Fire Shows, Ice Baths, and Falling Down the Rabbit Hole in Pai, Thailand

Pai, a drug-free psychedelic experience unto itself, already feels like a dream.

The man across from us is on fire.

My friend and I are sitting deep in the jungle at a bar called Paradise, bathed in flashing purple lights, watching a fire dancer attempt to wrest a burning staff from a man’s bag and motorbike helmet. Just a moment before, the performer had been spinning a burning black pole above his head at warp-speed.

You might be wondering how I ended up here. But first, let’s back up a minute.

A Bumpy Ride

I arrived in Pai, Thailand feeling like a bit of a mess. I was fresh off a difficult 10-day Vipassana meditation course, which felt like it had brought every emotion I’d ever failed to process right up to the surface. That was followed almost directly followed by 10 days of total isolation in COVID quarantine, and all of that meant I’d barely done any physical activity or spoken to anyone for nearly a month.

I still had no desire to try to do either of those things, and was overall feeling destabilized, exhausted, and honestly very depressed. And as absurd as it is to be struggling on a dream trip around the world, I’d truthfully been having a bit of a rough time for a while. As they say, wherever you go, there you are, and at this point it had become impossible to tune out.

The nauseating van ride from Chiang Mai to Pai didn’t help much, and by the time I arrived in my little cabin on a farm about ten minutes away from Pai’s main walking street, I wondered for a disconcerting moment if I should call this whole traveling odyssey quits and head right on home. 

But I had booked two non-refundable nights at this little A-frame cabin. During my first few days in Pai, it poured most of the time, and I spent my days walking around in soaked sandals, drinking smoothies, and reading. I ate alone at bars and sang karaoke songs to an empty room. I got my nails done by three very sweet Thai ladies who tried to set me up with their sons. I booked a mental health retreat I hoped would provide the relief I needed (much more on that later).

On the last morning of my stay at the cabin, while drinking coffee on my porch, a sweet black cat with giant gold eyes curled up on my lap, and its presence felt like a small blessing from the universe. Later, I dragged my still-exhausted body to a yin yoga class at a place called Bodhi Tree and sat in intenses stretches for long periods of time.

Slowly, I felt something in me begin to unwind just slightly.

I then decided to book an Airbnb that my friend had recommended to me over a year ago. It was a bit far from town and I didn’t have a motorbike (and was far too scared to try to learn on Pai’s winding roads), but I decided to brave the distance.

A Tortoise and a Song

The moment I stepped onto the land at Art Farm in Pai, I felt my nervous system begin to settle immediately. Ever since my Vipassana retreat I’ve been more hyper-aware of my inner world than ever before, and it’s been harder to tune out the energies of the people and places I’m around and the intense effects these things can have on me.

Anyways, this place had good energy.

A giant tortoise lumbered through a garden encircled with stones, and sometimes I’d see the owner going on ultra-slow morning walks with his large-shelled pet in tow. Near my house, soft music played from a cafe covered with hand-painted art, and a little vine-swathed glass tea house sparkled in the soft rain.

Lily pads glistened on a reflective pool. Green fields and rich jungle spread out in every direction. There was even something enchanting about the humid air.

The tortoise at Art Farm

The owner allowed me to borrow a guitar from the cafe, and after playing through some of the songs I’d written in Nepal, I suddenly felt inspired to seek out an open mic. There happened to be one that very evening at a gorgeous little cafe called Art in Chai, and so I took a taxi over as the sun was setting.

Sitting beneath countless hanging baubles, staring out at images of various deities that plastered the walls an the faces of strangers sitting cross-legged beneath them, I played two songs I’ve never shared before — one about the Greek goddess Persephone, and one I wrote in Nepal — and soaked up the glow of the crowd’s warm reception.

The Pai Effect

There is a very specific energy to Pai and the people there. It most definitely lives up to its reputation as a hippie town, and it turned out that the friendly hippies and open-minded tourists of Pai may have actually been exactly what I needed after so many days of near-complete isolation and so much doubt. 

The day before, while speaking to my aunt who’s done several Vipassana retreats, I half-jokingly said that I wasn’t sure I even wanted to talk to anyone who hadn’t done one of Goenka’s 10-day odysseys, as it was still so squarely in the forefront of my mind. Well, after I sang, a man with large blue eyes under thick black glasses sat down next to me, and I quickly discovered that he’d done four retreats — and also had very similar doubts about Goenka’s methodologies.

We kept talking. And talking. We talked until the sun came up. It was one of those wide-ranging conversations that covered everything from formative childhood experiences and spiritual beliefs to our shared favorite bands and our mutual fascination with UFOs.

He was a South African who had studied finance before leaving his life and the expectations of modernity behind, and now he was facilitating psilocybin ceremonies in Thailand. Through that alone, he could afford to live in an entire guesthouse while only working a little bit each day and hosting a few ceremonies each month. 

I began to see why people come to Pai and never leave.

We hung out a lot for the next few days and embarked on a little romance. While a short-lived fling while abroad is not usually a recipe for healing, it can be a sweet supplement to it, and for days I walked around filled with the fizzy glow of an early, idealization-cloaked crush.

One day we went to a sauna beside a chilled-out library-slash-hostel on the edge of town called Good Life Dacha, and I dove in and out of it into an ice bath, letting the extreme heat and extreme cold lull me into a blissful haze. I spent a long morning in the most amazing cafe I’ve ever been to, talking about god among the giant vegetable bowls and hanging vines.

Meanwhile, I did a virtual hypnosis session from my little Airbnb that left me feeling freer and lighter than I had in weeks or maybe years. I also drank spicy ginger tea in a cafe full of huge clay pots bellowing smoke over musicians playing acoustic guitars. I met new friends, and talked to strangers, and did hours-long yoga classes soundtracked by jungle birds. I slowly began to feel my whole worldview become more pliable in the jungle heat and rain, and my heart felt like it was softening ever-so-slightly.

I also ventured outside of town to attend a very cheap life coaching session followed by a talk on anthropology and human evolution, which happened to be led by a woman from my beloved San Francisco. During the talk, she dove into the possibility of aliens in ancient history — a topic you’ll know I’m deeply fascinated by if you’ve read the first issue of Cosmic Junkyard.

 (I am grateful for having COVID if only because it gave me the time to start that new project, which has been so generative and wonderful so far to write — and which has also inspired me to spend more time on Substack. There are so many people here doing such meaningful work, blending of writing and healing, slow travel and spirituality, and seeing their stories and creations makes everything feel more possible and honestly makes the world feel like a far more loving place than it did before).

I extended my trip several days and at last moved into town so I wouldn’t have to rely on taxi services. I wandered the late-night Walking Street and drank the most delicious smoothies at midnight and ate impossibly cheap pumpkin curries and Buddha bowls and spent whole days writing long essays about faeries and Persephone and the Eleusinian Mysteries at cafes. I met a collection of new friends at a yoga festival, including another lovely woman from San Francisco’s Richmond District, one of my favorite places in the world. I went out to dinner with strangers who became new friends. I allowed myself to heal in the warm gaze of others. 

As a true introvert, I truly love being alone, but I also know that I really do need people sometimes. I need substantive connections to come home to myself from time to time. We all do.

In Pai, I was reminded that while so much of healing work can involve working on oneself in isolation, be it through meditation or intensive, self-focused introspection or various behavior-altering tactics, sometimes genuine connection can be the most potent medicine of all.

When we remember that we are all mirrors of each other, our hearts begin to open not only towards ourselves and our communities but to the entire world and web of interbeing that connects all things.

A Psychedelic Experience, No Drugs Needed

Contrary to what one might think given the company I was keeping, I didn’t do any psychedelics while I was in Pai, but I really didn’t need to. On our final debrief, my friend from San Francisco and I agreed that we’d both felt slightly like we were on acid the whole time. 

Pai really feels like an immersion into an alternate reality. Everything there is slow and peaceful and slightly melodic, and there are smoothies and fresh-made noodles served at all hours of the night, and you’re always simultaneously ten minutes away from both a 7-11 and endless dark emerald jungle.

I’d been warned before coming that there are some real characters in Pai, and I definitely met some of them. Everyone had advice for me. A man I met told me about how he’d started his own performance venue, and I began to entertain an old dream of starting a bookstore-cafe-slash-artist-retreat-performance-space. Another man told me about his own healing-arts retreat, and then I continued to see him over and over in random places; one point, he outright told me that he often changes the lives of the people he meets. The life coach I saw told me about starting her own spiritual coaching and anthropology business and advised me to consider starting my own, reminding me that I am an unlimited being and anything is possible.

My days became a slow, harmonious blend of writing in cafes in the morning, yoga in the afternoon, and live performances or open mics at night – basically my ideal daily routine. I began to see that another way of life might actually be possible. My dreams actually might not be out of reach. 

I almost wanted to drop everything and move there.

But time passed, as it always does. 

And as quickly as it began, the rush of my nascent romance began to shift and fade ever-so-slightly. I knew that I’d been in a vulnerable state when embarking upon it, and love is generally not exactly something I can take super lightly or casually, so soon I found myself overthinking and overanalyzing. When he told me that his dream girl is someone extremely chill, I knew we simply were not meant to be. (I am chill in that I generally am up for anything and don’t get too bothered by logistical errors, inconveniences, or quirks, but deep down, as anyone who’s been reading this blog may have gathered, I am just a little bit, ah, intense). Anyways, I just queued up some Chappell Roan and tried rather unsuccessfully not to think too hard about it.

Still, in Pai it’s genuinely hard not to go with the flow, and beneath everything, I felt a definite sense of peace the whole time I was there. On my second-to-last day, my new friend from San Francisco and I took a taxi tour of nearby attractions, comparing notes from our lives as we sweated by a vast white Buddha in the hot sunshine and climbed up to a waterfall and put our feet in cold rivers.

Later, we wandered across a labyrinthine bamboo bridge and gazed out at miles and miles of rice paddies that looked synthetically, impossibly green. At last we reached a hidden temple that felt like a portal to another world, and started our way back.

The White Buddha & Bamboo Bridge

That night we went to a fire show.

Fire and Rain

Paradise Bar is about a twenty minute walk outside of town through near-pitch-dark streets, and it rose up like a neon-lit apparition among the shadows when we finally arrived.

We took two puffs each of a joint right before the show began — they literally sold weed right at the bar, which is quite common in certain parts of Thailand, as it turns out — and both became so improbably high that we later jokingly wondered if the weed had been laced with something. But we both agreed that it was just extremely strong weed, and the show really was that surreal.

Anyways, coupled with that, the fire circus was probably one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen.

The Fire Circus at Paradise Bar

Beautiful dancers undulated across the stage, hurling burning batons in intricate patterns as they danced to intense trance music and performed abstract, experimental skits. The MC curated a thoroughly unsettling energy with bizarre jokes. We theorized that everyone performing definitely lived in a commune-slash-polycule. 

Things got real when a performer dropped his baton and it rolled towards an audience member, brushing against his leg and lighting his bag on fire. We watched with horror as the performer tried and failed to wrest the flames away from his possessions. But the moment the flames had been quelled, the show resumed like nothing had happened. 

Where the fuck are we? we both asked each other. 

In the Pai-hole, as the long-term transplants would say. Many people, as it turns out, come here and wind up staying much longer than planned.

Somehow the man who’d just been blasted with fire seemed totally fine and even stayed there for the rest of the show, but we both fretted over our long skirts as burning hoops wheeled towards the stars just a few feet away from us. We unpacked the strangeness of what we’d just seen on the walk back, bought 7-11 snacks, and called it a night. 

The next morning, I spent the whole day writing an essay about simulation theory in yet another adorable cafe, feeling buoyed by the joy of writing, which has been a central part of my life for so long. Writing and creating really can sometimes feel like flying to me, and I was only jolted out of my intense focus when a man who remarked on how many hours I’d been sitting in the same position.

I spotted the same man outside and told him I was working on an essay about whether we’re in a simulation. I appear in simulations to give people good advice, he said, and advised me to go seek out the sun. I then discovered that the man, an improbably giant Australian with flowing golden hair, was a twin, and I’d spoken to his brother — or doppelgänger? — inside.

As I said before: No psychedelics are needed in Pai. The experience alone more than suffices.

So in the evening, my friend and I went to watch the sunset at Two Huts, a beautiful little bar with a panoramic view of the sunset. We listened to an acoustic guitarist sing Mitski and Fleetwood Mac covers as the clouds turned pink and rain poured down over the green hills in the distance.

Everything glowed. It was one of those perfect, sublime moments where the world goes still. I always say that God or the creator or simulator whoever made all this is the best artist of all time, and the majesty of their or its or our work was on full display that night.

Sunset at Two Huts

That night, nearly all the friends I made in Pai happened to gather in Jazz House, the town’s biggest local music venue, and we all watched a truly excellent cover band helmed by a badass female vocalist rock out to nostalgic classics from Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine and 4 Non Blondes as we shouted the lyrics to our hearts’ content.

Later on, we made our way over to a trance music party at the same bar where the fire show had taken place, and hit the dance floor.

At first I was hesitant and not really feeling the music, but as the night wore on, I let one of the performers cover me with glowing body paint and started relaxing into the sound. Eventually I danced very late into the night. 

Even though part of me still always feels nervous dancing in front of others, I long ago learned that the key is to just let myself feel the feeling of discomfort and embarrassment that can well up when I dance — and lean into it, and embrace it, and just try to look as weird as I possibly can without holding back at all. I usually end up getting complimented on my dancing when I use this mental hack.

This mentality is also the key to Pai’s weirdness, I believe, and also to doing anything really well. You just can’t let your fear of others’ judgment stop you from doing things. You can’t stop yourself from acting because you’re afraid you’ll fail. You can be afraid and do things anyway. As Susan Jeffers writes, there will always be fear as long as you continue to grow, so you might as well just go do it.

Sometimes you just have to let yourself radiate. Sometimes you just have to embrace your own experience and follow your own inner rhythm. 

And sometimes you have to go to the underworld in order to emerge from it again.

Down the Rabbit Hole and Back Again

In just ten days, Pai soothed my heart and suffused me with a sense of raw, fragile, yet lush and expansive peace. I’d arrived feeling slightly shattered, and it took me into its warm, weird embrace and reminded me that there is so much beauty in the world, and that healing and spirituality can be sweet and warm, not militaristic and deprivation-based. It was weird and chaotic and full of hippie cliches, but I think it was also just about what I needed. 

It reminded me a lot of when I lived in a San Francisco art collective, spending time with similarly unusual people living similarly alternative lifestyles. I loved it, but there was a sense of chaos that suffused the place that I also could sense in Pai. 

Often and unsurprisingly, people who dive deep into hippie lifestyles are running from something, covering their inner demons with a swath of inner peace and good vibes and a healthy dose of psychedelic drugs. I also know that the healing I experienced there was surface-level. I’m sure if I’d stayed longer I would have uncovered many new layers to the place, not all of them so idyllic, and I would have also been forced to face more of the parts of myself I’d been running from.

There is no paradise on Earth. But there is a bar called Paradise deep in the jungles of northern Thailand, and every Thursday and Sunday you can go there and watch dancers throw burning batons into the air. 

You might get burned. But it is so worth it, to see that beauty and strangeness all tangled up in one strange and surreal show. 

What a wild show, this life. So full of unexpected twists and turns. It’ll put you through the ringer, and then it’ll send you an angel in the form of a small black cat curling up on your lap. It’ll have you spending twenty days in isolation and then it’ll send you new friends who you feel like you’ve known forever.

Sometimes, it takes stepping outside of the boundaries of your ordinary reality, whether that means taking a risk and putting yourself out there at an open mic or daring to ask a new friend to go to dinner after a yoga class or seeking out a new form of therapy.

Sometimes it takes protecting your time and choosing to allow yourself to follow your obsessions and intuition all the way down the rabbit hole.

Sometimes it just takes a stroke of luck, and a bit of faith, and a few black cats and tortoises to help along the way.

Performing at the open mic at Jazz House

Love is Cringe, and to Be Cringe is to Be Free

To me, Pai still feels a bit like Wonderland, a surreal place at the bottom of the rabbit hole of so many journeys. It’s a home for misfits and experimentalists and dreamers and freaks.

And honestly, I generally don’t think that alternative lifestyles are more or less sane than traditional, so-called ordinary society, which also offers its own brand of insanity.

“We have a very important role right now,” Ellie Robins writes in an essay that identifies a sea change in consciousness occurring in the mainstream right now, pulling us towards more faith and spirituality and interconnection-based mindset and away from Enlightenment-era rationalism that has dominated so much of our words. “In order to honour this expansion of consciousness that’s playing out inside each of us, we have to indulge our deepest weirdness; we have to get skilled at hearing the urgings of our instincts and subconsciouses. We each have to celebrate and elevate our specific weirdness.”

And that weirdness — and interconnectedness — was definitely on display in Pai.

Pai is falling in love, said a huge mural I often walked by on my way home. That embodied Pai’s central vibe: walking a fine line between cheesy and cringe and deeply raw and beautiful and fundamentally, heart-splittingly true. 

While we were sweating buckets in the sauna, my friend and I had discussed how we know that really, deep down, everything is love, but even saying that out loud just feels sort of instinctually cringe, like hippie shit that we should be laughing at instead of embracing. 

Why can life’s most fundamental truth feel so cringe when spoken aloud, even among people who are ostensibly very spiritual?

It’s because of fear, I think. We’re afraid of love, afraid of getting hurt, afraid of leaning too far into our earnestness and risking being burned.

But sometimes you have to allow yourself to be cringe in order to be free. Sometimes you have to dance. Sometimes you just have to take the risk, because that is the only way to fully live.

Inherent in falling in love is falling. Sometimes you simply have to take the leap down the rabbit hole. 

Sometimes you’ll crash. And sometimes you’ll land in a small cafe called Carrot on the Moon, writing essays about Otherworlds and faeryland and finally feeling a bit like yourself again. 

I definitely felt like I was emerging from Wonderland on the winding drive back, and I began to miss it the further we drove and the closer to reality we came. Just now, on the very night I left, Pai already seems like a long-past dream. Chiang Mai has a totally different feeling and it lacks Pai’s weirdly personal feel. I am not at all inspired to go out and seek out live music tonight, and I’d much rather stay inside writing here. 

But in Pai I know there’s music at Jazz House tonight. There are drunken tourists scattered in the Walking Street. There’s coconut ice cream in the roadside stands and covers playing from the roadside bars that ooze neon out onto the rain-damp pavement. 

Just beyond the river on the edge of town, there are miles of dense black jungle. 

Just beyond the edges of the mind there is a world where anything at all is possible. A place where you can actually live out your dreams and do something truly meaningful and also afford to live well. 

I’ve seen that world, caught glimpses of it late at night, heard strains of its music seeping through on the strings of old Telecaster guitars. It’s not exactly real, but real-adjacent, living in that fertile ground where imagination meets fantasy.

It’s the synergy of pure connection with another soul who’s been exactly where you are and who can show you how to get out. It’s raw inspiration igniting on a six-string. It’s dancing in the darkness to strange music. 

It never lasts. It’s not meant to. But it appears sometimes to remind us of what is possible, so we can bring sparks of it with us back into our ordinary realities. So we can illuminate the road for others who are in the shadows. So we can all find our way back home.