Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [1]
A pilgrimage to Takshang is the highlight of a trip to Bhutan, but it is commonplace for the Bhutanese. They are carried here from babyhood. Slight, frail seniors navigate the twists and turns and inclines deftly from memory, in a fraction of the time it takes foreigners half their age. Tales are told of people with physical disabilities who labor for twelve hours so they might reach the top, where a cluster of temples awaits. The most sacred of the altar rooms there is open to the general public only once a year.
It is believed that meditating for just one minute at Takshang will bring you exponentially greater blessings than meditating for months at any other sacred site. If you travel here on a day the calendars deem to be auspicious, the merit you accumulate will be even more abundant. Ngawang tells us that the first time she remembers visiting was two decades ago, when she was four years old; her mother had died and the monks sent her here to pray.
What Takshang promises all who visit is cleansing and renewal. Into this valley in the eighth century a sage named Guru Rinpoche rode in on the back of a tigress. Then he retreated to a cave for three months and, with the most powerful weapon there is—his mind—swashbuckled away evil spirits. In so doing, he persuaded the Bhutanese to adopt Buddhism as their guiding light. Hundreds of years later, to mark the feat, a colony of structures was built in this precarious location—testament to how the people of Bhutan have long revered him, this being they consider the Second Buddha.
As we climb higher and higher, and as the gold-topped Takshang comes into view, I can feel Guru Rinpoche’s strength bolstering my own, diminishing demons, softening my heart.
THIS IS THE STORY of my midlife crisis—and how I wrestled with and then transcended it, thanks to a chance encounter that led me to a mysterious kingdom in Asia few have visited. In the march of years leading up to my fortieth birthday, and on the rapid ascent into that menacing decade, I’d found myself Monday-morning quarterbacking every step of my life, haunted by the revisionist history of regret. A near-continuous looping chorus of “what ifs” and “if onlys” became my soundtrack:
Why had I failed to have a family with a man I loved?
Why had I squandered my youth so haphazardly?
Why had I stuck with a profession that infuriated me so intensely?
What could I do with the second half of my life to make it more meaningful than the first?
How was I going to grow old gracefully?
Inhaling the cold, clear air on that trek up to Takshang, on the other side of the world from home, the pain and noise of those questions began, finally, to melt away. To morph into a sense of acceptance and peace. No longer did I feel stuck on a treadmill of emptiness; now my life story read as full, exciting, wondrous—with limitless possibilities for the future.
And we hadn’t even reached the most sacred spot on the mountain.
THE GROUNDWORK FOR this awakening had been laid months earlier, when I had only the vaguest of ideas where this place called Bhutan was on the planet.
Every Wednesday evening, I headed west on the clogged I-10 freeway in Los Angeles for an experimental workshop in positive psychology. In classic therapy—where you endlessly review all your personal history—you work to gain a better understanding of why you are the way you are, have done what you’ve done. But it isn’t necessarily designed to help you move forward, much less reframe the way you look at the world. By now, with the help of various counselors, I’d navel-gazed a giant gaping hole in my belly button, dissecting my own personal history the way a Proust scholar did Remembrance of Things Past. And yet I still found myself swirling in a vortex of despair.
I summoned a sense