Ask Me If There Is An Article of Dry Clothing in My Bag...

For the last five days, dry clothing has been harder to come across than water in the desert.

After a three-day meditation retreat at Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Education Center in a beautiful setting on the side of a mountain in a surprisingly expansive retreat center and monastery, we came back to Sinjuhang for a day of classes before heading off to Hualien, a beautiful nestled between sea and mountains in Eastern Taiwan.

Beautiful it was; rained it did. In fact, it rained so much that the road back to Taipei was blocked by rocks and mud and most of the exciting activities our guides had planned for us, which involved white water rafting and visiting the Toroko marble gorge, were cancelled so we had to rearrange our entire intinerary and trip route. In the end, we drove around the entire island of Taiwan. The entire island! Accumulating way too many hours in a bus along the way. At least the seats were nice to nap in...

But it was amazing to be among trees again. And more than just the ones in the park next door. The whole ride to Hualien, we took the road that hugged the coast. Looking out the left window, it was all sea; you had to angle your head down to see the road or dramatic cliff beneath. And to the right was all mountains, straight up. We wound around hairpin turns like I've never felt a bus wind before. It was fantastic!

The whole trip was filled with encounters with different types of healing. From aboriginal shaman women blessing us and ridding our souls of evil spirits, to hours spent in hot spring pools and showers, letting the sulfer seep into our skin and massage our muscles, to realizing how much this group of 20-odds has truly become a loving, supportive, cuddle-friendly family over the last five weeks: I was healed in every way.

One of the notable healing experience I had was a night we spent with some practicers of Tibetan singing bowls in Hualien. Although they were novices who assumed the roles of professions, cauing some inner controversy in me, the community of sounds that was formed as we sat among these practicers was moving, to say the least. It was different than the meditation we learned at Dharma Drum; I tried that type of meditation, and it didn't work.

But after I had found my place and settled in with the sound and the community, I got in touch with myself, through thinking about other people important to me, and realized how poorly I have treated my body over the last few months. My brief return into carnivorism has left my body full of toxins that make it harder for me to breath, sleep, and wake. I concluded, after coming face-to-face with the horrible way I'm treating my body, to return to my own eating habits after Taiwan and fade out of putting meat in my body for the rest of my stay here.

It will be very different, going back and explaining my habit as a health reason. Not "health" in the Western-sense, as an all-encompassing, universal state of the body, but a personal health.

In love and health,
B(ee)