I flew back from Thailand last week and have been busy reconnecting with my good friends in Santa Cruz and recovering from a cold I picked up during the 24-hours of traveling.

Now I’m at my father’s in Oregon and will be here for a while. I love staying here. First, my father and I are great friends and we don’t see each other enough. Second, this place is like a healing retreat center. We’re in the forest, about 5 minutes outside of Eugene, but you can’t see a single home as we’re surrounded by trees. The home is on 4 acres of forest and meadow, with a big garden, fruit trees, a waterfall and coy pond my dad made. There are deer in the yard on a regular basis.

My dad first build an A-frame on this land when I was 6 years old. Do you know what an A-frame is? It’s a home shaped like a big A. Two of the walls lean together to form the roof. We had an “out-house” and we carried our water from the well, and heated it on the stove to take a bath. It was “Little House On The Prairie” style and I loved living like that as a child.

My parents divorced a couple of years into that venture, and my mom moved to northern California. I would go back and forth between the two homes a lot, but that is another story.

My dad remarried a woman who had two daughters, and it was like “The Brady Bunch” – my dad and his two sons (I have a younger brother) and his new wife and her two daughters.

Needless to say, the A-frame (which was basically one huge room) needed expanding. That’s when my dad built the first addition, and he’s been building additions, bedrooms, sun rooms, offices, garages, a sauna, and more, ever since.

I like to tease my dad that he has obsessive-compulsive-building-disorder. In any case, he does nice work and this home is a sanctuary. I’m fortunate because he loves having me come stay.

I might be going back to Thailand about 3-6 months from now, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to find a home in Santa Cruz and get a lease, yet. So, this is where I’ll be for the time-being. It feels good to be here. I may be spending some time in Arcata with my mother and my brother as well.

I’m working on getting Nok a visa so she can come and experience the US and meet my friends and family. Unfortunately, it can be a challenge to get a visa for a Thai person coming to the US. Wish us luck!

I’m attaching a photo of my dad’s place. Can you see the original A-frame in the photo?

Enjoy the spring!

Ryan

My Father's Home

]]> http://ryaneliason.com/blog/back-in-the-usa-eugene-oregon/feed/ http://ryaneliason.com/blog/thai-tigers-are-just-big-pussycats/ http://ryaneliason.com/blog/thai-tigers-are-just-big-pussycats/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:16:20 +0000 Ryan http://ryaneliason.com/blog/?p=419 This video and picture are from my last trip to Thailand in February 2009.  Cuddling up to a big tiger was one of the highlights of my trip - and NO the tiger was not sedated. This video was taken just moments after the photo.  I don’t think they’d be having that much fun if they [...]]]>

This video and picture are from my last trip to Thailand in February 2009.  Cuddling up to a big tiger was one of the highlights of my trip - and NO the tiger was not sedated.

This video was taken just moments after the photo.  I don’t think they’d be having that much fun if they were sedated.

If you’ve been reading my blog then you know that somehow I’ve managed to include a lot of fun, travel, and adventure in my life. I’m not independently wealthy. My company doesn’t send me around the world on assignments. In fact, I’m self-employed. I’ve been self-employed my entire life. One of the reasons I get to travel so much is because I envisioned having this life, then I created a plan to make it happen, and I worked on transforming any limiting beliefs that might have held me back.

My business is coaching people to people to create their lives by design. I coach a lot of small business owners to grow their businesses while enjoying fabulous lifestyles, and I coach individuals without businesses in the areas of career, health, relationship, and achieving whatever meaningful goals are important to them.

I recently recorded a free teleclass with my friends Starr and Sara of This Moment Events that was part interview and part workshop where I led everyone through a powerful exercise to help them create a clear and compelling vision for the year. I wanted to share this recording with you.

This call is an interesting and dynamic exploration of what will help you take your life to the next level. We discussed some of the foundational strategies I have used with hundreds of clients over the years to produce truly amazing results.

What you will take away ….

1. You will identify the key strategies to create your vision, as well as the primary obstacles which you will need to overcome.
2. You will be guided to identify any limiting beliefs and you will be led through a powerful process for changing limiting beliefs into empowering ones.
3. You will explore the keys to living your best year, which includes a balanced approach that is both yin and yang, masculine and feminine, attractive and active, generative and aligned with a natural flow.
4. Finally, you will learn a specific strategy to synchronize your daily actions and habits with your bigger vision and goals. You will also learn a simple time-management principle that you can implement right away to begin producing bigger results with less time and effort.

All of this in 53-minutes? Yes, no kidding, all of this in 53-minutes. If you’re committed to making this year one of your best ever, this “mini-workshop” will help you to create the foundation necessary for success.

Get the free teleclass recording here:
Living Your Best Year

Our first stop was Phuket, which was a bit too busy for our taste, but the beach at Kata was perfect, and the ladyboy cabaret in the party-town of Patong was entertaining.

Nok had to leave unexpectedly to be with her family because her grandma passed away. Nok had wanted to go to the island of Railay, so we put it on our itinerary. Unfortunately, she missed this part of the journey.

We spent three days there. The beach was among the most beautiful I have ever seen, with breathtaking limestone cliffs that rise dramatically into the sky. It reminded me of Yosemite, but tropical, with Ocean instead of lakes and rivers.

Here is a video taken from a longtail boat. These longtail boats are one of the main ways to get between islands, as they can easily navigate shallow waters and dock right on the beach.

These guys and gals were used to being around people, but they weren’t domesticated.  I trusted them enough to get close, but I didn’t want them climbing all over me.  Here’s a video of me feeding some monkeys we found on the side of the road.

In the next video, Nok has some wild monkeys climbing all over her.  She had told me she was scared of monkeys because her uncle in Thailand had some monkey pets who could sometimes be aggressive.  She doesn’t seem too afraid in this video.  Maybe the Balinese monkeys are a bit kinder for some reason.

By the way, right after I returned from Bali, we went and watched the movie, Avatar, while in Bangkok.  It was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time and I highly recommend it.  The planet in Avatar reminded me a lot of the rain forest in Bali, so teaming with life, unknown creatures, both friendly spirits and dark dangerous creatures lurking in the shadows, the play of light and dark, the dance of good and evil, a spirit in everything, and everything connected.  The plants, animals, insects, and people forming a complex web of intelligent life.

The rain forest is teaming with life up there and, while our hotel was neat and clean, we liked to keep the windows open at night to let some cool fresh air in, and this unfortunately also invited in a number of guests from the rain forest to visit us each night.

One night an entire nest of flying ants decided our bed would be their new nest, while we were still sleeping in it!

There were the usual geckos and spiders, but the real excitement came when a bat decided to come in and circle around our heads for a while. We thought it had left, but when I awoke in the night to go to the bathroom and flipped on the light switch, there he was, hanging from the ceiling, yikes !

In this hilarious video, Nok accuses me of screaming like a little girl ! LOL

Later in our trip we made friends with a massive bat who had a hurt wing and therefore just hung around in a tree all day eating fruit that people brought him.  We thought he was so adorable that we would visit him every day in his tree.

Check out the video, I’m sure you’ll agree, bats can be kind of cute.

We decided not to hire a guide, even though it was recommended, and ended up being lost about half the time, but that was part of the adventure.  These videos capture a bit of our trekking experience.

We traveled around a lot for the first few weeks, then decided to stay up in a village near Ubud called Penestanan.  It has been known as an artist’s village since the 1930s.  Our villa was surrounded by beautiful rice paddies and forest.  This was our place to chill out.  We loved it!

I didn’t bring a single piece of warm clothing to Bali - no pants, no jacket or sweater. I would have been fine if we hadn’t made a motorbike trip over the mountains at nightfall!

It got pretty cold toward the top, so I bought a fake leather jacket for $8. We ended up staying in the mountains for several nights, as it was just too beautiful, so the jacket came in handy.

There are creatures everywhere in Bali. During the few days we spent in Manduk, we were visited by a bat that flew right into our room! Fun, Fun!

Each one has a unique energy and sometimes that energy is very powerful. The location is sometimes as impressive as the temple itself.

Men are required to wear a sarong (a large cloth wrap) inside the temples. This may be your one chance to see me wearing what looks similar to a dress, so enjoy!  Hehehe