Morocco | scrubs, souks, and soul food for my inner flower child
Amazing views of the High Atlas Mountains, where I took a day hike to explore the geographic diversity of the country.
Where do I begin to capture my reflections on Morocco? It is a place where you can’t help but experience sensory overload as you make your way through the maze of the medina (city center), but at the same time, it is the most culturally rich place I think I have ever traveled to.
In a matter of hours you can find yourself grooving to Afrobeats, practicing your rather rusty French, learning Arabic calligraphy, appreciating wafts of Moroccan spices, admiring the vibrant carpets crafted by the Berber people in a souk (or market), and indulging in a body scrub unlike any other in a Hammam. And the landscape is equally diverse, with mountains, deserts, beaches, and forests. It boasts a successful agriculture sector and has a history of being a haven for hippies (for other fun facts on Morocco click here). As a person who appreciates variety and is on a mission to connect with my inner flower child, I must say, I have felt rather at home.
One of the experiences I curated while traveling was to feed my future retreat dreams by visiting a multi-generational family farm 45-minutes outside of Marrakech, exploring topics related to spirituality/faith (more info on Sufi tradition) and movement (martial arts). I was accompanied by Oliver, an aspiring writer and documentary filmmaker from Estonia, James, an actor who wanted to incorporate martial arts into his performance toolkit, and Mohammed, a bricklayer who grew up in Montreal at a time where there was a lot of fear and misunderstandings about the Islam faith. While I enjoy learning from books, I am reminded as I travel how enriching it is to learn through conversations with other humans about lived experiences.
One of the key themes that stuck with me was from martial arts practice where we held certain poses alternating between “expansion,” stretching our heads to the sky and extending our energy outward, “contraction,” where we focused on contracting all of our muscles and pulling our energy inwards, and “hold,” where we focused on just resting in the posture. I found myself grateful for the embodied way of facing this reality of life. As humans we are constantly moving between seasons of expansion, contraction, and rest. As someone who loves the feeling of expansion (like a good Enneagram 7), I can struggle to accept and celebrate seasons of contraction and rest. Our retreat host also pointed out that the Western world often celebrates and values expansion, while the Far East has a far greater appreciation for contraction, affirming my pull to eventually head east with my travels to integrate this lesson more deeply. As I headed to the beaches of Morocco, and enjoyed the surf town of Taghazout while reuniting with a few pals from my Portugal Innate experience, the waves also reinforced this lesson that expansion, contraction, and rest are part of the natural order of things, and our own human resistance to this truth is where the discomfort lies.
Even as I travel, I am determining how I can balance time spent in a state of expansion, contraction, and rest, so that I can manage my energy and take a sustainable approach to the new life I am building. Next stop is up to Fes, the oldest imperial city in Morocco, to indulge my inner higher education nerd and visit the oldest university in the world, before doing a bit of an energetic refuel in the Algarve of Portugal. If you care to vibe with me, check out this Morocco playlist.
Are you currently in a season of expansion, contraction, or rest? And how are you supporting and stewarding yourself through it?
The streets of Chefchaouen, the blue city, in Morocco were simply marvelous.
