-
HUMILITY
Recipe for Humble Pie (some of you may know this as “eating crow”).
Ingredients:
5 cups of viscera and other inferior parts of a deer
1 frozen pie crust
Baking Instructions: Mix together in a large mixing bowl. Fold into the pie crust and bake at 350 for 1 hour. While baking, practice acts of humility. If your acts are genuine, there is no need to eat the pie. If you acted in haste and with arrogance…..DIG IN!!!!!!
Exercising humility on a regular basis was humbling in and of itself. We really had to work on this one and it challenged us. Acknowledging that we are not always right, was difficult for two “tend to be controlling” people. Putting the other before self was challenging for two “sometimes selfish” people. And, listening more than talking for two ” Chatty Cathy” teachers was excruciating some days. But, we practiced and we tried. Consequently, there was enough humble pie for both of us.
There are so many ways to live humility and act with humble intentions. It felt too big to tackle all of it, so we chose smaller pieces to work on this week. A partial definition of humility is “knowing our own limits, our strengths and weaknesses, physically, morally or otherwise.” This made every yoga class we took a humbling experience. We had to dig deep to find our balance and accept our limitations as well as our strengths with grace. Outside of yoga, we tried to accept the possibility that we weren’t always right AND admit it; we tried to listen more than we spoke and we tried to compliment each other and others often. Finding our humble selves in yoga was very positive for both of us. The rest? Not so much. We are a work in progress and will continue to work on keeping things simple, being grateful and acting with humility.
YogaBarn: WE had a love/hate relationship with this place. We loved going to a different style of yoga everyday for 9 days. The teachers were all great and a mixture of local Balinese and international yogis who have moved to Ubud. The shalas are very nice, clean and the ‘barn’ provides everything. The organic cafe was fantastic, but slow and we missed a class one day which really pissed us off. There are so many yoga shalas in Ubud, it is overwhelming. We just stuck to the YogaBarn and tried not to become part of the “scene”. And, it IS a scene for the young, bohemian yogi. All classes were full and if we were not there at least 30 minutes before a class, we did not get in. We became a little obsessive about showing up early and that got a little crazy. We had to plan travel time on the scooter in the most chaotic traffic I have ever scene (maybe equal to Bangkok in the old days.) All said and done, our yoga experience was very positive and Will is officially a true blue yogi now!!!! I am so grateful that he took every class with me! Now that we have moved on from Ubud, we are missing regular yoga class everyday and resorting to doing a practice on our own. Pretty sure Will doesn’t enjoy it as much when I am the teacher! It’s a control thing.
Ten days in Ubud was enough…it would have been torture without the yoga to keep us in our zen and balanced. The place is a traffic jam of Eat, Pray and Bohemian lovers driving scooters (that they have no business driving) up the wrong side of a narrow one way street. Everyday….all day. Not to mention the throng of tourists trying to cross roads that have no traffic lights, stop signs or crosswalks. INSANITY!!!! But, love/hate. We did a lot of exploring, staying shy of big tourist destinations. We found rice fields to stroll in at dawn and dusk. We ate at the local food places and became fans of Indonesian fare. We loved chatting with the locals and the Balinese people are some of the loveliest, kindest, and most humble humans on the earth. We adore them and would say that Bali’s best kept secret is not a place but the people who live here.
We escaped to the central mountains of this small island and we thought we might be in heaven. We passed three beautiful crater lakes, green lush tropical forest and landed at Lesong hotel in the middle of some of the most beautiful rice terraces we had seen yet. We had simple, easy hikes to waterfalls and because very few tourists actually make the effort to get out of Ubud or away from the beaches, WE WERE ALONE. Munduk was peaceful and bucolic. It was spectacular vistas and simple village life where there are no weekends. Hindu festivals, cremation and offerings dominate the daily life. We had a fun and informative cooking class at Lesong. Again, it was the fabulous people that made our 3 star hotel feel like a 5 star experience. On the way out of Munduk, we happened upon the deeply cut, steep rice terraces in Jatulawhi. We thought we had seen the best of the rice fields but these “fields of gold” appeared around a corner and we had to stop and immerse ourselves in their uniqueness and beauty. On a mission to get to the next place, we hopped on the scooter and made our way back to a new beach area. We were happy to turn in the scooter and let the taxi man do the driving. Goodbye Ubud. We might miss you!!!! We are off to Eat, PLAY and Love at the southern beaches of Bali. Bali Hai!!!!
