What made me leave everything behind and start travelling? My story pt. I

Chapter one: The dark ages

Part I: The emptiness

Once upon a time in the past, there was a completely different “me” in this suit everybody calls Michael..

This other “me” cared too much about what other people think.

So because of this, I tried to do, what I thought “the normal” people would expect me to do,
so they would consider me as “the normal” people too. Not that there is anything wrong
with this picture, this is part of our story as human beings, wanting to belong somewhere,
being part of a bigger whole, community, friends, family…

But despite of all the effort, there was no feeling whole or feeling like I belonged somewhere.
In fact the more I tried, by always looking for something new, changing jobs regularly, or the extreme party weekends, the endless search for pleasure,... Nothing helped, I was just numbing the pain, instead of filling the emptiness. But most of the time I convinced myself I was happy...

After years of ignoring my true self, I start to notice another part of me, a part I never really gave much attention too. This was a piece of me that was always rebelling against authority.
But because I cared so much what other people thought, I always kept this rebellious part inside, most of the time…

Part II : My Darkest Hour

In the last few years before travelling, I started to gain a lot of interest in ancient history, the really ancient stuff, the beginnings of civilisation, ancient cultures, the mysteries of egypt,...
I started to dig into the past..
After a long period of researching these ancient civilisations, I started to notice a pattern in all these ancient civilisations around the world, they all had similar stories and belief systems… The first thing I noticed was, that most of these ancient cultures believed that consciousness is something far more mysterious than what our mainstream science believes. Most of these cultures talk about reaching deeper states of mind with spiritual practices, plant ceremonies, drum circles, rituals,...

It intrigued me so much I started to develop a meditation practice myself. I even tried an ayahuasca ceremonie once.
Before I knew it, this rebellious me became louder and louder.. The meditation did not calm me down at all, it just became more clear that I was just making up a story, lying to myself, I couldn’t ignore the other parts of me anymore.
I felt like a prisoner in my own mind.. Every morning I got up for work, the rebellious voice inside was calling:
“Yo bro, you shouldn’t be doing this!”
“Why are you doing this shitty job?”
“Quit before it is too late!”
…
It felt like every cell in my body was fighting me. There was a war going on inside of me.
I hated these last jobs so much, and the last one was really making me physically sick.
One night I went to bed, my mind was racing, it was unstoppable. I never felt like this before.
My stomach felt like it was twisting, the nausea was unbearable but I couldn’t throw up..
I started to hyperventilate, my body was shivering.. my emotions were skyrocketing!
I was crying, I couldn’t take it anymore… I was losing my mind!

Meditation didn’t help anymore, nothing could calm me down… so I did the only thing I knew back then, take medication to calm down. But it was still a sleepless night. I called in sick.
I explained my doctor what I had gone true and that I was completely drained, no more energy left. I only wanted to sleep all day on my couch, this lasted for several weeks. It felt like I ran against a wall and there was no more way out!
I couldn’t go on like this, but somebody had to pay the bills… no space for freedom.

In the weeks I was home from work with a depression, I started to contemplate deeply… What is going on? How did I reach to this point? How am I going to get out of this situation?... Breathe...breathe…
I couldn’t picture my future anymore, everything was completely blurry. I started to think my materialistic mindset created a cage around me. The more I want to buy, the more I have to work for it. I began to think everything was fake, That every person was trapped and blinded by materialism.. I felt completely lost.. This was a very dark period in my life.

Eventually luck was on my side again, they fired me for my sickness, but I got the papers to get a monthly payment from the government until I found another job. Finally the space and freedom was there to let everything that had happened sink in, and decide what I wanted to do with my life.
My darkest hour had past, I could see the light again!

Chapter II: The New Beginning

Part I: My Discoveries

In this time that had past, I was searching the net for people who were living as simple as possible to create more freedom in their life. Little did I know the planet is full of these people!
I had never really looked into to this stuff before, but a lot of people are creating communities all around the world, to try and create new systems, that could make the old freedom restraining systems go obsolete.

In this search I somehow stumbled on the biggest community in Europe, Tamera in Portugal.

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This drawed my attention. I wanted to understand more about this kind of lifestyle, my curiosity was unstoppable. So I signed up to work in the garden as a voluntary worker. This was my biggest interest at that time, to learn the basics of permaculture, and learn how to be self sustainable with food. Little did I knew what life changing event this could be, to take the plane completely alone, to a place far away from home, where I don’t know anybody and stay with these strangers for a full month!
Like I said in the beginning, I was always looking for new things in life... some things you just cannot find in little, tiny, overpriced Belgium.
This was my great escape, my biggest adventure,.. The day was getting closer and closer...
more and more I got excited and nervous at the same time..

Part II: D-day

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The time had come, I finally arrived!
The place looked like a food paradise!
Everywhere I looked, there were food trees, food gardens and greenhouses. They even build lakes around the place with their knowledge of water retention landscape. They recreated nature in a way that nature knows best, to sustain itself.
This place was completely dried up landscape before they started the community.
They gave mother nature a hand to help recover itself, and result was amazing!
The landscape is completely green again, even lost species of wildlife had returned!

Now they use the place to set an example on how we can live with simple green technologies in cooperation with mother nature. For example they work with a huge solar cooker mirror, a biogas digester connected to gas cooking stoves, a lot of solar panels, they filter water from the lakes and recycle greywater,...
I was completely amazed with what they had accomplished, it was like a little village with 300 people, living almost completely self sustainable. They even had a school for the kids who grow up in the community.

Part III: The connections

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There were so many volunteers and visitors in this amazing place, it looks like Tamera is getting a lot of attention. In fact I heard a member say 3000 people a year visit or volunteer in Tamera.

Little by little, I start to get to know the volunteers in my group and other groups too.
Eventually I start to notice that most of the closest friends I made, were travellers.
When they started telling their stories to me and explain how easy it is to travel for a long time without big expenses, I was amazed, it can even be a lot cheaper than renting an apartment and work all day!
I started to feel a very big attraction towards this travelling lifestyle!
It just felt like this was something I had to do in my life.

Since I strongly started to believe more and more in the spiritual side of life, because of all the research I did into our very distant past, the connections I saw in the stories of all our different ancestors, I was thinking this wasn’t a coincidence. I am meeting all these people for a reason…

When the end of the month was near, I was invited to stay at a friends place in Lisbon, he was also an amazing person I met in Tamera who came to volunteer.
He did this every year in his summer vacation.
In these last 10 days before my flight back I was thinking a lot about the freedom that I would have had, if this was a one way trip!
I didn’t wanted to go home, I wanted to stay travelling..
This was it!
The big turning point!
I decided to go back to arrange everything so I could start travelling without a plan when to come back!
Who knows maybe somewhere in the near future I live somewhere on a sunny island, starting up a nice project to live self sustainable. Anything is possible!

...to be continued…

Now I would like to share some of the things I have learned from the amazing people I met on this journey so far…
For example, if you have travelling on your mind, but have no clue on how you can find nice volunteer work or projects to visit,

go to this website:
https://www.workaway.info/
or
https://www.helpx.net/
or
http://wwoof.net/#wwoof

Until now I have only used workaway but they’re all good websites. On workaway you can look at projects all over the world, all these projects are hosts that offer you food and accomodation (food is not always included) in exchange for volunteer work.
If you decide to contact a host that you’d like to visit, you first have to create an account as a volunteer. I believe it costs around 30€ a year, I am not sure if the price is still the same as a year ago, I haven’t prolonged my subscription yet.

There is also another option that you can use to travel cheaply, and it offers unique experiences that you probably won't get with a normal holiday travel, it is called couchsurfing.
You can hook up with people who offer you there coach or room for free!
Let’s look at the video on how exactly it works, there is an explanation included on how to use the website:

Link to the website:
https://www.couchsurfing.com/

Moritz, one of the friends that I met in Tamera was already travelling for a year with workaway when I met him. He was a very interesting person, we had a lot of interesting conversations together.
The reason why I bring him up is because I think he has found his passion and he is sharing it with the world through his youtube channel. His channel is so amazing, very informative stuff. He makes small documentaries of all the projects he visits, he includes many interviews with the main founders and locals who live in these projects.
A lot of interesting topics on his channel on living self sustainably with nature.
He made a lot of informative videos in Tamera too.

Here is a very interesting video from his channel about the biogas digester in Tamera (detailed explanation):

Here are two videos on water retention landscaping in Tamera:

If you want to know a lot more about Tamera, he made a 50 minute documentary about the village of Tamera, you can watch it here:

link to the website of Tamera:
https://www.tamera.org/index.html

I would like to promote my friend's channel here on steemit to support him because, I believe he is doing a good thing, he brings a lot of valuable information to the internet that could help a lot of people who want to know more about these projects around the globe, living with green technologies and nature. Follow the link and subscribe to his youtube channel if you’re interesting this kind of info:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCopgOTTCZHNb-PlBmaZGhcw

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If you are interested in indigenous people, ancient cultures, different tribes all over world and the similarities in their stories on the origins of man, despite some of these tribes living very isolated from the rest of the world, then you can read a very interesting book of an anthropologist called Jeremy Narby, who lived in an amazon tribe for 2 years.
He tells his story about his journey into the jungle, living with the tribe and how it had affected his life.. and how he then started to look deeper into the different mythological stories of the indigenous people around the world, he found a lot of crazy similarities in these ancient stories and our science about our DNA…If you are intrigued by the mysteries of the universe and the knowledge of the indigenous people than this book is a must read.
The book is called “The Cosmic Serpent - DNA And The Origins Of Knowledge”
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If you liked this post and want me to continue writing about my travelling stories or have any questions, then please leave comments.

My next journey will be about living two months in an eco-village in the south of Italy in Torre Milleto, Puglia, the name of the village is Giardino Della Gioia.

All non-sourced images are 100% my own work