My Happiness Journey

I'm not sure exactly when Nepal entered my mind. Maybe it was an old National Geographic article or perhaps a dusty book on Buddhism I picked up at the Strand. Suddenly the idea no longer felt abstract. It felt necessary.

One ordinary conversation became the end of a fifteen-year marriage I believed would last forever. My life split apart - suddenly I was living alone and miserable. Friends suggested therapy, medication, dating, distraction — anything to keep moving forward. Nothing worked. I knew in my heart the solution was to go. And that is what I did. I sold most things that I owned, put the bare minimum in storage and headed off to Nepal.

There is something about starting a journey that is instantly uplifting. The moment you leave, the future becomes more important than the past. On the road, life demands your attention. You stop rehearsing old conversations and start noticing the world again. Going somewhere means you are experiencing life as it happens. 

There is a Buddhist saying that a good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.  This trip was not about my destination but the journey itself.  Nepal was my physical destination, but it was not about where but about why.  I had taken wrong turns on my path of life and needed to find new direction.  A new way of being happy. It is a journey that started at the Pema Ts’al Monastic Institute in Pokhara, Nepal and continues to this day. 

Over the past dozen years I've had the privilege of teaching, traveling, learning and photographing Buddhist monks throughout Asia. From remote monasteries in Nepal to temples in Thailand and the mountains of Bhutan, I have spent countless hours observing monks — through the lens of my camera and through the quieter lens of attention itself.

What I repeatedly noticed, was something difficult to explain yet impossible to ignore. The monks I met owned very little. They lived without the comforts, distractions, and endless choices that define modern Western life. Yet they radiated a calmness, warmth, and sense of joy that felt increasingly rare back home in America.

This blog is not a travel guide and I’m not recommending you sell everything you own and move to Nepal (I probably would recommend this but I know it is not realistic). My hope is that this blog helps see the world around you a little bit differently and perhaps a different way of thinking about happiness itself.  Not as something to chase endlessly in the future, but as something quietly waiting to be noticed right where you are now.

Sunrise at the Pema Ts’al Monastic Institute