Sweet Farm Life, the Antidote to Bitterness.
Cult Recovery in Thailand, Entry, Entry #4 …
This blog is for and about real cult survivors, but in Trump’s new world, that definition just might apply to all of us.
ONE MORNING, AMIDST rooster crows and jungle birdcalls, I stumble out to the open kitchen in a dusty daishiki and Crocs to find Hans, my Swedish crush, deep in conversation with a Thai woman. She’s about my age, wearing a long, sculpted, black dress with sexy, triangle cutouts. Luckily, I’m over him. I swear.
“You two need to team up!” says Hans, by way of introduction. “You are so similar it’s crazy!”
If he means physically, this means I am gorgeous. The Thai woman’s name, I learn, is Plai. She has dark hair, shoulder-length on one side, shaved on the other, and a strikingly sculpted, beautiful face, like a model. She is also, I learn, a ‘white metal monkey,’ like me. Apparently this is rare in Chinese astrology.
“Yes, come see my herbal pool and yoga retreat,” Plai says, with a wide smile. “I’m your neighbor.”
“Oh boy,” trills Hans in his clipped, precise Swedish accent. “Watch out, world.”
MY FIRST FEW DAYS on a permaculture farm in Thailand, Hans my host and I like-liked each other (Blog Entry #2). The next few days, we kind of hated each other (Blog Entry #3). Thin line stuff, that kinda thing. Now we’re on our way to a real and lasting friendship.
Sure, maybe I went zig-zag- deep with a practical stranger pretty quickly. But hey, I’m a cult kid (Blog Entry #1). We have boundary issues. It happens. And at this point I’m so used to ‘letting myself down,’ no matter how much I try to retain life lessons that I’m willing to shrug off my ‘coulda’ done betters’ for ‘getting better all the time!’ I didn’t get into a relationship with Hans and move to Thailand for good until things went sour and I found myself stranded in a foreign country (not the first time). Progress.
I might make fun of the hippie lifestyle, but I also welcome it. I grew up like this, traveling the world, communal-living, wood-fires, dogs, sage smoke. Hans and I have watched the sun come up over farm-grown coffee, cooked up rice and bones over open fires in sooty black kettles to feed the ducks and dogs, hunted down nest-eggs behind woodpiles, watered papaya trees and the dark, moist mushroom hut — lambs ear, chanterelle, portabello — built fires in little pottery rocket stoves as the stars come out, fanning the smoke to shoo away mosquitoes, and through it all discovered our mutual desire for simplicity and realness, our disdain for the trite and evasive. What better way to get to know someone?
And what I’ve realized is Hans is currently incompatible with the world most of us live in. He is going through an intense personal rebirth, and this journey has him on a special and unique wavelength. He has clarity around insights it’s easy to look past while plodding through plain old 3D.
Culty or not, corny assumptive-spirituality as it may be, that observation Hans abruptly made on day one about my ‘monkey mind’ continues to hit home when it comes to the bitterness I feel in my heart and soul. By churning the sources round and round in my mind I am keeping the pain alive. By revisiting it time and again, like a celebrity gossip site or ‘just one more’ round of a video game, I am refilling the battery pack, letting it live to spew another day.
But when you realize this is what you’re doing and you still feel the pain, no matter how much you try to shut those churning thoughts down, what then? A quote in a book I recently read on forgiveness:
“She who can’t find a constructive release for her anger may live in bitterness prickled by an anger which can only smolder in prolonged bouts of hostile self-criticism. The most expeditious way to get past an unpleasant emotional experience is to embrace it and to fully feel and express it.”
Hans has taught me a meditation for bitterness. It has changed everything, already.
It goes like this. Hold the object you have strong feelings towards, or need to forgive, in your mind’s eye. Picture them like a black and white egg, yolk white, egg white, black. The white yolk is who the person truly is. Potential and purity. The black border surrounding it is all the memories, impressions, and experiences laid over that core essence. Breathing in deeply, turn your head to the right and breathe in the white essence of that person. Then, while exhaling, turn your head to the left, breathing out the blackness.
“It’s like energy hygiene,” Hans says. “Instead of re-tweeting what you’re doing back to yourself, 24–7.”
OVER PASSIONFRUIT COCONUT smoothies in the outdoor kitchen, Plai, the beautiful Thai woman, Hans and I talk about freedom and what it truly means, how few people, especially in the west access it, how scary non-attachment seems until you are living it, and then how liberating it can be. We talk about changing an undesirable action starting with noticing the thought pattern that surrounds it. Then, if you’re experiencing perpetual pain around it, pay attention to the things in it that trigger you. The triggers are powerful reverse-talismans for growth and learning.
I tell a story of feeling trapped years ago, hung up over an ex-boyfriend whom, equally, would not let me go.
“You’re corded to your ex,” Cynthia and Rio, two Vermont healers had told me when I came to them, desperate to be free of my obsession, and they performed a ritual that cut the psychic cords.
Plai seems mostly focused on Hans, and his attention. But her soft, dark eyes turn to me, wide and attentive when I tell the next part, where I went home after the ritual. I was laid out flat sick for two days, and woke up completely over my ex, after four years of being torturously attached.
“And you were free from him?” she asked, longingly. “It really worked?”
Whatever it was, it worked, I say. And I had tried everything. I’ve been considering going back to them for my current family drama, the root of my feelings of hurt and rejection, the branches of my bitterness. But something in that feels like cheating. It feels a little dark to go there with my family ties. I’ve lain low, hoping to find a maybe-better way.
“Plai’s trying to get over someone right now,” Hans says. “She’s stuck on him but he is not so available.”
After Plai leaves I ask Hans if she’s talking about him and he laughs and says no, but admits yes, they did once have a thing.
I decide it’s time to learn to drive a motorbike. I find I want to know more about Plai. What is an herbal pool and, more importantly, how does she have a resort, at my age?
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