ever further stealth

ever further stealth

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Monday, January 9, 2012

Who? Me.

For several years before coming to Thailand I was a seasonal gypsy breaking further and further away from the perceived 'restraints' of modern capitalist society. Having grown up in an urban environment (NYC) with parents who gave me everything and an education that trained me to be a complacent worker I was living life for money and self -enjoyment. After university I was hustling freelance work in the city and then almost got a cool job driving the Red Bull cars around giving out Red Bull, but after a long interview process and building up huge expectations of how awesome life with a good job would be, they didnt give me the job because of points on my driver's license. I was crushed by this and decided that i would pursue enjoyment instead of money so I left everything behind to go snowboarding in Oregon for one winter. That winter opened my eyes to Western living and a vastly different and more natural way of life than i was used to. Fast forward 5 years and I had lived no more than 5 months in one place, not worked very hard, enjoyed myself pursuing passions such as travel, snowboarding, surfing, bicycling, and consuming psychadelic drugs. I had simplified life, living very cheaply, and very proud of my power to manifest such a fruitful life without material restraint and responsibility; I was a "hippy" going "full weirdo for the commonfolk" as I often put it. I was all about peace and love but felt a big feeling of "us vs. them" meaning I had an understanding of the way life should really be but there was so many people who were merely pawns of the system, asleep, depressed, eating shitty meat and processed sugars and I had to wake them up. This gave me a frustrated feeling and assured me that i could never live within "normal" society ever again. I had acquired piles and piles of spiritual and metaphysical knowledge, but no real understanding of much (kind of like a jack of all trades, master of none). So this past summer I set the intention to have a life changing experience, accompanied with a strong feeling that I had progressed to a point where change was inevitable. The form of this life changing experience was to take place somewhere in northern scandinavia (because I heard that getting as close to the magnetic poles of the earth has a profound effect) pedaling my bicycle around on LSD or mushrooms until I reached enlightenment or at least breached the three dimensional restriction of this reality. While I was making preparations for this journey I was emailing my sister Katina and she was seriously blowing my mind with what she was telling me based on her time at Baan Kiri(my guru Tom Light's guest house), and I was amazed that she was going to Vipassana...Here was my little sister schooling me on ideas that made complete sense that put certain things into perspective that had been fuzzy previously; about karma, and compassion, and selfishness especially. I found this to be truly cosmic, and when she offered to buy me a ticket to Thailand, one way, I quickly said yes, and then dealt with the anxiety of wanting to change my mind later. That is how I ended up meeting Tom. I remember my first few nights at Tom's, laughing myself to sleep in utter disbelief that THIS was the lifechanging experience i had set the intention for, because as much as I wanted to run away and never come back, what i had heard was making too much sense and although I knew it would be difficult, a big part of me was willing to accept the difficulty just to see what was next....This was a big step for me because I usually made difficult things easy by running away from them. I still struggle sometimes accepting my duty to do for others, when i was so used to doing for myself, but the Buddha's teachings of impermanence reminds me that these feelings are only temporary, and there is something magical in pleasing more than just my self.