Suphan Buri: Thailand
At the time I was offered a teaching job in Thailand, I had also chanced upon an online course on myth and psychology, centred on the work of eminent twentieth-century mythologist Joseph Campbell. Both the course and the news of my relocation seemed to have fallen into my lap serendipitously, and both plunged me into unfamiliar territory.
Campbell is credited for bringing myth back to public awareness – an awareness which Thailand seems to never have lost – and he roots explorations of myth in imagination, advocating for the remaking of ourselves and the world as we know it through mythic perception. He is most well known for the idea that every human life follows a mythic structure: the Hero’s Journey. This journey is a cycle of departure, ordeal and return and begins when some event disrupts the individual’s known world. A call sounds, and whether we feel ready or not, we’re summoned to cross a threshold that will recreate us. A guide appears to say, “Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there, and so it starts” (The Joseph Campbell Companion, p.77) I experienced this disruption through a long term relationship which came to pass, finding that my life in England had changed beyond recognition, and at 21, with no other plans, I was standing at a threshold. The path forwards seemed to shimmer.
Months before I’d even applied for the teaching role, I’d felt drawn to various gold items which I chose for almost ceremonial purposes. Gold shoes walked me across the graduation stage, and a gold bag became my first ‘adult’ handbag. I feel that belongings chosen with conscious ritual purpose are a modern form of magic, like personal talismans. So there I was with these emblems of light, chosen with the intent to call luminosity into my own life and to project an almost solar power into the world— though I am shy to admit this intention, as it is still something I am growing into here.
Later, when I learned that the city I’d been placed in was called Suphan Buri, translating to City of Gold, I felt awe at the sequence of coincidence laid before me like my own yellow brick road. Attuning to this pattern let me relax into the idea that moving was the right decision, and so I was able to lean into every aspect of the process, from the almost 24-hour journey to Bangkok, to the week of training, where I was immersed in humidity and the sweetness of street-stall mango for its duration.
When I finally boarded the van that would bring me from Bangkok to Suphan Buri, the coincidence became theatrical. The entire interior gleamed gold. The seats, curtains, ceiling. It was absurd and perfect, and I laughed to myself, surprised by the precision of the joke. In Campbell’s narrative, this would be called the ‘magical aid’ – the mysterious assistance that appears once you’ve accepted the call to adventure, as a signal that the correct threshold has been crossed.
Similarly, I’ve found that Suphan Buri glimmers in the heat, with temples guarded by dragons coiled around gateways, scales catching the light. In Thai cosmology, the nāga — the temple dragons — are guardians of thresholds, warding off those unprepared to encounter the higher silence within. To Campbell, the derivatives of the underworld serpent, like the dragon, represent the unconscious deep, and calls all initiates towards their own vulnerabilities. Relocation invites this confrontation as you find yourself decentered from your world, thrust into a new environment with trust only in your own ability to navigate it, and the kindness of strangers who may not share your language. As it turns out, this is all I have needed, as the hospitality intrinsic to Thai culture has welcomed me with open arms.
I have also been reminded that despite any language barrier, the language of myth remains universal. To enter a temple, you must remove your shoes. The first time I did this, I noted the intimate act of stripping away protection between yourself and the holy ground beneath your feet. It reminded me of fasting during Ramadan, another ritual of reverence that begins with subtraction. To fast, to remove shoes, to empty oneself of noise and possession— these are all preparations for encounter. You clear a space inside yourself so that blessing has somewhere to land. This principle stands true across time and place. Leaving England had similarly been a shedding of identity, certainty and insulation. A necessary type of loss without which nothing new can be brought, and without which a person cannot grow. In stepping outside of your comfort zone, you are gifted with challenge that burns away into reward
The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth holds that, after a being dies but before they become embodied once again in the next lifetime, their consciousness passes through the in-between state of the bardo. The bardo, meaning ‘between two,’ is the space between death and rebirth. A suspended interval where form dissolves before it takes a new shape. It is fecund ground, ripe with both potential and disorientation.
So far, life in Thailand has also held this quality. I fumble through language, heat, and through the ritual choreography of daily life, unsure of what will come next, but in surrender to this bardo-phase. Campbell wrote that the descent into uncertainty is essential to transformation. The dragons guarding the gate are not there to be overcome, but to be approached with understanding, personifying the fears that must be integrated before we can enter the world as our whole and true selves. Thailand seems to model this integration, with reverence for ancient ideas balanced with a foot forwards into modernity, found in the peaceful and tolerant attitudes widely held here.
It is easy to dismiss coincidence as just that, nothing more than noise mistaken for pattern. I’ve found, though, that if you tilt your vision, the same events arrange themselves into design. I consider this to be the blessing of mythic perception: the invitation to live with the belief that life has a syntax all of its own. This does not require proof, just the cultivation of attentiveness. To an unwilling eye, the gold van is just a van, but I felt a wink from the universe, warmed by a feeling of protection as I approached this new life.
Irony does seem to be one of the world’s native tongues, and there seems to be both a theatre in the everyday, and an elegance to the way symbols stack upon each other. I wonder if this is why the Buddha is so often depicted laughing. Faith, as we tend to imagine it, is heavy and solemn, but the laughing Buddha lived aware of the playfulness underlying life’s severity. We find this across civilizations, such as in the theatre of Ancient Greece, where comedic and tragic elements were often fused— pathos and bathos always in dialogue with one another, in awareness of the cosmic absurdity in which meaning and meaninglessness coexist. Alert to the hidden humour of things, you can find that heartbreak can be a map, a course can be an outstretched hand instilling the courage to cross continents, and a job offer can mean signing up not only for responsibility, but for expansion on several levels. Sine Education has brought me all of this.
Campbell held the same understanding, not treating myth as dogma but as metaphor. Using myth as a vehicle for self-understanding, he encouraged the process of self-mythologising. This is to recognise that our private dramas tend to participate in an ancient pattern, not to inflate the self, but to see through it in realisation that every crossing and moment of grief is shared with all of life, and mirrored in it. I was lucky to find this reflected in the water on the night of Loy Krathong, a festival celebrated in Thailand on the full moon of the twelfth month of the lunar calendar. Rivers across Thailand were illuminated with small boats of offerings delivered as tokens of gratitude towards the goddess of water. Many use this night to seek forgiveness for wrongdoings, and pray for blessings; I took the opportunity to appreciate life’s flow and flux, its giving and taking — symbolised in water’s unique capacity to encapsulate multigenerational time, and the fluidity and interrelation of all life. Astrida Neimanis writes that “water guides a body from young to old, from here to there, from potentiality to actuality.” Everywhere in nature, we find guides on our journey. I have long felt compelled towards this idea, completing my studies with a research project on the healing potential of the intermediary figure of the mermaid, whose natural habitat is the inbetween, a kind of bardo. Here in Thailand, I have found shared understanding in this belief which organises so much of daily life, with deities taking the form of various animals in nature, each with unique qualities.
So to self-mythologise is not necessarily to believe that everything happens for a reason. It is to believe that everything can be read. Meaning can’t be forced on life, but may be teased out, like gold from ore. This gold, both in temples and in myth, is not really about opulence. It is the residue left after a fire. Alchemists know that to make gold is to burn away what is base until only essence remains.
Moving to Thailand has similarly been an ongoing purification. The stripping of assumptions, fasting from familiarity and the slow, bright process of being tempered by heat and repetition until clarity begins to take root. When I stand at the temple gates now, taking off my shoes, I feel that gesture differently. The skin of the foot meets stone, and the body remembers humility, and tunes into something far greater than itself. The dragons watch, impassive, as they have for centuries. And I step across, again and again, into whatever this next life is becoming, in gratitude for it all. I urge you to take your first step in a similar adventure.
By Teacher Evie in Suphan Buri.