Floating Bungalows

Notes on liberating my wild self through inner child work, written in a floating house on a lake in Khao Sok National Park, Thailand

From August 2024.

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Tonight I am staying on a floating bungalow on a lake in southern Thailand. We sway gently from side to side. Limestone cliffs tower in the distance, fringed with soft leaves and peppered with leaping monkeys and sleeping birds, and I am finally changing my life.

I float on the water and I allow myself to float through the changes that are softly weaving their ways through me. The night feels gentle, like pale fog. 

I go to open a blank document and suddenly, randomly, up pops an essay I wrote years ago. It describes a day I spent in Berlin following my intuition, which led me to experience countless synchronicities.

I remember, once again, that I’ve always known everything I needed to know. But I’ve largely failed to practice the knowledge I had. I’ve avoided really trusting it and putting it into action, and that was the missing link.

My head knew, but my body didn’t, and I was treating my body like it didn’t matter at all and wondering why I wasn’t feeling aligned with the great source I could visualize so clearly in my head but never could actually feel.

These days it seems like I feel everything.

*

To get to these bungalows, my mom and I took a ferry from the island of Koh Samui to a van to a hotel to another van to a boat.

To get to Thailand at all and to be here at this particular time, a million different things had to happen. To arrive here on Earth, infinite factors had to align.

And yet here we are. You are reading these words, which I am writing now. What are the odds? Impossible.

And yet.

*

On Koh Samui, my mom and I spent a few days at a wellness resort — a beautiful, shady jungle of an oasis that cascaded down a tall hill towards the sea. I drank lime water and tangy juices early in the morning. I downed supplements and went to the steam room and lay in long yoga stretches and practiced my new habits, which include waking up early and meditating before sleep.

During a Chinese medicine session, a doctor looked at my tongue told me I had all the symptoms of depression even though I was no longer feeling depressed. She advised me to address this by doing daily pranayama as she poked little acupuncture needles up and down my spine.

Another masseuse pushed into all 107 of my energy points until they blazed with pain beneath his fingers.

A Reiki healer told me to stare at a candle flame for ten minutes a day until it was all I saw and nothing else. Every single person I met told me I needed to take better care of my body.

I also spoke to an ex-monk-turned-coach/advisor who told me that he was proud of me for being brave enough to be on this journey of really looking deeply into myself. He also told me that I had to learn to let myself feel, truly, truly, truly.

Everyone is telling me this over and over so it must be true. Sleep well, eat well, and let yourself feel. This whole trip has been just as much of an internal journey ask an external one, and the biggest thing I have learned is that I am so deeply sensitive — I feel everything — and I must create space for the emotions to make themselves manifest.

I must not judge myself for feeling as I have all my life. I must also not let the emotions overtake me so that I fall into self-pity or self-hate, both boxes which I have spent so much of my life trapped inside.

It is a dance.

With my poetry book, Prisms

*

I’ve always been plagued by this feeling that I should be quiet, that I shouldn’t be taking up space, that I’m bothering people somehow by existing or sharing my truth. That has extended to the way I treat myself. I tend to shut down my own emotions, to negate my experiences, to swallow my own words.

During the inner child meditation, I realized suddenly that for a long time, I’ve been shutting down and suppressing my creativity, too. I’ve been blocking off whole sides of myself out of fear of showing who I really am.

I was so different from the other kids. I’m not saying this to show off but it’s just true, I was a bit of a writing prodigy as a child and was essentially born with the ability to write almost as well as I do now.

During the inner child meditation I suddenly saw legions of wildness in me that I’d tampered down over the years. I saw wildness and sensitivity and fury and brilliance, all quieted, all shooed away, all buried deep within me.

Shutting myself down has meant shutting down my real self, my divine self, and my wild self. It has meant blocking out the parts of me with huge ideas and the means and will and connection to manifest them in the world. These are the parts that cannot help but write and write because they are burning from the inside out with inspiration and emotion and songs and stories channeled from a source that is so much bigger than my own small mind.

For so long I’ve neglected and negated myself. I’ve allowed my inner critic to run the show, truly believing its cruel words.

But ever since I changed that pattern, it’s felt like the whole world has opened up. The doors of perception once looked like iron gates but now they resemble butterflies’ wings. I float on rhyme into the future, knowing that winds and storms will come as they always come.

This time I am not resisting the tidal waves of emotion and magic that flow through me and sometimes burn like lightning and sometimes, when I allow them to overtake me, show themselves to be nothing more than gentle clouds that only looked like storms when I was running from them.

Now I am not running. Now I look at the pinpricks of pain and the sparks of magic through me. I stare them in the eyes.

I don’t sink into them. I don’t fly away into the ether of distraction.

This time, like this floating bungalow, and like this earth sailing through space — connected to a million threads of gravity and chance and energy and infinite possibility — I breathe. I trust.

And I float.