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Finding well-being through travel and books. |
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Hello and welcome! I have two great passions in life. The first one is travel. After a series of life-changing events, my husband and I decided to spend the kids’ inheritance and see as much of the world as possible (I’m still bitter about Damascus). Our bible? A Thousand Places to See Before You Die. Please join us on our adventures seeing new places, meeting fascinating people and trying new, exciting, and sometimes just plain weird, food. My second great passion is books. Reading expands my interior world in the same way travel expands my external one. And, books are a great way to armchair travel - not only through distance but through time as well. My tastes are eclectic, so we’ll be looking at a wide range of writing in a possibly haphazard fashion. Come along for the ride! My best, Kirsten ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| One of the best parts of my trip to Ecuador was a visit to Mindo. The town is located about 79 km northwest of Quito in one of the richest areas of the planet in terms of biodiversity with over 350 species of birds and over two dozen species of butterflies. And it was the butterflies that really entranced me when we visited the Mariposas de Mindo, the Butterfly Garden. This is the largest butterfly farm in Ecuador and you can get up close and personal with hundreds of butterflies. Twenty-five species, all local ones occurring in the surrounding cloud forest, are bred here including the Morpho granadensis, the Brown owl eye and the Heleconius sara. A guide took us through a room where we could see the butterflies in all four stages of their lifecycle: egg, caterpillar, pupa and finally the adult butterfly. Pupae of all the species are hung up in rows outside the display room. The adult butterflies emerge from here and are then transferred to the flying area. The cocoons mimic many forms such as leaves and twigs to camouflage themselves. We were let loose to wander around the flying area, an enclosure filled with hundreds of the beautiful creatures. There were a number of plates filled with overripe bananas scattered around the garden. A little dab of banana on a finger, would lure a butterfly to come and hand-feed. The Butterfly Garden raises thousands of butterflies every year and, as many of these species are endangered, most are put back into the wild as part of the centre’s conservation program. After wandering around the garden for a while, I was drawn back to the rows and rows of cocoons waiting to hatch. This is a superficial pause in the life cycle of the butterfly. On the surface, the insect has withdrawn from the world, apart and yet still vulnerable. But underneath, profound metabolic change is taking place. It occurred to me, as I stood before them, that we need the same stage as humans in order to effect any significant changes in our lives. Read the rest and see the photos here  |
| It’s no secret that these days I’ve been far more likely to be found in a state of mindlessness, rather than mindfulness, overcome with the administrivia of everyday life and occasionally missing the big picture altogether. So, I was looking forward to David Cain’s talk “Creating a Life of Well-being” with considerable interest. David is a huge proponent of better living through mindfulness and he has just released a wonderful e-book called .You Are Here, A Modern Person’s Guide to Living in the Present David led off by differentiating between “happiness” and “well-being”. We often say that we want to be happy (an emotion) but what we really want is to experience well-being (a state of being). According to David, to experience well-being, a person needs to do several things: (1) she needs to have a sense of individual vitality, (2) she needs to engage in activities that are meaningful to her, (3) she needs to have a sense of independence and purpose, and (4) she needs to have a stock of internal resources that will give her the resilience to cope with things that do not go according to plan. Well-being is arguably the ultimate goal of human endeavor. Experiencing well-being means experiencing an excellent life—serene, useful, and worth living. You can test your current state of well-being here .Learning to be in the present moment (mindfulness) is generally recognized as one of the key requirements for achieving a state of well-being. Mindfulness is often equated with meditation. While meditation is certainly one way to achieve mindfulness it is by no means limited to it. I like Jon Kavat-Zin’s definition: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. Read the rest of the blog post here |
| As I mentioned in my last post, the theme of this particular Chautauqua was Happiness and Freedom. Like many other people in the western world who have all of their basic needs met (food, clothing, shelter), I have the luxury of worrying about how happy (or not) I am. I became so interested in it, in fact, that a number of years ago I became fascinated with the Positive Psychology movement and returned to graduate school to do a masters in psychology. “The field [of Positive Psychology] is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.” Positive Psychology Centre . The talks of each of the three presenters during the Chautauqua were fundamentally based on the research in Positive Psychology. Cheryl Reed gave a presentation on happiness based largely on the work of Marci Shimoff* , Sonja Lyubomirsky**, and the Sedona Method. Our experience of happiness can be broken down into three areas. Fifty percent of our ability to be happy is based on genetics, our fundamental make-up. Ten percent is governed by external events—whether we have enough food, adequate shelter, clothing, money, a job and so on. However, forty percent is entirely within our own hands. It is governed by our interior world—our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Even just tweaking this forty percent slightly can make an enormous difference in the level of happiness we experience. Read the rest here . |
| Two weeks ago, I was in Ecuador to attend a Chautauqua hosted by Cheryl Reed of Above the Clouds Retreats (insert hyperlink). The Chautauqua was an adult education movement that was popular in North America during the 19th century. The purpose was, and still is, to encourage learning through lectures, music, culture, events and storytelling. The theme of this particular Chautauqua was to explore happiness and freedom, and to learn about a small part of Ecuador. I was very excited about the week-long event, as David Cain (insert hyperlink), a blogger whose posts I read faithfully, would be presenting, as would the inestimable J. D. Roth (insert hyperlink). Our group spent the first night in Quito, where I discovered that being at nearly 10,000 feet of altitude was not exactly my favourite place to be, then we left the next morning to head for our retreat headquarters, the El Encanto resort in the cloud forest. On the way, we stopped just outside of Quito at the Mitad del Mundo (the Middle of the World) where, by 500 BCE, the ancient Quechua people had already figured out that the Earth was a sphere and therefore must have a dividing line in the middle. They named this central line, as determined by the equinoxes (equal day and night), Inti (sun) Nan (path). Over 2,200 years later, in 1735, a French Geodesic Mission set out for Quito to pinpoint the location. The Mission’s expedition lasted for nine years and succeeded in obtaining a fairly accurate measurement of the equator as determined by modern military GPS, and also in naming Ecuador (French for equator). Ironically, the French could have saved themselves a lot of time and money by just asking the Quechua, whose observations of the sun’s path gave a more accurate reading than the French instrumentation. Perhaps if we get out from behind our equipment and use our senses to actually observe the world around us we end up with a better idea of reality. Read the rest here |
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