should I stay or should I go

I was very happy in Bali, I guess it was self-apparent by the fact that I intended to stay for 3 weeks and ended up spending over 7 months there. Every morning I woke up with a feeling of bliss. At the end of each yoga session I thanked to be in Bali, to be aware and to experience whatever was going on around me. For once, I was in touch with myself and I felt every bit of thing; be it pain, jealousy or joy. I found my little paradise, the place that I belonged. Yet sometime around March, it became clear that I had to go back to Dubai in June in order to take care of the stuff I left behind. That decision made me feel depressed for an entire week; I guess sense of responsibility doesn't really agree with me.

I was trying to convince myself that I acquired a lot of different approaches and skills in Asia, and being in Middle East would be the ultimate test of how much I had really internalized them. Would I be able to keep my cool in traffic, would I be able to maintain a spiritual approach when everything around me was so materialistic, would I be able to pass shopping and say “I don't really need this”. To some extent, I even felt a sense of mission; Dubai was where  I seriously started practicing yoga and felt the seeds of change sprout. If I could help just one more person in Dubai get in touch with his/her true self and feel liberated, I would feel as if I paid back and then return to Bali with a feeling of contentment. (No, I don't expect everyone to be liberated by means of jumping on the next plane to Asia and meditate all day like the statue of Buddha)

Here I am in Dubai for the last two weeks and things are really super difficult. Police fined me for driving an unregistered car and I cannot register my car without an employment visa. So I am pretty immobile. I try to get a job but apparently I forgot how slow things can be during summer in Dubai – nothing moves. My tourist visa is about to expire and I just figured that I can't renew it, so unless something miraculous happens I need to leave Dubai in 2 weeks and cannot re-enter for another month. Did I ever mention that life here is also ridiculously expensive?

Every day I try something new to ensure that I can stay here. Latest by the next day, I find out that option would not work. As dramatic as it sounds, I feel as if all walls are closing on me. After all the carelessness and freedom in Bali, no wonder life here makes me feel claustrophobic. Every day, I take sometime to convince myself that this is what I have to go through.

Artist Name: Hajime Namiki Title: Banyan Tree

I'm pretty sure that if Gottama the Buddha lived in 21st century, he wouldn't have bothered fasting for months under a banyan tree to feel misery and suffering. He would have probably chosen to live in a soulless metropolitan city to accelerate his enlightenment. Yet every day, a voice in me says “why bother, haven't you learned to love and to protect yourself? Give up struggling, know when to quit and just go back to Bali”. Every day turns out to be a constant repetition of internal dialogues such as;
- oh I feel so trapped in Dubai without a car, job and money, it's good training for my ego / Why do you suffocate yourself with such barriers when you can be in Bali smelling incense?
- I will try a corporate job once again, this time equipped with the patience from meditation and mental flexibility from yoga / Why do you keep banging your head against the wall, hoping that this time the wall might be softer?
- I want to help people but they are so out of touch with themselves I don't know what to do / Why bother and waste your energy in the world's most materialistic city when Bali is full of people who know what they seek?

Both voices are mine and both have valid points... I still have to decide after hearing them both. I wish there was one correct answer and if I really thought hard, I would have it figured out. I'm generally happy to sit back and let things flow in their own course so that I can avoid making any decisions. But this is a time that I need to decide; knowing that only I can make it and it'll be a big one.

may all beings be happy

This is how we end each Vipassana meditation session, we wish that all beings in this world would be free from misery and feel happy. It's called Metta meditation and it's integrated to Vipassana trainings. I've already had that training twice during the previous trainings. However in my third sitting in Thailand, I noticed that I have a strong blockage to say “may all beings be happy”.

 There are two people in my life who had hurt me deeply. I've spent considerable time working on why I made myself vulnerable to these  people and what was the lesson I needed to learn out of my encounters with them. (I believe that no person in our lives is random, everyone is around either to remind us, teach us or to learn form us.) I thought I've already released a lot and let go of my pain. I knew the scars would always be there not to constantly remind me of what happened, but more to act like blue ribbons I received for passing with the highest marks. Moreover, I always perceived myself as a very kind and forgiving person who would never hold grudge against others. Yet there I was sitting, unable to say “may all beings be happy” with a knot in my throat and tears in my eyes. Those two people kept appearing in my mind and I realized in shock how I wasn't really ready to wish good things for them. Whatever happened has happened ages ago and currently I am a very happy person. So I don't know if it was a bigger shock to realize that they still hurt me or that I discovered a vindictive bitch in me.  Well as much as I didn't like it, it was there and apparent to me for the first time.

I wish that was the only discovery I had on the subject. Coming back, I had a lot of catching up to do with friends and this of course involved a bit of gossiping too. I came to know that one of those people whom I couldn't wish well was actually going through a very miserable period in his life. Ohhh, that was the moment in which the bitch in me felt so relieved. That relief was immediately followed by a deep feeling of sympathy. Only after coming to know that he was not happy, I could feel for him, wishing him to be truly happy and be relieved from his pain. What the hell did that mean? Was I trying to put an unconscious cap on the happiness of other people? May all beings be happy as long as they are not happier than me? Or may all beings be happy only after I wish them to be happy? Or people who hurt me are allowed to be happy only after suffering for a certain period of time? I still don't even have a clue, none of these create a buzz in my gut, so there's a possibility that it comes form a more deep-rooted or evil place than I could see. I don't like this, I now find it very hard to say “hey, this is who I am so let's celebrate the evil in me and hug her every morning to make up for the time lost that I wasn't aware of her existence”. Blah

present moment – part two

Things that I've always taken for granted and never questioned recently started to have a totally different perspective because I began to discover “staying here and now”.

I was sitting with some friends in a cafe today where the subject eventually came to how much longer each of us wanted to stay in Dubai. One of the girls said she's actually had enough but she would still like to stay a few more years to secure a bit more money for her retirement. Retirement? Considering how young she is, that would be at least 30 years from today. Who can predict where any of us will be in such a time frame? Considering how fast life is changing, I wouldn't be surprised if the concept of retirement would be completely outdated in a few decades. Or if the Mayan prophecy is right, billions of us need to worry about being wept off from the earth sometime in 2012 anyway.  I can't imagine waking up in a city that I don't like anymore, going to a job that I am bored of and then coming back home to calculate my retirement savings. When I was studying psychology, we were always taught “delay of gratification” is a sign of healthy emotional development in kids. Simply what it suggests is that if you ask a child if he wants half apple now or one whole apple tomorrow and the child chooses to have one apple tomorrow, he is considered to be more emotionally mature than the child who wants half the apple now... What's wrong with wanting half an apple in the moment that I want to eat it as compared to keeping my mind busy all day with when I would be able to receive my apple is a mystery to me. To a psychologist though, I am sure this is a crystal clear indication that I am stuck somewhere around the age of 2.

A lot of people are unhappy with where they are, what they do and whom they are married to. They dream of the day when they will be able to relocate to a village by the Mediterranean, their kids will grow so that they can divorce their partner, or that they will be able to open that tiny cafe and bake cakes all day. They dream while the reality is happening here and now...

Come to think of it, how different am I? Sitting in Dubai, I am trying hard to get a corporate job that I don't want and will surely hate, yet trying to convince myself that it will provide me the money that would enable me to go back to Bali. I have a thousand fantastic justifications why this is the right thing for me now but deep inside even I don't buy my own crap. I may end up having some money, but I know that I will lose much more.

I wonder how much money is enough to buy my freedom and to feel secure?

right here right now

“Stay in the present moment!” I must have heard this hundreds of times during my yoga classes but it never made much sense to me. Far from making sense,  it sounded Chinese. I have always been proud of my turbo-speed, multitasking, ability to switch between thoughts in a split second. What exactly the yoga teacher meant by saying “stay in the present moment” was a complete mystery.

35 years have gone by and there was never even a millisecond in my life without a background chatter in my mind. The background chatter would either be heavily criticizing the past; “i allowed him to take advantage of me / oh i should have just turned and walked away / if only i said yes then i would be ... now/ i wish i stayed ... Or it would be dreaming about the future “in my next job, i will be more assertive / when i travel to Asia i'll take a lot of photographs / i'll make sure that my next boyfriend will be more emotionally mature”... Millions and millions of thought particles either dwelling in the past or fantasizing wildly about the future. It was very tiring, every night when I went to bed I would be exhausted. Not because I did much or showed a lot of effort towards something. I was constantly lost among my thoughts and didn't have a way to stop them. Just as my legs would be tired if I ran all day, my mind was tired of a similar pace of thoughts rushing in and out.

At the age of 18, I tried Transcendental Meditation because someone told me that it gave him that millisecond window of “no thought”. There I was sitting in my lotus and constantly repeating “i'm still thinking, i'm still thinking, when will i have my moment of silence, oh the meditation time is almost over and i still didn't have my moment of silence... damn, maybe it'll come tomorrow”. Yeah, that was meditating a là Esin, and of course the extreme craving for a moment of stillness brought nothing but an even more chaotic and disappointing stream of thoughts.

About a year ago I went out with a friend; our plan was dinner followed by an opera. He would then continue the night at a club with his friends. He spent the entire time in dinner calling his friends to brag about getting the tickets to the opera, hence had no idea how much and how fast he ate. Then he fell asleep during the first part of the opera and then spent the second part sneakily texting to decide which club and what time. Poor guy enjoyed no part of the night, because he was constantly trying to make the perfect plan for the next hour. That observation was probably the first time I got a sense of what it meant to be staying in the present moment. Oh well, we don't always learn by positive examples do we? Sometimes an extremely negative experience in our faces would worth a million wise quotes.

That seed began to sprout very slowly. I don't know when and where exactly it happened, but about 6 months ago, I began to get a hazy sense of being present. I realized how much I missed the “now” when I was spending my time planning the good days to come.  I was in Asia, traveling, doing as much yoga as I wanted, meeting amazing people but my mind was stuck on when I'm going back and how much money I would have left by then. I had the time of my life, I was happy every single day, yet I was focused on something in the future that I didn't know when and how would happen... From that point onwards, slowly but very slowly I tried to let go. Whenever I caught myself planning for the future, I would say “i am blessed for being here, for experiencing whatever i am experiencing and for being aware of it”. It worked.

If I am really agitated, I would just close my eyes and focus on my breathing. There is nothing as “here and now” as an inhale and an exhale. It is always there, it is a constant flow yet each and every breath is unique. Sometimes I breathe very shallow, sometimes one nostril is blocked, sometimes an inhale is hot... Whatever it is, each breath is a gift and it is unique to the moment it happens. I cannot plan for the 5pm inhale, nor can I regret that an exhale last month didn't fully empty my lungs...

I am light years far from being a master of my mind, being constantly present. My mind is still like a dump site of all irrelevant thoughts, but what I am slowly learning is not to be stuck  with it. Even occasionally shifting my attention to only here and now, not dwelling in the past or the future is a major progress for me. What I've noticed is that on days when I can do that, I sleep so much better and feel rested with even a few hours of sleep. It's an interesting state of inner calm, that gives energy. It's definitely more difficult to do that in Dubai, where there are so many stimulants and barely time to close my eyes to feel blessed for being here, for experiencing whatever I am experiencing. I am hoping that it's only true that difficult things are more rewarding at the end.

old city, new in old city

In one of my previous posts in January, I mentioned how much I enjoyed being in a city for the first time; opening my perception wide to soak in whatever that city can offer. However I just realized that being out of my turf for a while and then returning gave me a somewhat similar experience.

It was the first time that I was away from Istanbul for 9 months. Coming back, my perception of the city wasn't so much different probably because that's not a very long period for a rooted city like Istanbul to change. Yet I felt like a complete outsider. At the end of my first day, I had a headache because of all the second-hand smoke and political discussions that I was exposed to. All of us living around the Mediterranean have always loved discussing politics, I cannot remember how many spontaneous conversations I had with taxi drivers in Greece and Israel on the subject. But now, I wondered why people wanted to share their political views with someone whose knowledge was as outdated as the bronze age. I wasn't even interested but people didn't really mind my yawning and went on. It doesn't make slightest sense to me to spend all that time and energy on stuff that I cannot change. Especially the energy that goes into it; nobody seems to talk about politics without a strong sense of judgment, dislike and blaming.  And mind you, these are neither politicians nor party members, they are my friends who work in advertising, finance, arts etc

Coming to Dubai, politics seemed to lose it's #1 place into a general sense of complaint of heat, stupid jobs, incompetent bosses, bad driving, senseless regulations, just to give a few examples. It's sad to see that only a few people are fully satisfied with their lives here. I'm not saying that life in Dubai makes sense in all the ways. Quite the contrary, it can resemble to an episode of the twilight zone pretty often. Yet we choose to stay.

I've been thinking about this quite a lot because this was my culture shock. I probably wouldn't have noticed this if I wasn't out for so long. Human beings are supposed to strive towards better (and therefore happier) but it seems that we build a very suffocating fence of complaints and judgments around our happiness so it does not grow up to its full potential. Why?

One possible reason that came to my mind was that we need to be heard, we need to receive attention. Since we are babies, we get more attention when we cry or have a sad face because it's an alarm of things not going as they are supposed to. Everyone hovers around when we are sick. Maybe some of never outgrow the need for this type of attention even when we are grown. Maybe we never develop the skills to seek a healthy dose of attention by means other than complaining. Hence we keep our unhappy masks on; we complain with an acute need to be heard and to be paid attention. Imagine a  random night out with friends you haven't seen in a long time, does the group spend more time listening to the one who says “oh it's all good, things are going fine” or to the one who says “in the office I work with the stupidest bunch of people who make my life a living hell every day”.

Complaining is a way to attract attention so that missing/wrong things can get fixed.  Most of those chronic complainers however are happy with things being  wrong/missing. If you actually try to correct things for them, they will either find a way to be unhappy with the new situation or will shift their focus to the next wrong thing, because the source of discomfort is internal.

I've been thinking a lot about this in the last 3 weeks and this was the only possible answer that I could see. I would really appreciate some fresh insight if you would care to share. What do you think? Why do we focus on what we cannot change and why do we keep complaining on things that we can change but do nothing about it?