Throwback Thursday: Therapy Part Two

Tags

CBT, healing, OCD, Self healing, stress, therapy, Work, Work place stress

At the start of every ‘therapy for the therapists’ group there was always a mindfulness exercise and for the first time I understood why we teach this to our patients who have severe emotional and mental distress.  I was nervous, but I focussed on the task:  I am sitting here, in a chair, the table is brown, the window is square.  Just the bare unarguable facts, no suicidal despair, no ‘I can’t cope, I am a leper’.  Just deal with what is in front of me.

A few weeks’ later and a few more weeks of Jaim’s lovely therapy and another therapy group meeting.  This time the mindfulness was not a ‘describing’ exercise like before but a ‘doing’ exercise.  In silence, the group leader handed out photocopies of Valentine’s Day themed Sudoku.  Printed on the bottom of the sheet was the website address: Activities for kids.  Now, when Sudoku first became a thing in England, I did try it and did know how to do it.  But that was a long time ago, and faced with this sheet, in the tense silence of the therapy group, I realised I had absolutely no idea what to do.  I ran through the options in my mind:  stay still, be mindful of the discomfort, and say nothing.  Or ask for help- traditionally we don’t often speak in mindfulness, but mostly the task is relatively simple and clarification isn’t normally needed.  I thought that if it was my turn as facilitator I wouldn’t mind if someone asked- in fact I wouldn’t want them to sit silent and confused.  So I broke the silence and asked the facilitator and my neighbour who both tried to give me brief and hushed advice.  Unfortunately it was no good, maybe because I’d got even more tense at speaking, maybe because the mindfulness section is so short they didn’t spend long explaining it, so I sat, writing anything in the boxes with no clue, feeling hot and uncomfortable but at the same time, a bit of me was laughing, a bit of me was looking forward to telling Jaim about it.  And a whole lot more of me knew that whatever was happening in that moment, underneath and beyond it I was still intact, still me, and would come out unscathed.

Jaim and I laughed long and hard about it.  ‘What, you mean, you, 15 years experience as a therapist, head of department, manager of a team of twenty, don’t know how to do Sudoku, I mean, really, what will everyone think!!!’ Jaim laughed.  He added more seriously: ‘the aim isn’t to avoid ever having a low mood or a bad experience, but to be able to let them go afterwards’.

Eliminate these behaviours and thoughts and I can experience pure happiness at least for a period, until and unless events in life happen as they do but it is true that at present I have no sad events or issues so it would be a shame to waste this opportunity to be perfectly happy.  

Driving home from work, listening to Radio 4, I heard someone say:  ‘Treat it as normal, that will help it to become normal’.  Yes, I thought, that is exactly what I need to do.  That could cure my suicidal thoughts and urges, my workplace anxiety, my body issues, my self consciousness, my OCD and all the rest of my various neuroses.  They were actually talking about Northern Ireland, but that kind of detail doesn’t bother me, I was listening to the radio at the time, so I’m taking it for my own.

But even as counselling is releasing years of blocks and bad habits from my mind, and recently rediscovered yoga and recently discovered deep tissue massage is releasing years of guilt and tensions from my body, a part of me is fighting to undermine this new found happiness.  New OCD behaviours appear and strange new worries spring up.  The mind is fighting back: Well you could be happy, but stuff always happens.  What if he’s just waiting until you are strong enough to manage on your own and then he’ll leave you?  What if he has an affair with your friend?  What if he dies?  What then?  But like in Eat Pray Love (the book, always the book) when she just sits on the beautiful island in silence for days and days while all her guilt and neuroses surface and then subside, I am just going to look kindly and patiently on whilst all this stuff works itself out and is eliminated, out of my mind, out of my body.

And then, in meditation, the thought came:  what if this feeling that I am interpreting as stress, anxiety, tension, confusion, OCD, what if it’s just a pregnant transition and is just me, teeming with energy?  It isn’t mental illness; it’s me, teeming with energy, coming into my powers.  And the power, the energy is just waiting to be told what to do, or for me to put them into action.

I’ve still got a fear of madness when I open doors in my mind.  Just like I have a fear of getting fat, stiff and unfit if I stop exercising and let myself off for a few days.  A fear of being totally lazy and losing all my drive if I sleep in or rest up or do nothing.  A fear of losing control at work or being sacked if I don’t work 100% all the time.  What if all these fears are equally unfounded? 

Like how anorexics, with devastating consequences, absorb the public health messages about food whilst obese people ignore them; I absorbed the ‘take responsibility’ and ‘accept guilt’ messages when I didn’t always need to.  Could it be possible that I am not guilty of everything that I accused myself of?

… Each moment is both unique and yet also the result of the previous moment and all previous moments, like beads being threaded on a string.  Is that that what heaven or enlightenment is, simply the result of day after day of right living? 

What if the happy, positive me, like when I am all chatty and cheerful and friendly at work, is the real me, and the dark, miserable one is not, is just a shadow trying to drag me back down, yet I used to think that was the real me, and the cheerful one was false, a front.

I went on facebook for the first time in weeks, and Elizabeth Gilbert had posted that having a creative mind is like having a border collie for a pet: if you don’t give it work to do, it will find itself something to do, and you may not like what it chooses.  This aligned with what the man on a work wellbeing course said: worry is a misuse of the imagination, give your mind something better to do.

It made me think of worry and also OCD.  Is it as simple as that?  Forget all the exposure exercises and behaviour charts; just give myself something big and all consuming to do- fall in love, write a book, etc.  I remember someone on a creative writing course writing about OCD, maybe she would be able to cure herself by writing more?

I didn’t tell Jaim about the OCD:  I didn’t want to be like one of those patients that goes to a ten minute appointment and adds loads of other issues on at the end of the appointment and anyway I was prioritising the most dangerous.  I also thought that maybe it would recede as all the other stuff got sorted.  And that if it didn’t, well, I’d got help once, I could always get help for the OCD later.  Or just employ same method: awareness.

One night late, on my own, before I went to bed I looked up some OCD self help information.  It was reassuring, very reassuring, as long as I can fully absorb it:

• Intrusive thoughts are common and are an OCD symptom, i.e. they are not me.  Sad, to think of all those people persecuted by thoughts, that they can’t share, and that get worse and worse until they are totally taken over.
• Worrying about them, blocking them, or taking them seriously are all things that make them worse.
• Laughing at them can help, as can reminding yourself that everyone has them and they don’t mean anything.

I thought about all the other healing I have done and realised that I can easily cure myself of my OCD, simply by using the method I have thus far employed for everything else I have done:

• Let go of it.  Un-hook my attention and my interest, hook by hook, until it disappears.  It is my attention and interest that make it a thing, that give it form, without that, it is nothing.
• And realise that even when I do have it, it doesn’t bother me, I am still intact underneath.

It’s like healthy eating:  in the moment of deciding and then starting you can feel totally healthy and transformed even whilst accepting that the body and health you have is the result of years of poor eating and will take a while to change/catch up.  Perhaps this is a secular version of the nature of forgiveness?

Postscript:

Gratitude on top of gratitude:  In January the man I had had all the difficulties with before Christmas was moved to another job and I never had to see him again.

Thank you very much for reading

Throwback Thursday: Therapy

Tags

CBT, stress, Suicidal, suicidal thoughts, suicide, therapy, Work, Work place stress

The night before I returned to work after Christmas, Anthony asked me if I was ready.  I said, ‘well my work clothes and bag are sorted’.  ‘I meant psychologically’, he said.  ‘Well in that case, no, not at all’.  The thought of facing that man (just before my Christmas break I had a horrible meeting at work with a very confrontational man) again was unbearable.  ‘Surely you must have a strategy for dealing with him?’ Anthony asked.  ‘Only the ultimate one’, I muttered.  ‘For God’s sake Rachel, you can’t kill yourself over someone at work.  You aren’t a depressed Goth teenager anymore.  I really think it’s about time you got some help with this’. 

I had been thinking about it.  The idea of getting help had come to me in meditation.  I had never sought help before, although I had had suicidal thoughts on and off since I was fifteen.   

I had even imagined myself doing a talk about it, at some kind of mental health event, about being in that lonely attic office at work where no one came to see me without an appointment, and then my knee started really hurting so I had to move to a downstairs office that is much more public and you can’t hear people coming from a distance, they just appear.  Just before I was moved downstairs I was having very strong suicidal urges.  I had brought a craft knife in from home for an art session, but it sat on the top of the filing cabinet screaming ‘method’ to me.

So on the 12^th January 2015, coincidentally (i.e. I hadn’t done it intentionally) one year to the day since I had driven to Wells-next-the-Sea with my swimsuit on under my clothes and bathed in the cold North Norfolk sea as a commitment to the spiritual path, (described in my previous book How to Find Heaven on Earth, which is for sale super cheap on Amazon) albeit my own eclectic and ever-changing made-up spiritual path, but still, I meant it, I picked up the phone and rang the work telephone counselling service.

The phone was answered with a lovely softly spoken Spanish accent, by a man called Jaim. Talking with this calm, gentle man every Friday morning… I sat on the floor of my office with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and an A4 pad in front of me and as he talked I scribbled down as much of it as I could.

Gently, he dismantled the strange framework I had built inside and around me.  Rachel, he said, ‘Thoughts are not real; they are just like when you are watching a film or reading a book, there is no obligation to engage with them.’

No obligation to engage with them?  Are you sure?  The idea of letting them go and letting myself off was tantalising and delicious but I felt conflicted and guilty at the same time.  Surely, if I have an idea as serious as killing myself I should give it some attention?  I mean, I must be thinking it for a reason?  Or at the very least, the fact that I have thoughts like this surely means there is something very wrong with me and that I am not like everyone else.  And if I did give up the suicidal thoughts, I wouldn’t have an ultimate Plan B or anything to hang onto In-Case-Of-Emergency.  

But Jaim helped me see that the thing I’m hanging onto is unhelpful to the extent that it has become the problem itself, rather than a solution to the problem.  The original problem has gone and all I am left with is the original solution, which has now become a problem:  The Problem.  I used to think it was a safety net for when I got all freaked out and scared about things that I found difficult.  But what if I just say fuck off to it as it as it arises?  And what if instead of freaking out over challenges and fears I just get on with whatever task is in front of me?  But what will I do without all that to fall back on?  Answer: Probably manage quite well or even better:  suicidal thoughts do not actually help.

If thoughts and what I think isn’t really who I am, then who am I?  How do I know who I am?   Is it rather what I do, and the reflection of myself and my actions in the people around me?  Question:  What to think about instead?  I don’t want to stop thinking, I like thinking…  Jaim said:  ‘Why should you stop the activity of the mind?  But you can direct it more consciously to what you want.  It’s a myth that stopping the mind, that that is what meditation is all about.  Imagining, creation, ideas, are all good things!’

My mind is working better- not thinking unhelpful thoughts.  I am learning not to fill my mind with noise except when chosen:  a subject of interest on Radio 4, music for pleasure, choosing consciously, rather than ‘filling without knowing’ in Jaim’s words, when you don’t allow yourself any silence or space to choose:

‘If you work too hard and fill every moment with purpose in a rush of doing you forget to just be.  Allow yourself times of silence and moments of non doing.  It’s in these moments that you realise who you are.’  Jaim said:  ‘Accept who you are, warts and all.  You have been afraid of showing yourself to be weak, forever trying to please someone else, to be ultra efficient, perfect and invincible but nobody is that.  Ask when you don’t know.  Tell yourself that it’s okay for me not to know.  It’s okay to sometimes not be on top of things.  Your previous assumption- ‘I can’t cope’- meant you had to demonstrate the opposite and that was the cause of much stress.  The need to prove is a constant source of nervousness.’

I told him about the man I had the meeting with, and that I was scared of facing him again.  Jaim said calmly:  ‘In my experience there is something simple that will perhaps help you; to be aware, preferably in real time, or if not as soon as possible after, of how you are feeling.  Monitor carefully your changes of mood.  This is the first indicator that something is happening.  If you feel upset, sad or worried, just notice, enquire with an open mind, what is going on, not criticising, not should, not should not, just:  Why?  What is the reason?  What is actually happening?  Outer event?  Memory?  Interpretation as threat?  Understand your interpretation:  what are you thinking?  I’m not good enough?  I won’t cope?  Deal with these asap- of course I am good enough, I can cope.’

 ‘Watch out for winter and being tired.’

‘The more you cultivate and develop the ability to observe yourself (your thoughts, feelings and behaviour), the more you will be able to deal with adverse circumstances without panicking.’

‘Your observing mind is the wise part of you that is there to keep an eye on things in the control room, ready to respond to any variations:  red lights= respond quick.  Observe the dashboard of your life, trust you have the ability to deal with it.  Choose to take appropriate action instead of panicking and giving into depressed or unhelpful thoughts.  There is usually a way out.’

‘Every half an hour, stop and check in, how I am feeling and why, very simple.  You have been so scared of not coping but don’t pre-empt it, don’t assume.  Whatever comes to meet you you will find time and a way to deal with it.

You have done it so far! (You have been around a while)’.

‘Being aware stops you being on autopilot, and when you are on autopilot your subconscious mind takes over and can lead you astray.’

‘When we are well we feel well, it’s an inbuilt gauge telling us life is going well.  When you get an uncomfortable feeling, that is a warning light:  use your feelings to help you.  Sometimes it will be a simple solution, sometimes it will be more complicated, that’s okay, we will never understand everything.  Feelings are valid:  they are telling you something.’

‘You are making decisions every minute, you start afresh every minute: life unfolds in the present.’

Then as I began to get better:  he said:  ‘The difference is, you are not beating yourself up.  You might be doing something wrong, if so, you can correct it.  You are walking through life with your wits about you, paying attention to yourself and what’s around you.  Observe your thoughts and behaviour, watch the dashboard, watch for changes in mood and take action accordingly.  Do you realise how important this is?  Feels life changing!’

Replacement coping strategies:

• Help is always available, all you have to do is ask
• Whatever comes your way you will be able to deal with it, as you have always done thus far

Thank you very much for reading

 

Throwback Thursday Hare Krishna

Tags

awareness, Hare krishna, London meditation, Mantra, meditation, mindfulness, Seeking, spiritual awakening, Spiritual experience, Spiritual practice, spirituality

Hare Krishna

On New Year’s Eve 2014 I took my step daughter back to her mum in London and then I had several hours until my return train.  I had no desire to go shopping.  I went to the Hare Krishna Temple near Tottenham Court Road.  It seemed to me like an appropriate thing to do on New Year’s Eve.

I’ve felt like that a lot since.  When asked what would I like most of all, or what would my dream experience be, and when trying to guess what a surprise day experience present was*, I’ve refined it down to this:  To go into a room, like a church but not a church, all alone, with perhaps maybe some kind of a priest or a monk on hand to answer any questions I might have.  That’s it, that’s my dream experience.

The Hare Krishna Temple Room was as beautiful as I had hoped.  A radiant young woman sat next to me, befriended me and gave me books to take away.  There were musicians.  We chanted the Hare Krishna mantra for a long time.  On the way out I picked up a leaflet that said:

Every now and again it’s good to pause in your pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

And so 2015 began with me chanting (in my head) the Hare Krishna Mantra every morning before work, using the beads of a choker my mum had given me for Christmas.  This exemplifies my do-it-yourself, just-do-it-now, no-need-to-shop-for-all-the special-equipment approach I take to spiritual seeking (and to exercise, I will do a yoga class in my work clothes if I haven’t had time to change, and I go to the gym in ancient trainers and any old clothes); as well as my practical approach:  I didn’t have time to do a whole circuit on Japa Mala meditation beads (those long strings of beads that are traditionally used to meditate with) but I did have time to do one or two lengths of the choker.  You do one full recitation of the mantra on each bead, rolling each bead between your fingers and gradually inching your way along the whole string.  The beads help you keep your place as to how many you have done and help keep concentration and focus as well.  (And enable you to time your practice so you aren’t late for work).  The radiant woman at the temple had given me a little card with the Hare Krishna Mantra printed on:

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare /       Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

Chanting a mantra: the idea that you are meditating and praying without actually having to think or do anything other than just say those words over and over, was very attractive and very easy to do and yet it was so purifying, the effects were so strong:

Feeling my lungs expanding and the whole mantra like a wave rising and falling, heading towards the light: We are always heading towards the light; it’s just that dying concentrates the mind so that we notice it.  Dying is the same as living, just keep on heading towards the light.

Noticing the little stillness that lives underneath everything but that is normally buried in my chest under my breathing and in my mind under the chatter of thoughts.  I breathe and I notice it.  It feels good.

Thinking in meditation one morning about how maybe God is an abstract concept like time, something we make up to conceptualise the impossible to conceptualise, something to hang our thoughts on.

I turn over hard decisions or stuff I am stuck with or unsure of to God and/or The Universe, or to Time (maybe they all the same thing) and then later I come up with the answer.  So that in time, inspiration strikes or the way becomes clear.  Could be due to Time, or could be God or The Universe but could equally just be our future selves like in the film Interstellar, or even The Future Itself, presenting the answers as it and them arrive and arise.

How much personal responsibility are we able or willing to take on and credit ourselves with?  Like when we ask God:  ‘Why don’t you do something, why don’t you send someone?’ and God says:  ‘I did send someone, I sent you.’

What did for me with the Hare Krishnas was that to get right into it you start at the bottom as a book distributor, giving out books on the street.  I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do that.  Maybe that’s why I haven’t thus far ever fully signed up to any one particular religion, because I baulk at doing anything that I don’t actually want to do….

Anthony’s sister wants to talk to me about spirituality- strange stuff is happening for her, she has just started meditating.  I reconnected with my friend  from years ago; she said ‘I want to talk to you about spirituality’.   Anthony said, ‘See, you always wanted someone to talk to about that stuff, now you are the person people talk to.’

*it was a flotation tank session, the photo was taken during the trip to London for it

Thank you very much for reading

Inspiration and support

Tags

Chennai, India, Pushkar, Travel, Travel memoir, Travel writing, Travelling, writing

The working title of my travel memoir is ‘I fell in love with you and I cried,’ from Chennai. After the drafting, now comes the editing. I hope I will just fly through it, after all, surely writing the first draft is the hardest. Some bits are near as dammit perfect such as my favourite chapter so far Chennai Part Two. For photos of Chennai see here. Some chapters need a bit of reworking, such as Pushkar, home to Babas, gorgeous looking cows, and fun monkeys. Onwards and upwards, wish me luck!

Charles Bukowski

“there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing

that
gentle pure
space

it's worth

centuries of
existence

say

just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch

that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won't
get it all

ever.
--It's Ours”

― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Currently in the UK, living on a narrowboat and finishing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appeared regularly on this blog, and I am returning to India 31/12/19!

Lord give me a song that I can sing: Part Two

Tags

Cosmic ordering, Ho Chi Minh City, Law of Attraction, love, marriage, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel memoir, Traveling, Travelling, Vietnam

Draft extract from the final chapter of my travel memoir

Lord give me a song that I can sing* Ho Chi Minh City

It can be hard to get a dentist in the UK, an NHS one anyway plus we’d have other things to do and might not get around to it for a while, so we’d decided to get check ups before we left. Anthony had booked the dentist when we were in DaLat. It was a private practice, very smart; the decor was leaf green, with green lockers where we put our outdoor shoes and green Crocs to wear. When it was our turn a member of staff took us up in the lift to the dentists. We were seen at the same time in separate rooms. We were struck by how many staff there were and how much attention we got, at one point I had three members of staff with me. Apparently lots of Australians come to Vietnam for dental treatment, even with insurance it is cheaper to fly to Vietnam.

We went to the army surplus market, it wasn’t as cheap as we’d hoped, the stall holders were good at the hard sell and it wasn’t at all easy to bargain. I bought army boots; Anthony bought army trousers and a long green coat. I liked the enamelled rice bowls supposedly used by the Vietnamese soldiers and considered getting them for presents. It was an indoor market and so incredibly hot we had to leave for a break.

We found a cafe where we drank freezing iced water, Red Bull and coffee. There was a waving cat on the counter, the man in the cafe told us about waving cats, businesses have them, he said, rather than waving, they are beckoning customers in. We asked him about whether the stuff in the market was real, given all the years which had passed. He said that some may be fake, but you’d ‘have to be expert to know.’ In the end we bought engraved US Army lighters for presents. Unfortunately these were confiscated at Air China check in. Every other airline we went on let us carry one lighter in hand luggage, Air China, none at all. At the counter there was a huge plastic sweetie jar half filled with cheap lighters, and our special ones were added in, sadly.

We went to the area popular with tourists, where there were narrow alleyways, lots of massage places, street food stalls, packed little shops selling everything and nice little bars and restaurants. We stopped at one and I ordered a mojito…

(We met *Geography of the Moon who we met here and went to see play, you can read about that here)

…I had only had only two cocktails, one mojito, and one cinnamon one called ‘The Struggle,’ invented by a previous bar tender, ‘She was going through something,’ the bar tender said, and one beer, with lots of space in between. But I got a contact high. Such a high of happiness. Later I lay there loved up, him asleep or resting, me thinking, appreciating him, thinking he may die, what would I be like. The next day I said, ‘I thought Oh my God what if you die, I’ll scream and I won’t be able to stop.’ I’d had a dream like that, like being out of body, trying to get a hold of myself and stop screaming. Anthony’s face was a mixture of horrified and sad. ‘No you won’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll say to yourself, ‘we had a great time together, and now it’s time to get on with the next phase of your life.’’

With two days left, I did my ‘Words are spells’ action plan/wish list. Interesting that post success life looks the same as what we are/have been doing… I imagined what I’d want, how it could start, someone could approach me about the blog… And they did. What next?

Jim Carey, ‘You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.’ The alternative is what we’d do anyway, get ordinary jobs, not suicide.

What is being a failure anyway? Leaving with nothing? You can’t take anything with you anyway.

In the coffee shop we had a conversation about The Future; Anthony saying I must finish the book and that he would support me, over coffee and iced peach tea and more free iced tea, so much liquid. Anthony said, ‘It’s funny how you get a free drink when you order a drink.’ And that at least in the case of coffee the free drink is often much bigger than the ordered and paid for one (a last metaphor!)

Just before we left we went back to the mojito place where we’d met Geography of the Moon. We ordered Anthony breakfast, me, Americano, a great big coffee. We had one last thing to buy, incense, we thought we’d have to go to China town but we were fed up with shopping. Like everywhere the restaurant-bar had a shrine with incense burning. We asked the woman where we could buy some. ‘Are you Buddhist?’ she asked. ‘Well we meditate, we use incense,’ we said. ‘Easy,’ she said, and told us to just go out of the restaurant down the alleyway and to ask at any shop, and wrote us down the Vietnamese word for incense on a piece of paper. Sure enough, at the first shop we came to, we were shown a big box full of packs and tubes of incense, perfect for presents and for us.

Lord give me a song that I can sing/Sing for me my lord, a song that I can sing (GOTM). Much as the mournful request is hardwired into me to love, I know really you can sing the song yourself. You can write the song yourself. You can write yourself the song you want to sing. 

‘Your life is your life, go all the way’ Bukowski

Thank you very much for reading

For more photographs of HCMC see previous blog

Thank you very much for reading!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Currently in the UK, living on a narrowboat and finishing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appeared regularly on this blog, and I am returning to India 31/12/19!

Lord give me a song that I can sing: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Tags

Backpacking, Cosmic ordering, escape the matrix, HCMC, Ho Chi Minh City, Law of Attraction, Mid life, Minimalism, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel writing, Vietnam, Voluntary simplicity

Draft extract from the final chapter of my travel memoir

Lord give me a song that I can sing* Ho Chi Minh City

*Geography of the Moon who you can read about here

The man at the bus stop in Da Lat asked us if we lived in Ho Chi Minh City. We marvelled at the possibility. There are ex pats. There are digital nomads. There are retirees. There are people with all sorts of businesses. It’s not that strange but at the same time, the thought that it could be us seemed somehow hard to believe. And yet he thought it. And yet, of course, it’s possible.

In Nha Trang we’d sat in a restaurant and checked the booking for HCMC. We realised we’d booked somewhere with no WiFi- since almost everywhere has WiFi, it was easy to forget to check. It was quite hard to find cheap places in HCMC and certainly they all seemed pretty small- I wondered was it a dense population, like Tokyo, with space at a premium? Anyway after quite a while of searching we re-booked a small but nice looking room.

When we arrived in HCMC we realised we’d forgotten something again and not got our own bathroom; we hadn’t always had our own bathroom on the trip, but it is nice to have, plus we thought, it was our last place. Not only that, the place was very hostel-y; and our room was actually one of two small private rooms off the main dorm, which meant we had to go through the dorm, right to the back, and through a door on the right to enter.

A balcony ran along the back of the dorm and past our window too. Our room had looked grey in the photographs, in real life it was unfinished with bare concrete floors, albeit with a nice rug and a comfy futon bed, a clothes rail and a desk. It didn’t help that the key to our room stuck and didn’t work so that we had to go in and out via the balcony doors. So we were a bit disappointed, and thought about moving, especially as the first night was very loud outside; below the hostel was a restaurant bar with people outside late.

But it turned out okay, as always. There’s a sense of having to bed in to a new place. We got used to the room and stopped being bothered about the lock, and the staff were really friendly.

I had been anxious about the shared loos, only three toilets for all those people but there was hardly ever anyone else in the bathroom area. Sometimes there were young women in there playing music, I wondered if it was a privacy thing, like in Japan? And later we even enjoyed the noise outside or at least appreciated it.

The dorm room had eighteen beds in it, you could even stay as a couple sharing one, occasionally walking through I caught glimpses through slightly open curtains, people had made like nests with food etc, like hutches, could one live like that all the time, I wondered?

Inside we had AC as powerful as we wanted, outside on the balcony it was hot hot hot and dusty. From the fridge downstairs I bought ‘big water,’ Sprite and beer and took them upstairs and onto the balcony. Such a pleasure, those things, and looking out, smoking, and watching the people below and passing by.

Again, breakfast was included, I only went down a couple of times, huge chunks of French bread, and black coffee. Anthony said that one of the biggest differences between when he went travelling twenty years ago and now, was the phones. We had a smart phone, Anthony did the booking of accommodation, trains and buses etc, and it was very useful. But at breakfast, in the open area at reception, we looked around, no one talking to each other, everyone on their phones. So when a man walked in, looking around for somewhere to sit, it was us who made eye contact and ended up sitting and chatting with him, as we were the only ones not looking down at a phone. He was tall, which confused me at first, as I hadn’t thought of Chinese people being tall, and casually dressed in shorts and a faded pale blue t shirt, the other Chinese people I’d seen had been smartly dressed. Plus, he was on his own, and the others had been in big groups. He was the first and only Chinese person we met. He said he had made his money already and now came for several months of the year to Vietnam to eat the healthy food; he often went to the market and bought a kind of vegetable/fruit that looked like a potato, he cut me a slice of it, I wasn’t that impressed, it tasted similar to raw potato to me. He explained that the food in China is poisoned; the air is polluted. He told us about a Chinese dissident, now living in the US, who is on YouTube, who speaks the truth about China, and who he believed would be the one to change everything. You can’t say anything against the government, maybe nothing happens then, but it is noted, and one day it comes back to you. He said it used to be hard for Chinese citizens to get a passport, now it is much easier, hence the huge rise of Chinese tourists.

There was the feeling of things to do, a kind of anxiety. In Nha Trang we were low, in DaLat we were high, here, it was more balanced, about practical things, shopping for warm clothes and presents. ‘Just do what’s in front of you’ (method of dealing with anxiety). It felt still, in the eye of the storm, it (home) upon us, surreal…

We walked to the night market, past very expensive looking creatively decorated hotels, everywhere lively, busy, vibrant. On the way back we walked through a public park, there were huge fallen leaves on the ground. A crystal meth addict stumbled around near a bench. There was music in a pavilion, with formal dancing lessons going on, young people, then in the next pavilion, older people doing dancing lessons. In the streets there were people of all ages out late, eating cheap food, drinking cheap beer. It seemed easy for people to be out having fun, socialising and enjoying themselves in the evening. Of course, being somewhere where it is dry and warm late into the night helps to make this possible.  HCMC had a nice vibe, people seemed happy. ‘We could live here for two weeks a year,’ we said; ‘Phnom Penh for a month, India and the UK for the rest of the time.’

For more photographs of HCMC see previous blog

Thank you very much for reading!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Currently in the UK, living on a narrowboat and finishing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appeared regularly on this blog.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Tags

Backpacking, Cities of South East Asia, Geography of the moon, HCMC, Ho Chi Minh City, Mid life, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel memoir, Travel writing, Vegan travel Vietnam, Vietnam, writing

I am still working on the HCMC chapter, so in the meantime here is another photo blog post!

(Above) The tourist area where I drank mojitos and where we met Geography of the Moon

(Above) Dusk near the night market

(Above) Our hostel was above this bar

(Above) The amazing all vegan design your own hotpot place complete with fake eggs!

(Above x2) A very cool cafe we went to after visiting the dentist!

All photographs by my husband Anthony John Hill

Thank you for visiting!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Currently in the UK, living on a narrowboat and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.