No Keys

For the first time since I was 16 years old, I have found myself with no keys. No house key, no car key, no mail key, no work key. It was strange taking my last key off my keychain after I sold my car and moved out of my apartment in Denver and was left with just an empty keychain. I was also left with a bit of an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, but my reassurance is knowing that this means a type of freedom that I have never experienced. I am truly a nomad now (at least for a while) and just about every emotion is running through my body – fear, excitement, anticipation, sadness, appreciation, overwhelment, loneliness…you name it. But I know that I must answer this calling that has been inside of me since the moment I stepped off the plane on my first trip outside the United States six years ago when I was 27. And there seems to be no better time than the present to do it – I have nothing really tying me to Denver any longer, no house, no children, no career, no debt. And the calling has become so strong in the past year that I have no choice but to answer.

It took almost an entire year of preparation to get to this point. I have been wanting to do some major travel for years but couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work financially. And I mean more than just spending a few weeks here or a month or two there. I want to truly experience different cultures and live among the people of faraway and developing countries. To learn more about their daily lives, who they are and why it is so enticing for us westerners to visit these faraway places. I have toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps since my divorce four years ago, but have always had reservations because you don’t have much control over where you are placed and you are committed for two and a half years. I happened to be talking about my desires to travel with a friend that I was doing some private yoga lessons with and she mentioned that she spent some time in Costa Rica doing TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) and highly recommended it. I began doing research and found several programs that cost around $1500-$2000 to get certified, but once you have the certificate you can teach all over the world. Perfect! A way to make money while travelling, and I already know that I love to teach!

I began considering where I’d want to do the training and begin teaching and considered Costa Rica as well as several other Central and South American countries. But ever since I did my yoga teacher training in India in 2014, I have been feeling something pulling me back to India. India unfortunately wasn’t an option because English is already so widespread that the only opportunities are volunteer jobs. But Thailand isn’t far from India and I’ve heard great things about Thailand. Not to mention it’s incredibly cheap to travel around Thailand and India once you’re there.

I really wasn’t sure where to begin with researching which TEFL program to do. One day I was surfing the net and came across a program in Thailand called UniTEFL. They have a special program called GoTEFL that partially subsidizes the cost of the training through private schools. The reason the training is partially subsidized is because the schools are located in more rural locations, so in exchange for being a bit more flexible with where you will be living (I still don’t know where I am going to be living), they pay for more than half of the training costs. I knew this was the program for me because I really didn’t have any desire to live in a large city like Bangkok or Chiang Mai anyway; I feel I will experience so much more of the true culture being away from the touristy areas. And why not save myself some cash in the process?!

After interviewing and being accepted into the program, I began my planning. First order of business, the school year that I applied for doesn’t begin until November 2016 and the training begins in late September, but the lease on my apartment ended in June. I needed to find a place to go in the interim, not to mention I didn’t really want to wait that long to begin my travels. I considered going to India, but our summer is their monsoon season which can be quite miserable and dangerous (I actually just read about several people getting hurt and killed in the monsoons in India). After researching yoga trade jobs (teaching yoga in exchange for room and board), I came across an opportunity to teach at Bali Silent Retreat. I would spend a month with my mom in Arizona before leaving the country, teach at the silent retreat for six weeks beginning in mid-July, and end my stay in Bali with two weeks in the yoga mecca, Ubud before heading to Thailand for my TEFL training. I was even able to serendipitously squeeze in a 10-day Vipassana meditation course in Thailand before the TEFL training starts, which is something I’ve been wanting to experience for a of couple years. After my year in Thailand I hope to spend 6-8 months in India studying and teaching yoga.

Everything was falling into place so easily that I knew I was on the right path. The months ahead were filled with getting all of the logistics figured out; selling all of my belongings (holy crap that was a job in itself), getting visas in order with the right timing, buying the supplies that I needed to live the life of a nomad for the next two years and of course spending time with my loved ones and saying my goodbyes. It felt like it was just a dream that I was working toward that would never really happen. But here I am, three weeks into my stay at Bali Silent Retreat and it’s REALLY happening…