last night I landed in Mexico after about 40 hours of travel including taxis, wheelbarrows, trains, airtrains, buses, and planes through four countries on three continents, and including meeting up with my friend in NY to hand off cold weather items and my entire Moroccan shopping spree to go home to Detroit.

today was a sort of day off from my vacation – I got my laundry clean, slept a lot, and got lost in cancun, far from the hotel zone and beaches, and super aimless. it was nice to sleep and to walk, to see all the markets and babies and VW bugs and just be in the sun.

I tried to find a Mayan healing clinic I was told about and ended up in a rather fascinating experience…up some stairs in a back room covered in violent jesus imagery with a guy who nodded when i said, ‘donde esta los limpias?’, using a computer translation program and an egg. the traditional healing I have previously experienced was from elder women with rosemary and juniper bundles, reiki, stone massage. I really need to get better with Spanish, because I think we were having a complex conversation, with a lot of good will and intentions, but the translation program wasn’t able to keep up…still, I’m going to sage myself tonight. that egg looked all bad.

I will try again in tulum!

tomorrow I begin the beach cabana sun on my skin piña colada yoga part of the sabbatical. I’ve been doing my sun salutations, now i want to integrate more balance poses.

I also have my workbook to work through from dr. schubiner (http://www.unlearnyourpain.com)as a huge part of this trip is learning about my aligned mind-body-spirit health, so that I don’t just achieve vacation health results, but long-term healthy practices.

I’m so ready to slow down after a fantastic whirlwind start to things. its been too easy to stay in the plan-and-do mode. today i went to do my laundry and the woman at the laundromat wouldn’t let me, explaining that its her service. i didn’t argue, just paid well and told the universe, ‘got it’, and went back to sleep for a while.

the thing about being abysmal at languages is that when I am alone in a country and don’t know the language, I can’t escape into charming banter and small talk, into the distracting field of new people and new stories. I have to just sit here with my stories, my questions, my inner work, my spiritual practice, my body.

I’m hearing so much more of my own voice already, it feels like getting to know someone after an absence. I didn’t know I needed so much unstructured time to hear myself.

and all the sudden its here, the time of not doing, the time of being. the dynamic tension of being alone for a while is right here, terrifying and thrilling and plentiful. and I’m noticing that I want to email, facetime, facebook, chat, scrabble, and call everyone I have ever known. I’m going to resist that desire, and lean into the contradictory one, to be out of touch.

I know, or at least have read many times and experienced in my life, that leaning into my discomfort is what opens the transformative space. my discomfort is not having a to-do list or anyone needing something from me…if I’m not needed will I continue to exist for other people? or is something else needed from me, which can only emerge if I slip out of the current paradigm? and what do I need from myself?

this space feels like an intervention on myself, AND a declaration of love and commitment to myself. I feel an elevated sense of presence and awareness and even scale of myself as a living thing. so much of our human experience is irrelevant simply because we aren’t actually present for our lives.

I am arriving.