest of the ride.
Now I have time to focus on creating a character for the first day of the week-long, end-of-course workshop I'll be attending shortly at the Casa Puente near Santander, Spain. (Now it's really raining! We're passing through a thunderstorm! It's beautiful: a green and mountainous landscape with swollen rivers and lightning bolts striking the fields and hills around us.) This time the character will be a bit different. I won't have to invent a new name and life story because the character will be me...only 16 years from now! I'm finding it to be an interesting and exciting if challenging task. Often, in job interviews, for example, we are asked where we see ourselves in 5, 10, or 15 years. We're expected to talk about family, career and lifestyle goals. The challenge of actually embodying my future self presents a whole new set of questions: How do I want to look, act, feel? How will I talk, carry myself, interact with others? It requires a thorough assessment of where I am now, where I want to go, what I want to accomplish and who I want to be. As I desigh this character, I find myself thinking with so many of the things I write down, "Why not embody that today, right now, for real?! Why save it for 16 years down the road?"
One of the first things I wrote down on the list of things I want to be in 16 years was "Thin, fit and healthy". Actually, it was the first thing I wrote down. Goes to show where my priorities are! I've almost always been pretty thin, fit and healthy but I've also always been sure to allow myself plenty of freedom to gorge myself. "Not like those annoying women who are always watching their weight. I'm not that superficial! I love eating and I'm not afraid to show it!" (Yeah, right). Inwardly, I felt anxious, fearful, defensive, irritable and uncontrollable around food. A great deal of my thoughts were occupied by when and what I'd eat next. Fully aware of the vicious cycle of deprivation, countered by over-indulgence, followed by guilt and renewed deprivation that is created by dieting, I was unsure how to escape my food/weight fixation. I was embarassed to even talk about it. It should be a non-issue. "You're thin! You're beautiful!" wasn't what I wanted to hear. It made me cringe. I'm not fishing for compliments, I just don't know what to do with my head.
I stumbled across some info on Intuitive Eating which I found helpful but filling in a chart three times a day has never been very motivating for me, so in time I gave up on it. I still read the Eater's Agreement now and then if I feel like I need it, though. I think what really started my process of deattachment from food was a chapter I read on "Breathinarianism" in an alternative health book from the 1960s. They had several testimonies from accomplished breathinarians and I found myself yearning to experience freedom from food dependency. An enormous amount of us humans' time and energy is put towards the creation and consumption of food. Imagine what we could do if we were to dedicate all of that time and energy to other things. I'm not certain there'd be a positive outcome... we probably wouldn't know what to do with ourselves!
A few days later, I was recommended to follow a diet of strictly raw fruits and vegetables for 4 or 5 days to combat a persistent foot fungus infection. (By the way, the best way I've found to fight athlete's foot is ashes. And when you cook everyday like we do it's always on hand). This was my chance, a perfect excuse and motive for starting down the path towards disattachment from food. I started immediately, no putting it off for tomorrow. I can't say it was easy but it was easier than I thought it would be. Knowing that my next meal would be either fruit or vegetables or both, my mind was freer to think about other things, I was more focused, alert, attentive, and organized. An active mind and body is hunger's best defense and so I was active and I felt energized. And then the unimaginable happened: I had trouble finishing my second plate of salad. I was full, stuffed even. No nuts, beans or other salad gimmicks. Just veggies. And then the even more unimaginable happened: I stopped feeling hungry. At least not the same anxious, desperate, "I could eat a horse" kind of hungry. After 4 days, I started experimenting with adding in non-raw foods. It was clearly apparent that bread and other white sugars and fried and salty things are the creators of the anxious, urgent hunger. I feel hungrier after eating them than I do before.
Though I am definitely not following a raw diet anymore, allowing myself to experiment with food in this way has opened up a whole new way of eating and talking to myself about eating. I no longer fear hunger or diets or all-you-can-eat buffets. It's not that the fear isn't there, I just treat it differently. It's all just part of the experiment. There's no winning or losing, right or wrong. I decide.
And what better place to carry out this reality-changing food experiment than Il Giardino della Gioia with delicious fresh organic food at my fingertips! Located in Torre Miletto, butting up against the Gargano Natural Park, is a small eco-village with views of he sea. We set out to learn everything we could, as much from the Giardino community as from the followers of Amma who arrived shortly after we did to spend a couple of weeks vacationing there. And learn we did! We devoured several books on permaculture, synergetic agriculture, and community building during our afternoons in the tree house, the best place to escape the flies, mosquitos and the afternoon heat. We hope to have one of our own some day.
Our relations with the followers of Amma led us to take a trip with them down to Cisternino in the Puglia region (the heel of the boot) to a center of Sai Baba. There we participated in free workshops of Laughter Yoga and Energetic Dance, gorged ourselves on pears and almonds from the orchard and enjoyed the peace and quiet around the temple, which was a Trullo they'd converted into a temple. The Trulli are stone houses made in such a way that by pulling out a stone or two, the house collapses into what appears to be a simple pile of rocks. So when you see the tax collector coming down the lane, you just pull out a stone and voila! Nothing to see here...
Laughter Yoga (Hayasayoga) is based on the belief that "forced" laughter has the same physiological benefits as "natural" laughter. Not only does it feel good to laugh, even if it's false, laughing when you normally wouldn't gives you the chance to take a more lighthearted perspective on things. In the round of introductions we had to say our name and whatever else we wanted to share about ourselves and we and everyone else would crack up laughing.
"I'm retired!" ...HAHAHA!
"I rode my bike here from Spain!" ...HAHAHAHAHA!!!
"I'm retired!" ...HAHAHA!
"I rode my bike here from Spain!" ...HAHAHAHAHA!!!
So on that note, I'll continue laughing my way up and down mountains in search of breathtaking views and genuine interactions. Nearly 10,000km, now... HAHAHA!
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Note: The blog posts in Spanish are written by Jose, and those in English, by Colleen. Those of you who understand both languages have the opportunity to understand both perspectives! Those of you who do not will have to rely on Google Translate if you wish to have an approximation...or start learning Spanish today!
Subscribe to our blog and get an update in your inbox each time we publish something new! We promise not to inundate you... we're too busy living it up to send massive amounts of emails!
Note: The blog posts in Spanish are written by Jose, and those in English, by Colleen. Those of you who understand both languages have the opportunity to understand both perspectives! Those of you who do not will have to rely on Google Translate if you wish to have an approximation...or start learning Spanish today!