Walkabout 2011 Updates
To balance BEing with DOing. To see and receive each and every moment and experience as a gift, not a skill or a task. To see that gifts are all around us, starting from the air that we breathe and the life-force of our souls.
January - April
Love and Charity begins at home. And so it was for my 2011 roadtrip, which I call my Walkabout to share Love, Peace and Joy.
In the first four months of the year, I’ve received incredible gifts from people –friends and strangers in my own home country
I had gone to visit & “pai nien” with friends who are newlyweds and others who are starting their young families. This is the first time I’ve been to their new homes as I’ve been abroad for the past few Chinese New Years.
I’ve also been blessed with new experiences including “work experience” at a friend’s after school day-care and tuition centre in Merlimau, a small town in the state of Malacca.
Then spent an enjoy clowning, literally, with at least 30 other clowns in a street parade for the Chingay festival in Johor Bahru, Malaysia’s southern gate. The Chingay street parade showcases cultural performances and takes place annually in Penang, Johor Bahru and Singapore.
Next, I was in more than 30 days of silent retreat in Singapore…quality time with my Self and the Divine in prayer and meditation. In which everything I had was emptied and let go of. So much so that post-retreat, I feel like a new-born babe, literally given new life, but needing to need anew how to walk and talk.
It’s like being reborn, but still retaining my past memories. My options today: to live this new life in all its fullness and abundance; or to hang on to the past.
I choose fullness and abundance, and am filled with gratitude for the love, peace and joy that I have received and now share with myself and others
From Singapore, slowly I made my way back north. Starting with a visit and tour of Majodi, a retreat centre in JB, as a potential venue for me to lead and present retreats and workshops. Then, back to Malacca city to meet and welcome Alexander, my friend, Aloha’s 5-day-old baby son.
And then back in KL, my former university flatmates and I had a sleepover, catching up on where we are today, 10 years since graduation.
In the next few days, I caught up with friends, companions on a journey from the days when I volunteered at a home for troubled teenage girls, Good Shepherd Welfare centre, and fellow pastoral carers at Assunta Hospital
I joined my parents one weekend on a short trip to Sekinchan to check up a village resort and enjoy a delicious seafood lunch at the fishing village.
I also caught up with former yoga students and have become good friends and presented a yoga class at one of them homes in Nilai, Negeri Sembilan.
