TBT - Living and learning..

Throwback Thursday takes us to Broome Australia today, where i originally went to finish my regional work at a 5 star resort on the coast. 
WWoofing is where you work for 5-6 hours a day and receive food and accommodation in return. It counts towards the 3 months regional work you need to complete in order to gain your second year working holiday visa.
Once my month WWoofing was finished and staff had suddenly departed i stepped into head housekeeping role for 2 months. I wrote this towards the end of my time there in Feb 2014...

 

Life at the resort isn't going to fast that i'm missing it and it's not dragging so i wish i could leave already. I'm really happy at how i have really been totally present in my experience here. It really is a world within a world that you have no choice but to be here. No phone signal and very limited wifi, we have walky talkies, our own tents, all meals are made for us and we all work with each other in the same spaces everyday. You are totally and utterly here, present in every sense.
For the most part i have loved it, no traffic to deal with, no supermarkets to go through, no being a slave to your i phone, no noise at night ( well apart from the bugs) it takes out so many of the little daily things we do in life that take so much of our time and for the best part you wish you were doing something else.
I like the feeling of being apart of something, all different types of people all pulling together to make something work. 

I have had many moments of reflection here, driving around in my little buggy listening to the whistles of the sea whilst i hot step my way between cleaning villas. I wanted to share a few with you; 

Firstly it reinstates that the more experience you have with different people in different places, organizations etc that most people are just winging it and really dont have much of an idea what they are doing in most areas. 
We look at people, companies etc and think wow they must be so clever, so rich, so whatever... well no not really. Everyone is just plodding along learning as they go.. taking a little bit more on to see what they are capable of. They might be humble and admit it in which case we are usually inspired by there strength or they are screaming from the hilltops how great they are and look at what they do etc.. but when they close the door to that office they too sit there thinking holy s%! how did i or will i pull that off???
I would say to anyone no matter what age or situation to experience everything and everyone you can, nothing is above you and nothing should ever be below you. We can all bite off, flourish or just attempt a lot more then we currently chew, business or non business wise.

Secondly, learning to let go of problems that aren't yours. I think we do this alot, we worry when we are at work understaffed, that the workload is to much for one person, whether we did something wrong or right etc. If you did that here you would be terrorized in paradise because most things don't run to plan  but why should i be worrying so much about it? it isn't my role to worry about things that aren't my responsibility. I don't own the worlds problems and in this case i certainly don't own the resorts. I appreciate this sounds like i don't work outside of my job spec, not at all, i am all for team work.  Pulling together in times of need and helping anywhere and anyone i can but there is distinct difference in doing this and taking on stress that doesn't belong to you. Do what you can with what you have, then let go.

Let go.

I havent really looked in a mirror, put make up, deodorant on or picked an outfit to wear in a good 3 months. I have said it a million times but its so liberating! You are so cut off from the world, society isnt able to tell you how you should look or what you should feel because you dont have the access to read it. 
You aren't sizing yourself up next to anybody else because you all wear the same clothes everyday with the same sweaty faces. Instead of watching people physically moving past me all day everyday i feel like i just see there hearts, there inner beings. I am so blessed to work with such gorgeous human beings, people i would want to be surrounded by regardless of being here. The fact that i am able to spend so much time with them is such a blessing and it is wonderful to cut the usual layer that you usually have to go through to get to know people. We are all open and vulnerable to each other which is just magical. I think to myself that if we practiced this method in everyday life we would be so much freer, so much less consumed by things that don't matter. I want to hold onto this perspective and keep it going long after i leave here..
Loving people for who they are not what they have and loving yourself not because the image in the mirror coming back at you is what you think 'looks good' but because you feel good from the inside and that in turn shines on your face from the outside.


I so thankful for all of this, for what this year has brought me and taught me. I always think that when you go through things, emotionally, different jobs, different living experiences it connects you to a whole new group of people. I understand how it feels to be lonely, depressed. I know what its like to clean poo off the toilet, i know how hard it is working in a manual job in the heat. To live with wild animals with no cold water in 40 degrees.
Some of these are menial some are impactful but nonetheless i understand what a whole new world of people go through everyday. It changes how i view people, how i treat them and the things i do everyday. That for me is the best feeling ever, i can connect with people that i couldnt before. 
I can help them if they are going through any of it, i can make sure i strip that bed when i leave a hotel room ( and ill think yes housekeeping is going to love me when she comes in to find i made her day a whole load easier - i scream and hollar when guests do that for me) i can make someone feel better directly or indirectly through these experiences. That to me is everything. 

 

Love and light.

Hells  xo

F!$% Conforming

It was in the car last week when I was searching for an email that I stumbled across some old diaries to my friends. I write about everything from things im feeling, the mundane to the exciting, my hopes and dreams, when im feeling really low and when I want to share a huge high. Its all in that sent items folder. My recent blogs are all slightly edited emails to my friends, I never write with the intention of anyone reading it. Its only when I read them back a few days, weeks later that I realize there is something in there that people will either enjoy, learn or be inspired by. Hence why I restarted blogging a few months back. To share some of the huge learnings I have had since my initial move to Australia nearly 2 years ago. The paths I have been on, the places I have lived, people I have met and mainly how it has affected, influenced, inspired and moulded me to this girl right now.

So there I was in the car, ohhhing and ahhhing over all these emails. Remembering where I was sat when I wrote it and exactly how I felt in that moment and I thought to myself; I really want to share these. I wish I could have read this when I was going though a certain time in life!

So I have decided that with the theme in social media of Throwback Thursday each week im going to post an old email, slightly edited to make sense to those who don’t know me, that maybe or should I say hopefully will find their way to someone that needs them.
This week is from May last year, whilst I was sat in the farm house I was working in in Dallwallinu Western Australia.

 35km from the nearest sign of life, surrounded by stillness and lots and lots of field mice. Little did i know how true this realization was to become...


So many times i have heard that i should be thinking about a career, starting at the bottom of the food chain in different industries and jobs, taking corporate assholes bad attitude because that is just what you have to do in the wonderful world of work.
Well there has been this innate feeling within me from the year dot that has just developed and become stronger that no we dont! none of us! we all have full control and do not have to merely accept this way, this behavior as a way of life.

My life can and will be made up of the people, the behaviors, the attitude of the things that i love, respect and value. I don't think that essentially means i wont face people like this or that it will be surrounded by pink clouds and butterflies everyday but it will certainly be filled with a higher percentage of the things i choose.

With that said that i have gone through many roles, industries, managers, colleagues, locations that have just never given me any other feeling that i have an obligation to be there, that it was just another wage packet to see me through to something that would make me feel ever so slightly more fulfilled.
Don't get me wrong i don't think that every office is full of people that feel this way, i think its fantastic when i hear friends, family that love their jobs and the people they work with. I think it plays such a huge part of your life that you must love where and what you do.
Again i can hear people thinking that this is some sort of wanderlust i have and a worry that this is merely a lack of contentment that will never fade because 'life doesn't work like that'.
What do i think of that? to a point i agree. I think the sad thing about the world we live in today is that so many people are searching for something else constantly. Never quite happy with what they have and want to feel the grass under their feet on the other side. I don't actually believe i am one of them, if there is one thing that fills my heart it is gratitude.

Gratitude for the amazing family and friends i have flaws and all, the bed i am able to climb into every night and know that i am safe, for the people that i meet in the supermarket that smile warmly and let me go first because i only have a bottle of water versus there trolley load, for my freedom to up and leave on any plane wherever i choose to and posses all the personal and professional skills/attributes to know that i would be get by.
I appreciate some of those points might sound rather bizarre and off the wall but they are all 100% true, i see beauty and gratitude in everyday things that many people dismiss or are to busy thinking about the next thing to notice.

I have done a fair bit of travelling myself, not as much as others or for as long as others but what i have seen and soaked up thus far has been enough to let me taste different cultures, different ways of making a living and most importantly ways of making a life.
I believe the way you decide to build your life should be like anything else that you choose to create or accumulate, you don't go into a shop and buy the first thing that you see, you explore, look at different models, makes, slightly different approaches until you make an informed decision about what route to take yourself.
That's how i intend on building my life, i feel like i'm still in that research stage with every month going past i learn a new way or certain ways become instilled as the right way to go for me.

My biggest learning for my 'career' has been that it must be making a difference, be purposeful and helping people in some way. I believe this has been within me all along but has been brought to my attention by my charity work, traveling, meeting new people and having my nephews brought into my life.
All of which have shown me my emotions and how all those things make me feel, brought to light that for me the best feeling in the entire world is to know i have made someones day, lifted them, changed or at least enhanced a childs life.
It gives me a feeling of contentment, purpose and a real reason to be.I find that even when in the deepest darkest hole personally i can be completely lifted from that through helping someone else with a problem, a dilemma, or just a bad day.
I have known that for a many years now and have had different people mention going into life coaching/ counselling, i dabbled in thinking about it but wasn't totally taken with it.
The more i have gone through the past few years, seen how i have the ability to make others feel and seen what a beautiful aspect of myself that is, it feels like a really natural path to walk down and i guess what feels different now is that i am ready to actively look at how to go about living this. It feels like the right time.

I guess to many that sounds like nothing short of a standard feeling, finding something you like/love doing and diving straight in but for me it is a huge deal. A realization, i have never given myself to anything 100% unless i completely believe in it. It takes a lot from me and will always be something that i have thought about and dissected in great detail before even speaking to anyone about it.
I have never wanted to be one of those people that has a 100 new ideas everyday of all these weird and wonderful things im going to do and then never actually achieving any of them. I will have a feeling, sit with it for hours, days, months or even years and then when i'm ready i will talk about to a select few and from there slowly but surely it will come to light.
So what next for this part of self discovery? well i have written to friends that work within counselling/ life coaching asking for advice and opinions on their own journeys, looked online at different approaches etc. From this i will build the Helen Wilkes way of doing this, i already know that i want to incorporate Yoga with this with the bigger dream of opening a retreat which have all different aspects of things that make people feel good and enhances their lives.
Whether that retreat be a small office in High Wycombe to a a huge open space in the middle of Bali, the beauty of it is to me that it could be either, no limitations, nothing to conform to, just whatever i want to make of it.

Its a great feeling to have realizations such as this, its so important to take note when you have them and enjoy that feeling of getting to know and understand who you are that little bit better.


Love and light
Hells

x

Impossible is Nothing.. Angkor Wat done!

I heard a lot about that moment, the 15 seconds of insane, stupid, bravery that it takes to make a change, to embark on something you thought you couldn't, to do what everyone thinks is impossible.
As i was crossing the start line of the marathon last weekend i smiled to myself that this whole experience was based on a moment just like that. A moment where you just say forget practicality, forget whether its the 'right' time and just do it.  
The team arrived on Thursday after a 13 -15 hour plan ride from our respective countries. One team member down and a new warrior added,we landed into the 38 degree heat of beautiful Siem Reap. Eager, nervous and just dying to get to the start line and channel all these nerves and hard work into the big day.
Dinners were spent carb loading on divine Cambodian food and frozen mocktails whilst trying to hide our ' ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh what have we done???!!!!' thoughts that were dashing through our minds. Mainly around the time the heat intensity hits you and you realized you weren't here to enjoy it by the pool...

Collecting our race kit..

Our first run in Cambodia and our last before the Marathon

Wahooo bring it on!

Oh how i miss the excuse of 'carb loading'..

I managed to sleep for 2 hours the night before the race, yes, you heard right. 10pm-12am and then i was wide awake. I knew the alarm was going off at 2.15am and i was worried of passing into that deep sleep that usually hits right before your alarm goes off.
Instead i stayed awake talking to myself and imagining myself crossing the finishing line. Thinking of the money raised and reminding myself that this was the easy part now... all we have to do is walk, run or crawl to get over that finish line and we are done.

Outfits all laid our ready the night before.. eeeeek

2.15am came and i put on some dance music ( much to the disappointment of my neighbors) doused myself in a ton of deep heat and went to eat my specially made big Carby/nutty flapjack. Well, that was until i realized the ants had gotten there first! i laughed and turned to the only other food we had: a cup of coffee and half of Neils flapjack. Oh if only that was the only hiccup we faced on the day..
We arrived to the temple with music pumping in the pitch black, hardcore Asian running clubs wearing their funky satin dressing gown things that stated the 100's of marathons they had taken part in. I realized we were playing with the hardcore runners and well when you felt the heat at 4am in the morning it made sense to me why...and there we were trying to hide our scared rabbit faces behind dancing, singing and general words of enthusiasm.

4am at the start line!

The run was flat, the heat reached 37 degrees by 7am, there was no crowd at all and at times you were running with 4 or 5 other people in no mans land. It was around the same time myself and Nigels knees decided they didnt want to run anymore and most importantly when we realized that the run hadnt been mapped correctly. According to the km signs ( that were so randomly positioned we were convinced someone drunk laid them out) we were around the 9 miles/15km mark. We passed one of the only western runners who shouted to us that it was incorrectly mapped, he just wasn't sure by how much at that point. That is when the biggest mental challenge hit us all... you are running in obscene heat ( they hadn't had any rain in 6 days) your knees are going and you have no idea how much longer you are going to be running for. Where i would usually say to myself, right just push through this pain for the next x amount of km instead I was thinking ' what if i push through then i have nothing left to give towards the end? because when will the end be? I have only prepared for 26.2 miles not longer?!? I had no idea at these moments how much more a crowd gives you, someones face smiling and cheering for you to keep pushing through! we only had a group of school kids at one part of the race and there broken English sent tears to fall down my face. They reminded me of the babies we running for.

Sunrise at Angkor Wat the morning of the race

We hit the 26.2miles/42km mark at 4.40hrs but the signs put us at 21.2miles/36k which meant we still had another 5 miles to run..and that is when the inner greatness, i will not be defeated slash oh god i'm going to die at Angkor Wat came in. The hunger pangs started, the heat and sweat was burning my skin and the ambulances were driving around to pick people up that looked tired or near passing out. They had so many people collapse they were trying to prevent anymore.. i cursed there air conditioned cars and both Neil and I swore that if it kills us we are finishing this race.

Those last 5 miles took us 2 hours and I can safely say for everyone who ran that day they were nothing short of horrendous. A fellow runner who was on his 302^nd marathon was also struggling promised us that marathons aren’t usually this torturous and that by any standards it was a very challenging run.
It helped because you start to get disheartened, you have trained so hard for something and planned for a victorious finish that you start to go through stages of loosing the faith and feeling weak. Thankfully our unified mind set of simply not giving up, that it didn't matter that it was unfair, that we had technically finished the race, that our knees were swollen. We were not leaving without a medal.

13.2 Miles in!

6 hours and 10 minutes after we started we crossed the finish line and saw Sarah waiting for us, i was elated, exhausted and in tears. I felt underwhelmed that we hadn't finished strong and well a little overcome with frustration that it had ended so unfairly. Thankfully Sarah's cuddles and knowing that Nige was on his way over the finish line ( we had lost him a little over half way) kept us up. His knees were in so much pain, he had committed a huge amount to take part in so many ways that I felt responsible for the way it had gone and wanted to keep the focus on what we had achieved, not what we didn’t, that we weren’t just marathon runners.. we were ULTRA MARATHON runners. Trust me there is a very very very big difference...
We ran in the region of 30.5 miles/ 50kms according to everyone's tracking systems. We later found out the race wasn't certified by the marathon officials ( whoever they are) hence the course being so far out because no one 'official' had checked it over.

 

Definitely took us an hour to get up off the floor for this..

Our post marathon meal..

I have taken a huge amount away from this experience,the training taught me what we are made of when it comes to committing ourselves to something be it a cause, a race or a particular goal. We traveled in every country and with each one came a different set of challenges, I learnt to let all the obvious thoughts of doubt and practicality fill my mind for a few moments and then just let them go..
The thing is there will never be the 'right' time to do anything, never the perfect conditions. We are always going to be thrown curve balls and hit obstacles but there comes a time when you have to just let that be, accept things will never be 'perfect' and carry on anyway!

Otherwise how will we ever achieve anything? It didn’t matter how long it took me or where it was i just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Forget the other nonsense your mind or others want to tell you and listen to that little voice inside that whispers, you can do it.
Secondly with our fundraising, well, it has been a phenomenal response from the video. It has had the exact response I wanted; people to feel apart of it, to see what commitment it has taken, where this journey has taken us and I guess most importantly truly understand what there money was going towards.
We are bombarded with charity pages, people asking for money and there are many times where i have struggled to understand where the money is going and question if the person fundraising knows? There is a lot of glorification that comes with fundraising at times and although I am all for people raising money for charity nothing makes me more engaged and willing to give then the cause coming from someones heart, something they are genuinley passionate about and just want to help. It shines through and I hope is why we have had such success.

All this combined with the day itself, a day where things weren’t exactly 'fair' and we were thrown the biggest obstacles possible, we didn’t give up. We adapted our game plan and we powered though regardless because in the end that is what happens in life.
Things don’t go to plan, everything is constantly changing and sometimes it isnt fair but you cant just give up, well I don’t think you can. As the famous saying goes 'It isn’t the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change'

Angkor Wat 'Ultra' Marathon taught me that important lesson and I hope to carry It through into the next curve balls, obstacles or challenges life throws my way.

Thank you all for lending me your voices to spread awareness, express words of support and great kindness. For donating you hard earned cash to these beautiful children, i cant wait to update you as the process kicks into action over the following months. Thank you Thank you Thank you. x