South Asia: Take Aways and Leave Behinds

Exactly one year ago I was returning home after a month in Nepal. Six years ago, I was returning home from India. Both were pilgrimages of a sort that required planes, buses, trains, and countless accommodations in order to see more, and somehow be more. Every night unpack and organize, every morning repack and reorganize. For me, it was simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting to do this daily dance.

Meanwhile each moment in South Asia presents something new, colorful, delicious, aromatic, noisy, maddening, curious or collectable. I’d traveled to India to learn more about yoga from my teacher at his ashram in Gujarat. I’m not sure what called me to Nepal. Initially, it was a solitary trek that grew into a small group retreat meant to benefit women’s literacy. I trekked barefoot into the lowest jungle caves and flew to the highest heights by helicopter to the base of Mount Everest. We explored rural villages with a local shaman, famous temples and stupas with scholars, and we took in all the sensory experiences of Katmandu. (Well, maybe not ALL of them.) Our last destination was Lumbini, a poor, sweltering and seldom-visited-by-tourists location that happened to be the birthplace of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the person who would become known as the Buddha. We visited the ruins of his palace, where he ultimately renounced his inheritance, his wife and his child in order to become a wandering aescetic in search of enlightenment.    

At what had been the palace gates, a teacher from our group gave an impromptu talk about renunciation. Essentially, she expressed that it doesn’t have to happen dramatically -- we are not royalty seeking to become awakened at any cost. Instead, we can let go incrementally, leaving behind something that hinders our spiritual journey without unraveling our entire life. 

This struck me as Truth, and without thinking I knew exactly what to renounce. I whispered the word “ambition” into the barely perceptible warm wind. Then I filled a tiny capsule with a bit of dirt as a memento, and that was that. 

One year later, the lesson in leaving behind ambition has proven to be no joke. I check in with my personal motivations regularly and find that sometimes my ego is busy doing what it had been used to doing – striving, seeking, overthinking or becoming enamored with achievement. And then I remember that tiny quantity of humble dirt. It was a brilliant take away, more valuable, and hopefully more enduring, than I could have planned.