Off The Beaten Track: New Life in Northern Thailand

We're pleased to welcome Kim Roberts as our guest today. Kim teaches mindfulness practices such as yoga and meditation and coaches clients at New Life Foundation in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Summers she spends writing, practicing and cavorting with elk at her retreat home in Crestone, Colorado. Her new ebook, Ashtanga Yoga for Beginner’s Mind, was just published on Amazon. Learn more about Kim, her travels, her practice and her writing at: www.toolsforevolution.org.

I’m walking down a lazy dirt lane in the late afternoon heat of Northern Thailand. A gaggle of ducks waddle about, making their way to a large pond for their afternoon dip.  Rice paddy extends to low hills in the distance and as I approach the meditation hall where I am to lead the afternoon meditation, the canopy of teak forest provides a welcome relief from the sun.

Chiang Rai (not to be confused with Chiang Mai, her more farang inhabited big sister) is the frontier of northern Thailand’s hill tribes. Here is where you find tea and coffee plantations, traditional culture, and a slow taste of how Thailand was before tourism. The surrounding area is also one of the world’s most thriving opium and methamphetamine producing regions in the world. Which perhaps explains why a mindfulness based recovery center located itself here.

Simply being fully in the present moment is a healing practice. By being more aware of body, thoughts and emotions you will receive signals about what’s out of balance. Mindfulness teaches you to respect these signals and welcome them instead of pushing them away.

The New Life Foundation was founded by a Belgian entrepreneur in 2010, as a place for people to come rest, recover, and learn about the healing powers of mindfulness practice. His own personal struggle found relief here in Thailand at the unique Thamkrabok Monastery Detox program, and his wish was to offer something in return, by creating a place where other struggling addicts could mend their lives through the miracle of mindfulness at an affordable, nonprofit organization. The organization first contacted me while I was living in Phuket and asked me to lead a weekend yoga workshop. At the end of the workshop they invited me to return and work there as a life coach.

Photo courtesy Kim Roberts.

People come from all over the globe to become residents here, in order to establish new patterns and heal from a variety of issues: addictions, burnout, relationship issues, stress, mid-life transition, illness. Or they come to volunteer, sharing their skills as yoga instructors, life coaches, meditation guides, sustainable building engineers, or organic farmers. On weekends, residents and volunteers can participate in excursions to cultural attractions, hike to and swim in waterfalls, go trekking or kayaking, visit orphanages, or play football with the local villagers. People stay anywhere from one day to several months. The daily schedule includes morning yoga, silent breakfast, a community gathering followed by work to keep the facilities running, lunch, a creative or therapeutic workshop that focuses on mindfulness, afternoon meditation, and after dinner, an evening program that consists of a group check-in. Sometimes there are special presentations or movies or podcasts from Western Buddhist teachers are aired.

The facilities are located on 63 acres of land near the golden triangle in Chiang Rai province, which boasts plentiful natural beauty: lakes, mountains and hills, rice fields, forests, rivers, hot springs, waterfalls. On the land are two meditation halls, a swimming pool, organic farm, communal hall where three daily meals are served (with produce from the garden), consultation rooms for life coaching sessions, and around fifty single en suite guest rooms. Some of the communal buildings are built in traditional style, with teak leaf roofing and mud walls.

Over the past decades researchers and mental health professionals have been discovering that mindfulness practices such as yoga can alleviate almost every kind of psychological suffering. The increased awareness that results from mindfulness helps you to see what lies at the root of your behavior patterns. Once you can see the patterns, you then have the power to make choices, and eventually transform negative habits that perpetuate suffering. My own journey through yoga and meditation started 20 years ago as a graduate psychology student at the Buddhist inspired Naropa University in Colorado. The practices have been integral in helping me negotiate life’s transitions and have taught me how to stay calm in the most difficult situations.

Photo courtesy Kim Roberts.

Eventually, the goal of spiritual practice is to remain present and aware during all our daily activities. The best medicine is ironically the most simple: stripping away the distractions that keep us from experiencing the beauty of the present moment. Which begs the question: is spiritual growth different from healing?

While the mindfulness element is based on Buddhist principles, there is no religious affiliation. The practices are intended not for adherence to any particular lineage, but rather as tools to help people work with their minds in a more friendly way or you could say, for spiritual growth. Because it is a Buddhist culture, Thailand is a natural fit for a center such as this. I was drawn to Thailand, and to Asia in general, to learn how Buddhist teachings can be applied to daily life and apparently am still enjoying what I have discovered, since I have worked in the region for 12 years now.

The foundation’s mission is to cultivate a lifestyle that fosters inner growth and helps people to find meaning and purpose in life again. The foundation offers a unique learning environment based on mindfulness and sustainable living, where residents can learn to nurture and maintain their recovery—whether from substance addiction, grief, crisis or burnout.

With support from the community and guidance from the staff, each individual develops their own action plan that enables them to discover their potential and develop a new healthy lifestyle based on mindfulness, personal responsibility and respect. The most important tools on that journey are yoga, meditation and awareness practices.

The approach is to use a combination of practice and coaching to help residents discover their potential, regain a sense of self-value and find happiness in a new approach to life. Everyone experiences obstacles and suffering at some point in life, but these experiences can serve as a foundation to gain understanding of ourselves and life in general.  According to Buddhist philosophy, each of us has a seed of wisdom and goodness inside-- everything it takes to create a peaceful, equitable and sustainable existence. All we have to do is renew our relationship to ourselves through awareness practice to let that seed grow.

Off the Beaten Track: Thailand in My Bookcase

We're pleased to host Caron Eastgate Dann as our guest poster this week. Caron is a writer, university lecturer and journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of The Occidentals (as Caron Eastgate James), a novel set in 19th-century Thailand, and the non-fiction book  Imagining Siam: A Traveller's Literary Guide to Thailand. Caron was born in New Zealand and also brought up in the US and the UK. She lived in Thailand in the 1990s, where she worked as a teacher and a journalist, before returning to Melbourne in 1999. She blogs regularly at CaronDann.com.

I have an entire bookcase devoted to my collection of more than 200 books in English on Thailand. I have novels and short stories, travel writing, travel guides old and new, architecture, politics, history, memoirs by Western expats, popular culture, academic studies, picture books, children’s books and more.

My publisher used some of the books in my collection to form a montage for the cover of my non-fiction book, Imagining Siam: A Traveller’s Literary Guide to Thailand. This was problematic, as it took a year to get all the copyright permissions to use the covers—I even had to find the original designer of my own book’s cover and ask him if we could use it (he said yes).

My bookcase.

For my collection, I scour second-hand stores, online as well as brick-and-mortar bookshops, for likely volumes. I also buy new books in English about Thailand as they are published.

I started to collect these books when I lived in Thailand in the 1990s. The original Asia Books store on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, with its rickety stairs leading to several floors of books, was my haven in those days. I also belonged to the Siam Society, which had a library of 20,000 books on South-East Asia and which would allow me to borrow books for a month at a time.

Before I wrote my historical novel, The Occidentals, set in 19^th-century Siam, as Thailand was known then, I did six months of full-time research, which meant reading and indexing all the relevant books I could find. In those days, before the internet, this meant compiling a hand-written index-card system, which you can read more about here.

In this blog, I would like to share with you some of the titles from my treasured collection.

Best find

One of my most exciting finds was a small, innocuous-looking book with a plain purple cover and what looks like the title part of the original dust jacket cut out and stuck to it. I bought this book for $88.80 US in 2006, via the internet from a bookseller in Ohio.

The book is a short novel called Simo: The Story of a Boy of Siam. The author is Pastor Dan F. Bradley, born in Siam in 1857, the son of the missionaries Dan Beach Bradley and Sarah Blachly Bradley. The book was first published in 1899 by The Ram’s Horn Company, Chicago, and is thought to be the first English-language novel set in Siam.

The first novel written in English
that was set in Thailand.

The title page says that Bradley is the president of Iowa College (now Grinnell College), so this edition of the book must have been published during his presidency, between 1902 and 1905, though there are no dates within, only that it is copyright 1899, to the publisher, Fred’k L. Chapman.

Most unusual

Walt Disney’s Siam (1958) is a bizarre book written to accompany Disney’s Oscar-winning 1954 film of the same title in its documentary series The World and Its Inhabitants. Its author, Pierre Boulle, was the same one who had written one of the best known novels set in Thailand, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1952). Boulle is a strange choice, since his dark prose in that novel is the opposite of a Disney treatment.  Boulle went on to write Planet of the Apes (1963).

Walt Disney’s Siam is written as a strange, fantasy-style guided tour, translated from Boulle’s French. It reveals itself to be also an anti-communist tract (the Cold War was at its height at this time). The Chinese in Thailand are presented as living in “smelly hovels” in “dirty and narrow” alleys where they run “miserable shops” (Boulle 1958:48). In comparison, the Siamese are presented as a simple yet happy people (close to the European stereotype of the noble savage), whose educated class speaks Western languages and wears European clothes.

I find this to be quite a sinister book, despite (or perhaps because of) its Disney logo that conjures associations with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. My copy appears to have been a library book, and inscriptions in the front say “Bangkok 1964” and “Presented by Mr. and Mrs. R. Davey, October, 1981”.

The elephant in the room

Yes, it’s Anna Leonowens, the school teacher who was employed to teach some of the royal children and wives of King Mongkut in the 1860s, and whose story was made famous in the romanticised musical, The King and I.

Leonowens has been vilified for telling lies about herself and for sensationalising aspects of her time in Thailand and criticising the King. I don’t want to elaborate on that here, as I have written about Leonowens extensively in Imagining Siam and in an upcoming article in the Journal of Oriental Studies Australia.

I do have multiple editions of her books, including The Romance of the Harem and The English Governess at the Siamese Court, though my budget doesn’t extend to purchasing a first or early edition.

I also have many books about Anna, including both editions of the most recent biography, Bombay Anna, by the US academic Susan Morgan. (Get the second edition published by Silkworm Books, which has interesting updates on the first  edition, published by University of California Press.)

My most interesting vintage book in this section is actually more about Anna’s son: Louis and the King of Siam, by W. S. Bristowe (Chatto & Windus, 1976). This is the first book that alerted me to the fact that there was more to Anna’s real story than was portrayed in the largely fictional The King and I. I borrowed this book many times from the Siam Society in Bangkok in the early 1990s, then made do with a photocopy that a friend kindly made and bound for me. I was delighted when, in 2007, internet shopping allowed me to buy a copy of the first edition for myself.

Most beautiful

I have glorious picture books on Thai architecture, food, maps and travel. Three of my favourite in this category are:

Thai Graphic Design, compiled by Anake Nawigamune (River Books, 2000).

I bought this book while visiting my old home town of Auckland, New Zealand. My friend from school days, Yvette, was taking me on a tour of the best second-hand book shops there, and I saw this book on display in the window. I am interested in the design of logos, film branding, and so on, so this suited me perfectly and has a marvelous retro feel to it.

Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture, by Philip Cornwel-Smith, photos by John Goss (River Books 2005, second edition 2008).

I worked with the author of this book, Phil, at Bangkok Metro magazine in the late 1990s, so I was curious to see his book. It didn’t disappoint. Apart from Phil’s amazing attention to detail in finding out about myriad aspects of Thai popular culture, the funky design and hundreds of photos are terrific. When I worked at Metro, one of the many mysteries of life in Thailand that we liked to discuss was why the cats all had short, twisted tails, and why it was so hard to find out why. I was amused to see Phil had researched this phenomenon, and in Very Thai he concludes that it is a genetic deformity, and, thankfully, not a result of mutilation.

The Grand Palace, by William Warren, photos by Manop Boonyavatana (The Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary, 1988).

I sourced this book online and was lucky to find a pristine copy. Warren and Manop were given extensive access to the Grand Palace in Bangkok, to many areas not open to the public, including the Inner Palace, or Nang Harm. The large-format book contains intriguing photographs inside the old residences of the many wives of King Chulalongkorn, who ruled from 1868-1910, and who was the last Thai king to keep what westerners call a “harem”.

Travel guides

It’s difficult to find old travel guides. This is because they are often updated regularly, and people throw away their old copies and buy the new one. Luckily, I kept my first Lonely Planet guide to Thailand (1990). It’s interesting to compare that older volume with the later guides. Discussion of guides formed a chapter in my book, Imagining Siam.

I was lucky enough to find a copy of a 1950 book, A New Guide to Bangkok, published in Bangkok by the Hatha Dhip Company and compiled by Kim Korwong and Jaivid Rangthong. It is a revised, illustrated edition of the original 1949 volume that was an almost-instant sell-out.

It’s great that some publishers in Thailand are reprinting classic old guides as well as travellers’ memoirs, and these are an important part of my collection, too. The Kingdom of Siam 1904, by A. Cecil Carter, for example, was reprinted by the Siam Society in 1988, while The 1904 Traveller’s Guide to Bangkok and Siam, by J. Antonio, was reprinted by White Lotus in 1997.

Antonio’s guide reminds us how difficult travel used to be in tropical countries such as Thailand:

The Occidentals and its German translation.

At a place called Puei Heng, some six days’ journey by bullock cart from Pak Preo through the jungle, there are numerous mines of stephanite…Travel in the interior to the foreigner is fraught with great difficulty and inconvenience…For instance, whenever business necessitates a visit to the interior, the system employed is to procure kwien [sic] (bullock carts) in which travellers deposit their luggage while they make the journey on ponies and, by easy stages, meet the caravan at certain spots where they may tie the pony to the back of the kwein in which they may accommodate themselves in case of rain” (Antonio 1997:57).

I could go on and on about my collection: amazing memoirs by intrepid explorers in centuries gone by; modern travel tales of east meets west; historical and contemporary novels released by publishers that recognise Thailand can be the setting for a million fabulous stories; a small but growing collection of writing in English by Thais; superbly researched scholarly books; histories and collections of historical photos.

Many of the older books I have reveal Western prejudices and assumptions of superiority that seem so wrong today. Yet I believe these books should continue to be read uncensored, because they are part of a literary and cultural history that should not be rewritten, but that can provide valuable lessons in our progress (or otherwise) toward non-racist thinking and a more inclusive, peaceful world. 

Five Months on The Rock

By Beth Green

After 12 hours of travel, we sat on yet another bus, watching through the dirty windows as Bangkok traffic chittered and lurched in the golden afternoon sunlight.

We’d been on this public bus for 45 minutes. We were nowhere in the city we could pinpoint on a map and didn’t really know if this bus would take us somewhere we wanted to go, anyhow.

The bus was old, but going strong. It stopped every few feet, and another crowd of school kids, or office workers, or ladies coming home from the vegetable market would get on and squeeze past my sweaty legs and big backpack, politely smiling and looking away as I apologized for being in the way.

The bus stopped at yet another intersection clogged with taxis, three-wheeled trucks, and motorbikes. I watched the shadows outside lengthen. I felt bone tired, but also, suddenly inspired.

“Let’s keep going,” I said to Dan.

He craned his neck to see over the top of the backpack he was cradling on his bent knees, crammed in the plastic seat across the aisle from me.

“Where?” he asked.

“Let’s find an island,” I said.

And so, we went to Koh Tao.

As sometimes happens when you make a spur-of-the moment choice to abandon a plan, we found that road blocks were lifted, obstacles decimated, red carpets rolled out.

We’d been sweating on the bus for close to an hour, stuck in traffic as gnarled as the noodles in a plate of pad Thai. But as soon as we decided to take Bangkok off our itinerary, it all came right. We alerted the conductor, shouldered the bags, leapt off the bus, hailed a taxi, shot through the streets, snapped up a ticket and were sitting on the night train to Chumphorn in quick succession.  At Chumphorn we transferred to a bus, which took us to the ferry. By morning, we were whizzing across the Gulf of Thailand on a high-speed catamaran watching British honeymooners drink beer for breakfast and subsequently puke it up.

We did our dive training at Master Divers, in Mae Haad.

Koh Tao is a tiny speck in the blue ocean, at eight square miles a fraction the size of its famous neighbors, Koh Samui and Koh Phangan. It has three villages, a surprising number of hide-away resorts, and the largest concentration of dive shops I’ve ever seen.

I was there for the diving, and Dan, an indifferent swimmer at this point, was there for cheap beer. Or so we thought.

The three days we’d initially decided to stay on Koh Tao stretched to seven once my divemaster convinced Dan to sign on for a scuba course. We spent the mornings underwater, checking out clownfish and coral and avoiding the island’s strangely aggressive triggerfish. Afternoons we read or walked the sandy lanes that counted as “roads.” Evenings, we met new friends and, yes, drank cheap beer.

By the end of six days, the seed of a radical idea was blossoming. We left, but Koh Tao stayed with us: Palm trees. Tropical reefs. Friendly people. We continued on our Southeast Asia backpacker’s circuit. Cambodia. Malaysia. Australia for the holidays. India. Vietnam. Months passed, and we saw amazing, incredible, life-changing things. And we still kept talking about how we could get back to tiny Koh Tao.

So we did.

We signed up for divemaster courses, found a bungalow with a pet monkey living in a tree outside, and spent five months admiring the way the water shone in Thai sunlight—both above and below the surface.

Image courtesy pelkaphoto

The diving industry on Koh Tao sprang up in the 1990s. Before then, it was mostly uninhabited, with just a few houses where fishermen would overnight. In that relatively short amount of time since then, it’s grown and developed and yet still retained that “deserted island” feel. The inhabitants of the island are castaways themselves. Foreign dive professionals from a hundred countries staff the technical side of the resorts and dive shops while Burmese and Nepalese migrants mind the shops and cook and clean in the restaurants and hotels. Tourists arrive from everywhere. Even the Thai population is adrift here—it’s no-one’s home, and because of that it’s as free and easy a place to be as I have ever been.

Living on a small island is not for everyone, however. Water shortages, power outages. Cash shortages if weather keeps the ferry from running and the banks from bringing more change. Jokes about “island time” are not really jokes, just a reflection of how perceptions of urgency are diluted by the sea that surrounds us.  Bad weather is the bogeyman.  If the ferry isn’t running, you might not make your flight in Bangkok next week. Emergencies are dealt with as swiftly as possible—but may require help from another island, or the mainland, an hour or more away.

And, like in many enclaves of expatriates and long-term travelers, there are some who come and never leave—but say they’d like to. Anyone who’s spent some time on “The Rock”—as Koh Tao is affectionately called—can name-drop two, three or a dozen people who have stayed over the time they should have. People who sit in perfect paradise and only notice the mosquitoes. Some of these became inspiration for characters I’d write into a mystery novel manuscript some months later.

Scuba self-portrait.
Water gets in my mask when I laugh.

Dan and I discussed staying on Koh Tao through the low season and on into the new year. We could have dipped farther into savings—travel budget gone now—and pulled out enough to pay the tuition for dive instructor courses. We’d need updated equipment. A higher rate of insurance. Maybe a larger apartment—a one room bungalow is fine for a few months, but indefinitely?  Outside practicalities had invaded our island life.

So we left. And chased money. And closeted up our dive gear.

But every so often, at an airport, we say, “Hey, let’s keep going. Let’s go back to Koh Tao.”

And one day, we might.