A yoga teacher tells the "spiritual" test of survival while he was lost in Hawaii | World

MAUI, May 29 – The yoga instructor rescued after 17 days lost in a forest reserve in Hawaii, told yesterday sleeping in wild boar dens, walking without shoes in a rocky stream and eating plants to survive a "rainy day". spiritual training camp "which tested his will to live.

Amanda Eller, 35, seated in a wheelchair in front of a Maui hospital surrounded by her parents, remembered her ordeal at a press conference four days after a research team in helicopter found her alive but burned by the sun, malnourished and barely able to walk to the end of the street. a ravine.

Eller, who also works as a physiotherapist, was reported missing on May 9, one day after leaving for what she thought was a 4.8-kilometer hike in Maui's Makawao Forest Reserve, and then lost herself. in the dense jungle.

She remembered lying on a fallen tree to close her eyes and meditate, then disorient herself as she resumed her hike, not knowing which direction was heading for her car.

By the time she was rescued, she had seriously injured her knee during a 20-foot drop in an embankment and had suffered cuts and cuts in her ankles, which had become severely swollen and infected. His shoes were washed away by a sudden flood the day after his fall.

Rescuers in a helicopter hired by her family finally spotted Eller near a waterfall on Friday, miles away from where she had parked her car. She was flown to a hospital for medical treatment.

She acknowledged feeling sometimes desperate, especially when helicopters flew over the forest without spotting her, while she frantically acted her arms to grab their attention. This happened about 20 times, she recalls, adding, "I felt invisible."

Meditate to keep calm

Eller said that she had used meditation to calm herself down and that she was pulling her strength from what she had described as a "strong, clear message" pressing her internally.

"You can either sit on that rock and die, and you can say" mercy, "you can feel unhappy and play victim, or you can start down that waterfall and choose life," she said.

Eller said that the experience was transformative and described it as a "spiritual training camp".

"This trip was extremely spiritual for me," she said. "It was an opportunity to be stripped of all the comforts of the modern world and to see what was left, there was such incredible beauty."

Her greatest physical challenges consisted of staying warm at night, moving around after being injured and feeding on plants, which she acknowledged was safe to eat in a book she had read on the subject.

At night, she slept in tall grassy areas or on large rocks. On occasion, she slept in the abandoned dens of wild boar wandering in the forest.

Eller said she was eager to return to work as soon as possible and that she hoped to be able to do without crutches in about two weeks.

When asked what she could do differently during her next outing in the woods, Eller acknowledged that she had not been well prepared for such a hike and that He had been stupid not to carry his cell phone with her. "It was ignorant," she says. – Reuters