North And South Lucky Bob Dive Sites, Pemba Island, Zanzibar

 

North And South Lucky Bob Dive Sites Northwestern Pemba Island Zanzibar

“We are tied to the ocean, and when we go back to the sea, we are going back from where we came.”
John F. Kennedy

One of the many benefits of taking on physical challenges like diving or walking long pilgrimages is that they present us with opportunities to face the limiting ideas that we carry inside, and do not otherwise challenge during our daily lives.

For example, when I am at home, I spend many quiet days painting in the studio.
These are days in which I am not physically active.
I could go for a walk or exercise in our home gym, but when I paint, the hours simply fly by.
Time becomes fluid or non-existent and before I know it, it is time to take a shower and prepare dinner.

When I have many consecutive days of not being physically active, I lose confidence in my physical abilities and start believing I am getting old, and start fixating about what is not perfect in my body or in my life.

After months of not doing a long pilgrimage or being physically active, walking for many hours becomes a real challenge.
My legs hurt, I feel fatigued, and I find myself wondering how I ever was able to walk 25 kilometers every day for months at a time.

Ancient Hindu scriptures speak of the body as a place of pilgrimage, in which you can discover all the gods and demons of good and evil qualities, existing within yourself.

No words have ever been more true.
In fact, this is the reason we have a body to begin with.
As Eternal Spirits, we do not need to inhabit or animate a physical body.

The body can offer us a road map to enlightenment.
Through learning to listen and recognize the inner demons, we can learn to choose the Voice of our inner God, and create and recreate the reality we want to experience, until we reach our ultimate release from all illusions and limitations.

The reason Jesus was able to walk on water, and Moses turned a wooden pole into a snake and the Tibetan Milarepa could fly, is that by itself, the body is pure energy and light.

The limitations of the physical body are all imposed by our collective beliefs and individual convictions.
Illusions are shared by the fact that our minds are all joined and divinely connected.

Because we believe that gravity is an absolute fact, we cannot fly.
Because we believe that walls are solid, we cannot walk through them.
Because we believe that time is a fact and runs chronologically, we cannot experience our multitudes of life-times as a synchronized event.
Because we believe that death is real, we mourn and despair.
Because we believe that bodies are physical objects that were born seventy or eighty or ninety years ago and must age and deteriorate, we experience the effects of aging.

The less we demand and expect of our bodies, the less they will perform for us.
If we decide that half an hour of swimming is a lot, it will feel like a lot.
If we decide that swimming six hours per day is totally doable, it will be so for us, regardless of age.

When I was in my twenties, I thought that four or five hours of walking was very demanding.
I could not imagine how people could have jobs that required them to stand all day long without sitting.
Now, after years of walking long pilgrimages and standing for twelve hours a day, I cannot believe that I demanded so little of my body.

I still do demand too little, eat too much, and believe in wrong and limiting ideas.
But at least now, I am facing these deadly ideas and am willing to discard them one by one, as opportunities arise for me to encounter them.

If I am physically or mentally clumsy, I do not blame aging, but lack of practice.

The body is the epitome of all knowledge, and it can provide you with endless opportunities to learn and recreate yourself!

Oh, and diving at the Lucky Bob dive site on Pemba Island was absolutely awesome!

For America’s independence day on the 4th of July, the Multiverse we live in gave me a special gift.
In a small cave under a pinnacle coral rock, I saw a very rare creature.
It was a stars and stripes studded jumbo shrimp, that is not mentioned in the book and has not been seen anywhere in Zanzibar.
I got good photos of this special jumbo shrimp, and felt so grateful to have seen it.

Happy 4th of July and many blessings,
Tali