Sex, Drugs and Meditation

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spiritual awakening, Spiritual books, spiritual enlightenment, Spiritual experience, spiritual healing, Spiritual journey, spiritual memoir, Spiritual practice, spirituality

What does it feel like to have a spiritual awakening?

What does it feel like to explore the edges of one’s consciousness and sanity?

What do you do next?

Sometimes it felt like the sky was splitting open and sometimes I fell into a state of bliss while staring at leaves. Sometimes I went on extraordinary journeys from within my own living room.

But I spent at least as much time reflecting on and managing the tasks of day to day living and workplace relationships; using everyday life as a vehicle for spiritual growth. Feeling my everyday life infused by this newfound spirituality, and learning to find my own way and read the signs of the universe for myself.

At the same time managing feelings of depression, anxiety and OCD and eventually seeking therapy, the lessons of which are shared here.

Experimenting with religion but ultimately not finding a home there. With my husband, experimenting with different philosophies and spiritual practices, including giving up sex and orgasms. Stretching my mind to the edges of sanity and insanity, or at least, that’s what it felt like sometimes.

This collection, of blog posts and spiritual memoirs, charts a journey of spiritual exploration and self reflection which eventually led to us breaking away from routine, security and family expectations, and selling up and going off on an actual one year trip to India and Southeast Asia, documented in my travel memoir I fell in love with you and I cried.

On Awe Walks Part Two

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awe, awe walks, beauty, nature, nature walk, spiritual awakening, spiritual enlightenment, Spiritual experience, spirituality

Rupert Graves- Letter to my younger self- The Big Issue Magazine

Just a couple of days after reading about Awe Walks for the first time (see previous post) I bought The Big Issue and in the Letter to my younger self whereby a famous person looks back (always good and often very moving, and which have now been collected into a book) were the words above from Rupert Graves. Definitely an Awe Walk. Here is another of my own Awe Walks, taken again from the little book documenting my ‘spiritual awakening,’ (available super cheap on amazon)

Let’s go for a walk, Part 2 (or, Heaven on Earth)

I had to go to Wales again for work. It was almost two years since my first trip, when I’d been so scared about driving there. This time, it didn’t even cross my mind to be nervous. I arrived in the sunshine and spent an easy afternoon at the hospital, being shown around and doing the work I needed to do. In the therapy office, waiting for my host, I glanced around the room: overflowing notice boards, information leaflets, resource folders, work boots and shelves of books. I scanned the book titles: two were about magic. Was that just the Universe reminding me, yet again, that magic is everywhere?

Because it certainly was. I finished my work and drove to my hotel. A budget chain hotel, it was situated in what at first glance did not look like a pretty area: close to a big roundabout in a concrete landscape of office premises. It was still light, sunny and relatively warm. I got some chocolate and a drink out of the vending machine and went outside to stretch my legs. I thought about asking the woman on the desk if there was anywhere nice to go for a walk but she was busy checking in another guest. I walked out the back of the car park to a scrubby grassy area, there was a path lightly littered with rubbish, a few trees shading the path. I found a more definite path and then all of a sudden there was a river, flowing over and between big, grey rocks with a waterfall. I went down to the water’s edge. It was so isolated, all of a sudden, even though it was just moments from the hotel.

I went back up to the path and now it was a real path, in a real wooded area, the litter had disappeared. All of a sudden, there was a canal, with lovely little boats moored up, paint peeling, covered in algae, hemmed in by what looked like years of waterweed. It reminded me of when I first met John, and he was living on a boat on a canal. Was it a metaphor or not even a metaphor, a real life tableau, an illustrated live experience of This is your life?

Here we have John, waiting, stuck, as I might have thought. A little way along, the boats disappear and here’s me or rather, a location for me: the water’s surface green with plants and sparkling golden in the light, like Ophelia’s grave. I was here. Despairing, suicidal and romantic.

I followed the towpath. Everything became lighter and prettier. The water was like glass, reflecting the huge green trees that lined the bank.
A group of dog walkers came past with not just one but four lovely, bouncy dogs, who all, dogs and people, stopped for a friendly hello.

Through the trees, I glimpsed a huge cemetery, which gave me a momentary pause: evoking a layer of gravitas to my skippy summer-autumn walk; increasing my gratitude and the urgency and importance of appreciation; reminding me that I was alive. Beyond the cemetery, a rolling vista of green, sloping down towards houses in the distance. It was as if every view imaginable had been laid on just for me.

There was a field with sheep in it, another with cows and then a friendly horse looking over the fence at me. Around each curve of the river, something new and more lovely than the last. I wondered when I should turn back or if I should just stop for a rest: a little bench appeared for me to sit down on.

Bridges, each one quainter than the last, made of roughly hewn pale stone, dinky, just big enough to walk under, it was like being a child. They were numbered 52; 53; 54; John’s age? The future? Tracking the course of our life?

You couldn’t make it up.

My senses tingled. My soul soared.

Silver- really silver- birch, almost gold in the late afternoon light as if it had been painted, washed with metallic paint. Who knew you could get silver trees? Real, silver trees? Not in a royal palace or a rock star’s deluxe OTT garden or on some fairytale film set but just out here, on a walk that anyone could go on.

Hobbit fantasy land like tree roots, travelling down over the whole surface of the steep bank so that I could see them all in all their twisted glory: as if the steep bank was there on purpose.

Like life… it just got more and more beautiful, it went on for how long, who knows, when to stop, when did it start?

I could have asked about somewhere to go for a walk. I could have turned left instead of right. I could have found out all about it, read about it in a guidebook, looked it up on the internet. Maybe I alighted on the only pretty stretch or maybe it was this pretty for twenty miles or more.

I hadn’t had a drink, I hadn’t been meditating and I wasn’t tired. I’d just been working and then driven to the hotel. So what tripped me over into this state of grace? Maybe the chocolate in the hotel vending machine was spiked. I’ll never know.

Thank you very much for reading

Please feel free to share your own awe walk experiences!

Self portrait, Pushkar, India 2020

About the author

In 2018 in our forties and fifties my husband and I sold up, gave away most of our possessions, and went travelling for a year, mainly in India, and also to Thailand, Tokyo, Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam. My personal/spiritual/travel memoir of the year is completed and out with agents. I live on a narrowboat in rural Northamptonshire UK with my husband and two cats.

Follow me on Instagram thisisrachelhill

Further… A post about my husband’s ‘spiritual journey.’

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books, Film, relationships, spiritual awakening, Spiritual books, spiritual enlightenment, Spiritual experience, Spiritual journey, spirituality, They live, waking up

My husband Anthony John Hill ‘became enlightened’* in 1985 in his mid twenties and the fact that he’s stuck around so long I sometimes take for granted.  Remembering explains why I cried so much when I watched the end of The Good Place on Netflix. (*my words not his)

They Live 1988 film

His words:

‘I became aware, or more aware, and began to question things, to question the world I lived in, and to see through the facade.  It was in 1985 that I realised I was here to ‘bear witness.”

How it started:

‘My girlfriend at the time,** her mother liked me a lot and lent me books; On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Jung.  Later I found The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test by Tom Wolfe, about Ken Kesey; Fear and loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson, The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, and, most important of all, Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse’ (which we both regularly mention whenever we feel as if we’ve ‘fallen off the path.’) (**who he remains in contact with to this day)

‘Becoming vegetarian was the big thing.  You can read as much as you want but it’s the actual doing something that makes a difference.  That was the first thing I actually did in terms of self improvement.  From that moment I started questioning things more; I moved away, and started doing courses in personal growth.’

The Merry Pranksters were cohorts and followers of American author Ken Kesey in 1964.

‘Once you wake up the veil is lifted.  It’s like being on a hill looking down.  You have the opportunity to step out of it and look back and see it as it is.  Of course that could be all part of the illusion too, you can’t know.  All you can do is be as genuine as you can.  I still get angry, I still make mistakes.  I can still be unaware at times, a lot of the time, not be full of love to my fellow humans.’

Anthony John Hill at 25

My anchor and my guide

 

Throwback Thursday: The story so far

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awareness, buddhism, Hare krishna, meditation, spiritual awakening, spiritual enlightenment, Spiritual experience, Spiritual journey, Spiritual practice, spirituality

A book should be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us

Franz Kafka   

For Book, you can substitute Love.  This is my story:

In 2009 I drove to work in the morning and watched the pink and gold sky split open.  Driving home in the evening I passed outrageously lit up lorries that looked like fun fair rides.  Somehow I managed to keep one foot in the visible and one foot in the invisible.  For the next six years, I followed the trail.  I always joke that it was like Eat Pray Love but without the travel.

I meditated and felt as if my skin was being bathed in soap and soft water.  I saw situations worked out from behind my closed eyelids.  I had the most amazing physical sensations.  I took up Yoga.  I had deep tissue massage and experienced profound physical and emotional release as she worked my knots out until her fingers got down to my bones.

I practiced Paganism and Wicca, I went for walks and stared at leaves, gathered foliage, wrote spells and held rituals every full moon for almost a year.  I was invited to a women and Islam open day.  I bought books and began praying five times a day.  For a few weeks my life was illuminated.

I chanted the Hare Krishna Mantra every morning for three months.  Things led on from each other.  I felt purified, and wanted to feel even better.  I had trouble with someone at work.  In meditation I said, I have no protection against this person.  The answer came: oh yes you do, you have this.

I did an evening class in Buddhism.  Stepping out onto the top floor of the car park after class, the sky filled with birds, the breeze cool and warm at the same time.  Listening to The Stone Roses on the way home:  This is the one, this is the one she’s waited for, yes, I thought, yes, this is it.  But no sooner had I filled the house with Buddhas than I woke up one day and realised I had burned through that as well.  Or it had burned through me, whatever.

I read The Secret and practiced The Law of Attraction.  Not to get cheques in the post or to get parking spaces, but just because it made life easy and more beautiful.  Simple things like walking up to a crossing and it turns green just as I get there.  To the sublime:  Arriving home one night I pulled into the car park, and in the second before I turned into the parking space the headlights lit up the hedge in front of me and I saw a mouse on a branch.   A mouse on a branch!  Almost immediately, the thought came into my head:  I hope you enjoyed that, because it won’t happen again.  I thought straight back, yeah, I did enjoy it, and no, I don’t expect it to happen again, who would.  And I don’t need it to happen again, because I saw it the first time.

As well as experiencing anything and everything I was also searching for a spiritual or scientific explanation that made sense to me.  A unifying theory, if you like.  After about six years of searching it arrived in my mind fully realised in a dream:  We’re all green mist, we created these bodies because without bodies we can’t pick up a pen and write poetry or kiss each other.  But the kissing and the poetry are so distracting that we forgot that we’re green mist come down for a human experience…  but maybe that’s the point.  You can’t enjoy a party if you stand at the door with your coat on and maybe spiritual beings can’t enjoy a human experience on earth unless they fall in feet first and forget their previous incarnation….

I woke up on the massage table as if I had just arrived there and looked at this new person in the mirror:  hair everywhere, skin glowing, mind wiped clean of all previous concerns.  But you wake up again every moment, and in this moment I can’t imagine anywhere else I’d rather be than right here.

Thank you very much for reading

Throwback Thursday: Signs

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awareness, signs, spiritual awakening, spiritual enlightenment, Spiritual experience, Spiritual journey, spirituality, The Field, The law of attraction, The Secret, The Unconscious

Those of us who are awake to the Universe but who have not adopted or been adopted by a particular faith have to be flexible, I believe, in where we get our support from.  The whole world is ours but we need to be discerning in order to read our own Bible from the world around us, as it presents itself, in each moment.  It’s like running your fingertips along a fence and on one in every thousand railings there is a message written in Braille that seems just for you.

Perhaps especially for women, with no religion that’s female led or totally okay for women other than Paganism or Wicca or some New Age stuff; and with the toxic nature of much of the news and advertising, we have to keep our ears pricked and eyes wide open for those helpful messages that still abound in listening to Radio 4 on the way to work or seeing adverts at bus stops or watching box sets at home.

I learned almost everything I needed from the streets, the rest I learned from films and books (Mozart in the Jungle  watched during a free trial of Amazon Prime over Christmas).

Starve your ego, feed your soul (sign outside Earlham road Norwich shop)

From the moment we’re born we’re seeking (advert on YouTube)

There is no time for regrets, it’s far better to see where you are now and work from there (my stars in a magazine at the hairdresser’s).

We all search in different ways (advert on YouTube).

Charlie Higson on R2 Chris Evans, he said, ‘If you write something that’s good, it will get published, there’s no magic trick or secret doorway.’  (okay, it was advice to kids who want to become writers, but I was listening to it at that moment, so I am taking it).

How do you know it was meant for you:  you were listening/looking at the time, no one ‘put it there for you’ you, I don’t believe, to quote Nick Cave, in an interventionist God, it’s all just us, learning to read our path out of all the billions of possibilities that exist within every second.

It’s about being open minded and flexible and the more you notice these things, the more of them appear, so it goes from every thousandth time to every other rail you touch seems to have a message for you….  and then it becomes about balancing keeping your feet on the ground and head in the clouds.

I am noticing that the answers to everything are all around me- sometimes people tell me things directly, sometimes they are chatting or advising each other and I hear.  Sometimes it is less immediately interesting to me and then when I review it I notice things for me.   This is why it is important not to do too much, not to expose yourself to too much stuff, to be discerning about who you spend time with and what you do and where you go, because, although the energies of the universe are unlimited, the hours in my day are not.

Driving on the dual carriageway, I see ‘DIE’ on the number plate of a lorry and wonder if I should move into the inside lane.  But maybe you just see what’s reflected, i.e., everything is there, but you notice what matches what you are feeling- the number plate matches my anxiety about driving.  Even the Earlham road shop sign (a blackboard with a different message on each day) that I like so much, why am I so keen on looking at it?  What do I want to it to tell me?  So maybe signs are just a reflection of what you feel- a visual interpretation of what you feel;  useful if you don’t know how you feel, but if you do, then perhaps it’s best to look inside not outside.

Thank you very much for reading

No Sex No Drugs No Sausage Rolls! Part Two

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awareness, Be as healthy as possible, Enlightenment, Greggs vegan sausage rolls, It's not boring it's radical, karezza, Make good choices, Make smart choices, meditation, Mid life, middle age, Midlife awakening, Natural skin care, Natural teeth care, No sex no drugs no sausage rolls, No Sextember, No sugar, No vegan junk food, Reflection, Screen free Saturday, Screen free Sunday, spiritual enlightenment, spiritual memoir, Travel memoir, Travel writing, Turning 50 in eight months, Turning 60, WiFi free Wednesday, writing, Yoga

No sex no drugs no sausage rolls #NoSextember

My husband recently celebrated his 60th birthday and that inspired a fair bit of reflection and the creation of our September programme. The bodhicitta mind isn’t only about years of spiritual training or pure magic. Some of it is a choice which we can make right now e.g. think about how the Dalai Lama would behave in a traffic jam and act accordingly.

September Programme

Starting from September 1st running through the whole month and beyond for some things.

‘Be as healthy as possible’

‘Make good choices’

‘It’s not boring it’s radical’

Mediate together every day The only must do every day; show up daily for the commitment benefits likewise be careful what you commit to as self blame etc is not beneficial if you can’t stick to it.

No sex (see previous post)

One screen free day each week

No alcohol or cigarettes. For after work destress lying on the floor, doing yoga or tea and chat is just as good, plus free and and non harmful.

No sugary confectionary (no biscuits, cakes, tarts, sweet pies, chocolate, ice cream, etc, also no crisps.) The vegan junk food explosion has been a mixed blessing…

No Greggs vegan sausage rolls 😦

Overall be more healthy and wholefood and cooking from scratch but allow ourselves some bread, baked beans etc.

Yoga morning and/or night. I won’t hold myself to every day but intend to do daily- just a stretch will do

Put moisturiser on face each night as well as each morning as usual. Do regular salt facials (use salt as facial scrub.) Do regular electric toothbrush and baking soda teeth whitening.

Go for big walks/lots of walks

Have September as a super productive month re writing: Get to the end of the trip/draft (travel memoir) so that October, November and December are for the editing and polishing of the entire manuscript. Wish me luck!

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back 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.

‘Order beer with your breakfast we won’t judge you’ Siem Reap Cambodia Part Two

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awareness, Cambodia, Enlightenment, Siem Reap, spiritual awakening, spiritual enlightenment, Spiritual experience, spiritual memoir, The matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Travel, Vanilla sky, writing

Draft extract from my travel/spiritual memoir

See you in another life, when we are both cats*  

*Vanilla Sky

I watched a couple of YouTube videos with Anthony about ‘the matrix’ and felt trippy and inspired, as usual.  I scribbled down quotes and ideas :

Words are spells that programme you

Make friends with your body, subconscious, conscious, make all one

People inside same age- body irrelevant look past this 

Don’t live in the past

Don’t live in the future

Stay in the NOW

Don’t live in fear

Raise your frequency

Dream where you are now

One of the comments mentioned language and conditioning; would we be freer without language?  I’d talked about this before when thinking about the man at Osho’s guesthouse in Kerala who couldn’t read.  If you didn’t see any ads, if you weren’t exposed to all those ideas and conditioning… But it is double edged: the good books get you there, wake you up, the bad ones keep you sleepy and distracted.  Who defines good and bad though?  I’ve had an inspiration moment through a car ad and they’d (car ads) would probably be banned if I was in charge…

Anthony had seen The Thirteenth Floor and told me about it but I hadn’t seen it.  In Koh Rong I had a conversation with a fellow blogger who had written a blog post about Westworld and its effects re thinking about consciousness etc.  I mentioned Battlestar Gallactica which we had recently finished and had similar themes.  Anthony said, ‘Tell him about The Thirteenth Floor.’  It turned out that The Thirteenth Floor was kind of like his (the blogger’s) The Matrix, he had gone to see it with his cousin, hadn’t known what he was going to see and had his mind blown unexpectedly.  The internet wasn’t strong enough at Koh Rong to download it.  We tried again in Siem Reap: bingo.

We switched off The Thirteenth Floor.  I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, still kind of in the film, feeling or imagining that I had just ‘arrived.’  I noticed two new moles on my body.  I came back in, still feeling floaty, as if I was a film character.  I looked out of the window.  There was an unrecognisable animal sitting on top of a car.  I couldn’t process what it was, and I couldn’t find the words to name it.  It was black and about the size of a monkey.   But at the same time it looked like a cartoon; with big orange triangles inside its ears and an orange ‘O’ shape for a mouth.  It was as if my brain didn’t recognise it at first.  A monkey?  A cat?  A completely unrecognisable animal, before coalescing into a recognisable creature; a black cat.  Or possibly a small monkey.  I remember returning home at seventeen and thinking the cats were enormous, having not seen them for a while.  Anthony didn’t look until it was almost too late; he thought it was a cat, although he admitted it did look weird.

We went outside, me tripped out on a drug free high, everything colourful and sparkly.  I pointed to a building, struggling to speak: ‘Look- orange- no- purple-.’  I couldn’t find the words, couldn’t say the colours.  I was looking at a small purple house set back from the road.  Next door to it was a bigger building, a guesthouse, peachy orange with shiny chrome balcony rails.  Draped in front were sparkly tubular lights, plastic tubing, it was still daylight, sunny, and the lights in the tubes were subtle like a prism or glitter.

I wanted to talk about the cat.  I kept telling Anthony off for not staying with me; I used to say this a lot when I was trying to explain something strange and he was either trying to ground me or finding it hard to follow me.  Plus he was hungry.  We went into the 7/11 next door.  I told myself:  ‘Don’t think about coffee or deodorant or mascara (things I wanted).  Don’t speak.  Wait for him to eat and go back’ (To the cat, etc)

We sat outside the 7/11 on a bench.  ‘Don’t let me get put off.  Don’t look at anything.  Pick the most boring thing to look at.’  But even just sitting on the bench, it was hard to keep my focus on my ideas, a man walked by, some interesting dogs, always distractions…

To wake up is to realise.  To unplug is to disconnect- no distractions, no phone, no unconscious actions/interactions; no actions/interactions that aren’t conscious.  Act in awareness.  Wake up.

We walked down to the river.  I had to sit down again.  Even under normal circumstances I can get overstimulated walking and talking.  It’s easier for me to be still when talking about something serious, and if the visuals around are interesting I can’t take both in and process everything.  So we sat down on a bench.  I looked down- it was made of shells, like a mosaic.  Like the paving in Otres Village, like the path to the village in Koh Rong.  Even the bench was overstimulating.  Shells and mosaics seem to be kind of a thing for me, maybe they signify arrival?.

So are there blank lives we go into, available slots that we light up on the circuit board?  I have visualised this like a ball of stiff string, with many intersections, our lights/us moving around it and lighting up different places.  Like a circuit board crossed with a ball of wool attacked by a kitten; like The Thirteenth Floor?  Or is it remembrance of other lives?

It was hard to focus on thought.  So many distractions- a man acting weird, on drugs, two weird dogs.  Keep focussed, wits about.  It felt like it was a matrix.  Experiment with thinking it’s a matrix.  Stop saying hi to everyone- waste of energy.  Don’t worry about what others think; people near/walking past. Parents, possibilities; if not real then not scary. Personal power.

We kept looking for a quiet road- but it just got busier- and then the neon lights of Pub Street with the multi coloured tumble blocks of lights. Eventually we came to a dusty road, three stools were set out at a mini table; I felt like I could sit there.  ‘I think that’s just where the staff go for their breaks,’ Anthony said.  It was the back of a hotel.

Even underfoot, so many distractions, so much to focus on, sand, uneven paving of all kinds, constantly watching footing, feeling footing, small chairs in the path to go around, being aware of obstacles, constantly aware/distracted, how much variety/stimulation can there be?

Home….  The plastic cable lights of the orange-pink and chrome guesthouse were brighter now that it was dark, I could see all the different colours, blobs on a loop…

Day after, had I changed reality?  Egg off the menu- avocado egg sandwich.  I used to order without the egg, almost every day, a wet, full sandwich chock full with avocado and salad, absolutely delicious.  Now it had a blank sticker over the egg!  I was excited, Anthony not so much, he said he tends to just notice and accept things like this and move on rather than focus so much on them as I do. Aside from whether it was exciting or not, we agreed it was a sign of being in flow like Instagram synchronicities, like all synchronicities.  Like ‘conjuring’ sheets, towels, beans on toast at the ‘wrong time,’ in Kerala.  Why so hard to believe, when people have vision boards of Porsches and trips to Australia?  Because people think the little things are just coincidences.  As if The Thirteenth Floor wasn’t enough, we also watched Vanilla Sky:  exploring consequences, the little things, decisions… ‘There are no bigger things.’

The hotel had really lovely staff but ultimately they weren’t all that effective; they never did fix our window mosquito mesh which we improvised a repair for by stuffing tissue in the hole, and they didn’t book our cab for the correct time to get to airport.  Still, it didn’t matter.  The happiness of Siem Reap, me experiencing a work-pleasure balance, or at least, both things; us both physically well and feeling close again, the out there experiences…  It was a very full six or seven days, and we didn’t even go to Angkor Watt…

Thank you very much for reading

‘No Drugs, No Prostitutes, No Weapons:’ Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Part Two

Tags

awareness, Cambodia, guesthouses, hostels, Incredible India, Love India, Phnom Penh, spiritual enlightenment, spiritual memoir, Travel memoir, Traveling, Travelling, writing

Draft chapter for book about our time in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in January

‘No Drugs, No Prostitutes, No Weapons:’ Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I got my laundry ready the first day, but forgot to take it out with us, and after dinner it was closed.  Even getting it ready was enough.  Likewise with shopping, I had tried to do it all on the first day.  I bought a few things, they didn’t have everything, at a friendly shop on our road near the laundries, but didn’t make it to the 7/11 style supermarket until the next day.  We flew with low weight and needed to buy shampoo etc on arrival.  The first day and night was enough stimulation- I was over stimulated, walking through the bar street I felt tired.  Noticing my tendency to overdo and crash.  Don’t have to do everything all at once.

The next day we found a real stationers, an entire shop selling stationery, I bought a really nice notebook, and gel pens!!!   I had brought enough for the trip, given away some in thanks for my monkey tablet rescue in Hampi, and so had just run out.  And at the ‘7/11’ there was soya milk, face cream, body moisturiser, Vaseline, Nivea, makes, luxury four blade razors, and all kinds of biscuits!  Almost all cream was whitening again like in Thailand. and Japan and sunblock went up to Factor 100.  I bought big thick sunscreen; I had slacked in India and let my skin go chicken skin-ish.  Never mind, they are the tiger stripes or stretch marks of the experience.  Simple pleasures; stocking up on necessary items such as soap etc, and also nuts, and getting our laundry back, done in washing machines, with little tickets when you took it in, felt so good.

Mobile rickshaw or motorbike stalls often had a phrase on a loop coming out of a speaker; we’d hear a vehicle going past with a repetitive, monotonous announcement, it sounded so serious to us.  In India it would have been politics trucks, here it was someone selling snacks or corn on the cob or coconuts; the coconuts in Cambodia were the biggest I’d ever seen.  There were handcarts with bells, and noisy kids’ toys like in Thailand.  Again, I noticed the difference in noise tolerance between South East Asian countries and the UK.  One day a bicycle with a loudspeaker blaring out a repeated an announcement just parked in the street near our guesthouse selling filled baguettes.  It would have driven me insane but the stall person and the passersby seemed unperturbed.

We mostly ate at a pavement cafe on the front, there was free iced tea, we risked it the first time; later we looked up about ice.  If it is big chunks with a hole in, which this was- chunky cylinders with a hole through the middle like very large beads- that’s good, that’s for drinks.  Otherwise it could just be from packing- we saw great slabs of ice on trolleys, beautiful like glaciers with air bubbles and fractures and the light shining through it.  We might have been more nervous about eating there but we saw a Westerner there who looked like a regular.  Normal sized plastic tables and chairs that spilled onto the pavement, the cooking was mainly done out the back, with some barbecue meat inside and out the front.  Inside the restaurant was a glass fronted wooden cabinet full of nail polishes, as if someone had a sideline doing nails.

On the way to the restaurants, we passed a glorious gold and red temple, so shiny as if it had just been built.  We saw a rickshaw with Astroturf over the roof and down to the top of the window, and at the front over the wheel.  There were lots of barbers set up on the street who kept asking Anthony to come and have his hair cut.  Before we left he did go to them and was given a typical Khmer haircut, a little too short at the sides for him.  But except for the barbers and a man outside a restaurant who asked us a couple of times if we wanted to eat there, that was it.  Compared to Varkala Cliff, Kerala, India where there was a strip of ten or so restaurants and twenty or so stalls, with everyone practically begging us to eat or shop at their place every time we walked past.  In India tourists can feel permanently pulled and guilty and buy to support not because they need or want anything.  At Bangkok airport we met a man who was just returning to the UK after a holiday in Goa, India.  ‘I’ve bought so many shorts and t shirts and I didn’t even want them!’

We went to the night market and saw Marilyn Monroe style silver lurex and red velvet plunging neckline dresses.  There were lots of bright colour designs printed on t shirts and shirts.  I saw a woman wearing a shirt, so bright and with two big faces on the front, one on each side.  In the evenings women often wore pyjamas in the street, usually button through shirts and three quarter length trousers; one evening a woman walked towards us wearing pink shiny pyjamas which were luminous in the dark.

But… it soon didn’t seem enough, after India it seemed too tame, too touristy, not authentic enough and no engagement.  It wasn’t like India in Pushkar  or Chennai.  No cosmic recognition, we didn’t meet any of the young tourists, families or ex pats around us.  And after all our complaining towards the end of India about selfie takers, I missed the attention.  Not because I liked feeling like a celebrity (okay maybe a little…) but because it was positive interaction with the people of the country.

We missed India.  All the things we had been annoyed about, we missed.  Really like a love affair, you may be annoyed by your wife doing xxx or your husband doing xxx but when they’re gone, oh you miss those things.

I drank coffee French press good strong coffee and wrote downstairs in the restaurant.  Sometimes it was hard to concentrate, with families and other guests talking and playing guitar.  The coffee was great for writing, not so good for sleep; I caught myself out a couple of times having coffee too late in the afternoon and then wondering why I couldn’t sleep at night.

It was whirring around my head so I wrote it down, the What’s Next, and then the word document disappeared.  I had emailed it to myself as back up so I could’ve found it in my emails, but would that really be best?  Is it beneficial to live in the future?  No.  Was losing my What’s Next? ideas a ‘coincidence?’  There’s no such thing as coincidences.  What’s another word then, synchronicity?  Serendipity?  Signs you are on the right track?  Assistance for staying on track?

Rather than trying to plan for or worrying about The Future, it came to me that a useful self support system could be to make spiritual enlightenment or awareness the goal or guiding aim or principle of one’s life rather than anything else.  That way you’ll always be okay because you can do that whatever, wherever, and anything can help.

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left job, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back 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.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony