Information flows through me in an exhaustive and exhausting stream. When asked at the end of the day what stories we have done, I often can’t remember. Synapses in my brain are blowing like small fuses connected to a faulty main that services a large city – I have zero short-term recall. The London years of massages and facials and mid-morning editorial meetings at Soho House over toasted ciabatta and jam are now like a dream. Maitreyabandhu and those cosy nights at the Buddhist Centre that made so much sense at the time also seem very far away.
But our website is the most read site in Australia. Based on the traffic, readers like stories about: brides, brides in peril, bad bridal wear, tattoos gone wrong, Photoshop gone wrong, plus-sized models, crime (particularly gruesome crimes), people killed or maimed by claw hammers, Josef Fritzl, people locked in dungeons, freaky animals, funny viral videos, Australian television celebrities, celebrities who have died.
It’s crazy and I love it, but that same old ghost haunts the margins. The ghost who tells me it is not sustainable to live like this – drinks that finish at 1am, the early alarms, falling asleep while getting a pedicure and also – improbably – while getting my legs waxed. At least one full day each weekend is spent sleeping. Daytime sleeps are heavy, long and dreamless, like mini comas.
Then there are all the large lattes, the cups piling up on my desk in a curdling tower, all the stodgy food-court lunches, all the sweet, tangy gulps of sauvignon blanc in the Sydney sun and the cadged cigarettes in the open-air bar downstairs, all the dawn taxis and the urgent music that precedes the news bulletins. Urgency and adrenalin, our constant, never-sated lust for breaking news, for the next, the next, the next thing – it’s like a blowtorch to serenity.
I can feel myself burning out. I need some reprieve from this pace, and to reconnect with meditation. It worked like a temporary miracle in London, but I haven’t been able to summon the energy or the willpower to integrate it into my daily life. So I do that thing a lot of cashed-up Western women do when they feel stressed out: go online, google ‘yoga retreat’ and bang in their credit card details. The retreat I choose is in Sri Lanka. Britain’s Observer has called it the ‘best yoga retreat in the world’, and it promises a more holistic approach to health and wellbeing, using ancient Ayurvedic medicine. Each guest has a consultation with an Ayurvedic doctor and a choice of treatments.
I fly into the capital, Colombo, to see my old college pal Brett, who works for the UN. He’s been relocated there after many years in the north, and months of intense civil war conflict. His town had been shelled, and many of his friends and colleagues killed or injured. On the way to his place from the airport we drive past a massive structure, the top of its walls covered with rolls of barbed wire.
‘That’s the prison,’ he says flatly. ‘Some of my friends are in there, being tortured. Others have been disappeared.’
Welcome to Sri Lanka. Namaste.
*
Brett lives in a colonial pile in the centre of town that has an air of dilapidated glamour. The high life has come and gone. Tall, compound-like walls, large, musty bedrooms, trees growing through the lounge-room floor, monkeys overhead, cracks in the marble … The jungle bashes down the door. I imagine previous generations of inhabitants as Somerset Maugham types – British civil servants gone to seed, the wild gardens running through their kitchens as they tried to negotiate railways, schools and the price of tea. But the streets of old Colombo are also thick with rats.
Brett emerges from his room the next morning red-eyed and shaken. I peer in. It looks like he got drunk and trashed it. A massive rat has crawled up through the plumbing in Brett’s ensuite and chewed its way through the wood in the door. It ran at Brett and attacked him before he set at it with a cricket bat. Things are broken, bookshelves are turned over, furniture has been gnawed to bits. Just before dawn, Brett managed to push the rat back down the drain, placing a brick over it.
The next night the rat returns. It must be strong – somehow it manages to push aside the brick. Books and wood bear the marks of vicious little teeth. The rat has also shat everywhere.
I decide to get out of the house and explore Colombo in a tiny rickshaw decorated with plastic flowers and sequins. The driver, playing tour guide, takes me to his favourite beach, which is covered in rubbish and gloomy with pollution and light rain. After ninety seconds walking on the depressing beach, I step over a large plastic bag that is ripped and has stuff leaking out – like a corpse that has been stabbed and left to drain. I ask if I can sit back in the rickshaw.
‘This is our best beach!’
‘No, it’s okay, I can see it from the rickshaw.’
‘You should walk on the beach!’
‘No, it’s okay, I’ve seen enough.’
We have been walking together, which feels weirdly intimate. I don’t even know him – I just flagged him down and sat in the back of his vehicle. Now we are like a couple, fighting, not holding hands, walking along an empty beach.
He sulks as I direct him to this place that sells really great salads, according to TripAdvisor. It’s also a bookstore with a lot of post-colonial Sri Lankan and Indian literature – think Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. I buy Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual bestseller The Power of Now to read on the yoga retreat – a move so cliched that I tell myself it’s ironic.
I make my way to Ulpotha, a village deep in the interior of Sri Lanka that could have been dreamed up by some author in a magic-realist phase – Gabriel García Márquez, perhaps. I arrive at night and am given tea, then escorted by lamplight to my quarters. There is no electricity.
My room is a mud-brick hut with only one supporting wall, almost entirely open to the elements. A bed sits in the middle, covered by a tightly tucked-in mosquito net. Gas lamps glow low around the hut and a monkey runs past. The jungle at dusk suddenly fills with animal noises.
Ulpotha is a retreat and working village in central Sri Lanka, open to guests for part of the year. The backbone of the place is a community of villagers who have been in the area for generations. They live in similar huts to the guests’, worship in the nearby temples, farm the land, cook the food and help run the retreat during the tourist season.
It’s kind of like a farm stay mixed with an Ayurvedic health retreat mixed with the sort of luxe interiors that feature in Condé Nast Traveller – in the middle of Sri Lanka. And then there is the food – vegetarian and delicious, also prepared by the villagers. Without electricity, food is cooked over a fire. Breakfast is fresh bananas, unusual juices and coconut pancakes. There are pots of tea, made from leaves picked in the nearby farm. A villager is on hand with a machete if you want to open a fresh coconut to drink.
On my first day I’m walking through a carefully swept path in the jungle when I run into a bare-chested, middle-aged Englishman wearing a sarong.
‘Careful of those monkeys,’ he says, pointing up to branches thick with them. ‘Yesterday I was having a shower and one of them nicked my watch!’
His name is Pete and he lives in Slough and works as a bricklayer. He’s here with his wife, Sally, for two weeks and they are jumping out of their skins – vital with good health, their energy levels nuclear, their eyes bright, their faces and hair shiny. I look exactly as you would expect me to look: an unhealthy office worker who’s had too much white wine, too much time online, and has just spent the last few days being terrified by a rat.
While I did want to look like my new friends from Slough, I wasn’t sure if the Ayurvedic path was for me. Ayurvedic medicine is one of the world’s oldest holistic (whole-body) healing systems. The term ‘Ayurveda’ combines the Sanskrit words ‘ayur’ (life) and ‘veda’ (science or knowledge). Developed thousands of years ago in India, it is based on the belief that health and wellness depend on a delicate balance between the mind, body and spirit. Using these concepts, Ayurvedic physicians prescribe individualised treatments, including herbs and diet, exercise and lifestyle recommendations. It’s still widely used in India and Sri Lan
ka today – sometimes in conjunction with Western medicine.
There are two categories of treatment available during my stay. There are the ‘nice’ treatments – preparatory things called oleation and fomentation therapies, including oil applications such as massage, steam and medicinal bath therapies. Then there is the other sort, classified as ‘elimination therapies’. These include enemas, bloodletting and vomiting (or ‘purging’, as it’s delicately put in the retreat’s literature).
Some of the oleation therapies involve searing yourself like a barramundi in a coffin-shaped cane basket, and prove to be uncomfortable. Or lathering yourself in oil like an early ’80s porn star. I submit to a steam in one of the cane coffins but don’t enjoy the experience. It feels like being in a primitive MRI.
Each guest, regardless of whether they sign up for an Ayurvedic program, gets a consultation with the retreat’s doctor, Srilal Mudunkothge. He is an Ayurveda doctor of some renown, and I expect some esoteric Eastern wisdom. Instead he just looks me up and down, shrugs and says, ‘Lay off the carbs after lunch.’
Easier said than done, mate. After breakfast one morning I cycle to the village clinic, where there are more than fifty locals crammed into the waiting room to see Dr Mudunkothge. So popular is the clinic that villagers sleep out overnight to get an appointment. The clinic dispenses free Ayurveda medicines in return for a symbolic offering of betel leaves.
In a sort of Robin Hood move, money to pay for this clinic comes from the yoga retreat, which is expensive – around $2000 a week. According to the Ulpotha clinic website, in its first ten years it treated over 15,000 patients and carried out over 47,000 consultations. The money raised from tourism also goes into keeping the village sustainable. The villagers use organic farming methods and ancient techniques such as threshing crops using buffalos.
This soothes my white guilt. Retreats in developing countries make me feel a little uneasy. Capitalism is a system so complete that it has swallowed up and repackaged even Eastern spirituality – and sells it back to us at Western prices. Retreats tap in to (or rip off or appropriate, depending on where you stand) ancient spiritual practices of the host country, but with the added bonus of having a lower cost base due to wage and infrastructure prices in that country. You certainly get more bang for your buck on retreat in Vietnam than you would in Byron Bay. But it’s not just costs and cultural appropriation. There can also be a massive disconnect between the world of the retreat and the world outside the retreat. Sign up to a retreat and they’ll usually offer to pick you up from the airport, not the city. The experience is more seamless, more magical, if you stay in the retreat bubble.
But I’m having fun in Ulpotha. Soon enough I forget my Sydney life – the early starts, the news cycle that spins so fast it’s impossible to step back and read the patterns and the tea leaves, to get the big picture of what’s really going on in the world. I forget all of that – and I forget the rat in Colombo, and Brett’s stories of war and torture. I’m in the wellness bubble. I could stay here forever with Pete and Sally from Slough. With all the treatments we’ll age backwards, just like Benjamin Button.
I get into the very healthy pattern of twice-daily yoga sessions in the gorgeous open pavilion that looks out over rice paddies. I’m going to yoga all the time because I have fallen for my yoga instructor. I love him! But I love him in the way you love your science teacher in Year 9: irrational, embarrassing afterwards. I experience his lessons as something romantic and meaningful – suffused with a kind of dreamy, slow-mo hot-buttered loveliness. A lock of sweaty Hugh Grant hair flops over his eye as he demonstrates revolved side angle pose. ‘Yes, sir. Anything you want, sir.’ This is the unspoken eros that can exist between student and teacher. He keeps me coming back to class.
At every mealtime, I seek out a seat beside him. There is a pattern here – I am always travelling to exotic locations and falling in lock step with diffident Englishmen. We’d meet for tea, walk around gardens, explore cities and exchange gifts, without anything actually happening – just a tender feeling between us, an enclosed sort of warmth. And when we’d part, there’d be a nostalgic afterglow, fading like a bruise. I would get these lovely romantic bruises time and time again, like I was a character stuck in a decades-long Merchant Ivory film, where the most erotic thing that happens is that the man touches the sleeve of the woman’s dress for a beat longer than necessary.
I give him my Eckhart Tolle book, inscribed with a gushing message. But later, in yoga class, he drops me when he’s trying to hold me aloft, demonstrating a pose. Perhaps I am too heavy and unwieldy (although he had no trouble picking up the couple from Slough). And just like that, the spell is broken.
But another spell takes its place – a discovery that is more intoxicating than a crush, partly, I suppose, because it is unexpected. It’s the discovery of stillness. Finally! Stillness is the gateway to serenity. Serenity is like one of those wild animals that will only approach if you remain very still and quiet, like a statue. Yet we are so conditioned to recoil from stillness, confusing it with boredom or inertia. We don’t really know how to do it. Before my breakthrough in Ulpotha, moments with nothing in them were to be rushed through. A stretch of quiet and inaction had no currency in my value system. Boredom was in the empty moments and boredom was to be avoided. I didn’t know how deep and rich the experience of just sitting still could be, of looking – really looking – at something, particularly nature. Stillness made me uncomfortable in New Norcia and I was too excitable to be truly still in London. But in Sri Lanka I locate a steady, quiet – even grounded – part of myself.
In the jungle it’s boiling hot, like the inside of a kiln – and this definitely helps with the stillness. I hang out near the lake, snug in a hammock’s sling, tracking a gecko that slides across the ground, watching a bright tropical flower – its folds and buds and openings and the way it sways. I follow the splash of a shadow moving across the grass. I could stay there all day – and so I do. I have nowhere else to be. Days pass this way. I lose track of time. It’s only hunger and a darkening sky that rouse me.
Those time-muddled and peaceful days in the garden in Sri Lanka remind me of a song Leonard Cohen wrote after many years in a Zen Buddhist monastery. It was about the floating dust motes you see when a ray of light comes through a window and how if you look closely enough they seem to dance and are a thing of beauty. That’s what you see when you are very, very still – an individual dust mote. If you are still enough, the world opens up to you somehow. Everything seems epic and beautiful and miraculous.
Is this why people drop everything and move to a jungle or a monastery or a religious order? The intoxicating pleasure of finally observing life writ small? And how to harness this feeling and turn it on at will?
It’s not hard to see that the enemy of this state of almost ecstatic stillness is the internet. Back at home the internet runs my life. I wouldn’t have a job without it. But when I’m in Sri Lanka it becomes apparent that the pace of the online news cycle is killing some quiet corner in me. The web never stops – and as a consequence my brain never stops. Walk behind my desk and you’ll see twenty-plus different tabs open on two browsers, plus a heap of Word docs. I constantly toggle between these, email and Twitter. I get agitated if the internet is slow, and anxious if I’m offline. And that’s just my computer. My phone is a whole other story. My head is bowed more than sixty times a day to this digital deity, checking and refreshing and tapping out little messages.
It’s not just that the internet and our phones contain a multitude of ways to entertain us. It’s that they are so effective at taking us away from ourselves. And if there’s anywhere a lot of us don’t want to be, it’s with ourselves. A meditation teacher told me years later that we get addicted to our phones ‘because we want to avoid feeling something. It’s a resistance to and a rejection of life. The phone is our anaesthetiser. The outer world we live in is mainly out of our control. On social media we get agreement and approval constan
tly. It’s a safer world.’
A revelation I have in Sri Lanka is that all I need to feel alive and good is to walk into long grass and lie down there – for a long time, doing nothing in particular – and just feel. Ulpotha is set up for discoveries of this kind. It’s a world before and beyond technology – electricity, even. Without electricity you cut off the possibility of a whole range of night-time activities. These include reading, watching TV, surfing the net and talking on the phone (there is no mobile signal either). When it gets dark, it really gets dark. Gas lamps are strung from trees around the jungle and the looming forms of villagers each carrying their own lamp gives the place a vibe like a tropical Narnia.
I’m forced to spend time with other people at night, playing backgammon or cards, strumming guitar, singing, dancing, swimming and talking. It is enchanting and gives me a glimpse into a way of life, almost pre-modern, that follows the light and the seasons. Some nights we gather around the lake and sit in a large, open tent to talk then chant. The chanting is a loosely organised initiative designed to calm us before sleep. The retreat works its magic. Maybe it’s the yoga, meditation, rest, stillness and treatments – or maybe it’s simply nature. But I’m moving slowly but surely away from the belief entrenched since childhood that God could be found in a church. I’m finding evidence of this mysterious, animating, unseen force everywhere here; mostly I’m finding it in nature. I know that if I am serious about having serenity that lasts longer than a holiday, I will need to reassess my relationship with technology.
My blissed state lasts for as long as I’m on retreat – which, sadly, is only another few days. After a week in Sri Lanka, I fly back overnight to Sydney and go directly from the airport to work. I turn on my phone and computer, fire up the internet and ask my colleagues in the newsroom what big stories I have missed. No one can remember.
I reel into 2012 feeling battered and sorry for myself. I’ve moved back to Melbourne for a job and then three months in, as I am leaving for Christmas break, my boss calls me into her office and says, ‘Here’s your Christmas bonus, you’re fab!’ Actually, she doesn’t. She tells me the position isn’t working out or I’m not working out – one of the two – and that today will be my last day.
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