LET’S LOVE
LOVE YOUR BODY, MIND, AND SOUL.
LOVE THE WORLD.
People ask me, do you really live on a tropical island? Your life is just paradise? The short answer- Yes, but I call it Paradise..with a twist. It's a yummy cocktail, but there is definitely still a sour twist. It's not just sunshine, rainbows, butterflies and unicorns ALL the time. Sometimes the unicorns take a break. They book themselves a vacation on some other island, and when they leave, a whole swarm of mosquitoes come to take their place. People ask me, so there is sunshine, luscious greenery, fresh coconuts, breathtaking sunsets, starry skies and clear turquoise sea with white beaches? Yes. It's absolutely gorgeous, and I feel so grateful and blessed every single day. Wow, and you have all the healthy food options served to you right outside your doorstep? And friendly, smiley, open-minded tourists from all over the world who are looking to explore, expand their perspectives, know themselves deeper and heal together? Mmmhmmm. And you guys all have this amazing community with tons of events and offerings every day like dance, yoga, all kinds of healing, fun and play…and it's all super affordable??? Um, yeah. So your life is totally carefree and perfect??! Sorry my friend, no. Life is still life. I am still human. Everyday problems and challenges still arise. And as trite as it is, wherever you go, there you are. No matter how many fairies, frolicking hippies and beach sunsets you throw into the mix. It is, however, much easier to move through life's challenges in this kind of community. There is so much support, from nature's healing elements and from the community itself. BUT, high-vibe, loving communities also mean people are working through serious healing they've brought from their non-paradise western lives. Which is great that people are doing this healing! But it also means that all that stuff is flying around and you can easily get smacked in the face by someone else's healing process..and get smacked hard. Things are highly intensified in this kind of environment. So it's intensely good when it's good and intensely difficult when it's not. Paradise isn't the perfect utopian package we might imagine it to be. Paradise also includes MOSQUITOES. A lot of them. And hot, humid weather. Air conditioning is only slowly beginning to be a thing here, so the vast majority of places do not employ this magical wonder. It includes living in a community where tourism brings in all the new money and advancement, but it's built on the backs and hard labor of the locals who are serving us privileged foreigners in their own country. You can't help but feel a bit guilty for your ability to run off from your overpriced, overstressed country to enjoy their beautiful home at a price that's cheap..for you. Because you have western currency. Sure, our tourism benefits their economy. But you also feel a bit responsible when you see what all the McDonald's, 711's and greed for money and power start to do to their once simple and pure lifestyles. You see the irony of how your escape from the money-hungry capitalistic lifestyle is actually what feeds their growth into the very same thing. Eeek. But this is just another life lesson that you really can never escape anything, at all, ever. It is always there, you're bringing it right with you in your luggage wherever you go. Literally just bringing it over to another country, and unpacking it all right there for them to use. The question is not how to escape from the mess, but what can I do to help fix it? This is a daily, ongoing question with ever-evolving answers, but it's much more creative and inspirational than the escapist mentality of 'I'll just enjoy my cheap, easy life over here in paradise, away from the hectic modernized world.' Which I will admit, was my predominant state for quite some time after my exhilarating 'flee' from the U.S. The fantastic irony is that my parents immigrated to the U.S. from Russia, escaping their country for the promised land of paradise which was..the United States of America. The same country I later felt I needed to flee from. Now here I am on an even far-easter part of the world, living a much more primitive lifestyle than my parents ever knew. But it seems to be what was needed to create a full circle of healing. My parents' generation endured such hardship and horrible difficulty that all they could do was escape their past and seek a better life. This gave me the opportunity to grow up in a much easier, privileged lifestyle which I then felt was empty and meaningless, as it did not include the depth and fullness of what it meant to be alive. It was the result of an escape from pain and difficulty, which left a gap in the human experience, disconnected from the past and from many other humans who still suffered greatly in the world as I lived in a bubble of comfort. There needed to be a reconciliation of all the pain and difficulty that my parents were forced to escape. I needed to see the life that most of the world still experienced, and I needed to understand my true roots as a human being, when we were more connected to the earth and didn't have access to luxuries that disconnect and numb us from the vibrant, passionate, raw life we once knew. I needed to include the past and human ancestry we came from into my life experience, rather than simply escape from it, trying to leave it behind in exchange for a seemingly more evolved, advanced, better life. I realized that true evolution and a good life can only come from an integration of our past, where we came from, and all parts of our being. Including the more primal, primitive, simplistic nature that is at the core of our humanness. Progress that's built on escape from the past will never have a healthy foundation. If you are building without any regard for the soil and land beneath you, the very thing that holds you and makes your development possible, eventually it will crumble and collapse. It seems it's a time-old theme, this escaping to promised lands. I think we are all doing, or dreaming of doing, this constantly. In our own ways, big or small. The ol' grass-is-greener clever trick that can productively drive human evolution and progress, or it can drive us mad with envy and constant seeking, never feeling satisfied with where we are and what we have now. The key is to realize paradise is here, anywhere you are, whenever you choose to see it. Of course there are certain conditions we would prefer to live in. So we can make it a goal to include more and more of the paradise aspects into our lifestyle. But we have to discover what are the elements that truly make paradise for us, as we all will have different versions. Part of my island paradise lifestyle is being in a culture where it's more connected to primal, natural living, which is awesome. But this also means it's slower and not up to speed with technological and modern civilization standards we can take for granted. So…random power outages. Slow service for..everything. Having difficult and limited access to a lot of items we're used to having that don't exist in these countries..and there's no Amazon over here! The list goes on for all kinds of unexpected, unforeseen surprises and hurdles that might come your way. But then there's soooooo much more freedom in the fact that it's less modernized and less rigid in its structure. You can drive your motorbike without a helmet and no one will care. You can feel the wind on your head as you soar past the trees and the views of the sea. You are free to weave in and out of lanes as you please, there are barely any rules of the road, and no one around to get you in trouble. You might think it's more dangerous this way, but actually there are far less accidents here! People are actually really good drivers. They are actually MORE alert and careful. And much more considerate! In the west we've become so numbed and zombied out due to the excessive rigidity, that most people are barely functioning and they drive mostly on autopilot, totally shut out from the world outside your car and the white lines carefully laid out for you. This is exactly what creates a ripe opportunity for an accident to occur, when you're not fully alert to see and react to what's going on around you. And because people live in a much more separated, individualistic and stressed, hurried way in the west, they will be much more concerned about getting to their destination first, instead of calmly allowing someone else to pass or merge. This creates the road rage and dangerous aggressive behavior that leads to more accidents and an unpleasant commute. Here on the island, most people drive on scooters where you are open and exposed to the elements and other people around, which keeps you grounded and connected to them as other humans creating empathic behavior. When you drive around in a car with your radio on, you completely become immersed in your own little life. Just in this one example it is seen how modern advancement and its attempt to create more ease and safety for us, can actually become a hindrance and create more unsafety. In the west, we've allowed fear to be the driving force that creates stricter and stricter rules and rigidity. Like a mother seal who accidentally smothers her children to death when trying to protect them. It's a bit graphic, but I'm hoping you get my point. We cannot squeeze the life out of people because we're afraid that life will harm them. That's just a silly play of irony. But if we look around at society in the western world, it sure looks like we've squeezed the life out of these people. And all this for the promise that society would protect and take care of them. So they would never have to feel the pain or discomfort in things going wrong, breaking down, not going as planned. This illusion of safety in a structured, predictable system that eliminates all surprise, spontaneity, freedom and room for unique expression. We convinced ourselves that we were upgrading to an easier, safer life, but instead created our own prison from this fear of being unsafe. I'm living in what they call a developing country. So I'm seeing how life was before society became western modern civilization as I know it in America. I'm seeing all the intricacies of what it takes to go from an undeveloped, minimalistic, nature-connected lifestyle, to starting to adopt and be hungry for more growth and advancement, structure, control and perfection. We used to be guided by nature, by the elements. We surrendered to its ultimate wisdom. Bowed down when it said it was time to rain, and celebrated, worked and created when the sun invited us to come out and play. In the west we just plow through it all. No regard for rainy days that might bring a lower, less productive, more inward energy that wants a slower pace. No care for women who have menstruation that is connected to the cycles of the moon and is begging for a rest. Just plow through it. Keep going. Keep building, creating, more, more. Be efficient, fast, productive. Make it bigger and better. Our greed has overtaken our natural rhythms and cycles. We've disconnected from the earth and our bodies, and from our communities. No wonder the local people I see here are full of smiles amidst all the imperfections and complications. Whereas in the West people 'have it all', all the comforts and luxuries and things they ever said they wanted, and yet they are unhealthy and miserable. What's the answer? Do we all try to turn back the clock and try to un-know what we've learned and un-build what we've built? Of course not. That would be impossible. And unnecessary. It's about balance. Balance seems to be the final answer for any life riddle. It's yes, and yes. It includes all facets and elements of life, but with conscious awareness. Yes, have your cake, eat it too (why wouldn’t you eat it if you had it???), but don't do it all the time, and don't overstuff yourself. Be conscious of your choices and know WHY you're doing it. If you're just building to just get bigger and bigger, and gain more and more profits..we know where that road takes us. We've seen in a major way how it destroys our bodies, lifestyle, society, and our planet. Well, at least some of us have seen it..others still seem to deny this fact. But for those of us who can see it happening, we are the ones who must choose a new way. So we can slowly shift what is considered to be 'normal.' We have to honor and respect our bodies and the earth, the natural elements. We have to honor ourselves and each other. We have to listen and learn. Ask ourselves, have we done too much lately and need a break? And then ask when is it time to get up again and create more? It's a fine balance that may seem difficult to master, but it's a journey of discovering more and more what is the way that works. Everything is a metaphor for everything else. So how you listen to and treat your body, is the same way you are with other people, how you treat the earth, how you treat the work you do, all aspects of your life. Let's start living in a more balanced way that includes the natural wisdom of nature and our bodies, and the exciting ability to imagine and create new advancements for the future. Let's bring in our wise grandparents' timeless knowledge with the fresh budding youthful generations, to create spectacular ways of living together, in harmony with everything. When we invite in the balanced life, no matter where we are, we can all live in paradise. Well, paradise with a twist ;)
2 Comments
a Citizen
4/26/2017 09:02:33 am
Interesting ideas. And yea, I love the balance take away. With safety though, the other question is how much safety are we willing to give up for freedom. In the U.S. with traffic for instance, there isn't a safety illusion when compared to Indonesia. It's actually much safer in the U.S. Just looking at the traffic fatality statistics and there's no question about it. But take a small piece of that, like seatbelts for instance. Should people in the U.S. be legally allowed to or feel comfortable riding without seatbelts? What about for kids? They have been proven to dramatically reduce deaths and injuries, but they do take away some freedoms. So where does the line get drawn? Tough stuff!! Keep it up :))
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Michaela Clara
5/10/2017 05:03:01 am
Yes this is a great point! I think this is how we created such a fear based society in the West. We made more and more choices towards protecting ourselves, favoring safety over our freedom and joy. The more we chose safety over our happiness, the stronger the fear became, because we perpetuated the belief that we needed to protect ourselves at all costs. That life was something to fear and that we were somehow fragile and separate from the forces of nature, needing to be shielded, even if it meant giving up our connection to the very nature that gives us the vibrant, peaceful, healthy life we all love. So as I mention in my post, it comes back to balance. Caring for our safety is important, but not in an extreme way where we sacrifice who we are and what we love. And staying conscious to not buy into the fear that can come along with this need for building protective walls around us. It's a tricky topic indeed, but ultimately if we focus on the positive intentions we have around it, we will be guided towards the choices that align with that positivity.
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MICHAELA CLARA I'm here to share what I've learned through my journey of self exploration-traveling around the outer world and within the inner world-learning about how to live a healthy life, in alignment with the body, heart and soul. Every day I'm discovering how to live more in health, connection and truth. Through joy, passion & self love, creating the life I want, and sharing this love with others. Join me for the ride! Read More |