To retreat is to pull back or withdraw. It also means haven or refuge. A retreat is not a defeat, but a commitment to adjust or rethink. It can be a noble endeavour to recoil from the outside world in order to sink deeper into one’s inside world. It can be the only safe way to develop and enhance one’s mind, heart, body and soul so as to gradually reform old habit patterns and show up for oneself in a more appropriate and supportive way.

The man I married professed to have 18 wives; claimed he didn’t know which one he would wake up to each morning. During the 15 years of marriage it was a boast; his own personal harem he’d say. During the 2 years of divorce, however, I was schizophrenic, bipolar … shamed, an outcast … abandoned by friends and family alike, I found my way by moving … down the road, up a mountain, or across the globe … anyhow and anywhere … “Can’t you just be normal?”

Stories make sense of my world. Everything comes from myth and is told in parables. Words haunt me. Memories are fulcrums that our futures are hinged upon; the seesaw that highlights the anchor point in its motion. As I write, the voices ask what’s the point, who are you to speak about your experiences, what makes you so special, no one is interested in what you have to say, go to your room, eat your food and keep quiet, don’t interrupt me. I write like  I live: scrappy. Undisciplined, I break the rules.

As someone who has had many life periods of not wanting to be here, I have developed a capacity to divert attention from feeling isolated, abandoned and generally misunderstood into copious amounts of diploma courses, research and, more recently, podcasts. I learn to live better through gaining knowledge about why I am, how I am, and how better to channel my unique gifts and superpowers into my work, my relationships and my step-by-step manoeuvres on life’s labyrinthine map. Without movement, however, this can become rumination … even stagnation.

When I checked in at CT Int’l I was overweight—and I’m not talking about my baggage. I had been overriding my body’s homeostatic drive with months of anxious buffering against the outside world, the inert emotional sludge now hanging off my dense physical frame.

Arrival at Sinharaja Kurulu Ella Eco Resort after 7 hours of potholes, downpours, dust and sensory overload is New Year’s Eve. My psyche wants refuge. I forego the trekking in the trees for washing under waterfalls. I’m not allowed to trek alone here; they say I’ll get lost. They saw me coming. My jump rope lies coiled, cobra like, at the bottom of my bag. Unused; lifeless. The snake of transformation comes instead in the form of a rescued python my host fetches me to see. It too is immobile in the bottom of a bag waiting to be set free.

As I begin to work into my word for the year—equanimity—I assess whether travel too is simply a diversion from the battles going on inside. It is, of course! And also, of course, it isn’t. It’s like water that falls over rocks, sometimes flexing around them and sometimes carving right through. Never clinging, it gains momentum, flows in and out of all spaces, and keeps moving. Structure generates its flow. And ultimately it merges with the ocean without separation. Humbled.

A word closely related to equanimity is homeostasis, which is defined as the desire for the system to return to so-called normal. How long will this recalibration take? I shame myself for trying to rush it. This is allostasis, the system’s means of achieving stability through change. But what happens when the system is constantly trying to compensate for an abnormal emotional or physical environment? The set point gets recalibrated as an abnormal normal and the system goes into a compromised state of harmony.

A black and turquoise butterfly keeps banging its head on my window. A woodpecker taps on the tree outside. I meditate, I breathe, I contort. Peace descends, strips me, leaves me naked. The tension of the inner critic takes its cue. Slithers up. It clings to me like the leeches sucking on my flesh on New Year’s Day. It lambasts me for being so unproductive, so sedentary and I have to wonder, is this hedonistic—not contributing, only experiencing? What’s normal anyhow?

I walk down to the water, modestly covered; back up not so. The cascades cleanse me; expose my feral. The river is never the same; neither am I. Water is my greatest teacher … it clings to nothing. Except my laundry. Nothing dries in humidity. My skin is moist. I haven’t eaten much since arrival—the water fast during my first week in Sri Lanka merged into mostly fruit and only the occasional vegetable. And as the physical buffering has dropped away, the emotional baggage has too. A resolution isn’t a miraculous instantaneous transformation; it is a gradual ratcheting and greasing of the cogs of change until, slowly slowly, the machine works on its own, unconsciously competent.

There is a distinction between nomad, tourist and traveller. You get nomadic travellers and travelling tourists yet there is a distinction between the three. Whilst a nomad makes a life of travelling and a tourist escapes life through travelling, a traveller slips somewhere between the two as a touristing nomad. I was mostly a tourist whilst married; I could only dream of the nomadic life. It was the tension between the opposites that exposed the traveller in me. I doubt I will ever be a typical tourist again and, as I create a map for my inner nomad to navigate, I travel.

I am mutable. I travel to be anyone I want to be—the harem, the schizophrenic, the deranged. I don’t have to be who I was yesterday. I want to change my names to days of the week. Even that feels limiting.

The jungle breathes for me now, the rivers move me. I offer my host a craniosacral session—I miss my craft—and get gifted a breadfruit curry in exchange. The days now are all about waterfalls and perfumed fruits; connection and comfort. There’s elemental alchemy here. As I plot the route and navigate the journey, it is like placing pins in a globe of the earth. Travel is an opportunity for data gathering and those pins are mirrored like acupuncture needles mapping the nadis and activating the elemental chakra bodies. The trapped energy is released to turn the wheel, and the gears lock in and ultimately drive movement.

Traveller acupuncture. The quintessential calibration tool.

Already my trip has shifted radically through meeting new friends and reconnecting with old ones. I feel into whether the re-planning is due to fear of boredom in the pauses or whether they are legitimate growth-through-travel opportunities. The adventure has begun to sweep me up and I am not resisting … it feels like doorways are stretching open and luring me across the liminal spaces of transition like a space gate.

A baby monkey hangs from the balcony loitering with intent to steal my banana. Ferns hang from high branches, hitching a ride from the undergrowth into the canopy; an umbrella for the plants and creatures beneath. Tension palpates instinct, the neuro pathways create their own patterns, building without thought or knowledge of where the pathways will lead.

I go for one last plunge. I say goodbye to the river … for now. The rocks provide the momentum for both of us. “I’ll meet you in the ocean.” I say.

Next stop Hiriketiya Bay 🐳