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Being Buddhist in Thailand: Day 1 On Bear Paw Mountain
TravelWriteSing.com My Stomach Tells Me to Run Away from Bear Paw Mountain The Abbot of Bear Paw Mountain is an older man, maybe 70, with black peppered gray hair stubble on his head. He’s laughing and...
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Being Buddhist in Thailand: Asking for Morning Alms
TravelWriteSing.com At 3 AM, a gong reverberates us awake — time for morning chanting and meditation. I place my cushion behind everyone else’s so that they will not notice my frequent fidgeting. In...
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Thai All You Can Eat Monk Buffet: The Paradox of Chowing Down Mindfully
TravelWriteSing.com When your brain dreams for the body, it desires bowl after bowl of fresh fruit—pineapple, durian, mangos, watermelon, papaya, melon, grapes, oh grapes!, strawberries, and a dozen...
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Shooting the Shit with Buddha at Bear Paw Mountain, Thailand
TravelWriteSing.com Som Petting a Sun Bear in Thailand After breakfast, one of the younger monks and comes up to me and proclaims, “I teach you how to ca-pot.” I am making a mess of my bows to the...
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Thailand: The Abbot’s Challenge
TravelWriteSing.com At 11am, Guay and I head to the office. I don’t think much about this meeting and sit beside Guay while the secretary says whatever she is saying to him. I gather at one point he is...
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Being Buddhist in Thailand: Passing The Abbot’s Test
TravelWriteSing.com In a booklet Mott gave me, the Thai monk Chanmay Sayadaw writes that, “Talking is a great danger to the progress of insight. A five-minute talk can wreck a meditator’s concentration...
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Being Buddhist in Thailand: Technology AND Mindfulness?
TravelWriteSing.com Today at tea, after small talk and the daily exchange of English for Thai words, Mott asks me, “Can I ask you a question?” He said he saw me writing all the time and asked what one...
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Being Buddhist in Thailand: Science, Self, Religion, Sex, and Desire
TravelWriteSing.com Last night a rainstorm engulfed the mountain. The thunder wakes me before the 3 AM meditation gong. I am overjoyed to experience it. What could complete the picture of this mountain...
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Being Buddhist in Thailand: The Fruits of a Focused Mind
TravelWriteSing.com Mott in his indomitable serenity had a way of dropping conversational bombs as casual asides. “You know tomorrow is Ne Suschij?” He asked on my penultimate afternoon at Wat...
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Being Buddhist In Thailand: Leaving The Monastery
TravelWriteSing.com On my last afternoon and Wat Klegonwan, the sky darkens, rains begin, thunder crescendos, the lights go out, and when trees begin crashing into the temple it becomes clear that this...
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Thailand: The Gifts of The Visitor and The Visited
TravelWriteSing.com Real life happens out in the world. Time away from it reconnects us with the world and disconnects us from the dopamine-fueled compulsions the Internet can cultivate. As I’ve...
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Searching For A Seaside Sanctuary in Thailand
TravelWriteSing.com The Sanctuary, Thailand As much as I wanted to follow up my yin’d out week at the Sarapatdi Monastery in Thailand with some yang’in by nomading it through the rural Thai...
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Thailand – From Monastery to Full Moon Party
TravelWriteSing.com Only Three Drinks, But They Were Buckets of Booze After my second bucket of whiskey and Red Bull at the Full Moon Party, I’d officially failed in my plan to stay sober, but...
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What We Talked About At The Men’s Workshop in Thailand
TravelWriteSing.com Early on, I learned being a man is ordering your martinis shaken, not stirred. It’s about building a fire and drinking John Dickel Whisky on top of your guitar. It means being a...
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The Case for The Travel Vest
TravelWriteSing.com (Siem Reap, Cambodia – 2015) Recently, I waxed poetic about my travel vest during my first exploratory visits to Angkor Wat. The first day I decided to go without cameras....
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Lizard Attacks and Ten Days of Silence in Thailand
TravelWriteSing.com Since arriving in Asia four months ago, I have only been bitten by one animal (a new record!). A lizard sunk his teeth into me on Ko Phangan, off the Gulf of Thailand. I’d say he...
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Modern Innovations to the American Road Trip
TravelWriteSing.com The American Road Trip in our Intrepid DNA The American road trip is to travel what baseball is to sports – an American phenomenon enshrined within our wanderlust. With two massive...
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Emma Larkin on Self-Publishing, Crowd-funding, and her Novel Mechalarum
TravelWriteSing.com I met Emma Larkin a few years back at a writer’s meetup in New York where she gave a presentation about how she successfully crowd funded the self-publication of her sci-fi novel,...
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How To Be a Part of Doing a Lot With A Little
TravelWriteSing.com Dear Reader, I am reaching out to you today invite you to join me in acheiving a goal that’s concrete and attainable—open an education center for 60 impoverished children in...
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The Sea Warrior of Australia
TravelWriteSing.com Encounter With a Sea Warrior In the 70s, the local Papua New Guineans called him The Sea Warrior for his fondness of swimming 20k across the ocean. “Any white guy who did...
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