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Inspirational Retreats appear to be the go-to holiday for now. We have always needed holidays to relax, but nowadays, we need the digital detox, too, quality time away from our screens. In Parts one, two and three, I will detail some of the more popular ones, and because of my facetious nature, I will include some that are ridiculous, and you can decide if they are true or not.

How about the Sacred Passover retreat, where you drink the ashes of the dead to encapsulate their good spirit. Bet you could be dead relaxed after it…sorry. Perhaps some time away at a retreat specialising in animals and reptiles, including snake massages and sniffing Aardvarks. Apparently, Aardvarks emit a pheromone which is extremely relaxing and can help with anxiety. Snail massages, where snails slither all over your back, also have a similar effect. An elephant-dropping massage can improve your memory and stave off dementia, as elephants never forget.

But I nearly keeled over when I discovered a retreat that insists you dress as your favorite Muppet character whilst experiencing magic mushrooms, aka psilocybin in the form of micro-dosing. I have written several blogs over the years which have featured my favorite Muppet characters hence my reaction when I discovered this retreat. Surely, they must allow us to switch and change Muppet outfits on different days to allow people like myself who have a few favorites? I can see myself now dressed as Animal one day, Grover the next and finishing with a flourish as The Swedish Chef. Honestly, I would skip the drug bit as I am not a fan and would maybe just offer to help whilst the other Muppets get merrily off their little heads.

There are such things as crying retreats where you can access any unconscious pain and attempt to release it through crying. It is great for self-soothing and releases oxytocin and endorphins, which work on physical and emotional pain such as grief, loss, trauma, depression, anxiety, and stress. I can just see myself at this retreat, crying like a banshee and enjoying every minute. For now, if I need a good cry, I just watch the movie, Pay it Forward. It works—every single time.

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

I believe that mindfulness should now be incorporated into eating and walking. Even though I expressed my cynicism in the previous blog, I am guilty of walking my dogs and being completely distracted by my thoughts. I call it my Mosquito mind, and I wrote a poem about it. You can find it under my poems on this blog. Over the years, I have been trying to learn to witness when my mind is like this. Eckhart Tolle and The Power of Now is my favourite author for mindfulness.

Here are some more cringeworthy jokes about mindfulness.

• I’m thinking of going on an online digital detox program.
• Why do they keep giving out free chocolate at our meditation retreat?
  Because it’s a reTREAT.
• One of his students gave the Dalai Lama a big box with a ribbon for his birthday. When he opened the box, he found that it was empty inside.
  “Aha,” he exclaimed, “just what I wanted!”
• What do you call a mindful wolf? Answer: Aware wolf
• Why did the Zen master go to the beach? A: Because he wanted to ‘seas’ the present moment.
• I love meditating in my herb garden…Good Thymes…
• I’ve taken a vow of silence for the rest of my life…I can’t tell you how much it means to me.
• When giving a present, remember it’s the thought that counts. Unless it’s for a meditation teacher. In that case, it’s the thought that doesn’t count.
• My mindfulness teacher told me I’ll never stop procrastinating until I meditate, and I said just you wait.
• Can mindfulness help stop me from asking rhetorical questions?
• Cows meditate – Oom is Moo backwards.

 

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

I received this Penguin Mindfulness book as a gift from my niece, and I pick it up when I need a giggle. Mindfulness and Menopause seem to be endlessly discussed over the last five years. The cynic in me will say that mindfulness used to be going for a walk, walking the dog, daydreaming, and gazing at a tree or a flower, but these days it must be a more intentional practice. And I get it; mental health is now at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Meditation is a key practice, but I must admit that I am not very good at it. Inevitably zenitis will set in at some stage as my dogs start barking at passers-by. Maybe I need to teach them to meditate with me, or just not bark?

I felt the urge to research mindfulness jokes for these two blogs, so here goes. Some are good, and some are woeful, so apologies in advance.

– Ok, these jokes may be bad. But please don’t roll your third eye at me.

-Non-meditator: ‘Don’t just sit there, do something! Meditator: ‘Don’t just do something; sit there!

– What pop music does a spiritualist listen to? Chakra Khan,

– Knock, Knock. – Who’s there? – A Shaman- Shaman who? – Shaman you for not letting me in. (Shame on you, geddit?)

 

I will stop now as they are getting too cringe for me.

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

Thank goodness I have never encountered what the swimmer in the photo is swimming through. Although, honestly, sewage is not always visible, as we well know.

There have been many perils that I have experienced over the years. Forgetting my pants, and my bra went missing once. I found it a month later in the pocket of the director’s chair I had used. On several occasions, I have skipped back to my car with the NKD attitude, aka, no knickers Dryrobe. Other perils include jellyfish and witnessing low-flying testicles whilst a heavily endowed overzealous man was drying his bits.

I like to think I am Ursula Andress from the famous Bond film when I exit the sea, but the reality is more Melissa McCarthy on a bad day. My exit is often twinned with me trying to fix a rather troublesome wedgie. I have swum into a few people when I was not paying enough attention. However, this is a natural enough occurrence as where I swim has three buoys measuring a kilometre swim out at sea for swimmers doing triathlon training.

Sex noises as somebody takes a dip must be the worst. A few middle-aged men do this as they look around, hoping for a reaction. It always makes me smile and cringe in equal measures.

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

 

I love this photo. This would be me as the only attempt I could ever make at being an Iron Woman is, like this lady, to take an ironing board into the sea. I can swim quite well, but the running would have me walloped. Once I swam to one of the far buoys in Low Rock where I swim. It is 200 meters to the buoy and 200 meters back, I am not brave or fit enough to do the whole 1km swim. One time when I swam out to the buoy, I could not swim back due to the current. I had to do the walk of shame back to my friends as I came in off the rocks much further up.

When I hear of people like Eddie Izzard who ran 31 marathons in 30 days it baffles me. She also raised over half a million pounds for charity. Their strength and endurance is unreal. I believe some ultra-marathon runners can run 100- 200 miles. Eddie Izzard has also performed her stand-up comedy in French, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. She is extraordinarily talented and I adore her surreal sense of humor. ‘Cake or Death’ has to be my favorite sketch. So ridiculously clever.

Eddie Izzard – Cake or Death sketch

https://youtu.be/PVH0gZO5lq0

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJaJTu8Q/

Today was definitely one of those days. It started with a doggy walk and my two dogs going feral at a passing husky who was minding his own business and being husky-like as, after all, he was a husky. I digest, whoops, I digress. Buzz and Finn were both leashed up and last week they loved this particular husky. I cannot fathom why they can like a dog one week and then dislike it the next. It is the same with two beautiful serene Samoyed dogs. They are like big white serene clouds and again Buzz and Finn just decide to take a notion not to like them when they were licking them another time.

As I got into my car a seagull pooped on my head. Putting out the bins later, the bag burst and I had to fight off two pugs off leads that were trying to eat chicken bones. It turned out that one of the pugs was lost and I had to take him home, give him water, photograph him and put a mayday onto our residential Facebook site for somebody to claim her. She was very overweight and breathing with difficulty. I was afraid somebody had abandoned her but thankfully she was claimed.

From now on I will be armed with treats and keep my eyes more peeled than I usually do to distract them and prevent them from barking. But after today it is highly unlikely that I will put my nose outside the door. Although to be honest, I know I will.

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJadhbDM/

Today is a sneezy day for me. I had a swim earlier and as I inhaled salt water; I had a fit of sneezing when I came home. Following two of my sneezes I farted. My two dogs, Buzz and Finn, looked at me with disdain. Yesterday I made a lovely frittata with lots of leeks followed by my now-famous Black Bean Brownies, made from kidney beans. I had a lovely feast but my colon became nuclear later in the evening. Whilst practicing yoga I could not stop farting. I think at one point I saw Buzz’s eyes watering.

Viz has been my favorite comic since it was launched many many moons ago. Johnny Farty Pants has to be the best character. The scene where the climate activists visit his house to ask why the ozone layer has disappeared above it is way before its time. His mother responds by saying that she has suffered chemical burns to her lungs due to her son’s toxic flatulence. It is hard to believe it began in 1979 and went National in 1985.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/26/how-we-made-viz

A dear friend gifted me the Viz, War and P*ss Profanisaurus with a foreword by Professor Cox. It is without doubt the rudest book on the planet.

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

Warning- content may offend.

This comedy duo gives me the giggles. The sketch is hilarious with 10 million views

https://youtu.be/CYOIbXJTVIc

Before I commenced nurse training, I did an interview to become cabin crew with an Airline named Air 2000. I was not chosen and often wonder how different my life would have been if I was cabin crew as opposed to being a nurse. I adore travelling and as my father was an engineer in Aer Lingus, we travelled a lot. We lived in Kano, Nigeria for six months when I was eight and later in Malta. The memories I have of Kano have always stayed with me. I had never seen a black person before and was sticking my tongue out to them as my father drove us to our new home in his Nigerian Airways car. I was very bold and just thought they looked like aliens.

The house where we stayed was beautiful with gorgeous landscaped gardens. We played Monopoly in the living room but the best fun was stopping the money from flying away from the giant fan above us. Capturing scorpions to pull their tails off was a great pastime. We didn’t realise how dangerous it was at the time. As I had learnt to swim the previous year, I was obsessed with being in the pool. Each weekend we went to a pool club and by the end of the day I had webbed hands and feet.

However, I remember the poverty. It was extreme. The children were blind and maimed begging on the pavements for ‘Dashy’. As a foreign family, we were very privileged in the early ’70s, however, I was too young to realise it at the time.

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

I love this weather-predicting stone. It does what it says on the sign. No guesswork, just plain and simple. The weather has been unpredictable, to say the least, and I have not been doing too well in choosing the correct clothing. I went to the beach the other day to walk Buzz and Finn and looked like I was about to commence a Mount Everest ascent. I had my big padded duvet-style coat on, a giant orange mohair scarf, and my teal Nepalese woollen hat. When I got to the beach the sun had come out and it was 18 degrees. When I had left it was a windy twelve degrees. Whenever there is wind, I always take four to five degrees from the temperature to make it accurate and the beach is always extra windy anyway. Not to mention my tummy from a hearty curry the night before.

I peeled everything off and had to try and tame my wild hat hair. There was no point and I looked like someone from the Blasket Islands circa 1920. It didn’t matter, Buzz and Finn were in beach heaven. I love the thud of Finn’s tiny paws as he is let off the lead and races across the sand at breakneck speed, anxious to get as much sniffing in as possible. He has taken to picking up coffee cups as he sees me picking them up for the litter bin. I am off to have a cuppa now.

All the best

Stay fab

Adele

Please accept my apologies in advance as my objective in my blog is to never offer opinions and make you smile. Every now and then something happens that incenses me so much that I either have to write about it or write a poem about it. The latter is the case today in honour of the momentous occasion of Trump’s arrest. BTW I am aware that the photo is a fake arrest photo. It is merely a wry nod to his fake news claims over the years.

 

Spunky Trump

 

The spunky Trump got spanked by stormy

He paid her from his expense account with glee

He hates Mexicans and tried to build a wall

Incited a riot and joyfully watched the squall

Stated In Africa there are shit-hole countries

Falsified documents with criminal ease

He is a fake news activist

Now he’s indicted and oh so pissed

He is anathema to climate change

Didn’t honour veterans because of the rain

He loves the Russians and insulting women

After this, the Kremlin won’t even have him

He sacked all his staff and attacked racial injustice protests

He ran a mafia, not a government and now we will see justice.

By

Adele Leahy