Tag: Awakening to Presence

Squeeky Shoes

On By rrainefioreIn Teaching, Thailand, UncategorizedLeave a comment

This morning half my class was missing.  Do I teach a class when half of them won’t get the lesson?  How do I teach the other half later without boring the first half?  I wasn’t sure what to do.  Of course, they just wanted to play games instead of have class.  Then I thought, I’m the teacher, I can do what I want.  I don’t want to teach to half the class.  So, we played scrabble and bingo.  I had two classes in the afternoon and neither class showed up.  Well, that means less lesson planning, but still, where were they?  I texted Noi to tell her they hadn’t showed up since they were her classes too.  She was at a seminar.  She texted back that they went to join the mountain bike festival and they were all riding bikes all afternoon.  She said I should have gone.  They had enough bikes for teachers too.  Then she sent me photos of the students and teachers riding.  And this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I am so over this place and the end of September is not soon enough to leave.  There is nothing to do here.  I work too much and when there is something to do, no one tells me.  Pat and I talked about this in February and I told her I wanted to race when the festival happened.  She didn’t see fit to tell me.  Robin knows I want to bike, but he doesn’t see fit to tell me even though he’s already signed up to race in the road bike race.  Noi tells me I should have gone with my class as if I’m some mind reader.  How the fuck was I supposed to know my classes were doing this?  Wouldn’t they learn more English by have an everyday conversation while riding bikes with their teacher instead of me sitting in an empty classroom by myself?  How difficult is to send a text message – “no class today, go bike riding with them.”?  And then everyone seems so surprised to hear I’m leaving.  How is that surprising?  Am I supposed to love living here when all I do is work or sit alone in my house?  I would think people from a communal culture would get it.

Noi just kept sending me pictures of the fun I missed.  I sat in the coffee shop crying for 20 minutes.  I’ve been holding back so many tears.  I haven’t been trying to hold them back, they just seem to hang out beneath the surface and never quite come up.  I decided to go home and see if I could cry more.  I felt like I could cry for days.  I got home and no crying came.  Huh, ok, so we’re done with that for the day.  Then I decided to drive up to the dam and see what was going on.  There was supposed to be a market and other festival activities.  There was a massage tent set up and all four of the masseuses in town were there so I was able to get a massage from the man I usually go to on the weekends.  There was a small child with squeeky shoes running around outside the massage tent.  The shoes have squeekers like dog toy squeekers in them.  She ran up and down the street for about 45 minutes.  Squeek squeek squeek squeeeee squeek squeek squeeeeeeee squeek.  There was also bad Thai music.  So, I found some sort of relief in the fact that I had a massage to the sounds of bad Thai music and squeeky shoes. Then I found Tip and her family and hung out with them for a little bit.  They went home kind of early (little children).  I was intrigued by the shake that Dam (Tip’s son) got.  It had condensed milk, some white cream I can only guess was white sugar in liquid form, ice and grape jello.  She put everything in a blender and mixed up real good before adding the jello.  That she barely hit the blender for so that it was still in chunks.  Then she threw powdered ovaltine in the cup at the halfway mark and on top.  I’m not sure if this would be good or horrible.  I should have ordered one just to see what it was all about, but I didn’t.  I have no idea how to order it now.

I ate dinner alone by the river.  It was kind of sad, but also quite relaxing.  I’ve had enough people for the day.  The lights on the bridge lit up the water below.  That brought lots of bugs and that brought lots of fish.  The surface of the water moved an rippled as bugs moved on top and things moved underneath.  It wasn’t fish jumping.  It was more like snakes or river monsters gliding just below the surface.  It was fascinating to watch.  I vowed never to swim in the river – ever.

There was a beer garden and a stage so I went to check that out after eating.  The beer garden looked very uninviting as it was only groups of people at reserved tables so I stood near the stage for a while.  There’s no place to go hang out at night here so I was determined to hang out.  A German guy walked by me and asked where I was from.  He was kind of creepy and I didn’t really want to talk  to him, but I couldn’t run away either.  I told him I lived here and taught English as Sam Ngao Witt.  He said that was a terrible school.  He lives here and his son can’t speak English.  I asked if his son could speak German.  Oh yes.  He told me about 6 or 7 times that that was a bad school and shook his head like I should leave school before I got killed.  Ok, I’m not a fan of the school right now, but the fact that his son doesn’t speak English is just as much his fault as the school’s fault or his son’s fault and it doesn’t make the school a scary place.  The conversation just got more difficult and awkward.  Finally, he left and I decide that hanging out alone standing next to the beer garden listening to Thai music did not qualify as hanging out. I went home.

At home I wrote a facebook post about how frustrated I was and how, even though there are some wonderful things about living here, I’m ready to move on.  I got a lot of responses telling me there’s no shame in giving up and moving on and a lot of “oh I’m sorry you have to suffer so much”.  This is not the response I wanted.  I don’t regret my decision to move here at all.  I’m angry, but not suffering.  I have no shame in moving on. I never mentioned shame.  So, I realized that my facebook post did not paint the right picture.  Or, people are so use to suffering and drama that they read what they want and use it to feed their need for drama.  Or facebook is just not the right venue for such thoughts.  So, I questioned why I wrote it in the first place.  I know facebook works in this way.  I know that most of the people reading it don’t know the rest of the story because they haven’t read my blogs.  The people who read my blogs seemed to get it and respond in a way that showed they got it.  I didn’t want the pity party or the “look on the bright side” or “here’s my advice because I know more than you”, but I knew I would get some of that.  So, what did I want?  Here’s what I figured out.  1.  I was angry so I wanted to vent and there’s no one here to talk to.  2.  I’m tired of people on facebook that say things like “oh you live in Thailand, how lucky” as if I’m sitting on a beach drinking Mai Thais instead of working my ass off and terrified of my own bathroom.  I’m mad at these people.  3.  I have friends that can’t be bothered to send me a text or email and say “hi, how are you?”.  They only want to see me post pretty pictures so they can like them.  I’m mad at these people.  4. I know I can’t confront Pat directly for the ways she has set me up for failure and for the fact that she can’t be bothered to spend 10 seconds to send me a text to tell me what’s going on.  I know she doesn’t do it on purpose and that she is very stressed, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m mad about this too.  I can’t confront her because you don’t confront people here and it would do more damage than good.  Thai people deal with negative feelings mostly through passive aggressive behavior.  Most of them truly don’t have negative feelings, but when they do, it’s socially unacceptable to show them.  So, I think I was also hoping she’d see the post and know how I feel.  Punish passive aggressive behavior with passive aggressive behavior.  Well, that’s a shitty plan.  So, no more pity party and no more posting things on facebook other than the pretty pictures.  I deleted the post.  If you really want to know what I think, tune in here.  You’ll get plenty of it.

It is wonderful to be able to have an issue, feel like shit, question it and go “Oh, I was angry, that’s what was going on”.  Then it’s over and there’s no guilt, no regret, no beating myself up.  I have spent a lot of my life beating myself up and I no longer do that.  I didn’t think I shouldn’t have written the facebook post or I shouldn’t be angry or poor me.  This is why I deleted the post.  I figured out why it wasn’t working for me, because people want to see all this drama that I just don’t see.  I was angry long enough to cry for 20 minutes and long enough to write the post, but then once I wrote the words, I’m not angry anymore and moved on.  So, by the time I got the responses the responses didn’t fit the situation anymore because my view of the situation had already changed.  It just seemed silly to leave the post up.  So, in other blogs when I talk about where I don’t think enlightenment is something that happens once and then you live happily ever after, this is what I’m talking about.  I still get angry.  I still have feelings.  I still think things should be different than they are.  Then I notice that something doesn’t fit, something is off and I question it.  Then I learn and the whole body/system/process or what ever you want to call it is reset to a new place of balance or a new point of normal.  Then you do it all again and again and again.  Over time this process happens faster and faster.  By the time you read this you are thinking, “Oh poor Rraine, she is suffering so much” and I’ve moved on and am thinking “What are you talking about?  I’m not suffering.  That was a whole minute ago.  Everything is fine.”  Living in the present doesn’t mean not having feelings, it just means not buying into the concept that those feelings define you.  It means not buying into the concept that something is wrong if your feelings aren’t always happy, peaceful or some other thing we define positive to be.  It’s not buying into the concept that something needs fixing.  There’s nothing to be fixed, because nothing is wrong.  And my decision is still to leave here in October, not because I want to end the suffering or because I’m miserable, or because the grass is greener over there.  If I left for any of those reasons, I guarantee you there would be suffering and misery over there because if there’s suffering or misery, I’m the source of it, not the situation or location. I am leaving because this is no longer where I need to be.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

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If you are a mother of a little girl, you probably have a unicorn in your purse
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Tip, Fai and Dam
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Yes, my face is this greasy 24/7 here
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Fai is not loving the stationary bike

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The Future

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I notice that biggest thing standing in my way of being completely present is the future. I imagine this is a common problem.  I spend about 70 to 80 percent of my waking day present and the rest of the time I live in the future.  This is a huge improvement over the rest of my life where I probably spent 90 percent of my time or more in the future.  There’s a time for planning and preparing, but not at the expense of living now.  But, I think most of us live in the past, reliving good times or replaying horrible heart breaks.  Or we live in the future thinking “if the weekend would just get here”.  “When I get that better job, when I get that great boyfriend, when I make more money, when I get invited to that party, when I get to go on vacation…….then I will be happy”.  I know I have done this most of my life.  My childhood was very unhappy and sometimes just too much for a child to have to deal with.  The easiest way to deal with that was to live in the future, a time when life would be bearable.  These defenses we learn early on stick with us and get hard wired into our nervous systems.  They become the automatic way of being and it takes a lot of focus and concentration to see the automatic pilot, much less to get it to change.  In theory, it shouldn’t take a lot of work – just notice that you are not living in the present moment and shift your focus to now.  But, for most of us the automatic pilot is so strong that it takes time and work.  I’ve have worked on this for many years which is why it is much better than it used to be.  I use to also split my thoughts into 20 different directions at once.  If I’m having 20 different thoughts or story lines going on in my head at once, the one that is unhappy with the present moment can get drowned out by all the noise of the rest of the thoughts.  It’s a very effective method of protection.  However, I am not a little child and I don’t need protection any more.  Then the noise is just noise and it’s exhausting.  Through the many years of work, I have almost gotten rid of the different tracks of thinking.  At most, there is only 2 or 3.  I notice as I’m getting closer to the end of my teaching contract, my thoughts are running to the future more often.  I have no plan of what to do next.  This scares me and I feel like I need to have a plan by now.  It’s very difficult to just be here now and trust that something wonderful will happen and I will make decisions when they need to be made, not sooner.  So, I’m no closer to making any decisions because just thinking about the future is not actually helpful in making decisions.  I went through this strongly before I decided on living in Thailand and I’m going through it again.  It’s quite a battle – I’m in the future, I notice and bring myself back to present, then one minute later I’m back in the future, back to now, future, now, future, now.

So, I open my book and yes, you guessed it, the subject is the future.  And once again, I think Almaas describes the topic at hand so well.

“We are always going somewhere, internally or externally – to the store, the movies, the beach, the office, the restaurant, the television, the internet, the newspaper, the latest spiritual teacher to come to town, our partners, our children, our friends, our parents, our worries, our concerns, our fears, our hopes. And on and on. We are in motion, going after, seeking out, restless, never satisfied, never at peace. This seems to be the central dilemma of human life – that it is easier to desire what is over there than to appreciate what is right here. In fact, what is here seems to be so fundamentally inferior, less than, or inadequate compared to what is apparently over there, that it hardly seems worth the effort to look here. Why not just go over there?”

“Spiritual paths and techniques thus become ways of getting there – to the place where you feel real, where you will become all these wonderful things. So you meditate, attempting to empty your mind or calm yourself or focus on an image or let go of all attachment. Or you chant and dance to invoke your spirit. Or you say prayers and go vision quests. Yet all these techniques of finding your deeper self subtly imply that where you are now in yourself is not where you need to be. You are seeking some ideal of the spiritual self and using these methods to attempt to reach that. The result is that the spiritual search can evoke the same dilemma that all other aspects of your life do”.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

The Unfolding No

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, UncategorizedLeave a comment

For a couple of months now, I’ve been getting periods of light headedness.  It’s usually in the afternoon to early evening.  I don’t feel like I’m going to faint or fall over, but I do feel like doing anything other standing, sitting or walking might not go well.  My vision goes a little blurry and I don’t feel equipped to make decisions or have conversations.  It was strong about a month ago, but doesn’t happen every day anymore.  Of course, my first though was, oh no, I have some horrible mosquito borne disease and I’m going to die.  Then I wondered if it was too much exposure to the bug spray I’ve used to kill house invaders.  It seems to kill everything.  Or, maybe I have a brain tumor and only have one week to live.  Once I’m done with the dooms day thinking then I settle on a new theory.  I think it might be a combination of stress, bad diet and nervous system changes trying to happen.  I think there is re-wiring going on in the brain and my body is trying physically to change the way it takes in and processes information.  Then the stress of what am I going to do next, how am I going to pay for it, teaching, what creature will I find in my house next, how am I going to pack up all my stuff, will my house sell, why is my car such a drama…….blah blah blah…..then all this stress stops the physical process from finishing.  Or maybe some of the stress is a result of the physical process.  Maybe the drama needs to be flushed out first.  So, now whenever I feel the light headedness, I just try to relax into it and just experience it instead of worrying about it.  I’m also trying to eat more veggies.  I would like to drink less coffee and eat less sugar, but I’m not there yet.  They are both very addictive.

As always, when I read one of Almaas’ books, he’s describing exactly what I’m experiencing.  I started a new book called the Unfolding Now.  I found it quite funny that when I opened the book in my nook (Barnes and Noble’s version of a kindle), it split the pages of the cover sheet so that the title of the book appeared as The Unfolding No.  I found this very funny.

So, I leave you with a quote from Almaas that describe things I am experiencing right now.

“In our work, each of us will encounter challenges; we will arrive at Crossroads where we have to make changes. These challenges and Crossroads will help us to develop. They will enable us to realize the life of Truth. The more of those challenges we have, the more chances we have to realize the true perspective. If your life is comfortable, if you are always getting what you want, you might think it’s great. You might think “everything is going wonderfully. Now I can do my spiritual work”. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. The more comfortable you are, the less chance you have to make the choice, and the less chances you have for the choice to be clear”.
(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

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Doraemon

On By rrainefioreIn Teaching, Thailand, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It was kind of a normal week except I was done with lesson planning on Saturday instead of Sunday!  Whoa!

One of my M6 classes (12 grade) always wants me to sing or dance.  They love music.  So I brought in music related to the doctor since my lesson was on health.  They went nuts and got up and started dancing.  Then after the first song they wanted to play Doraemon songs.  I knew Doraemon was a cartoon, but had no idea Doraemon also had electronic dance music too.  Huh….Who knew?  The other M6 class was a bit different.  They sat on the edge of their seats watching the video that went with the song and had little interest in dancing.  The first class was oblivious there was a video.  So far most, if not all Thai music I have heard is horrible.  It’s like bad walmart sappy love song lounge music.  Doraemon throwing down the beats was a welcome change.  When I told Noi about the M6 class loving to dance she said that was because that class had a lot of boy girls in it. I assumed this was like a very effeminate boy. It does seem that is true.

I’m still amazed by the restaurants here.  It’s a wonder I’ve only gotten sick twice.  Not one place I have eaten in since I got to Thailand would pass a health department inspection in the US.  Yet, it all seems to be just fine.  All of them in my area are outdoor kitchens.  The number of chickens I saw running around kitchens this week alone was mind boggling.  We went back to one of the places I wrote about before where there were so many chickens and flies.  I’m now naming this food shop, House of Chicken.  No food shops appear to have names and if they did, I couldn’t read the sign anyway, so House of Chicken it is.  They were everywhere, pecking at a bag of food, playing in the sink of dirty dishes, pecking at the frying pan, running in the street.  The kitchens are like camping kitchens.  I feel like I’m just camping 24/7, but with a lot more chickens.  Yet, no one seems to get sick, including myself so maybe we are just over paranoid in the US?

I went to Tak with Noi one day after school.  I went to the bank to find out why I can’t transfer money on line.  The lady helped me register for on-line banking, but I don’t know she understood my concern and I don’t think it changed anything.  I also went to the store to buy cheese and cereal – both things I can’t get in my village and can’t live without.  I ran into the western teacher I had met in Chiang Rai.  That was kind of funny.  We stopped at a teacher’s credit union / co-op type thing after the store.  There was a younger kid in there.  I assumed his mom was one of the ladies working there.  All the ladies encouraged him and cheered him on as he tried to speak English with me.  He asked my name and where I was from, my favorite food, and a few other questions.  Very cute.

Of course there were no classes Friday afternoon because it was National Thai Language Day so there were speeches, dances and other performances all afternoon.  No one told me until about lunch time.  Oh well, that’s just one less lesson plan I have to do for next week.  There was a going away party for one of the teachers after school.  I was told about this in the afternoon.  I felt funny going since I didn’t even know who was leaving until she got up after dinner for all the speeches and photos.  But, I didn’t want to offend anyone by not going and I was curious what a going away party would be like.  It had lots of Thai music, spicy food, rice, sugary sweet sodas, whiskey, speeches, giving of gifts, lots of photos, lots of selfies, and karaoke.  I managed to find some food that I could eat.  I probably should have tried the whiskey, but I don’t really like whiskey.  I tried the atomic fallout green soda.  It was quite delicious.  They love to take photos of gifting.  So there is a overly posed photo of every gift she received being handed over by the giver.  Still, as I sat there and looked around, I felt very strongly like I was a guest at someone’s family dinner.  This is a family and they truly care about each other.  I did get a not so good video of my next door neighbor, Q, singing karaoke.  A lot of people asked if I did karaoke, but I don’t know any of the songs and I can’t read the words on the screen.

I left my motorbike at school because it was raining so hard when I left.  So, I walked up to get it Saturday morning.  The janitor, Q, and some of the other male teachers were sitting in front of the school office around the drink cooler obviously working on the left over whiskey.  They wanted to know where I was going.  “Teacher Rraine, where you go?”  They also wanted to know where I was going in October.  Then the janitor proceeded to say he loved me about 7 or 8 times.  “Teacher Rraine, I love you.”  I’m going to guess he thinks that means he likes me or he will miss seeing me when I leave, not that he actually loves me, but who knows.  He barely speaks English so I’ll chalk it up to that, that and whiskey.

The coffee shop was closed so I texted the lady that makes salads and burgers to see if she was open because I know she has coffee and wifi.  She was open so I spent most of the day there.  The tables and chairs were very uncomfortable, but there’s more than sugar on the menu so I got an egg ham and cheese sandwich was was delicious.  A lot of students came in while I was there.  It was a nice change of pace.  I did massage yesterday too.  It was one of the most painful yet.  When he worked on my shoulders I cried.  I was glad this was near the end of the massage because it felt like there was so much crying and screaming wailing wanting to come up.  I just don’t feel safe letting that volume of emotion out in that atmosphere.  After he gave me his phone number.  I think he was trying to tell me he would work on me at my home or his or come get me if it was raining.  He was either trying to give me a safe place to work next time or he was hitting on me.  I really have no idea.  I went home after and tried to release some of emotions I’m holding in my shoulders, but nothing came up.  How can that be?  I know it’s there.  Even as I write this, I can feel so much crying stuck in there, but I can’t reach it.  Maybe tomorrow….

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

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The best crispy pork is made here
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The Ping River from Crispy Pork Restaurant
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House of Chicken Restaurant
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House of Chicken Restaurant
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She is cooking my lunch right now at House of Chicken
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Chicken
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What?  There’s a chicken behind me?
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This is a restaurant

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Teacher’s Party
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Giving of the gifts
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New Coffee Shop
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New Coffee Shop

Short Week

On By rrainefioreIn Teaching, Thailand, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I came back from Chiang Mai with Noi and Chelon.  We stopped in Lampang and I got to see some of Noi’s home there.  After I got home, the rest of the day was laundry and cleaning.  It was nice to have a short week – 2 days.

Somehow, Pat realized that I wasn’t the right person to be creating the curriculum for the Mini English Program and she assigned different parts to all the other English teachers.  I will proof read what she writes though.

My MEP students did horrible on their tests.  I didn’t think the test were that hard.  Pat suggested I re-test them.  In America, they would fail and if they failed enough, they would be held back a year.  But, here, they help them by re-testing or giving them other ways to make better marks.  I think I will re-test them, but then average the scores of the two tests.

I got home Friday and just decided to go to bed early.  I slept 12 hours.  I needed that.  I know a huge part of why I don’t like teaching is that being in a school setting is reminding me how much I hated my childhood.  It’s exhausting, but it’s also good to be facing it head on.  I know that much of what I feel isn’t real.  There is absolutely no reason to feel negatively about any of this – it’s old stories.  I’ve known this for a long time, but it feels like I’m looking at it from a different angle as if I’m not actually feeling this childhood stuff, but watching myself feeling it.  It is very detailed as if I am looking at it under a microscope.  This is what most, if not all, humans do to themselves.  We spend so much time feeling things that aren’t even real.  They may not have even been real in the past the first time we felt them.  But we keep pushing play over and over and over on an old recording of a bad feeling.

I notice that music helps break the cycle of old feelings.  So, I’ve been playing music more often when at home.

Here’s some pictures and video of the students cheering and some pictures of Jetson, the village next to mine.  Even though it seems run down, there’s so much beauty in this area.

(c) all rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

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Recent Investigations

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Lately my spiritual investigation is about living in the future.  I find myself thinking about the future a lot.  When I’m living in the future, I’m missing now.  When your house scares you and your job overwhelms you it’s easy to assume the future will be better and to think about that.  But, then that adds stress too because I have no idea what I’m going to do in the future and I feel like I should have a plan since it’s only a few months away.  I can’t stop it from happening – my mind jumping to the future, but I can notice it when it happens.  Just the practice of noticing is helping me to bring my attention back to now.  I don’t want to miss all that is going on now.  I’ve been able to relax more.  I’ve been able to enjoy what I do like about here more.  I want to spend more time with my friends here and more time exploring Thailand before I have to leave.  And of course, I want to spend more time everyday present instead of in the future.  I already spend a lot of my time in presence, but little bit by little bit, it’s more time spent in presence.

Hand in hand with the future is the need for a to-do list.  I’ve always used a to-do list to keep things in order.  If I didn’t, I’d forget so much or I’d drive myself nuts trying to not forget.  I learned a long time ago that if I kept a to-do list I could relax more.  When I set out on this adventure one of the things I so looked forward to was not having a to-do list.  If I didn’t have a social life, an engineering job, and the the busy life I had in the US, the to-do list would disappear.  I would teach and in the evenings I’d read or sit and watch life happen.  The to-do list followed me here and it’s as long as it ever was.  There’s a lot to do to get my furniture out of my house, sell my house, deal with the car drama, make hotel reservations for next weekend, research how to get a book published, research possible jobs for the future, lesson planning, engineering work, this blog, laundry, cleaning, cooking, call mom, and on and on.  The list may be even longer because I don’t have much free time.  On one hand the list helps me not worry as much about the future.  On the other hand, it is the future.  Tricky…..

Movement helps.  I’m trying to find the time for conscious movement every day.  I try to get massage at least once a week too.  My fingers are still feeling numb.  I’m wondering if it is my diet or if I have some nerve damage from something.  No clear answer on that yet.  Massage is still so painful, but I think it’s getting slightly better.  Reading Almass helps the most though.  He still has a way of writing a long time ago exactly what I needed to write today.  He might as well be sitting across from me when I read his books.  I can’t read a whole chapter in one sitting because half way through a chapter I am no longer able to understand words.  My thinking brain no longer works and I am just here.  Nothing else.

Here are a couple Almass quotes that I liked this week.  In what I’m reading now he’s talking about how we take the physical world we see to be reality.  It’s not.  It’s all concepts in our mind and we’ve taken it to be reality.  Reality is more than just the physical world.  And as long as we believe that we are our bodies and our thoughts and the only thing that exists is the world we see, then we are missing reality.

“Reality is so mysterious, so amazing, so magical, that seeing it is bound to change us and change our lives.  Knowing what is real, we can’t continue to live in the same way”.

“Our belief in the fundamentalness of physical reality remain solidly entrenched in our souls.  In any authentic spiritual work, this conviction must eventually be confronted, shaken, and dismantled.  It must be shattered before we can perceive totally, completely, what is actually there”.

I feel like I’m in the middle of this shattering.  My body is holding on to being all there is to reality so tightly that all my muscles are so tight.  If I give up on the physical world being reality, I fear that it won’t exist at all.  Part of me knows this isn’t true, but the part that has that fear is what is in the process of shattering.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

Exams

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, Teaching, Thailand, UncategorizedLeave a comment

All my free time in school to do lesson planning was taken up rewriting exams.  After I was told I needed 40 questions per exam instead of 20 I turned in my exams.  Then I was told I needed to re-format my directions and put a specific cover sheet on it.  I can’t have multiple choice A, B, C, D and E.  That’s too hard.  So I have to get rid of all the E’s.  Then I turn in my exams again.  Now I’m told I need to have an objective for each section of the exam.  But, if I have more than 3 objectives, it will make more work for me later when I have to do end of the semester reporting on my semester’s objectives.  So, why wasn’t all of this conveyed to me at the beginning of the semester instead of the middle?  I don’t think “Teach some English and get the hell out of Thailand” is an acceptable objective.  And they wonder why I don’t want to stay another semester.  I have now spent over 20 hours trying to write two 40 question exams.  It’s Thursday evening and I haven’t done one lesson plan for next week.  I really don’t understand how anything gets accomplished in this country.

The rest of my free time that wasn’t spent on exams was spent with students that want to come into my office and speak English with me.  Even though it makes it harder for me to get lesson planning done, that’s so important that I can’t say no.  Those are the students that will learn the most because they want to learn.  I can’t damage that desire to learn.  The students I was helping tutor to get ready for the English competition did ok in the competition.  They didn’t do great, but they were excited to come back Wednesday and tell me all about it.  They also questioned why I wasn’t there with them.  Good question.  Don’t you think the native speaker should be the one at the competition with them?  I just told them that I had to teach classes.  It was great to see that they wanted to come tell me about it.  One of them loves talking to me and spent a whole hour asking me questions.  He also asked if he could Line or Facebook me to practice English, even after I have left.

Last week, one day, everyone wore yellow again and no one told me ahead of time.  No one explained why, after the fact.  So, all I know is something happened and everyone wore yellow to memorialize it.  But, I’m getting use to having no idea what is going on. I spend quite a bit of time every day standing around having no idea what’s happening or what I should be doing.

I’m still at a loss for what to teach.  The information I think should be easy is not and stuff I think they should know, they don’t.  I have some lessons where they know what I’m teaching and I feel like I wasted all this time preparing for it and teaching it.  This week I taught what to say at the doctor’s and it was so difficult for them.  I taught giving directions a couple weeks ago and it was almost a total fail in every class.  Don’t get lost in Thailand, no one will be able to give you accurate directions.  However, if you ask for directions in Thailand, they will probably take you there personally.  Then I had one class that was introducing yourself and others.  This was part of the curriculum given to me for one of the older classes.  I thought, how do they not know this already?  This is too easy and boring.  They were laughing and cracking up the whole class.  My most boring class was a hit.  Then for the class one younger than that  I’m supposed to teach Illegal Imports.  So the older kids get “Hi this is my friend Bob” and the younger kids get “You can’t take products made from endangered animals into another country”.  wtf Thailand?

Before one of my classes, I was standing in the hall and watched a small bird take down another bird in flight, pin it to the floor and kill it.  Then after class, I checked, yes, the bird was dead.  Then after the next class, I came out to find the killer bird eating the dead bird.  I know that this is all just part of life – life, death, change, circle of life, etc.  But, I just can’t get it out of my head – bird cannibalism.  Why is ok when we eat meat or a lion kills for it’s food, but it’s disturbing when it’s bird cannibalism?

Speaking of food….. I discovered a delightful dessert.  It’s called Roti Sai Mai.  Tip gave me some a few weeks ago.  I found it at the market this week and bought it.  It’s a thin sweet crepe, so thin you can almost see through it.  Then you take this sweet stuff that looks like colored hair and put it on the crepe and roll it up.  The hair stuff is kind of like cotton candy with the consistency of fiberglass insulation.  Fascinating.  And very delicious.  And not dangerous to eat because there is no actual fiberglass in it.  Now longans are in season.  They are a clearish whitish fruit in a hard shell, kind of like lychee.  They remind me of lychee in that they kind of taste like you can’t tell if they are going bad or not.  I was given a bunch as a gift.  I decided I won’t buy them in the future.

I’ve been investigating further into what position I’m in when I wake up in the morning.  I stretch out and see if it changes my desire to get up in the morning.  I find that I’m not as curled up as I use to be in years past.  Some mornings stretching out helps.  Some mornings it doesn’t.  I’m half asleep and half awake from 5:30 when the birds start squawking to 6:40 when my alarm goes off.  I thought, maybe it would be more useful to just get up and start my day earlier than to toss and turn, not quite awake and not quite asleep.  I got up around 6:00 two days and did some of my conscious movement in the morning instead of after school.  The other mornings, I didn’t manage to get up early.   Baby steps….

The sale of my house is actually moving forward.  I received the start of contract paperwork last night and have been trying to work out moving my furniture out.  Fingers crossed that this goes smoothly.  It should close in August.

I’ve been investigating how I always have a long to-do-list that never seems to get any shorter.  I’ve also been investigating living in the future instead of now.  And, as usual, as I read AH Almass, he’s talking about seeing reality instead of the physical world we think is reality.  All fabulous stuff that’s not new, but is starting to shift and change as how I see reality is shifting and changing.  So, all that needs to be a blog of it’s own.  Hopefully, I can put some of it to words tomorrow night.  This type of spiritual work is very difficult to put into words.  And as I write this, I find my brain going all fuzzy because enough words have already been used for the day.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

 

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One of these is the cannibal
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Legal Items you can take on Holiday (mostly)
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Roti Sai Mai
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Pineapple, mango and longan

Sleeping

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I had email conversation with one of the students in the current Awakening to Presence class about the way we sleep.  If we sleep in one of our character patterns or in a defensive pattern will that affect how we feel when we wake up?  We both think that it does. Over the years I have woken up not wanting to start the day.  I’ve gone through periods of time where I wake up with numb hands.  Awhile ago I tried to change the way I sleep.  I sleep on my side and use to sleep all curled up in the fetal position.  I was able to greatly improve the way I sleep and rarely get numb hands any more.  For quite awhile I didn’t wake up not wanting to start the day.  Every morning when I wake up now, I take a few minutes to straighten out my body and just lie there noticing how I feel and tuning into my body.  I’ve been doing this automatically, not thinking about it.  I do think if we sleep in a position of fear we will wake up anxious, in a position of collapse we will wake up feeling defeated or not wanting to start the day.  I don’t sleep anywhere near as curled up as I use to, but I’m wondering if I can uncurl more and see how that changes my mornings.  Of course if I had a bigger bed, that would help – my bed was made for a short tiny Thai person.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

Just Lesson Planning

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, Teaching, Thailand, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Friday night I tried to work on lesson plans, but by 7:30pm I couldn’t keep my eyes open and I was real dizzy so I went to bed.  I slept for 12 hours.  And by sleep, I mean toss and turn, but that’s normal for me.  Wow, I never knew giving blood would put me down for days.

I did laundry and mopped the house Saturday morning.  I find that I have to mop every 3 or 4 days since there is all kinds of dead bugs, mouse and lizzard poop everywhere.  I hadn’t cleaned up after the termite invasion so it was good to mop.  I went to the coffee shop and worked on lesson plans all day.  I promised I myself I would leave by 4:00pm even if I wasn’t done with lesson plans.  I tried to leave at 4:00pm but it kept raining and it wasn’t a light rain, but a downpour.  So, I didn’t leave until 5:00pm.  It was still raining, but not bad.  I rode up to the massage place and the guy was in!  I’ve had massages from him and his wife.  She’s good, but he’s better so I was glad she wasn’t there.  Two hours of pain.  Everything hurts.  I really need this as part of my daily routine right now, but I just don’t have the time.  I feel like bodywork is an important part of working through some of the stuff that I’m trying to work through.  I’ve been doing conscious movement every day as well and trying to get my body to stop holding all this stuff it’s holding.  It feels like it’s holding more than usual, but I don’t think it’s actually more.  I think it’s just different stuff, stuff that can’t be worked through cognitively.  I wonder too, what taking blood and forcing my body to make a lot of new blood is doing.  It kind of feels like I had described before when I got sick and lost a lot of muscle weight.  I had felt I was at muscle zero and rebuilding from there was a good thing.  What if this is a rebuilding of the blood system?

Today, I went to the Sunday market.  I didn’t walk around for long, but long enough to run into the really nice guy that is always excited to talk to me.  He sells veggies.  He said he had missed seeing me at the market and was glad I was back.  I was going to cook today, but didn’t.  I spent the entire rest of the day getting all the lesson plans for this week in order.  I was hoping to get ahead of lesson planning today.  So, I’m a bit disappointed.  I’m also concerned that I will never be ahead and that I will spend all my free time doing lesson plans.  I’m also concerned that I might get behind at some point.  On one hand, I don’t have a ton else to do.  But, this isn’t how I want to spend the next 4 months either.  Everyone that offers me advice says stuff like just play more games.  But, I have to come up with the game and how does it teach English?  How does it teach English that isn’t too easy or too hard?  Half the games I’ve tried were a total fail.  Then people offer ideas that seem like they would be a ton more work and not actually make things easier.  Plus, people forget that the game has to be easy enough to explain with out using Thai. One person suggested I just go to Bangkok and buy some books.  With what money?  Bangkok is a 9-12 bus ride from here.  There is an overwhelming amount of information on line.  Half of it would work for kindergartners and the other half would work for university students.  The in between stuff is not useful.  I just hope that I get faster/better at this soon so that I can get ahead.  Or maybe sports week will happen again and I’ll have a whole week with no classes and I can get ahead.

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Trying to make Bali Cold Chocolate

Too Many Classes

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, Teaching, Thailand, Uncategorized2 Comments

Not much exciting happened Sunday.  My bus left Chiang Rai at 8:30 in the morning and took most of the day to get home.  I’m not sure why it took longer to get home than it took to get to Chiang Rai, but it did.  There were 5 police check points on the way home, 4 of which we got pulled over and they searched the bus.  I assume they are looking for people sneaking in the country as they checked IDs.  They never checked mine.  I don’t look Burmese.  I got home and found nothing scary in my bathroom, but there was a dying rat peeing on my stairs.  Why can’t dying critters go outside and die?  They all have to die in some dramatic fashion and wait for me to get home to do it.  I assume he ate too much of the rat poison.  I had to sweep him into the dust pan and take him outside.

Yesterday at school, I found out that they are still coming up with random issues with my work permit.  Now they want my work permit dates to match my employment dates, but instead of making the work permit good for 8 months, they want the school to rewrite the contract for a year.  This would mean I would be here through March of next year instead of September of this year.  How do you politely say no to that?  I tried.  Pat made a phone call.  I have no idea where this stands now.

I have two higher level English classes.  Today I went to teach one of the regular level classes and was told that the higher level class was mixed in.  So, basically, what I was teaching was a repeat for the higher level class since I taught them earlier in the week.  How is this good classroom planning?  It will be an issue for the first two classes, but not after that.  Still, this added on to work permit thing just set me in the wrong direction for the rest of the day.  I felt defeated and although I know it will all work itself out, I couldn’t shake the feeling.  After school, I figured the best plan was to go get a massage.  They weren’t there.  I contacted Tip and asked if I needed an appointment or could just go get a massage at the hospital.  They have a section with acupuncture and massage.  She called to set up an appointment, but they were closed for the day.  I went by two coffee shops.  They were both closed.  I gave up and went home to clean my house in the heat.  I’m going to have to clean my house every few days anyway.  I cleaned 2 rooms and felt a little better.

I question why I don’t want to be here.  Ok, there’s the obvious: critters, bugs, the heat, the language, etc., but in theory, it shouldn’t matter.  I know that the real “I don’t want to be here” is the one from infancy, not wanting to be here alone in this body, in this life.  I have worked on that a lot over the years.  All I can gather is that I was left alone a lot in the first few weeks of life and it left a mark that is difficult to define and difficult to work on.  I started doing the DSE (Developmental Sequence Exercises) again as I think this is what is needed to finally work through this issue.  I catch myself wanting to blame someone else for my problems.  Then a second later, I think “that’s stupid.  I’m the one who chose this – on purpose”.  There’s no one to blame.  Even if there was, what would that solve?  Nothing.  So, this wanting someone to take responsibility is part of not wanting to be here.  They both feel backwards and inside out.  So, I feel uncomfortable and unhappy and I do my exercises.  I watch my thoughts and reactions and I wait for the issue to turn in on itself and flip so it’s no longer inside out.

Today I had 5 classes.  I’m exhausted and brain fried.  Sometimes I have Thai teachers that help.  Today, I didn’t for 4 of the classes and the lesson was pretty difficult.  So, I feel like I didn’t do anything useful today.  One of my classes was 50 students.  I couldn’t keep their attention for more than 5 seconds.  That’s too many students.  I teach 6 different grades and 2 advanced classes.  I had 16 classes last semester and now I have 18.  Last semester I was creating 2 lesson plans a week – one for the first 3 grades and one for the last 3 grades.  One teacher told me today that next week she wanted me to teach on one of the subjects in her text book.  This is great because what I’m teaching will be relevant to what they are supposed to be learning.  I’ve been asking for this for months.  However, it now means I have more lesson plans to do each week.  So now I will have to create one for the first three grades, one for the 4th, one for the 5th, one for the 6th, one for one of the advanced classes and two for the other advanced class.  So instead of 2 per week, I’m now up to 9 lesson plans per week.  I’m not sure this is actually physically possible.  Then add on that I agreed to teach a monk after school twice a week so that’s now 11 lesson plans.  Then I found out that Tuesday the last period is for clubs and I have to co-lead a club with Pat.  We have to teach them hobbies.  My hobbies are snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking, etc.  How do I teach hobbies?  We will do pottery, but I have no idea how to teach that without supplies and equipment.  Beyond that, I know nothing.  Help – send me ideas.  If you add all that up, I’m now teaching 21 classes a week needing 12 lesson plans.  I suck at lesson plans.  How did this blow up to this proportion?  I can’t possibly see how this is going to work.

I came home to an air conditioner in my room.  So, that’s wonderful.  I had to clean the whole house again, but I didn’t mind.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

 

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This is what every street in Chiang Rai (and most of Thailand) looks like
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Air Conditioning!!