After a 2 month hiatus from blogging, I've come back to share a supremely simple, yet powerful realization that came to me yesterday evening. The past five months in Australia have been great (of course with the occasional challenges), but yesterday afternoon at the end of a roller coaster of a work week, I was asking myself "Why am I here (in Australia, in Dunsborough, at Samudra)? For 90 minutes, I could not find an answer to the question, no matter how hard I tried. I started thinking that if I couldn't find an answer for why I was here, it was time to move on to a new adventure. Then, thinking back to the state of mind I was in before I had ever been to Australia and coming here was only a dream, I realized that I came to Australia to have fun! This seems such a simple and obvious answer, but I had forgotten it. Being in a daily work environment where everyone takes everything so seriously had contagiously led me to do the same and I had been suffering for it for quite some time. I had stopped having fun. Now, how to solve this problem? I resolutely decided to start having fun every second of the day at all costs. If I appear unproductive and lose my job? No problem. If losing my job means having to leave Dunsborough or Australia and lose the possibility of future residency here? I'm not too worried about it. I'm going to have fun no matter what. If being here prohibits me from having fun, I'll move on, but I'm going to give it my best to have fun here before abandoning this place.
So today I started putting my new resolution into action. I slept in until 8 o'clock (this is a major thing when I'm used to getting up at 5 AM every day for yoga) and then made my favorite warm chocolate herbal elixir packed with ridiculous amounts of superfoods and superherbs. I stood out in the sun in the garden and drank half of it and bottled up the other half, which I drank in the car as I drove 45 minutes south to Margaret River, where my friends Kylie and Cat were having their debut at the farmers' market selling their homemade raw chocolates and dehydrated treats. The drive down to Margaret River takes you through some incredibly majestic forests. As I searched out their booth, I stopped at the bee keeper's booth to buy the last few kilos of bee pollen that he would have for the season. The Western Australia bee pollen is the most nutritious and best tasting bee pollen in the world. At home in California, I would use bee pollen in my smoothies, but would never consider it tasty enough to eat on its own. Here, its not uncommon to see me eating the bee pollen by the spoonful, sometimes up to ten tablespoons a day! It is so delicious! I then found Kylie and Cat and jumped behind the booth with them for a few hours to help them sell and had so much fun doing it! At 12 o'clock when the market finished, I helped them pack up and drove 20 minutes to one of my favorite beaches, sipping spring water that I had collected a few days earlier as I went. (The place where I get this spring water is amazing, just below the mouth of a huge cave with wild celery growing right where the spring water comes out of the rocks!)
The waves were head high and perfect- totally ripable rights with barely any wind and the water was a perfect light blue that most people only ever see in exotic photographs. (I'd love to show you pictures, but I accidentally drowned both my video and still cameras in a broken bottle of pau d'arco tea a few weeks ago. Check out some of my older posts to see the phenomenal water color here.) There were only two people in the water and they both got out as a frantically put on my wetsuit, saying that they were both exhausted, having caught about 50 waves each over the past few hours. I paddled out on a board that I hadn't ridden in a few months and had an epic session! I was having so much fun getting one wave after another. I kept looking around, seeing nothing but wild nature around me without a soul in sight and saying "This is unbelievable!" 30 waves and 90 minutes later, the waves died out and I went in content and stoked. I took off my wetsuit and let the sun feed my body for a few minutes before driving off.
Its now after 4 PM and I haven't eaten anything (only drinking spring water) since the smoothie I had 8 hours ago and I'm not remotely hungry. This is something interesting that's started happening the past few days. I've reached what feels like such a supreme level of nutrification (attributed to two of my three daily meals for some time now being almost entirely comprised of superfoods with lots of mineral packed kelp) that I don't really need to be eating much. The past few days I've observed the lack of hunger, but still eaten regular meals out of habit, but today I'm taking a different route and waiting to see where it takes me. For the moment, spring water is so amazing, my energy is high, my mind is clear, and I'm having fun! I'm feeling like I probably won't need to eat tonight. I'm not setting a planned amount of time not to eat, I'll eat when I get hungry, but not just out of habit. I'm thinking that maybe when hunger does come, I'll be able to thrive on just one superfood packed smoothie per day and not need to burden my body with three daily meals. This feels really good. Let the fun continue!
