Breaking Free: A Journey of Self Discovery Read online

  My two week holiday had come to an end and although I wouldn’t leave Thailand with all traces of my fear and anxiety having been dissolved - as had happened with the Buddhist monk - I did feel happy knowing that I had made a lot of headway and that I was moving forward in the right direction.

  ***

  I arrived back in Korea on a Sunday afternoon. For all these months that I had spent teaching in the country, I had always wanted to go to a Jimjillbang, a Korean-styled public bath, but had never got around to going. My fear had always kept me away. However, today was my 34 birthday and so on my way back from the airport, I decided that this was going to be the day that I went to see what it was all about. Standing in the entrance of the Jimjillbang, I got cold feet and was about to turn around and walk away, when suddenly a man appeared behind me and offered to show me where to go. The man appearing and speaking to me like he did, without me even saying a word to him, I felt was no coincidence. Life knew that I needed a little push forward, and so that is exactly what this man was here to do. First it was my shoes, then my clothes, and before I knew it I was sitting butt naked amongst a bunch of Korean men in one of the heated pools in the bathhouse. This may not have sounded like much, but it was a major step forward for me. With my legs stretched out in front of me and with my arms resting on the walls behind the pool, I felt free, but it wasn’t the kind of freedom I felt when roaming the world with a backpack. It was an internal freedom that I had never felt before. It were as though all my inhibitions had dissolved and every part of my being had been set free. My skin did get all red and break out in hives, as I had expected it would, but I didn’t care. For the first time I truly didn’t care! All I wanted to do was to stay where I was, stretched out in the pool, so that I could hang on to this blissful feeling of freedom for as long as possible.

  On my way to the bath house the next evening, I felt the same anxiety building inside me, as had happened the night before, however this time the feeling didn’t bother me at all. I was able to smile at it, knowing full well that I wasn’t going to make the same mistake that I had made so many times in the past of identifying with the feeling. What a liberating feeling this; to be able to observe the anxiety and yet feel such peace and joy at the same time.

  It was in the pool this evening, sitting naked as I was, that I had an epiphany. For all this time that I had been doing my spiritual practices, I had always imagined that I would be free only once I had got rid of all the negative mental habits within me, my fears, insecurities, anger, jealousy, and so on, but I suddenly realised that perhaps freedom was going to come to me in a different package to how I’d previously imagined it would. Perhaps my freedom wouldn’t only come to me once I had got rid of all the mental habits that were agitating my mind, but rather my freedom would come to me in me being able to separate myself from the mental habits that were causing my agitation. Many of these mental habits were so deeply embedded within my mind that it could take months, years, maybe many more lifetimes until they had completely dissolved. If I was only going to be feel free once I had got rid of all them all, it could be a mighty long time that I would have to sit around waiting. The secret to it all, the secret to my own freedom, I could now so clearly see, was for me to become a witness, a watcher, to whatever was happening. In this way, the thoughts and the emotions that were stirring within me all the time wouldn’t bother me at all, as I was merely watching them, witnessing them, rather than feeling as though these thoughts and these emotions were happening to me. A story I once heard summed it up perfectly.

  One day a disciple went to a spiritual master and asked him what it was like to be enlightened. “Before I became enlightened I suffered terribly from depression,” said the master. “Now that I am enlightened, I still suffer from depression, but it no longer bothers me.” In other words, the master no longer identified with the thoughts and emotions that were passing through him. He was able to stand aside and observe what was happening with complete dispassion.

  Over the next few days, I made it my meditation to go to the Jimjillbang and to do nothing other than sit in the pools and observe what feelings were arising within me, and then to keep a sense of space between me as the watcher, and the feeling, just as the master suffering from depression was able to do. It was during these few days in the bathhouse that I realised that the shift that I had been praying for, hoping for, and working so hard towards for so many years, had just happened. It didn’t come to me as a thought, nor was it a voice that I heard, but rather it was a deep feeling of knowing that something in me had changed and that my skin condition would no longer trouble me as much as it had in the past. After all these years of struggling, and feeling like I would never get to the end of it, there was now light at the end of the tunnel after all.

  CHAPTER 32

  It wasn’t the start to our bike trip across Asia that I was hoping for. Moments after touching down in Istanbul I looked out of the window and saw my bike being offloaded from the hold with a big hole in the side of the bike box.

  “Damn it!” I hissed under my breath. I should have taken more care packing the box in the first place. Instead of packing it myself I had quickly handed it over to a guy at a bike shop when he had offered to do it for me. Now I had to worry about whether or not anything had fallen out. Thankfully nothing did, but I wasn’t in the clear yet as later on that evening when I was reassembling my bike, I noticed that my rear de-railer, the part of the bike that is used for shifting gears, wasn’t working properly. I went to bed stressing about it and wondering how I was going to get it fixed.

  ***

  When I woke up the next morning, I decided to meditate for a while before going about trying to get my bike fixed. With a relatively calm mind, I got the sense that there were two lessons that I needed to learn from this experience. The first was that I had to pay more attention to the small things that I did, instead of seeing them as not important and therefore not paying much attention to them. The reason I was in this mess now was precisely because of that: I hadn’t done the little things properly in the first place. The second thing I needed to learn was that to worry about it didn’t do any good at all. I had no doubt that the hassles that I was now having with my de-railer would be the first of many problems that we’d have to face along the way. Instead of worrying about it - which wouldn’t do anything to solve the problem - this bike trip of ours would be a great chance for me to practice handling the ups and downs that came along in a more steady and even-minded way.

  As things turned out, I couldn’t get my bike fixed in the town that we were in, and so I was left with no choice but to set out on the first day of the trip with my bike as it was. My gears were slipping and sliding all over the place, yet still it felt great to be in the saddle and back on the road again. With all the excitement of it all, Johnny and I completely misjudged the distance and landed up on a mountain pass well after the sun had gone down. Cold and exhausted after a long day of riding, things weren’t looking good, as we couldn’t find anywhere to sleep for the night. We knocked on a farmer’s front door hoping that he would take us in and offer us a bed, but sadly he didn’t speak English and didn’t get the hint of what we were after. With all the trucks on the road, Johnny and I knew that we were being bloody stupid to be on the road at this time of night. However there was nothing around and so we had no choice but to keep going until we found somewhere to buy food and pitch our tents. Thankfully, not far up ahead, we found a lone restaurant on the side of the road. After putting on some warm clothes and grabbing a bite to eat, the owner of the restaurant told us that we were welcome to sleep in the room out back with the chef. He was quick to warn us though, that the reason the chef slept alone was because of his snoring. This didn’t worry us. A little bit of snoring seemed a whole lot better than having to face the cold in our tents for the night.

  ***

  It didn’t take us long to realise that we had made a mistake with the route that we had chosen. The Black Sea coastline was far
colder and a lot hillier than we’d thought it would be. With the clothes and the equipment that we had with us, we were massively unprepared for the weather. The first chance we got we made a stop at a big chain store to buy ourselves each a polar fleece blanket. They did help, but not even these thermal blankets were enough to keep us warm at night. Whether it was the cold nights that we spent shivering in our tents, or the days that we were out on the road cycling in the rain, it wasn’t long before I started to feel unwell. It wasn’t so much the small dose of flu that I had picked up that was troubling me, but rather the fatigue that I was feeling at the end of each day. Johnny would often want to go and explore the town that we were in at the time, but I wouldn’t want to do anything other than climb into my sleeping bag and rest. Even on the relatively short days I’d feel absolutely wiped out and drained of energy.

  One morning I had a particularly bad day. After only 40 kilometres into the ride I was completely flat and had nothing left. With no choice but to stop, I told Johnny to go on without me and that I would hitchhike to the town that he was planning to reach that evening.

  When I arrived in the town a few hours later, the first stop off I made was to a pharmacy. The person who helped me was a slightly chubby middle-aged Turkish man. He didn’t speak much English, but he was very friendly and did his best to help me out as best as he could. No sooner had I got chatting with him than he asked me to sit and join him and his wife for lunch. I didn’t get any closer to working out what was wrong with me, but I did leave the pharmacy with a full stomach and a bag full of medical samples that they had told me to take with me.

  From the pharmacy, I then went to find an Internet café, as I wanted to do some research to see if I could work out what was making me feel so incredibly fatigued all the time. If I couldn’t figure it out myself, then I would have no other choice but to try to find an English-speaking doctor in the town that we were in. However, I had met so few people who could speak English along the way and so the chances of me finding an English-speaking doctor seemed slim. So what was it that was making me feel this tired, I wondered? I did a Google search for fatigue symptoms and that was when it hit me: Anaemia, a lack of iron. The year before in Korea I had discovered that I had mild anaemia. The doctor that I had seen at the time had advised me to start eating meat again, especially beef which is rich in iron. I had thought that this and a few months of iron supplements would have fixed me up in no time, but clearly it hadn’t! I should have realised though, as the fatigue and dizziness that I was feeling now were exactly the same symptoms that I had felt the year before in Korea. I went to the pharmacy right away to buy a few packets of iron supplements. Still, I wasn’t sure of how long it would take for them to kick in and whether or not the iron supplements would be enough.

  That evening in bed I clasped my hands together and said a prayer. Life, if this cycle trip is really what you want from me, then I’m going to need a little help from you here.

  At that, I switched off the bedside light and rolled over to go to sleep. Little did I realize where I would be this time the following evening.

  ***

  The next morning I took Johnny to the pharmacy to introduce him to the pharmacist and his wife. They were both just as friendly as they had been the day before. On our way out, they invited us to join them for lunch that day with two of their English-speaking friends, one of whom was an English teacher, and her husband a doctor at the local hospital. After lunch and a tour of the town, I was knackered and all I wanted to do was chill out in my hotel room for the evening. A few hours later, the time having just gone on 10:00 pm, I was about to turn off the light and go to sleep when there was an unexpected knock at my door. Of all people, I was surprised to see that it was Mustafa, the doctor. He told me that on his way home that evening that he had a thought that maybe he should take me to his hospital and give me an IV drip to help sort me out.

  “What do you think? Would you like to have one?” he asked.

  “Absolutely!” I eagerly replied.

  Whatever it was that they gave me, it was powerful stuff. The next morning I cycled out of the town feeling like my old self again.

  CHAPTER 33

  The border crossing into Iran went smoothly. In no time at all we had made it to Baku, a town 40 kilometres from the border post, but it was then that disaster struck. Seeing as though we had only ten euro between us, Johnny and I figured that we had better draw some money from an ATM in Baku before pushing on. However, it wasn’t quite as simple as that, as none of the ATMs in Baku would accept our bank cards. An Iranian guy walking by must have seen that we were in some kind of trouble, as he came up to see if he could give us a hand. After explaining to him that none of the ATMs were allowing us to withdraw money, he offered to take me to a local bank up the road to see if they could help.

  The manager at the bank made a few calls before coming back with the news that it didn’t look good at all. “Due to sanctions, there is absolutely nowhere in Iran where you can use your ATM cards,” he said, “not even in Tehran, the capital city. You’re just going to have to go back to Turkey and get money there, and then come back to Iran after that.”

  I knew that this wasn’t an option, as our 30-day Iranian visas were only single entry. Once we crossed the border we wouldn’t be allowed back in.

  “Well, then,” he continued after I explained to him that we only had single entry visas, “the other option for you is to give your ATM card to someone you trust and ask them to draw money for you from the Turkish side and then bring it to you. This is the only other way.”

  You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought to myself. To give my bank card and pin number to a complete stranger had ‘scam’ written all over it and would be completely insane. I thanked the manager for his help and left.

  The same guy who had taken me to the bank then took me to a few hotels, jewellery shops, and various other places around the town, to see if they knew of a way that we would be able to get our hands on some cash, but it was a waste of time as nobody could help us. Things were looking bleak. I was now starting to seriously think that our bike tour across Asia was about to come to an abrupt end. Strangely, in all of this, I was surprised at how composed I felt about the whole thing. If I was feeling anything at all, it was sadness. I was sad at the fact that I had got it all completely wrong in thinking that this bike trip of ours was really what life wanted from me. I had felt so sure at the start of the trip that this was what I was meant to be doing at this stage of my life.

  Before going to give Johnny the bad news, I decided to pay one last visit to the same bank that I had first gone to, to see if there really was nothing that we could do. This time when I went, there wasn’t only the manager in the bank, but rather there was a small group of people sitting around casually with him behind the desk. It wasn’t long before they all knew my story and the situation that Johnny and I had found ourselves in. They started speaking amongst themselves in Farsi, the local language, and then suddenly, one of the guys reached into his pocket and pulled out a few notes. This got the ball rolling and within no time at all a collection pile had started going around from one person to the next. At the end of all of this, 50 dollars worth of Iranian currency was handed over to me in a wad of notes.

  “This is enough to get you two bus tickets to Tehran, and a taxi ride from the bus station to your consulate.”

  “Do you think they’ll be able to help?” I asked dubiously.

  “They have to. They are your embassy. If they don’t help you, then who will?”

  It was now decision time. Johnny and I could either cut our losses and leave Iran right away, or we could take a gamble and head to Tehran, as they suggested we do. I wasn’t so convinced that the embassy would be able to help us, and of course the last thing I wanted was for us to be stuck in Tehran with only ten euro, but in my heart I knew we had to go for it.

  “You better hurry then, as the bus is leaving in the next hour,” said the manager, looking down
at his watch. I thanked them all for their help, then sped off down the road to get Johnny and to tell him what had happened.

  I spent a lot of time on the bus staring out the window, completely lost in my own world. I just couldn’t get over the sequence of events and how we were now on our way to Tehran. Maybe I hadn’t misread the signs after all. Maybe completing my bike trip around the world really was what life had in store for me. I felt a rush of adrenaline pass through me at the thought of this, as I was suddenly struck by the realisation that we were being perfectly looked after. Sure, we would have more hassles along the way but at that moment I had such a strong feeling that everything was being taken care, and so there really was nothing for me to worry about. Come hell or high water, we would make it to Beijing because that was exactly what was destined to happen.

  ***

  We arrived in Tehran at six in the morning. The lady who dealt with us at the British Embassy was quite amused to hear that we had arrived in Tehran with only a few euros between us.

  “So you mean to tell me that you came to Iran with no idea that you wouldn’t be able to withdraw money from the ATMs? Did you not know about the sanctions?” she asked, with a puzzled look on her face. I just kept quiet and looked over at Johnny, as I didn’t know how well it would have gone down had I told her that I didn’t watch the news and barely knew what was going on in my own country, let alone what was happening in Iran. Anyhow, it all worked out in the end as we started the process of transferring money from Johnny’s account in the UK to the British Embassy in Tehran.