Chapter 6: Pim

Chapter 6

Pim

If you had asked me a few years ago if I would find myself in Thailand volunteering and praying with a pagan woman, I would have told you that you were absolutely out of your mind.  But there I was, sitting in a small little shop in Chiang Mai, a large city in Northern Thailand with a woman named Pim who was praying with me.  I had a moment of incredulity and wondered how the hell I had gotten there.  It passed quickly as I sank into a pleasant prayer and meditation with Pim.

Reality is I loved Thailand.  This was my third visit doing service work since I had been clean. Praying with a woman named Pim who called on a Hindi goddess, meditated with Buddha and ended in “Jesus Name” was exactly the reason why I loved the country. This time though I was planning on staying for a year and had been in Thailand for maybe a month when I met Pim. My reason for praying with her in that moment started two months before I left for Thailand.

I had met a guy.  

I didn’t mean to meet a guy, but I’d done it and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.  I fell quickly (as I always do) and this time, I fell exceptionally hard.  

The fear of being alone in a foreign country and the fear of facing the unknown had me running for comfort and, once he had entered my life, I felt driven to his arms and his reassurance. We talked a lot and I felt like we had an amazing connection and we had it incredibly fast. I’m not the kind of girl to get scared off by moving too fast and he seemed to be moving with the paces nicely.  At first, he didn’t seem to be the type to bolt: he met my parents and we talked about making it work while I was away in Thailand. In those moments when we talked, it didn’t seem to matter that we only knew each other for only a month.  When we talked it, seemed like I’d known him forever.

After a few weeks, I made the decision to trust him because I wanted to believe that he could rise to the occasion. I certainly would. I knew, by this time in my life, that I was worth rising for but I was scared that he wouldn’t rise with me. In my experience, they always, always ran. But once again, whether it was because of my fear of being alone or because I saw something in him I laid my heart in his hands and hoped for the best. Within a month, we said “I love you” and were talking about what our life would be like together in the future.

My fears of him running, however,  were actualized. Within two days of my leaving the country, he found a reason to break it off, to run.  In my emotional haze, it really seemed as if he just didn’t have the balls to tell me he was scared.  In retrospect, I believe it was that he just didn’t have the skills to tell me what he really wanted or needed. He ran in and jumped head first and, by time he realized that he wasn’t able to swim, he was already in, neck deep.  Instead of treading until he got safely ashore, he thrashed about and took me with him. Regardless of what was really going through his head, my heart was shredded up in tiny little bits just days before packing all that I owned into two suitcases and jetting off to another country...where I would be quite alone.  

We texted, one last time, the day I left.  He said he loved me and his text gave me hope that we might be able to maintain a friendship with potential for something more. I was foolish. I look back now and wonder why I would even want that with someone who so easily succumbed to fear. But I had no real reason to believe that he didn’t mean what he said or that what he said meant the same to him as it did to me. I hadn’t known him long enough to think that he was less than what he said he was. I would soon find that my heart and my rational mind are often miles apart. I landed in Hong Kong and had a three-hour layover.  I friended him on facebook, made a video update of my flight progress and waited for my flight to Thailand.  I was sure when I landed all would be well and we’d start talking again.

I landed. No response.

I emailed him a few days later.  No response.  

In this time, I began to go crazy. There was no way he’d not gotten either the friend request or the email.  I knew he’d gotten both which meant that he had blatantly ignored them.  I tried to pretend everything was ok and that maybe he was just processing his hurt or his own emotions and he would contact me soon. I, however, was unable to wait for him to contact me.  Caught up in my insanity, I stalked his facebook profile a few days later.  His profile picture was some other girl and him- they looked incredibly snuggly.

My heart was shredded.  There I was, on the other side of the world, hoping this man that I had fallen in love with would show the fuck up again in my life… and my hope was destroyed. There I was in Thailand with little support in the 12-step arena like I was used to.  I didn’t have women to cry on. I could not afford an emotional breakdown in a third world country. If I didn’t take care of myself no one else would.  So I called a few friends back home, cried on the phone and kept pushing forward.  Had I been in America, my reaction might have been very different.

My body moved forward.  I did the tourist gig in Chiang Mai and met some friends in recovery, got to know some people. I moved out to the country where the bulk of my work would be. But my heart stood still.  I thought about him all the time, it was obsessive and overwhelming.  I was lonely and scared and my heart felt incredibly hurt.  This was the guy who, just a few days before, had told me he wanted to give me babies one day.  My heart and my mind weren’t quite connecting.  I talked about it at 12-step meetings, I called my sponsor back home and I just kept feeling the hurt.  And it did hurt.  I felt abandoned on every level, I felt played, used and lied to, and there was nothing I could do about it.  Trying to contact him would solve nothing. Screaming would solve nothing. If he didn’t know how much of an asshole he was to me then he wasn’t worth yelling at anyway.

Even though I rationally realized I didn’t want a man who would treat me that way, my heart still held onto hope.  I do love this about me.  My heart hopes long after hope is feasible. This is probably because of my own life -- I was past feasible hope and I came back from it. Couldn’t somebody else? I find this a highly-attractive quality and yet, it causes me incredible pain.  I hope and, because people are fallible and broken, that hope is almost always ill-placed.  It was no different this time around.     

After almost two months of absolute silence I was beginning to let go of him.  Slowly.  I was trying to be ok with my own process of letting go what I thought was a sure thing.  

I lived in Phrao in the countryside but went to Chiang Mai almost every weekend for meetings. During this time, I had made some good friends in the 12-step fellowship.  Deedee, a particularly close friend of mine, had heard the obsession and frustration with the situation over and over and over.  Her presence and patience during this time was pivotal for me because, yet again, I had stalked him on facebook.  This time, however, I found the girl that was on his profile picture.  I clicked on her page and it said “in a relationship”. My heart did flip-flops as I realized he had begun a committed relationship with her just days after I flew off.  My rage, anger, and betrayal were so intense, it caused my already fragile body to implode on itself.

I had been experiencing stomach issues since arriving in Thailand; the food mixed with stress and jetlag had not been favorable to me.  That night, after confirming for a fact that he had begun the relationship just days after I had left the States, my stomach rebelled against my body.  I wound up in the hospital after several days of upset and Deedee was next to me the entire time.  It wasn’t until the next weekend when I was, again, talking about the situation that she suggested me meeting up with her teacher Pim.  At this point I was annoying even myself with the incredible amount time I was spending on him.  I asked her why I should see Pim.  Deedee simply told me how incredible Pim was and stated that Pim was her teacher.  Deedee explained Pim might want me to do some crazy things but it would be positive in my life.

Out of options and annoyed with my own behavior, I happily relented. I hadn’t prayed in depth since I arrived and I was truly missing God. Deedee, who had been a huge support in my life since being in Thailand, walked me over to her friend and teacher’s little shop and introduced us.

Pim is a classic Thai spiritual woman.  She wore all white, hre hair was pulled back from her face in a poofy spot on top of her head and she had makeup on that was soft and made her skin look lightened.  Her pink lipstick was pronounced but not offensive.  She was a soft-looking woman and, as such, she spoke softly but with authority.  She was the type of woman that fully believed that she heard direction directly from the Divine.  She did not doubt herself on any level.

Deedee quickly departed and left me with Pim.  In broken, but solid, English, Pim asked me to tell her what was wrong.  I told her an abbreviated version of what had happened and how I couldn’t seem to let it go even though a huge part of me wanted to be done with it long ago. I repeated myself. I told her that I could not let go.  She nodded solemnly.  I thought she would think me a fool for being so childish, to hold on for so long, instead, she listened intently until I was finished.  There was a pause as I told her my plight and cried. In that pause, she reached out and lay my hands palms-up on my knees and placed her hands on top of them. There was nothing about it that I found weird. It was a natural thing, it seemed, for Pim to do.

I’m not sure to this day if it’s because she was truly divinely-inspired or because caring and loving touch was so absent in my life since being in Thailand, but that genuine act of touch broke down my walls.  She said,  “Your heart and mind are divided. Your heart wants him to love you but his love is bad for you so why do you want it? He does not want you. Fine. He should not have you.  Let this go, throw your worries into the mighty Ping River and let it carry it away from you.”

I looked at her for a moment and like she knew what I was thinking she said “I know not so easy so we pray to my goddess Lakshmi, you can see her there” and she pointed to a picture of a Hindi goddess on the wall. “She is my goddess and she speaks me with because I am a messenger of the Buddha. We will pray.” It was not a question nor was it a command it was more a statement of reality.

So with that she pushed her hands down on mine with more pressure. Touch and warmth and care surrounded me.  I felt warm from the inside of my broken spirit and I felt safe. I felt so safe in that space.  And Pim began to pray in the most wonderfully caring and sweet broken English I had ever heard. I couldn’t tell you exactly what she prayed but I do remember, “allow her to be healthy and wealthy and throw all that is evil into the Ping”.  She invoked the name of her goddess before she began and in the middle she placed my hands in a Thai Buddhist meditation pose, with hands in lap, one on top of the other, thumbs touching, and we had a few moments of meditation with Buddha and then she began to pray again.  She ended with “and in Jesus holy name I pray”. I smiled at these familiar words that I had grown up with.  I opened my eyes slowly. I didn’t want it to stop.

She saw the smile at her closing words and with a wink she said, “We both know they are all three the Lord and the Lord is all three.”  And then she proceeded to talk to me about meditation and detaching myself from the world that told me I should love a man who was capable of loving me back.  Over and over she told me that every time I saw the Ping River that I should through my fears and hurt into its mighty waters and allow it to take them away.  “Remember” she said, “this pain is not yours to begin with. It is the Buddha’s to take care of.”  

The woman, in a few short moments had encapsulated my two majors beliefs in God: First, that God was one but that there were many paths. Secondly, holding on was silly because he was never “mine” to begin with. Therefore the pain that resulted wasn’t mine to begin with either.

When I left her little shop in Chiang Mai, I felt as if the world had become a thousand pounds lighter and that it no longer rested on my shoulders but was floating somewhere down the Ping.  I felt completely and utterly cared for on a spiritual level for the first time since leaving the States.  It was no work of my own.  Pim, in one moment, had reached into my heart and prayed with me and related to me on the spiritual level that I had not reached in a very long time.  My vulnerability, this time around, was well placed in the hands of Pim.  This divine messenger had reached into my depths and had addressed the fears of my heart: loneliness.  For that moment, that day and the one after it the loneliness abated and the need to hold onto a man that was not worth holding onto passed.

I won’t lie though.  It did not cure me.  I had been around in the spiritual world long enough that I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that it would last.  But for those few days my heart’s ache was eased.  In the succeeding days, the hurt returned but not to the level it had before I met Pim.  The obsession finally passed, and while I still thought of him often, it was not obsessive in nature.  This pagan woman prayed with me; she had no motives beyond helping me. She wished to help me because I was human and I was hurting. She had eased the pain of abandonment and hurt because her motives were pure.  

It amazed me how one human’s actions and the motive behind them can have such a profound effect on the healing process. On the hurting of my heart.  I realized now that it was when the motives were selfish that people get hurt.  My motives with him were just as selfish as his own. I was looking for comfort and I found it until it wasn’t mine to have anymore.

So, leaving Pim’s shop, I met Deedee outside and we walked away. “So, how do you feel?” she asked, but she already knew, I described it anyway and she nodded wisely.  We walked to a second hand shop on the other side of the Ping River. As I crossed over it, I couldn’t help but throw all my emotional and spiritual “crap” into it.  I let those muddy brown waters take every last piece of it away for that moment and, though the winds of emotional change brought some of it back to me, the acute pain in my heart was never again the same.

I never had to hurt over him in the same way I had ever again.

And that was enough.