More to Spain than the Plain

More to Spain than the Plain

I went to Spain for a holiday for a week to ten days and arrived back in the U.K. more than six months later.  It surprises me but in that time I feel like I learnt more than in the previous six years and it was the longest I’ve ever been away from home beating hands down the six weeks I was away to walk and celebrate completing the Camino de Santiago in 2009.  I’ve bored everyone I’ve met since then  with those adventures, now I get to start over with new stories.  The first night arriving in Nerja from Malaga Airport, I walked straight from this tourist town to a little village called Maro that has two beaches closeby, an easily accessible one with everything you might expect at the height of summer like a small bar and sun loungers but this was the middle of winter, coming into the spring months of March and April, the other beach is Caleta Playa and officially a nudist beach, is wild and untamed, no facilities at all and sits at the bottom of some irregularly spaced concrete steps after you’ve already walked down a fairly rustic path for about ten to fifteen minutes from the centre of the village.

I had planned to stay with a friend who was living at and looking after the Yoga / Reiki / Massage centre at the top of the hill but by the time I arrived he had already had to suffer the combined attentions of the fleas of the 20 plus cats, two dogs and two Black pot bellied pigs and the thought of staying in the house was too much for me, so I took directions from him and made my way down to the beach.  I got it wrong, as usual and ended up in a farmers field while someone was cleaning their teeth and getting ready to turn in for the night.  Retracing my steps I finally made it down the concrete ones and onto the sand of Caleta well after 10pm because I was later getting to see my friend than I had planned, later catching buses and later doing everything because it was all new to me and I get lost easily everywhere, even at home, so it was pitch black and with a warning having been given that I might not know who or what to expect and as I had no choice it was easy to just walk over to the fire that was lit at the far end of the beach, to get over the fears and doubts and just go.

I was thinking to myself as I approached, who would be sat around such a fire at this hour and what might they think that I’m just walking up to them in the dark a complete stranger.  I immediately got on with and made friends with the four or five young people from different countries that were sitting there, some singing, playing music on guitar, or smoking and enjoying the night, we chatted and i stayed up until the next morning speaking to one of them, an incredibly enthusiastic entrepreneurial spirit called Franz from Germany with so many creative ideas, I learnt an awful lot just in the next few days about what you can make with spring water, and raw ingredients from the super markets, such as oat milk from oats.

So I resolved to stay here on the beach and the first week consisted of regular two hour plus excursions to the tourist town of Nerja with my friend from the Yoga Centre Sean, to walk from greengrocers to biological (ecological / organic) shop via the front doors of a couple of his ‘grandmas’ houses where homegrown veg and fruit was for sale, they even had scales and would weigh everything right then and there for you, I ate only raw fruits and vegetables and felt amazing although very full sometimes and we would occasionally take a trip to a raw vegan picnic called a potluck, where everyone would bring a dish or desert, in my case a badly cut fresh Mango and the food was so healthy, rich, tasty and interesting and most of all beautiful, I have images on Google that have received thousands of views, there was one particularly generous host who shared some homemade ice cream made from a special fruit from one tree in her garden and I swear it tasted like butterscotch Angel Delight, it was unreal how this fruit tasted, she even showed me around her plot and I was treated as if I had known them all for years.  After that what money I had went on rebounding from such a good feeling to being a tourist for a week or two, taking myself into town to the first bakery and trying out all the cakes they sold, into the bars in the village and ordering a cana (small draft beer) and tapas (as meaty or fishy) as I could get hold of in order to satiate my bodies need for what it was used to and a cafe for Churros and Chocolate.  Churros are a donut mixture, squeezed through a machine until they come out shaped like something from a play doh mould, cooked and then sugared usually then served with melted, VERY HOT!  Chocolate to dip them in, so you have been warned, whilst there I saw two people I recognised from the U.K. walk by what a surprise!

Three weeks or so have passed and I don’t want to but I’m addicted to paying for things and without any more money I figure it’s time to go home.  A group hug on the beach with my two close friends, a German couple I really hope to see again one day soon, filled me with such a feeling of energy I could literally feel it flowing between us and made it harder than even a normal goodbye, something I have always disliked.  But I have to go and return to England to earn some money so that I can go  back out to Spain to provide Spiritual Energy Healing to a friend of the friend whose idea it was for me to go out there in the first place, and I resolve to be back in a few days.

It ends up being three weeks later that I arrive back in Malaga Airport and I get chatting to two British Pensioners, I want to make them feel better because he looks knackered pushing the luggage trolley and fed up and they make you walk so far from the terminal to the first chance to leave it and as we were delayed I know there won’t be a bus and I’m likely to have to stay up all night until morning or find somewhere on the street to sleep, as luck would have it, they are headed to the town of Nerja for their holiday, the j is silent but I dare not tell them that and they don’t have any Spanish language practise so I get the cab sorted and they’re kind enough to let me come along with them all the way to where my heart needs to be and the rest of me with it.  We get dropped off at their apartment way out of town because I insisted on making sure they were inside before I walked back into town, through Nerja from one side to the other and on to Maro, with my Backpack and a lot more stuff with me this time as I walk past the Roman Viaduct all lit up at night with a bluey purple glow for the tourists, it’s still a novelty at this point and eventually I get back to my home on the beach, figuring I’ll stay up to see who is still here and who is staying where so I can make camp.

You see everyone who lives on or near the beach does so for free, wild camping in the tall grass, like bamboo, also called cana, or just sleeping on the sand itself.  Caleta Playa has depending on the day or night you find yourself there on and the time of year a large number of travellers from all over the world, a community of folk coming and going, residents and semi residents, high tides that were exceptional and reached the base of the cliffs above you and virtually washes away the sand and anyone there that night with it if they’re not careful, exposing the rocks, it’s a truth I never knew about the coast and just how fluid it is, how much a beach can change, how grateful I would become to the noise that kept me awake at first that I came to get used to and even miss, having grown up in a very quiet place indeed.

On my first night there a magical event occurred that I only witnessed a couple of times, a bioluminescent algae in the shallows that spark into life with light when you wade or move your hands from side to side through the moist sand and visible as a shimmering silver light on the leading edge of the breaking waves violently cause them to glow, whilst out on a paddleboard I saw wild Dolphins jumping for the first time, I really cannot describe the feeling of seeing these things with your own eyes.  So some people are coming and going, some stay for a few days, weeks, months, some have been there for years and some only for as long as it takes for them to see a naked human being and turn right around and walk all the way back up again.  You see we lived for free there and apart from gifts or loans from friends and family or donations for my healing work online I didn’t have to spend money either on food or lodgings or clothes, just luxuries like chocolate and things I thought others on the beach might like to share because everything else was being thrown away by the tourists in the town, and if they don’t want it anymore or care to take it home with them, whatever it is, from good food to the items they have replaced with new ones it’s discarded.  Recycling from the supermarkets also means that there is a glut of anything you could wish for in terms of staple food stuff and as the days turned to weeks and months, someone was always arriving with something to share as our community developed and grew into an impromptu rainbow gathering.  I took it upon myself to welcome new people, introduce myself, show them the communal kitchen (all recycled pots and food) explain that if they would like a hot drink in the morning, a meal at lunchtime or to come and sit around a fire in the evening and share a meal cooked together they could and life settled into this routine as I was also doing some gardening work and trying to fit in my healing work for my now friend Peter although he was receiving help from a healer in the North of Spain.  The work I do takes the form of Spiritual Healing that replaced my own intuitional massage that I learnt by doing self healing, by learning where and how to massage myself to resolve health issues, and by practising on friends and anyone who would like to receive a massage at festivals and trance parties.

Using your intuition and instincts is a far cry from book learning or prescribed techniques and it involves a subconscious unconditionally loving connection between two people where I know where and how to touch, because they are communicating this on a level we share.  As a spiritual Healer it involves no need for physical manipulation or pressure, merely the laying on / or off depending on the person of my hands on their shoulders at first to make the connection between us, and then to the area I have discerned during my body scan of them.  All this was new to me although I had felt energy in my hands in meditation and had played with energy as a child, something I remembered later in life especially during the training for healing that I undertook for a year including six months of weekly volunteering at a church to provide anyone with healing sessions with amazing results, I allow healing energy to flow through me into the person and they use it to heal themselves.  I learnt all this from a great friend and mentor who runs The Circle of Light Church in Uckington near Cheltenham.

My whole life has been transformed thanks to him and others especially those I have been privileged to provide with healing and a natural talent has been turned into a truly blessed gift.

If you wish to know more feel free to get in touch with me on Facebook or email me.  So Spain and healing and raw food and life as a community leader and a million and one other things I would never have dreamed of or imagined or feel like talking about here, and soon the tourist season began in earnest.

Walks to the mountains eating mostly only wild herbs on a vision quest only to have fevered dreams and a cold night because it’s chilly up there and the heat of Spain finally came on strong, making it hard to think and only easy to sweat and sit and bathe in the ocean.  I had met many inspirational people, one such individual was a young woman from Estonia called Aggie, who I had seen doing a Sun salutation and yoga practise first thing in the morning completely naked, not a surprise on a nudist beach of course but still impressive for her to stand in her power and it made me realise that I ought to face my fear of being naked and it lead me to ask her how she also swam far out to sea too.  “Ask the Ocean to take your fear” she said.  Which sounded easy so I did.  Over the days and weeks I swam further and forgot to worry about what was beneath me until I could swim out to a buoy a long way out at another beach, and whilst my brain might have had thoughts I found disquieting, I still did it anyway.

At first being barefoot, walking on the beach but especially on the rocks has you feeling like a baby learning to walk for the first time, and rougher surfaces like the road or pavement is incredibly painful when you step on small stones and your foot isn’t used to it, but over time the skin hardens and your feet start to learn where they need to go, you look ahead not down.  As I was to realise, we are born this way and naked skin and bare feet are our natural state, without shoes and socks we connect, lose fungal infections naturally too, become grounded literally earthing ourselves to our mother below us and connecting to our father sky above us as we stop wearing hats and artificial fibres in contact with our skin, we feel more, experience more, deepen our rootedness, our feeling of wholeness, lose stress, heal, and eventually there is no going back.

In the end I could float up a mountain by looking as far ahead as I could see, my focus on that point took away my need to be in my body and my body just wished to take me there, I also found that my knees and thighs and hips relaxed to the point of being able to place myself in the lotus position for the first time, this happened spontaneously on the beach.

No going back, not to so called ‘normal society’ or normal living, not to a job with regular hours, or a week and a weekend, five days fixed, two days off, a routine, that’s normal, that’s boring and repetitive, we settled down in one place as humans and settled into routines and since then our brains have shrunk, we are nomadic at heart, we love new things, new places, new experiences, that is who human beings really are, intrepid explorers and a lifestyle based on four walls that need to be paid for, or bills of almost any kind once you are free, why would you ever cage yourself again?  I accept that some people provide the world with things that require them to stay in one place, doctors, many of us work in the area we live in, but so many fewer than in the past, the idea of a community is long gone in most cities, where very few people know each other, a real community where we work together, share our lives, those days are coming back though in places like caleta playa for a while.

I also understand that some people find nudity shocking but their attitude is outdated, and most things of the archaic are on the rise, tattoos, freedom of expression, we are wild in nature and nature would wish us to be wild and free to express ourselves and nudity is a part of that, if nudity makes you feel uncomfortable it says more about you than the person who has no clothes on, your fears are driving your reaction, or you have preconceived ideas as to what nudity, nudists, hippies, free spirits, natural humans, those without fears or who choose to face and embrace them only to conquer them are like.  I have had to work through and past many of those same internal dialogues and ideas, fears and a good deal of religious dogma that says how we ought to live.  Morals and right and wrong are important and taking into account how others feel, to respect them whatever they choose to believe or do, is to give that same permission to all, live and let live, set everyone free from prescribed ways of being.  Manners are a standard I attribute to good behaviour and the ability to get on with other people requires humility and to become humble but also self confident is important.  To be and have a balanced outlook on others and the world, to walk through life the middle way between riches and asceticism, to be and feel comfortable in your own skin and to know yourself is key.

We live as children in the west, we are comfortable, lazy, cowards compared to those tribal cultures of the past and present who have brought us here after a million years of humanity.  They didn’t wreck the environment, create plastic and oil from the slowly accumulated bones and bodies of our ancestors lying on the ocean floor and beneath the bedrock of the planet or use technology and prejudice to subjugate the poor and titillate themselves at least not to the extent that we have done in the tail end of the last century and the beginning of this one.

Look in the mirror and ask yourself how much blame you can personally take for the state the world is in today?  Keep looking in that mirror and try to say I love you how does it feel?

So it’s hot and I’ve found myself slipping into old habits, drinking a little alcohol, smoking cigarettes, amongst other things that are readily available here in the wilds of Spain, I had quit everything for two years previously to my travels and it reset me in many pure ways.

Tired also by now of the pressure being put on friends who chose to leave because the police would rather the beach was clear of us, I was personally manhandled by one officer of the Guardia Civil who has no respect for individual humanity preferring the tourist euro influx.

Leave or stay, someone suggested a trip back to the Amethyst Mountains of the south coast.  I’ve been there and seen it for myself, so I ask to come along.  The rest of the story takes in a walk, hitch, bus when the heat becomes too much, squatting in deserted buildings and living off the land adventure that included a myriad of characters, locations right out of film sets and dreams, romance, action, and the best months, weeks and days of my life.

If you want to live in fear of what might happen or fill your head and heart with stories that tell one side of this planet, focussing on the worst of humanity then continue to watch the news, continue to allow everything to be someone else's problem to solve, continue to allow technology to shorten your attention span to the length of the proverbial goldfish or accept that most creatures feel and think more than we perceive or allow ourselves to recognise that they do, please by all means just watch as the natural world continues to be pillaged to within an inch of destruction, until the environment is no longer capable of supporting anything other than a very healthy population of cockroaches, or becomes one giant desert as the south of Spain is forecast to become within the next 50 years or decide instead to travel alone or with a trusted friend, meet and become another homeless person, learn what life is really all about, experience moments of sheer bliss, heal yourself and others, through true and lasting connections, be at peace with yourself and the world around you and finally accept your place as a loved soul in a much greater universe than you ever imagined.

The journey from here to wherever it is you end up whilst fraught with perceived dangers and real ones will leave you gasping for breath at the incredible beauty of nature both human and all the other forms that life takes in this amazing paradise in the making that we find ourselves in.  Life is a gift best opened with gratitude and cherished thankfully and to those who feel incapable of it I say, I was one of you and to all those who helped me to realise who I could truly be, I say bless you, and thankyou, and I love you.