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Blessings on Ubud Holistic

SarahAlderson

November 7, 2010

I’m having a ceremony for the opening of the clinic, my friend Meg tells me.

She is opening Ubud’s first proper colonic clinic. (I’m not sure what proper means? That they have EU certified hoses or something?)

I’ve no idea what it will involve she says, but please come.

You will have to give a pig a colonic and then they’ll sacrifice the pig and you’ll have to drink the poo,’ I say. Or something equally as mature.

Meg tells me to wear a sarong.

I wear the length of ikat I’ve bought to turn into cushions. I get three Balinese people telling me how beautiful I am. I made the right choice on upholstery I think happily.

The clinic is beautiful. In each of the bathrooms there are instructions on why and how to squat and poo. It’s actually a fascinating read and I vow to squat more.

The offerings of fruit are piled high in the reception area.

‘When can I eat it?’ Alula asks.

‘Not yet,’ I whisper.

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ I say, ‘the priest dude is still chanting. And it would be rude to steal from the fairies.’

‘The fairies?’

‘Yes,’ I say. It’s easier calling the spirits fairies because this is a frame of reference she can understand and after the whole cremation and ginormous horse episode I’ve learnt my lesson.

‘The naughty fairies get this pile of offerings with all the chicken feet in it,’ I say pointing at the incense strewn, chicken foot offering.

‘Why?’

‘Because naughty fairies like yucky food.’

‘And the good fairies get all of the yummy food?’

‘Yes exactly. But you get no food until the priest has done his bit.’

We have rice and water sprinkled on us and pasted to our heads. Alula starts eating the rice off her head.

I’m slightly disappointed that there is no actual blessing of the colonic machine. And no pig.

Dealing and Healing

SarahAlderson

1 comment

November 6, 2010

It’s amazing. You think you can travel 8000 miles and never have to deal with the old shit again.

But guess what folks, turns out you do. Turns out you could move to a whole new galaxy a million light years away and that shit would still find you. You’d still be dealing.

Luckily I’m living in Ubud, land of the crazy, land of the Tarot and the theta healer and the ecstatic dancer where you’re only a phone call or a green juice order away from someone who can heal you.

This is a list of the things I have been told to do in order to overcome the obstacle flying at me from 8,000 miles away.

Cleanse (but of course)
Attend laughing yoga
Be authentic
Surrender
Chant ‘I am sorry. Forgive me. Thank you. I love you ’ until the person who was mean has a change of heart.
Read Eckhart Tolle’s chapter on the pain body and ego. Oh, and live in the now.
Meditate

So in the spirit of trying things I started a cleanse. Even bought myself a juicer. Told self I was only going to drink fresh juice and water for a week. Lasted three hours before I ate a sandwich with mozzarella and tomato.

Was going to attend Laughing Yoga. Ended up sleeping instead. Might go next week because for sure there’s a brilliant blog post in that.

Contemplating authenticity but the only thing I have concluded is I hate the word and that people who use it are smug, self-righteous fools. Or people who attend Landmark Forum events.

Surrender. Same as succumb. I’m not a natural surrenderer. This I have learnt. The only thing I’m surrendering to is the bottle of Absolut in the freezer.

Tried chanting. Managed five minutes of it but the whole time I was wondering who I was supposed to be telling I loved and who I was supposed to be apologizing to. I am going to keep going on this because apparently a whole ward of criminally insane people got cured when one dude started chanting this in the room next door. So I figure it’s worth a shot, as a control experiment if nothing else. Because not to cast doubt on its ‘authenticity’ I’m not sure I totally believe it works.

Read Eckhart. Trying to live in now. Involves not thinking which is ok because having dropped caffeine from my diet I’m pretty much a walking zombie and thinking with any kind of clarity is off the menu.

Meditate. I’ve already charted my successes with meditating. At the moment my meditations go like this:

One breath two breath urgh how much longer three breath I’m hungry but there’s no food I really want to buy a puppy no I really want to buy furniture what would look good on the balcony so tricky hmmmmm ooooh woops four breath no I’ve done that ok start again one breath no if I start again it’ll take me forever to get to twenty let’s start at five. Is that cheating? I’m going to go into town and check the dvd store today because I really want to see if Mad Men 4 has made it yet. So miss Donald Draper. Focus sarah focus try to focus on light and energy travelling through your body….nope. not happening. Try to imagine laser death rays travelling eight thousand miles. NO. remember Eckhart. I forgive. Thank you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you. Who – who am I talking to? Who do I love? Who do I forgive? I am going insane. I am becoming one of those bug eyed yogis who inhabits Ubud wearing stretchy leggings and drinking only reverse osmosis water. Next stop laughing yoga. Eighteen breath. Nineteen breath. Bored.

It’s funny because in my ‘want to do the same?’ page I talk about thinking that if you up sticks and move abroad you’ll suddenly become rich, successful, beautiful, thin and spiritually enlightened. I couldn’t even manage the thin. And that was in India.

Let me be a warning to you.

You can’t run away from what’s in you. Remember that before you book a flight. But also if you do want to face up to it then Bali’s the place to do it.

stick it up your bunghole

SarahAlderson

8 comments

November 2, 2010

Our lovely housemate who is staying a few weeks comes into the kitchen one morning and asks:

‘What time does Bintang open?’ (Bintang being the local supermarket on a par with Lidl).

‘8 I think,’ John says, ‘But if you need anything for breakfast just help yourself.’

‘I need butt lube,’ she says.

‘Right,’ says John beating a hasty retreat.

‘They sell butt lube in Bintang?’ I ask.

‘Well vegetable margarine,’ she says.

‘You use vegetable margarine? Urgh.’ I say.

‘It’s better for you than petroleum based gels,’ she says.

I nod silently because there’s one thing that our housemate knows and that is butts and putting things inside them.

She is a world-renowned colonic irrigator.

And she’s trying to get me to cleanse and irrigate. And by cleanse we mean raw juice 3 times a day and by irrigate we mean a hose stuck up my bum.

Ubud is the kind of place where people accost her on the street and start begging her for appointments and I just stand there wondering how embarrassing that must be having a stranger who’s on intimate terms with your anus stand and chat to you whilst the traffic honks. But it would seem that it’s only me who has such issues and who’s squeamish about having vegetable margarine slathered on my butt and a tube pushed up there. It seems that most of the rest of Ubud wash out their butts as often as I wash my hands.

Everyone tells me it’s really good. That you drop eight pounds in half an hour. That you feel like a light being once it’s over. And really I must, must, must try it.

Yeah.

Isn’t that the same feeling you get after drinking 10 shots of tequila? Apart from maybe the eight pounds.

And then how would I be able to spread flora on my toast and sit down to breakfast with my housemate ever again?

Last time I discuss cremation and death with a 4 year old

SarahAlderson

1 comment

October 29, 2010

Alula and I drive past a fifty foot high horse and Alula asks:

What’s the horse for?

– The King died.

A real King?

– Yes. He died and they’re having a cremation.

What’s a cremation?

– It’s something they do when people die.

So will they take him to the not dead doctors and make him better? Will they make him alive again?

– Errrr kind of

What do they do to the horse?

– They burn the horse.

And the King is in the horse?

– Yes.

But if they burn the horse won’t he die?

– He’s kind of already dead. He died two months ago. (I don’t mention the digging up of his body by his relatives after two months which is how long it’s taken to prepare for this event next Tuesday).

But what happens to him?

– (pause) The horse takes him to heaven

But you just said they burn the horse.

– Errr. That’s after.

And will he come back after that?

– Yeah, it’s called reincarnation.

What’s re instarvation?

– It’s when you die and come back as somebody else. Your soul transfers into a new body. Kind of.

What does soul transfer into a new body mean?

– Err. It’s kind of like. Well – Err. Oooh. oooh look a cloud. Shall we sing a song? Ten green bottles…

But –

– Look a giant Barbie –

Embracing a clean free future

SarahAlderson

1 comment

October 29, 2010

It was when I had just finished school and was taking a year out to work and to go travelling, except I had no work so I joined this posh temp agency in Clapham who found posh sounding girls like me and matched them with even posher, rich people who needed people to walk their dogs, open their post, look after their hamsters and occasionally their children.

The first job I had was nannying two gorgeous little boys in Hampstead Heath. They had to be dressed in colour co-ordinating clothes every day. I was more interested in their uncle than in their clothes. Still I did a good job. The boys loved me, the uncle definitely liked me.

Then I got offered another job and I said yes, because there was nothing else on the horizon. And it turned out the job was cleaning.

I’ll say that again. It turned out the job was cleaning.

If you know me you’ll know that’s funny.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know how funny.

It gets better. It turns out that the job was not just cleaning a four bed house in Esher but that the job was for the Daily Mail who were running a piece on how much a housewife was worth. So they’d brought in a cleaner, housekeeper, cook, chauffeur and nanny to replace the miserable lady of the house, to illustrate that a housewife’s value was roughly $895,409 a year. Or something.

So Daily Mail.

So there I am, eighteen years old, in my ripped jeans, staring at a mop thinking WTF am I supposed to do with this thing? But I give it a go because I’m being paid something like £7.50 an hour and surely it can’t be that hard?

By the end of the week I’ve mastered hovering and dusting. Mastered in the same way I’ve mastered mothering and Indonesian and meditating and cooking.

The funny thing is I guess as a teenager you never think ahead that much – never really run though things like consequences – so I never thought ahead to the fact that on Monday when my job was finished it was going to be analysed in the Daily Mail and my performance judged by the entire population of middle England.

So Monday dawns and there I am in black and white pixilated fuzziness, but clearly still me, arms slung across chest, half scowl on my face, clearly more worried about how I looked than the fact that my cleaning ability was about to be dissed.

Which is was. The housewife in question spent 300 words yapping about the amazing cook and chauffeur and nanny and then 30 words dismissing the cleaner who she felt wasn’t up to scratch. A waste of money.

That’s what I was. A waste of money. That’s what all Tory voting, daily hate reading, asylum loathing housewives would now be thinking of me. (Funnily enough about ten years later a Daily Mail reader would call me ‘a monkey in a room with a pen’ – reading about a refugee integration programme I’d set up which the Daily Hate, being the Daily Hate was obviously outraged about – refugees clearly being illegal benefit scroungers who deserved to be held in prison and then sent home to be tortured but I digress…)

I am thinking about this story (of me being outed in public as a rubbish cleaner) as I come up the stairs of my house in Bali. I am thinking about it as I notice the freshly made beds and the folded laundry and the clean, mopped bathroom floor. And I’m still thinking about it as Kadek comes in with my cup of tea.

I am a rubbish cleaner. I can live with this. I embrace my inner teenager, who still wears ripped jeans (though now cut offs), and converse, and still folds her arms over her chest when confronted with the unpleasant and who still scowls at anything which is lame.

I embrace Kadek.

Alula and her new boyfriend

SarahAlderson

no comments

October 28, 2010

I have an idea

Come on you know you want to

Alula: Let’s play princesses Dil: I don’t want to

If I look all pretty will he want to then?

Dil: No I already told you. I’ve spent 4 hours doing everything you’ve told me to and now I’ve had enough

Lula: Oh come on...we can do dancing and jazz hands. Dil: Girls are so fricking annoyin

Dil: Ok, ok, I give up Alula: yayyyyy

My brother’s book

SarahAlderson

no comments

October 26, 2010

Available from Amazon and WHSmiths

So, so, so proud of my brother whose first book came out this week. He opened the Chester Literary Festival.

Buy it!

Crazy cat lady, Louis de Bernieres and I

SarahAlderson

3 comments

October 21, 2010

Crazy cat lady spots me as I stand next to the ice cream in Bintang (think local supermarket on a par with Lidl). I am talking to my friend who I’ve also just run into when I see her heading towards me at eleven o’clock. And I think about ducking but I’m cornered between a trolley and the freezer.

Crazy cat lady always wears the same Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany’s black dress and she has her hair cut into a bob which she must blowdry though heaven knows how she has the wattage in her house – it must fuse the whole of Ubud every time. Anyway, her hair makes it look like Darth Vadar is coming towards me. And she always, always wears sunglasses so large you could eat your dinner off one lens and your dessert off the other. She wears them come rain or shine, indoors and outdoors. I have never seen her eyes. Maybe if you ripped the glasses off lots of wires and red lights would come spilling out of her eye sockets and little puffs of smoke would escape from her mouth and ears as her robot body shut down. Now there’s a thought.

The reason I call her crazy cat lady and not say, Darth Vadar or Robot Holly Gofrightly, will soon become apparent, but let me first tell you a little story. Last week I volunteered at a literary lunch at the four seasons where Louis de Bernieres gave readings from his new book and talked about…well he talked a lot about women actually. During the Q&A session, I watched crazy cat lady stand up (wearing her sunglasses) and asked him for his recipe for catfood. She didn’t ask him about how long it takes him to write a book or whether he plays the mandolin or whether he got to meet Pen Cruz. She didn’t ask him about the political background to his books or whether he visits countries he writes about. No she asked Louis de Bernieres for his cat food recipe. I think I need say no more.

So she corners me and I see my friend smirking at me. And the first thing crazy cat lady says is, ‘Have you decided on getting a cat yet?’

My face freezes into a rictus of a smile. ‘hahahhahaahaha’ I say hoping this answer will suffice.

It will not.

‘Because I have 46 cats needing homes.’

‘hahahhahhaahahahahahaha.’

‘They’ve had all their jabs.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’m not really a cat person. Hahahahahahahhaa’

‘DON”T GET A PUPPY,’ she practically roars at me.

I cringe back against the ice cream freezer. Who said anything about puppies? Maybe I used that excuse last time when she was sat next to me at the 4 seasons and there was no escape except into the magically refilling wine glass before me.

I look at my friend and for a perverse moment I am tempted to tell crazy cat lady that said friend just turfed a mewling stray baby kitten out of her house and into the rice paddy because it crapped on her bed. That might take the spotlight off of me and my failure to adopt half the discarded cats of Bali.

There could be quite literally a cat fight in the building. I picture it. I picture ccl hissing and swiping in outrage and my friend hating on me for dumping her in it. I picture myself stepping in and ripping off the sunglasses. And maybe it’s a wig I think as I ponder the fact it never, ever moves like normal hair should. That could come off too.

Obviously I keep my mouth shut because I’m not the crazy one in this situation.

You couldn’t make this up

SarahAlderson

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October 18, 2010

The girl is tap tap tapping her leg whilst the man is reading out his graphic sex scene involving bobbing breasts and excited members. I am biting down on my bottom lip trying so hard not to laugh that I think I might give myself an oral piercing.

We are in a workshop on writing for young adults. I’m just the volunteer on the door but this is far more entertainment than I bargained for. I am kind of qualified for the workshop because I write young adult fiction. I’ve even written a sex scene – though my agent made me take it out of my last book because apparently it’s all about the denial these days. Damn Edward Cullen.

The poor girl tapping her foot has a curtain of hair cascading in front of her face emo style. During the introductions she announced that she wanted to kill herself a few years before and is now seeking her purpose. Everyone claps enthusiastically.

She is sitting next to a girl in a preppy Indonesian school uniform. She must be about sixteen but she looks about six , with her shiny shoes and shiny hair complete with red ribbon.

The workshop leader asks if she would like to read aloud what she’s just written. She shakes her head terrified and mute. I wonder if she’s written some hard core torture porn.

The girl next to her – an Australian who teaches sexuality through yoga – happily volunteers to read aloud what she has written.

This is so much fun I’m thinking as I watch the people in the room read out their work, alternatively squirm, give academic nods, tap their feet and look nonplussed. There are lots of ‘compelling’s afterwards and mutterings of ‘so brave.’

Then an Indonesian man in his fifties, a biology teacher, reads aloud a story he has written about a girl wondering if the boy she loves who is a science nerd will be good in bed. At least I think it’s about that. It’s kind of hard to tell. After he has finished he asks if it is ok to fictionalize yourself.

The man next to him spends fifteen minutes introducing himself but all I hear are the words peace and love. Peace and love. Peace and love. There is so much peace and love inside him he is about to erupt with it. I glance around for the Kleenex incase he actually does.

There are some amazing writers in the group too – people who write something in five minutes which I end up thinking about for days after. Writers that make me wonder how on earth I got a publishing deal whilst these people didn’t.

It also reveals to me the chasm of cultural difference between the Balinese and Westerners when it comes to talking about sex and swearing (things I do all the time). We have no modesty on our side of the fence. Having said that the writing that is shared is from our side of the fence is, for the most part, phenomenal.

The whole workshop has sparked an idea for my next novel. A year in Ubud. Kind of like a year in Provence Jilly Cooper style. Because truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Every day I’m filling up whole notepads with hilarious things overheard in cafes and bars and on the school run. Yesterday I had a conversation with a new friend who drinks her own wee. The day before I had a conversation with my other friend about gravitational systems for colonic irrigation.

I’m telling you, you couldn’t make this shit up.