Eternal Truths From Ubud, Where Yogis Meet With Digital Nomads, Bali, Indonesia
Eternal Truths From Ubud, Where Yogis Meet With Digital Nomads, Bali, Indonesia
Ubud is a paradise for yoga lovers and health enthusiasts.
There are many yoga studios around the city, including some very professional studios, with attached vegan cafes where you can drink health inducing potions you never saw anywhere else.
The leaves of the Moringa tree are served in restaurants here frequently, made into soups, veg patties and coconut based curries.
In my country, nobody cooks Moringa, even in health food restaurants.
Delicious raw food restaurants and cafes are not hard to find, and in many places you can sit for hours, among backpackers, yoginis, digital nomads and tourists, sipping tea, eating and chatting about everything and about nothing.
I love the traveling life.
I love roaming from place to place, allowing the places I pass through to leave their marks on me.
In Ubud, there are many stores selling yoga specific clothing, yoga accessories and designer yoga mats, cleaning spray for yoga mats and carrying bags for yoga mats.
You can buy aromatherapy essential oils to infuse the air in your room with fragrant scents that will help elevate your mind, or purchase a beautifully designed meditation cushion, or a meditation blanket, to cover your lap while meditating.
For some, this may seem like superfluous consumerism for what should be achieved by simply sitting to meditate and quieting the monkey mind, but I would rather live in a society that sells health-food fads and meditation and yoga accessories of all kinds, than a society that sells sex and bondage toys, or guns of every kind.
The phenomena of digital nomads has seriously taken root around the world in recent years.
Being able to work from home means that you can work from anywhere and everywhere, including your favorite vacation spots.
Digital nomads travel to the places in the world where they can stay and have a great time, for very little money.
They stay for months, living on very little, eating cheaply and spending their time in cafes, socializing, exchanging ideas or networking with other digital nomads.
There are a few places remaining around the world where it is not just cheap to stay and eat, but also where you can get high quality, wonderful experiences.
Many of these places are located in Asia, in places like Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and when things stabilize again, in Myanmar.
For me, the appeal of those places is not just the inexpensive prices of everything, but the fact that I can get so much better quality of accommodation, better tasting fruit and foods, and so much better attitudes than what I am used to at home.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love living in the middle of nature with almost no neighbors and no traffic.
I love it that the air is so clean at home, and that the water I drink comes out of my own well dug deep into the surface of the earth, fed by snowy mountains and clean creeks.
But as human beings, we are complex.
We have many dimensions and we need exposure to many kinds of environments.
Sometimes we need quiet and isolation, to listen to a babbling creek and look at the millions of stars, to listen to the songs of birds or the cries of the coyotes at night.
And sometimes, we need the stimulating vibes of big cities, full of contemporary art, music performances, great cafes, and to be inspired by creative design in fashion, accessories, craft and architecture.
For me, sometimes I need to be a diver, diving in remote places of the earth, and sometimes I am an artist, and sometimes I am a skier and a runner, and a traveler roaming around, sometimes a writer, sometimes a photographer, sometimes I am a student and sometimes I am a teacher.
I have observed that those who live lives without understanding the human need for stimulation and variety, are not even aware that they are bored with their lives.
They have created lives according to their ideas of what should make them happy, and are surprised that raising kids, focusing on their jobs or careers, buying their luxury car or achieving their goals of a second and third home, still leaves them feeling empty.
The truth could be that they are simply bored and unhappy with the lives they created, only they cannot imagine and design a better life.
Most of us will never feel fulfilled by repetition of a daily routine, centered on a job, success in a career and raising families.
We tend to fear becoming sick, or losing our loved ones or losing what we have, and we try to protect our position in life and preserve our assets.
Life is eternal and at the same time, very temporal.
We are here for a second, yet we are eternal and will always be here, just not in the exact form that we have now.
For most of us, this is not a big loss.
The forms we have now reflect the ideas that we used to hold in the past, and since we are evolving and changing, so will our forms change.
There are masters walking among us, helping people to find the way.
They do not look like high priests of any religion.
We might not be aware of them, yet they are still there to assist and guide us.
They will subtly point to things we should do, places we must visit or books we must read in order to help our evolution towards understanding our unlimited Godly powers and Eternal Nature.
Meanwhile, we pass our days and years, playing at being humans, falling in love with people and places and discovering what works and what doesn’t, trying different personality traits and changing the ones that don’t benefit us.
The Game of Life might look tragic to the unenlightened mind.
Life seems to be laced with suffering, but you cannot lose this Game of Life.
You ARE eternal and you ARE a god, creating your reality like a master weaver.
From all your many lives, you weave a beautiful tapestry that reflects your glorious Being.
From Ubud with love and wishing all of you in the USA a wonderful Thanksgiving,
Tali
