I returned to Eric’s Hatha yoga class last night. I hadn’t done non-Bikram yoga in 2 weeks (yoga in the park has paused for the winter) and it was OMiful (yes, I’ve created a new word).

There’s this pose that gives me the same feeling as the pigeon pose, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the name of that pose is. It looks something like this, only you bend your head and chest down and place your elbows on the ground (ok, it’s nothing like that pose, but you get what I mean). It’s hard to get the elbows down to the ground and you really have to breathe through the tension in your hips. But as you breathe through it and release the tension, it’s ORGASMIC.

I was in a happy haze as I walked slowly home. I felt a renewed appreciation for Park Slope. I had been so caught up in the frustration of NYC not being Tulum, NYC being too materialistic, that I had sidelined the beauty of living in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I looked at each brownstone I walked by and stepped on every pile of autumn leaves I saw, crunch crunch crunch. I admired the last of the trees which still held on to their leaves, and reached up to high-five the low hanging branches. I saw the last of the leaves fluttering in the wind like loosely trapped butterflies yearning to break away. The air had turned cold and crisp and everything seemed to vibrate with an unspeakable energy.

When I got home, Pat was just setting up our 2008 Christmas Tree! I got a whiff of the pretty pine, walked right up to it and hugged it.

It’s official, folks. Kellykelly is a tree-hugger.

I’m working on a new layout for Kellog. CSS is giving me a headache.

In the meantime, you may see some weird changes. Sorry!

Wow. People just love giving me clothes. This morning, there were two HUGE bags (Saks Fifth Avenue and Anthropologie) sitting at my desk filled with cute, barely-worn clothes, given to me by my colleague (or more accurately, her 2 daughters who are fast growing out of their old clothes). It’s stuffed with stuff from H&M, J-Crew, Banana Republic, Armani, and a few small boutique stores. Apparently, Surprise Santa has another two big bags waiting for me.

I have this print out that I pinned up at my office table (you can download it for free at this adbusters website):

I guess it’s really easy for me to say cos people keep giving me their nice stuff! Is that hypocritical? I refuse to shop for stuff because I can’t stand mindless consumerism. But hey! If you wanna give me stuff…it’s just recycling! Recycling – good for the environment; good for my wardrobe; good for my wallet.

Speaking of hypocritical, you’d have noticed that I now have Google ads on my blog. I was curious about Adsense and how it works so I tried it out. Man, Google makes it SO easy for you, it’s scary. I’m part fascinated part scared by how innovative the advertising world is. How ingenious is it to use bloggers as your diversified army of advertising agents for cheap? It’s incredible how they pick out key words in my posts and show the links right away. I figured, hey! I always link to what I am writing about in my post anyway, might as well get paid for it!

update: the other 2 bags just arrived. Christmas is here:

Our first glimpse of the water.

Our room at Cabanas Tulum (highly recommended)

View of our room from the beach

Food! I generally don’t like Mexican food but this was goood!


The house, Behla, rented for the wedding:

View from the wedding couple’s bathroom:

Sign to the balcony…

Sky

Another house that a group of friends rented next to the wedding house:

We spent most of our time just chilling with friends, chilling by ourselves…it’s the life.




Reading The Virgin Suicides

Pat plays frisbee with friends…and a couple of stray dogs


Wedding setting:

Beautiful guests:


I title this one “Congratulations, you are still in the running to becoming America’s Next Top Model”. Nicole (right) is actually a model. Cecele (left) isn’t one, but darn sure looks like one! Alex aka MEMPHIS ask Assman is just him.

Wedding couple:


It was a wonderful wonderful simple and heartfelt wedding. They had people stand in a circle and started off with the wedding couple giving thanks to their respective parents. Then an inner circle of closest friends took turns to read their vows and everyone read an affirmation out loud. Just lovely.



The unplanned part of the wedding. These “wedding crashers” came to perform (really really good) and there was even fire dancing thrown in!





Me and the flute player…2 of the most different looking people at the wedding

Best wedding cake ever

The Tulum Ruins

Cenote Dos Ojos


The story of these sunglasses is: on the first day, one of the handles broke (that’s what you get when you pay $5 for a pirated pair) and I had left it sitting outside our room for all 5 days thinking I’ll bring it home to fix it. On the last day, while I was packing, I picked it up and realized someone had fixed it for me!! It must have been the cleaning guy. Is that service or what??

Take me back, please?

I went to the American Girl retail store at 5th Avenue last night to accompany someone that was into that kinda stuff.

Have you heard about American Girl before? Being it that store ripped my pro-business, anti-consumerist self apart.

Pro-business: I did some investigation when I got home. American Girl is owned by Mattel, which also owns Barbie, Fisher-Price, and all the Disney toys. American Girl is a stupendously great business concept. As an analyst, we like to look at “stable and recurring revenue”. In American Girl, girls buy an US$87 18-inch doll. It doesn’t end there. The entire store sells stuff mainly for the dolls, clothes (you can also buy the same outfit for the human girl), combs, hair pins, house, a pet, stuff for the doll’s pet, books/cds on how to braid the doll’s hair, even a wheelchair for your sick doll. There is a “hospital” for the doll (if your kid cuts off all the doll’s hair, you can get it fixed). There is a salon. You can have lunch or a tea party with the dolls. The stable, recurring revenue opportunities are endless.

And little girls go APE-SHIT for these kinda stuff. I would if I were a little girl! I loved the Barbie dolls I had when I was a kid. Rephrase kid-in-a-candy-store to girl-in-an-American-Girl-retail-store.

And yet, I rewind my head back to my childhood and I had just as much fun with what little (relatively speaking) I had. My parents were really great with not spoiling us too much, at the same time, giving us enough to be happy with. We got one toy at birthdays and christmas (so choose carefully!). There wasn’t a change of clothes for my Barbie dolls, or matching clothes for me, but I had just as much fun taking towels and wrapping it in my hair pretending I had long hair (I wasn’t allowed to have long hair till I was 17) like my Barbie, or using a towel and making it into a dress. With my cousins, I remembered hilarious times tying a piece of string to a plastic bag and going to the top floor of the flat and fly it like a kite. And really, somehow as a kid, you don’t really NEED too much stuff anyway. I don’t know about you, but think back of your favorite toy or book…there isn’t many for me because if I had a favorite, I’d play with it over and over and over and over again. I had favorite books that I’d read over and over and over again, until today I can’t pick up the same book without that pang of being a little kid again. Even cartoons. We weren’t allowed to watch TV in the weekdays as kids (starts Friday night). We went to our grandparents’ place every Friday night and my uncle had Disney cartoon tapes. We’d watch the SAME cartoons every single time we went and somehow it just gets more and more fun the more you watch some stuff. I think the Tipping Point had something to say about repetition in kid’s TV programs and how kids love to think they can predict the next scene.

I digress. Let’s move on.

Anti-consumerist: In another Adbusters article (man, I’m starting to love that magazine more and more) I read this morning, they spoke about Wal-Mart “whose aggressive stack-em-high sales philosophy has brought mindless consumerism to new depths of extravagant wastefulness”. Those 4 words “mindless consumerism…etravagant wastefulness” was in my head the entire time I was in that store. Why do we NEED all these STUFF? It was ridiculous! A manicure set for your DOLL? Are you kidding me? The cash register read US$1,400 for one of the parents. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? What are you teaching these kids with these dolls? That shopping is a joy of life and accumulating consumption is what makes you happy? They have American Girl books. I browsed through the books they have. They have books like Hair: Styling Tips and Tricks for Girls, Skin & Nails: Care Tips for Girls, , A Smart Girl’s Guide to Boys. WHAT? Oh nonononono….a little girl should NOT have to worry about their hair, skin, nails and boys! Granted, they have a bunch of other books that supposedly teach self-esteem and the like, but the prevalent theme of the entire brand teaches you to compare and desire material stuff.

I saw these girls in the store with their little girlfriends and I could already see them looking at each other, checking out what’s in the other’s girl’s shopping bag. “What did you get?” “I got this and that and this and that” “MOM! I want that too!”. The sheer wealth and nonsense of this country is mind-boggling. I don’t want to bring up the whole there-are-starving-kids-in-Africa thing but….yeah, there are starving kids in Africa and you are sending your DOLL to the doll hospital.

It’s really hard to stomach our way of lives and how exploitive and wasteful it is. I say “our” because I’m guilty of it just as much as the parent that takes her daughter to American Girl to shop shop shop. I take airplanes to go on holiday (carbon emissions). I work for a bank that finances companies to sell sell sell so that they can pay down their debt and pay our fees (my income). Heck, I buy organic cat food for my FOUR cats. How silly is that? All the recycling I do just doesn’t take away the fact that I am one of the exploitors.

sigh.

Oh, and I walked round the store looking at where the stuff is made. Everything I saw was MADE IN CHINA. Even the books were PRINTED IN CHINA. Well, I saw one outfit that was MADE IN MACAU, but Macau is now part of China anyway.

American Girl is actually China Girl!

I saw this comic strip on the latest issue of Adbusters:

Ha!

Amidst my search for spirituality with yoga and meditation and all that new thought stuff, I discover that Britney I-show-my-coochie Spears’ new album has really great pop tracks. There are some albums that are great, this is clearly not it. But most of the songs are so deliciously girly-girls danceable! Like, oh my god.

This is my favorite track, mainly cos I don’t hear her voice for half of the song. I love the trippy guy’s voice.

Ready for more trippy kellykelly experiences? I warn you, this is gonna sound really loopy.

I went to Bikram today after about 2 weeks of being away (was flu-ish before the trip). It was a really tough session for me. I felt like my heart was pounding too quick at times and was light-headed alot so I had to sit out alot of the standing poses. Yeesh. But I still enjoyed the sweating. I just didn’t push myself too hard this time to perfect poses.

At the end of the class, we have up to about half an hour to lay down in savasana and meditate till the next class comes in. I used to get up right away, for the silly reason that I didn’t wanna stand in line for the shower. Well, this time, I decided after my first trippy experience that I did want to try to meditate. So I did.

I started saying in my head “I am here now” repeatedly. I thought it’d be harder to meditate because I wasn’t on a magical beach by myself at sunset; there were other people in the room getting up to leave at different times and the next class’ students walking in and people chatting outside loudly (yeesh). But after a few moments of being still and saying “I am here now”, I suddenly saw an explosion of many lights taking over my head and a weird sensation of the lights wrapping around my body and being lifted up from somewhere between my stomach and my chest. CRAZY SHIT!

The last time I fell into the Disc, I freaked out and snapped out of it and wanted to fall back in again. But this time, I wanted it to last longer. My chants went from “I am here now” to “I AM HERE! I AM HERE!” giving myself up to whatever was overwhelming me. My heart started to pound WILDLY while I felt myself being wrapped and pulled up from the middle of my torso. After a few moments, I felt like I couldn’t take it and snapped my mind back out of that “explosion”.

I continued to lay there for a bit, hearing sounds of people moving around me but not listening. I felt drained from that weird body-lifting shit. My mind wandered a little and I tried to bring it back. Then another sensation came. It was like a warm massaging horizontal light stroking my body from my forehead down to my chest then to my arms. I tried to will it to go down my legs but the light massaging sensation stayed above my waist. I don’t know if I can describe it as a peaceful experience. I felt emotionally drained. Then I started to feel really ecstatic, and then intense sadness until I teared. I wasn’t thinking of anything whatsoever, just feeling the different sensations in my body so I was kinda surprised by that heavy sensation of sadness pressing on me. My fingers started to twitch a little as I was feeling the sadness and my eyes felt like they wanted to pry open but I kept them shut because I just wanted to feel whatever that was taking over. There were alternate waves of joy and sadness. No other way of describing it.

This whole thing probably took just 15-20mins. When I got up, I was drained. Physically from the Bikram and mentally and emotionally. It was being in the present alright. During my shower and walk home from the studio, I couldn’t quite get my head to think about anything.

I’m not sure if this is what meditation is supposed to be. I’ll read more about that. I just did a brief scan of this Buddhist meditation forum, and apparenty “weird meditation experience” is a common topic and the common advise is to simply observe the sensations with “equanimity” (I just learned what that words means).

I can’t say my mind felt calm and quiet…more like I experienced an explosion of emotions and sensations. But I have to say, this is definitely interesting!

So this is the story of my trippy meditation experience. Oh dear, you think, kellykelly has gone all trippy new-agey hippie on us. Oh yes, believe it.

I had never really meditated before. But that whole art of doing nothing revelation made me interested in the practice of meditation. To learn to quiet my jumping mind (monkey mind) and be present.

On Saturday, after our dive in the cenote (pix later), Pat went to do a Temazcal (sweat lodge) with the guys. I had done it the night before with the girls. The Temazcal was like Bikram yoga, only you just sit and repeat affirmations and meditate in this clay-like igloo with a hole of hot coal in the middle. It was so HOT. It was about an hour session and the igloo got hotter and hotter and hotter when they added more coals (you cry A HO! everytime they bring more coals in). And our guide would occassionally “fan” us with his bunch of herbs which would make it even hotter. There were moments where I had to cover my face with my hands cos it felt like I was burning up. In the middle, they gave us a bunch of herbs to rub on our body to cleanse our bodies of negative energy. I felt like I was marinating myself for a oven-roasted kellykelly. And at the peak of heat at the end when I’m literally in prayer position on the ground gasping for air and feeling the burn on my back, the guide tosses cold water all over you…AHHHH!!!! I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It was hotter than Bikram at times and it reminded me why I did Bikram. WHOO!! Pat, who had sworn he’d never do Bikram, enjoyed his experience so much that he now says he is open to trying Bikram! Double WHOO!!

I digress. This is about my trippy meditation experience. On the day Pat went to the Temazcal, I sat on the beach at sunset and did yoga for over an hour. It was glorious cos I was the only person on the beach within sight at that time. Then I sat down and tried to meditate. I started chanting the only chant I knew “nam myoho renge kyo“, which was the line my best friend chants everyday twice a day as a Buddhist so I heard that alot growing up. I read that chanting is meant to focus your mind on the chant itself so I did. It didn’t really work cos I found my mind still wandering. So I started saying to myself “I am here now. I am here now. I am here now.” I started chanting that instead.

Within a few moments (who knows how long it took?)…you know those lights you see when you close your eyes…a dark blue, almost black, oval started forming on the left side of my inner sight. As I chanted, the disc started to grow bigger and bigger and bigger, and then…this is the cuckoo bananas part…the best description I can give is that I “fell into it”. I don’t know how else to describe the experience. I fell into that blue-black disc. And my mind was clear and quiet of course. Fuck, I just fell into a blue-black disc in my head, what else could I think about?

It probably lasted for a few seconds. Then I freaked out. I just fucking fell into a blue-black disc in my head! The moment I freaked, I came out of the disc. My eyes were closed the whole time and I was sitting upright cross-legged on the beach. The moment I came out of the disc, I wanted to go right back. It was insane. I didn’t manage to go back in that session, but during the time I sat there, I felt excited and ecstatic, gloriously happy. I’d get waves of wanting to cry. My breathing got deep and heavy. I just wanted to go back in, but somehow I knew that desperately desiring it wasn’t the way in. So I sat for a few more moments and got up.

Last night, I told a friend about my experience. He’s been doing yoga and meditation for years. And he said it’s called “the blue pearl“. Shit, there’s even a name for my Disc! That made the whole thing even more trippy. I’m really glad I had never heard about it so the experience felt more raw and real, otherwise, I wouldn’t have known if my mind was just playing games with me with something I’d read about or expected.

There you have it. Kellykelly’s trippy meditation experience. And I just wanna go back.

Ahh…I’m still in a Tulum state of mind.

It took me 1 second to assimilate into the beach life in Tulum. It’s been 3 days since I’ve been back and I’m still trying to get my mind and body back into the groove of NYC.

I’m probably romanticizing the beach life (it was a vacation after all, magically temporary), but this vacation really made me realize how little I needed in life to truly be happy. My daily internet, my cellphone, my HDTV, my makeup, my cable,…I don’t mind having them, but they really don’t make me any happier than I am when I’m on the beach with my husband with absolutely nothing to do and nothing in my possession except my books (I am reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides who also wrote Middlesex…he is an exceptional writer, in my opinion, just a natural). We didn’t have a watch on us most of the time, so we just sat around doing nothing.

I spoke to a German girl who’s been living in Tulum for a year (and traveling elsewhere prior), living in a tent with her boyfriend (an Italian who is also a fire-dancer and performed impromptu at the wedding) next to the big wedding house on the beach and making small pieces of jewelry to get by. She said she couldn’t imagine giving up this lifestyle. The next morning, we saw them hanging out by the beach and then he ran completely naked (you see lots of topless women on this beach too…a bunch of our female friends were topless most of the time on the beach) into the water then rolling himself in the sand laughing. Cuckoo bananas? He seemed pretty happy to me. Oh and he had a hot body too, so the naked dude was easy on the eyes. Ha.

Am I really romanticizing it though? One morning, I woke up and heard the ocean from our simple cabana and shouted to Pat “I COULD GIVE IT ALL UP FOR THIS!”. Maybe not running around and rolling in the sand naked in front of other people, but definitely in private. I wonder how I’d feel if I truly just gave it ALL up and lived with Pat on the beach for 2, 3, 6, 12 months at a time. We had friends we made in Tioman who just did it. Move to an island/beach town, do odd jobs, and just fucking chill. The thought takes me to my current and past life, where being hardworking and driven for success is a virtue. Study study study so you get the As and the scholarship to go to a top university so you get a top job that earns you alot of money. Then study for a thing called the CFA so that it earns you a title that could make you earn even MORE money. Is THAT really a virtue? I think it’ll take an enormous amount of courage to give it all up. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have that courage one day.

I think this is a reaction to living in NYC. I love NYC for what it is. But this city doesn’t seem consistent with what I am learning that I want in life. It takes so much money to live just a simple life here AND tempts me with SO much that I want to spend my money on (yoga classes, great restaurants, Broadway shows, sunset cruises, organic food, etc) that I find myself getting sucked into that ol’ rat race and thinking too much about how much you make or desiring to do too much. There’s so much to DO here that will some way or other cost money, so you desire to earn more money…it’s all a vicious circle.

Singapore was the same…well, it had less things to do within the country itself…but at least it was cheap and so easy to LEAVE. A 5-day trip in Tioman would have cost us no more than S$500 (about US$330). In NYC, this 5-day vacation cost us both slightly more than US$2,000 in total (half of which went to air-fare), and that’s on a budget (I picked one of the cheapest Cabanas to stay in and that was still US$60 a night). They tell me it’s “Caribbean prices”. I searched my old blog posts and damn! I got to go to Tioman a WHOLE bunch. Those short but frequent getaways were really important to my spiritual happiness, I now know.

I hadn’t really realized how much the simple life meant to me until I sat on the beach in silence (I had a weird meditation experience that deserves its own post) and realized how little I truly wanted in life.

I walked through Times Square the night after I came back on the way home from work. The jarring lights, the people, the noise, the screaming (some celebrity was at the Virgin Megastore nearby and there was a SWARM of teenagers yelling)…it was too much to bear after an amazing peaceful time with just the sound of the ocean most of the time.

In Tulum, each place had to use its own generator so we had limited times where we had electricity (6-11pm; 7-11am) which was more than we needed. We barely used any electricity anyway, except to charge my camera batteries and use the lights in the night sometimes (we used our camping flashlights elsewhere). On our rented scooter, we used half a tank of gasoline (about US$1.50 worth) for all 5 days.

Then I looked up and looked at the complete WASTE of electricity/energy used in Times Square just for all the advertisements screaming at you to want want want buy buy buy, I just wanted to cry.