Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand April / May 2017: Health & Wellness Issue | Page 34

From the Ashes of Disaster
CELEBRATING
THE JOURNEY
OF WELLNESS
For this last installment of “The Ashes of Disaster,”
Amelie Yan-Gouiffes tells us the story of how, rather
accidentally, she transformed her health by setting off on
a journey toward wellness. It all started with a book…
I
n 2002, Zimbabwe was in a ma-
jor humanitarian crisis. The fa rm-
ers had recently been thrown
out from the country. Without the
farmers, no one was there to man-
age the farms. There was no food
production, no maize — a staple
food for Zimbabweans. As a hu-
manitarian worker, I was sent on
a mission to Zimbabwe to help
those facing the spreading hunger.
While waiting to board my flight to
Zimbabwe, I came across a book in
an airport shop that grabbed my
attention.
The book, called “The Perfect
Health,” was written by Deepak
Chopra. Chopra is a now-famous
American with Indian origins, and
he was just beginning to bring
Ayurveda to the Western world
with this book. He had extracted
wisdom from an ancient tradition
and adapted it for Western under-
standing and lifestyles.
I don’t know why this particu-
lar book attracted me. I felt healthy,
after all. But my lifestyle of 15 years
ago was decidedly unhealthy.
I used to wake up and have a
coffee and a cigarette. It was a time
when everyone would smoke in the
office, too. As humanitarian work-
ers, we were under a lot of pressure
and needed to cope with stress-
ful environments. We’d begin our
days at 5:00 a.m. and sometimes
finish with an emergency meet-
ing at 1:00 a.m. The one person
not smoking was the weird one. To
34 WANDERLUST
avoid scaring my mother, I never
disclosed just how many cigarettes
I puffed through, per day.
It wasn’t just smoking that was
keeping me from perfect health —
not that I was very concerned back
then. I also drank alcohol when
going out or having dinners. And,
like a good French, I was a big
meat-eater.
Only God knows why I bought
“The Perfect Health” in the London
airport that day. Without giving it
too much thought, I slipped the
book into my bag and boarded
my plane, eager to help the peo-
ple in Zimbabwe survive the crisis
at hand.
My focus in those days was al-
ways the betterment and wellbe-
ing of others. I didn’t realize then
that, by purchasing a book, I had
just taken my first step on a jour-
ney of wellness to spark the better-
ment of me.

In Zimbabwe, we got straight to
work. We had to. The political sit-
uation was tense; the first signs of
hunger were emerging. Prior to this
crisis, Zimbabwe was considered to
be like a paradise in Africa. It had
been a thriving country, but now it
was declining and quickly becom-
ing like the countries in the rest of
the continent.
We organized the first food dis-
tribution in the country with food
shipped in from outside, because
the only food otherwise avail-
able was sold on the black mar-
ket. At the food distribution, 3 and
4-year-old boys and girls waited in
queues for big bags of maize, oil
and sugar. We’d ask them, “Where
are your parents?” And these tiny
children would say to us, “I am the
head of my family.” Their parents,
dead from AIDS, had left behind
very young children who needed
to fend for themselves and, many
times, for their infant and toddler
siblings, too.

In this midst of this stress, some-
thing told me I needed to read the
book from the airport. One of the
first exercises was a breathing ex-
ercise. I took the book at 7:00 p.m.
one evening and followed the
simple instructions: Breathe in.
Breathe out. I breathed in and out.
In, and out.
At 7:00 a.m. the next morning,
I woke up. Surprised that a simple
breathing exercise caused me to
sleep for so long, I continued read-
ing the book where I’d left off. In it,
Chopra says that when there are a
lot of negative emotions inside of
us, the breathing exercise induces
sleep (because it leads to release)
and the body knows then that it
needs to rest. I laughed out loud. I
must have had a lot in me that I re-
leased, if I rested for 12 hours!
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