Secret Royalty On Tour

There’s a reason I don’t stick to the beaten track: it has fewer discoveries. Which is how I found myself, on my first day in this small town on the Nam Song River, standing outside the Pull Mind café covered in dust in 30-degree heat, having a moment.

What an inspired name.

Because from where I’m standing (well, sitting by the pool writing this on my separately insured laptop in fact) my mind is one of the last parts of my body that deserves my trust. Yours too frankly.

We often talk about ‘trusting our gut’ like it’s a final check in before a decision is made. It shouldn’t be. Our gut has its own nervous system, a second brain quietly reading the room long before our mind even boots up. And the body? It’s constantly sending a kind of a Morse code through a thing called interoception, subtle inner cues that know what’s true before we can explain why.

Cognitive psychology is clear on this one: the mind’s job isn’t accuracy. It’s narrative coherence. It fills in gaps, pastes old fears onto new situations, smooths over contradictions and chooses safety over possibility. Evolution made it a survival machine, not a joy machine.

Meanwhile, our instincts have already sussed the whole damned situation and are waving wildly at us like, “Come on. We gotta go. Now.”

So today’s micro lesson from Laos: it’s not woo. It’s true. Trust your gut and let your mind catch up later. If you’re lucky, it might even find you standing on a dusty road to nowhere.