Nepal after 4 years
Trust the pausing moments
I’ve waited almost 4 years to come back to Nepal!! It’s hard to believe, because in the last 20 years I’ve been back here a lot. In my 22 years living nomadically, North India & Nepal are the places I came back to the most. The mountains in Nepal being one of my favorite places on Earth.
So why wait so long to come back? The biggest reason is that I had been traveling so much for so long without stopping, that when life offered a clear invitation to pause, I took it. And I’m so glad I did.
Pauses can be true gifts in life. I took the big pause of 2020-21 with a smile, determined to make it great, and curious to see what it would bring me.
There was a lot of processing and assimilating. Deeply digesting what had been the previous 2 decades of my life, what I had learned by traveling to 100 countries and living in so many of them. Integrating what I had learned from relationships. Getting cozier with family. Rediscovering the nature of the place where I was born. Integrating bits & pieces of so many cultures I’d been in touch with. Reassessing my world view. Regrounding Tibetan Buddhism. Synthesizing the different tools & modalities I’d been bringing to my work as a psychotherapist. Establishing deeper ways to work with trauma. Stretching bigger wings to my work of Deep Ecology & Active Hope. Rebalancing home & travel life. Reconnecting with myself. Grounding a new company from which I can do my work in a more structured way - psychotherapy, online courses, and trips to special places around the globe. Doing more inner work with therapy. Deeply connecting with Portugal, and my hometown Cascais. Getting to know new parts of me. Building home. Becoming much more embodied. Coming back to Body Mind Centering. It was easy to let go of what no longer served, and mysterious to explore new inner territories.
In the long pause I gained new perspectives of myself and of the world I love so much. My current trip to Nepal came from that space of regained comfort and freedom. A new kind of freedom. A feeling of being so comfortable at home that I would be as happy staying there as I am here traveling in the Himalayan mountains. It felt like the most grounded sense of freedom I ever experienced with traveling. Happy to be here, while I would be happy at home too.
And here I am now, in one of my favorite corners of the world. Feeling like I’m a new person in so many ways, and at the same time I’m the very same essence in wider deep ways.
The background being so familiar helps me to track the inner changes I’ve made. I am right now sleeping in a mountain lodge where I stayed 7,5 years ago. The quarter of a compete Saturn cycle. A perfect amount of time to measure change. Change that I’m so happy to feel.
Stopping something that became habitual is precious. Like observing the mind going on loops, and see what’s there in the spaciousness when it quietens.
Living in that expanded spaciousness is my favorite thing. Maybe that’s why my spiritual name is Namkha - spaciousness, the blue sky, emptiness.
Stopping also allowed me to create my travel agency, at last. It has my spiritual name too, because I feel it is an extension of my spiritual path. The move to take people on Namkha trips is a pure reflection of what happens in the flow of spaciousness.
Nepal now. A journey that started with so much synchronicity. That pulsating feeling of being in dynamic flow with Life. Breathing together.
I write this after having dinner with a Sherpa family I met 7 years ago in the lower Everest valley. A place that has taught me so much about true happiness. The coziness of dinner in the kitchen by the stove. The deep conversations about the last 4 years. The shared joy of simplicity. Soft intentions set for a peaceful and loving world for all.
Happy, at home. Like all true homes, Nepal was here waiting for me on my return, and I’m so grateful for that.
