Mexico > Costa Rica

I’ve been putting off writing this for weeks because it’s felt like there’s been too much to say. The problem with delaying something like this is that the more time goes on, the more that there is to delay writing about. So now I’m listening to Al Green sing ‘I’m So Tired of Being Alone’ in a slightly swanky cocktail bar (or swanky in comparison to my recent lodgings) in Jaco, Costa Rica. The Pacific Ocean, which has a different character each time I see it, has become quite familiar to me now. I am not tired of being alone, far from it. I don’t feel as if I am alone, though I am by myself a lot. The beach in this town has dark sand and warm waters, and the waves are perfect for beginner surfers. I won’t surf here, though, I’m on a steady march down to Panama’s Caribbean coast, where a three-week festival awaits me. 

The last time I wrote one of these, I was on the verge of a silent retreat in Mazunte, Mexico. I’ve now travelled through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and half of Costa Rica. Amazing times, but too many currencies in too little time and the Costa Rican Colon confuses me. I have just splashed out around 6000 of them on some air-drying modelling clay which I’ll save until Panama. I’ve had the vague urge to sculpt something at various points on this trip, most often when I’ve been exposed to the ancient pottery that’s been preserved in museums. Now I’ll have my chance to use my hands for a little bit of creation.

The silent retreat at Hyridaya Yoga was incredibly beautiful, powerful and left me a little shaken. 

We were busy from 7 am to 9:30/10pm, meditating for at least five hours, an hour and a half of nice, slow meditative hatha yoga, a couple of lectures on various topics and a question and answer session each evening. There was a three-hour break in the peak of the day’s heat. 

The retreat was led by Claude, who managed (being the only voice heard for the entire ten days) to keep a warmth and safety and depth to the place for the entirety of the retreat. I have big respect for him, big love. As I write this, I’m not referring to my notebooks and I’m very aware that there is no way that I can give a true impression of the time in words without spending some serious time in consideration of exactly what it is that I felt (and still feel). But I’ll try.

A memory - early on, maybe day three, something happened with the food. All meals were eaten slowly and meditatively, and like the rest of the retreat, no eye contact was allowed. This morning, I bit down hard on a little stone. A small white piece of gravel. I moved on with my day. At lunch, the same again, but this time a black stone and a piece of my tooth came out of my mouth. A chunk of one of the teeth on the upper left side had been broken off. I was a little pissed, obviously, but, silver linings, this proved my first opportunity to understand the primary meditation technique taught at the retreat - ‘Who Am I meditation’. 

OK, I said to myself, I must not be my teeth because I’ve just lost a corner of one and I haven’t lost any of myself. So, who am I? If I am not my teeth then I must not be my toenails or my toes. I could lose both feet, legs, arms and still be, so I must not be them either. I am not my liver or lungs or heart because all of these can be transplanted. I’m not my eyes or ears or tongue. I’m not my hair. But am I my brain? Here comes the sticking point for the mind. ‘I’ cannot exist without my brain and therefore ‘I’ must be in my brain. But the lesson taught by the technique goes further. Can I exist without the ‘I’ being present? ‘Who am I?’ gives an utterly wordless answer of intuited existence. The ‘witness observer’ that is there in the pauses between breaths and the gaps between thoughts, silent, but ever present, is the gateway to even deeper knowledge - that I am something far deeper than ‘I’ think I am.

There is much pseudo-science and scientific misinterpretation in ‘spiritual’ circles, but it seems to be true that modern physics when delving deeper and deeper into the smallest things that can be discovered, finds basically nothing. All matter is, apparently (and I am very open to being shown that I am wrong), made up of the very same energy, just in different forms. This is more or less the teaching of Advaita Vedanta, of yoga - unity. It is the unity of everything. At its deepest, all is one - energy - and when this is glimpsed through meditation, it is fantastically beautiful. 

Enlightenment is the goal in these circles. Enlightenment being something like total disidentification from the self, the personality, and something that is not quite within grasp of those of us who haven’t made it there (if anyone truly has). It is self-realisation. But the lessons taught during the retreat were not only guides to enlightenment. Live your authentic truth, whatever that is, because life tends to unfold more cleanly when you do. That rings true. Allow the focus of your life to shift though, from those things which have been felt as illusory through meditation, to that which has been shown to be real.Thoughts of the past, dreams of the future, all are virtual reality. Every single memory that flashes through your mind does not exist, every future plan, which, if you’re planning with any imagination at all, has no chance of coming exactly true. This way memories lose their power to sway your emotions, future strategising too - I felt this keenly in the darkness a couple of weeks after the retreat ended. The only real thing is what is happening right now. And I know that I’m in a very fortunate place, on a very incredible journey, but what is happening right now is beautiful, everything is beautiful, even pension administration in an office block in Croydon is beautiful. This attitude creates incredible gratitude.

The last night, though, was a tough one. I felt that I’d touched something life-changing during the silence and time has told this to be true in the short term, but in the immediacy of the moment following silence’s end, I was overcome by a strange terror, unlike any terror I’ve felt in my memory. The silence was officially ended after a final meditation and then a sharing was initiated. Out of the silence came fifty egos, most seemingly totally unchanged by meditation, as if they’d been bottling up their words since the first day and the pressure had finally become too much. Some people spoke for close to half an hour and, in the moment, I was overwhelmed by it. I said to myself, listening to all the personalities sharing mostly beautiful things, that I actually like having egos and personalities in the world but can see that I’d be better off slightly less identified with my own. 

The sharing went on for hours. I walked down to the beach and whispered quietly to the sea  (these were my first words for ten days), then went back up and eventually, I decided that I should talk. Walking up, I was shaking. I hugged Claude, and said thank you quietly by his ear before turning and saying something like, “I didn’t think I was going to break silence tonight… but now I have.” My voice sounded very strange in my ears. There was a disconnect somewhere. I told them it was my birthday the next day and thanked them for sharing the end of my twenties, but couldn’t find other words. Claude asked me how the meditation was, I said only ‘very good’ and then hurried off the stage. Later I spoke to one person before scurrying off to bed. Everything felt odd. ‘I’m on a motorbike trip?’ I said to him almost as if it was a question to myself, ‘To Argentina?’ I’d felt so secure throughout the ten days and suddenly I was all at sea. I excused myself and lay tossing and turning all night, suddenly terrified of losing myself.

The fear did not fully dissipate until I was in Guatemala. I left Mazunte soon after. My thirtieth birthday was unusual. I spent most of it alone, a chunk of it naked, on a nudist beach, as a metaphorical representation of how I intend to live my life going forward. Balls out to the world, nothing hidden from it or myself. I played a game of chess with an old Canadian man who hung around in a hammock outside of my hotel room. Saw the sunrise with some near strangers. But I was really still coming to terms with the turbulence created by the silence. I got away from Mazunte a day later.

The next week passed largely uneventfully. From Mazunte I stopped in a recently earthquake struck town whose name I’ve forgotten, buildings collapsed all over the place. Then on to San Cristobal de las Casas. The town was a huge shift. Cold and dry from Mazunte’s heat and humidity. It was a nice change, but I wasn’t prepared for the weather. San Cristobal is objectively a fascinating town, but I wasn’t interested in it. I was floating around, slightly bewildered by the world, not wanting human contact (it was only confusing), but very happy to be alive. 

There was a temezcal ceremony on the Saturday morning of my visit. A sweat lodge in a wood framed, animal skin tent, totally dark inside, filled with twenty-odd people and an ever increasing number of red-hot stones (abuelas - grandmothers) onto which water was thrown. As the heat built and the sweat poured out, drums were played and songs were sung. My first taste of total darkness was a communal one. I started to sing along with the others and fell into something of a trance. The outside world was new and beautiful on our emergence. The temezcal symbolises a womb, and it felt a little like one. Safe. Away from petty superficiality. The next day I decided to leave, to go to San Marcos, Guatemala where I’d be doing the dark retreat, to be still by Lake Atitlan for a few days. The motorbike is a gift when a decision like this can be made on the split of a second. 

At the border, a Guatemalan biker kindly helped me through customs and immigration and then offered me a free night in his hotel in Huehuetango. I accepted, obviously, and slept very well before riding to San Marcos. A three-hour journey became six when I discovered that the only road to San Marcos was closed. It took a lot of riding around and then, finally, angry persuasion to be allowed through the barrier to carve a careful way down a very confusingly organised piece of road work. I’m certain that they could have done it in such a way as to keep the road open with a little forethought, but this is not my battle. 

I found a little room with a desk and a wonderful view and spent the next week or so enjoying the volcanic lake, eating well, doing yoga, chanting, going to various workshops and writing the first 13,000 words of a children’s book which I may or may not ever finish. In a strange, synchronous moment on the day I’d started the children’s book, I wrote the first word, which was ‘Luna’, the name of the little girl detective who was to be the star of the story. Later, I was convinced to join a tantric workshop by some randoms in the street and one of the women there was called Luna-Dara. We shared a few of the exercises together and I decided that someone like her would become a character in the story, a Mexican friend of the little blonde Luna of my morning’s imagination. 

My San Marcos days were simple and still; mostly empty of human interaction. I was in full retreat mode and taking real pleasure from it. Conversations with myself were better than the conversations that I was having with others - when I had them. And then, after a week or so, the darkness came. I arrived at 4 pm and was shown around the space. I was to be living in a tall adobe circular building with a domed roof. It was cold inside, colder than I’d thought it would be. There was a toilet, a shower, a large blanket on the floor, for meditation, a space for yoga, some shelves (which seemed to move around once the darkness came, so that they were always in different places) and a ladder up to a bed, eight feet up in the air. The ins and outs were explained. We decided on two meals a day, most days, leading up to only two smoothies on the last two days (in the end I requested smoothies on the last day only with a note). The outer door was shut and then it was up to me to close the inner door, blow out the candle and put it and the matches into the food hatch. Five or ten minutes later, I was in total darkness and would be for the next six nights.

The first evening was very high energy. Yoga, meditation (but with a monkey mind at play), ukulele and loudly sung randomness, a little blind writing and drawing and a dinner that came not too long after I’d turned out the lights. I slept well.

The next day is a blur. A heaviness set in. I couldn’t find the energy to do anything. I lay on the floor for the majority of it, somewhere between sleep and waking, allowing thoughts to flow as they wanted to flow. Day 2 was similar, but I had more energy. Blind yoga first thing was followed by a day of allowing everything up, that wanted to come. Thoughts, memories, emotions related to these thoughts or memories, whatever, and I looked at them closely. I looked at them and managed to see them for the illusions that they are. 

This was a transformative period. Everything that flashed in front of me, I could see it is as it was, without denying it, but without it affecting my present moment. Memories that would have caused me to re-feel the pain that I’d felt before, no longer created that old feeling. Over and over this happened throughout the spell in darkness, so that by the end I was saying to myself on repeat, ‘show me something buried deep, show me something buried deep’. (I had initially asked myself the question ‘show me something I don’t want to see’ but then realised that this was a paradoxical question, so changed it when nothing came through). 

Many memories emerged but nothing major, nothing that surprised me, and if there is still something huge and deeply repressed, I’m in a perfect place to see it in the light now. It is this which is the greatest development of the ‘work’ that I’ve been doing. I am utterly unafraid of that which is inside of me. There is the feeling that there are still some habitual behaviours that were created as a result of the ‘traumas’ that have occurred throughout my life and they have not been removed, but there are no major open wounds. This is a great privilege. To be in this position and to recognise it. I do not, now, feel the need to try to ‘fix’ any of these habitual behaviours. They are what I am for the moment and this is perfect.

The actual experience of darkness for five days and six nights is probably worth covering. Not long after lights out, a hallucinatory light came on in my head. It was positioned just behind my left shoulder most of the time and was usually a yellowish white. Sometimes it was as if I could see my shadow lit up brightly to my right-hand side. Twice in moments when I had made a decision, the light very noticeably changed colour, from white to a deep red. I do not know what this means if anything. There was an illusion of being able to see, but the brain got it wrong and I walked into things now and then while getting around my little circular cave. (Having forgotten early on that the place was circular, I was very confused on several occasions when things were not as I had expected them to be). 

There were intense hallucinations from the third day onwards. They did not stop from waking to sleep and were variously indistinct, geometric, figurative and bizarre. I can vividly remember two bacteria or parasites as if under a microscope, but appearing to be puppets made of fabric, speaking silently to each other; a beautiful red-haired wolf-like dog; a hawk of exactly the same colour; and a little boy in blue and white, with a blank face pointing at me like a horror movie. The boy scared me a little, nearly nothing else did. Only once, after a dream that I was on my back in a small tunnel, when I woke with a start to darkness and felt the walls closing in on me, did fear come over me. I moved the mattress onto the floor after this (two birds with one stone - I no longer needed to climb the ladder).

Mostly I was content. Yoga became slower and deeper day by day, meditations too. I laughed a lot at myself singing stupid improvisations and spent quite a bit of time waiting for food to come. The last day was ecstatic. I was overjoyed and uncontained. But when night came I couldn’t sleep. At 5 am there was a knock on the door and my time was up. I could leave whenever I wanted to. I wrapped myself in a blanket and walked down, past protective yapping dogs in grey light, to the lakeside to sit on the pier to wait for the sun. I doubt that I’ll ever see a more beautiful sunrise than this. It was the colour of the fox and the hawk for a period. This felt meaningful. I sat and took in the day as the village woke up, kids got on the boats that took them to school and dogs started to roam.

My sister tells me that I was texting like a nutcase that morning and she had no idea what I was going on about. Before I crashed, I felt as peaceful and happy as I have ever been. The darkness did something to me. In the room, on the last day, I had a realisation: my retreat was over. I was ready for the world, for other people, for interaction. On one page of the notebook I took into the dark room, I’d written: ‘Keep on being the funny bundle of cells that you are!’ Not a bad motto.

On then, to Inanitah. A little community on the side of one of the two dormant volcanoes that make up the island of Ometepe in the middle of a lake in Nicaragua. El Salvador and Honduras were crossed in a hurry which gave me a week at Inanitah. Between 30 and 40 mostly twenty-somethings dancing, playing, sharing with each other, with Gaia as the figurehead. A truly beautiful place, perfectly timed for me, which confirmed that I am indeed ready for people again. 

One quick memory from Inanitah - Amira, another guest, had offered to babysit Omran and Cayenne, who are five and three, for their parents. We decided to take them for a walk to the nearby chocolate factory. It was an exhausting day, but halfway through I had Omran on my shoulders and started to run. He loved this, I stopped by a sign and told him to hit it. When he did, I started to run again. He immediately realised that this would happen whenever we stopped next to something and started giggling like crazy, ordering me to stop by anything we passed, now and again saying through his laughter, ‘Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’ as I ran. How much he loved it made me run a little more than I might have otherwise, and I was totally destroyed later on. At dinner, he gave me a piece of cardboard, scribbled blue around the edge and said, “This is your house.” I carry my home around with me now, sentimental fool that I apparently am.

So, I’m working my way through Costa Rica and Panama to the where the festival, Tribal Gathering, will be. There'll be a few days of chilling by the Caribbean Sea before it starts. It’s funny to travel with so many pre-arranged things to do, I’ve always gone with the flow, seen where the winds have taken me, this time it’s a little different. I still don’t know where I’ll be staying most nights, but I’ve got a general direction of travel pulling me forward. I like it. I’ve missed nearly all of the sights that 'should' be seen but would change not one thing. They say it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. I’m realising that there’s nothing wrong with ‘it’ being about both.

And after reading most of The Snow Leopard, an account of a trek through the Himalayas, I’m toying with the idea of walking the length of the Andes, from Peru to wherever I end up. Right now, it feels like an achievable challenge, but there’s still a way to go between now and then. And I’ve done zero research into the logistics. It is though, a definite possibility, virtual reality for sure, but a viable future present.