A Little Bit of Kailash:
My 14-Day Sojourn

Landed in Kathmandu at 9:45pm, flying in from Singapore. The pilgrimage doesn't wait for jet lag to settle — it starts the moment you step off the plane.

I got lucky right away: an Isha representative was there to receive me at the airport. While waiting, I ran into a group of four Indian-Australian pilgrims, all Gujaratis, also headed to Kailash Manasarovar — just with a different tour organiser. There was something instantly warm about them, an easy enthusiasm and camaraderie that made the airport feel less like a transit point and more like the beginning of something shared. I hope our paths cross again somewhere along the next two weeks — on the same mountain, under the same sky, it feels like they might.

Checked into the Radisson for the night. Kathmandu waited outside, and so did the journey.

An easy morning to start — no rush, no itinerary pressing in yet. After a properly sumptuous hotel breakfast, I decided the best way to meet a city is on foot.

Set out on a long walk that stretched to nearly 10 km over two hours: past the Kathmandu Durbar (palace) square, through the quiet green of Ranibari Community Forest, and into the Garden of Dreams — a small, unexpected pocket of calm tucked into the city's noise. Stopped for a snack at Kaiser Café, which turned out to be the perfect resting point along the way.

Back at the Radisson by late afternoon to meet the rest of the L1 Isha Mansarovar group — the faces I'd be sharing the next twelve days with.

The evening carried its own quiet gift. We visited the Linga Bhairavi temple — an astonishingly quiet, serene space, thick with what felt like genuine divine presence. It reminded me strongly of the Linga Bhairavi shrine at the Isha centre in Coimbatore, the same stillness carried across a different skyline. I sat and meditated for a while, watching others move through their own poojas and rituals around me — two hours passed inside what felt like a single, unhurried breath. A deeply divine experience, and not one I expected so early in the trip.

Dinner afterward was easy and warm, full of the kind of unplanned conversation that only happens among strangers who are about to become fellow travelers. One family in particular stayed with me — a mother and her two sons, Arya (19) and Aadhya (16), who have been following Isha practices for several years now. Arya, I learned, does three hours of practice every single morning. There was a light on all three of their faces that's hard to describe and easy to recognize once you've seen it. Watching a younger generation draw this kind of meaning and discipline from the practices was, quietly, one of the best parts of the day.

Kathmandu was the doorway; from here, the real journey begins.

Up at 5am — the sojourn's rhythm properly announcing itself. Three hours followed of yoga, Shambhavi Kriya, and a virtual satsang with Sadhguru, before we'd even had breakfast. It set the tone for everything that came after.

Sadhguru walked us through the dos and don'ts of the journey ahead, and then came a small, weighty gesture — a sacred thread tied on the wrist, meant to hold and protect through the sojourn. A few lines from the satsang stayed with me through the day:

1. I am responsible for my life.
2. I am not jaded by my belief systems.
3. I am going to Kailash with an open heart and surrender.
4. I am ready to receive divine experiences with no prejudice or expectation.
5. Shiva is an energy form — endeavor, and then experience that divine energy.

There's something clarifying about hearing intentions spoken aloud in a room full of people about to walk the same path.

The second half of the day took us to Pashupatinath — spoken of as the forehead of Shiva, a site some 5,000 to 8,000 years old, its linga predating even the Vedic era. Standing at a temple complex that old has a way of quietly resetting your sense of time. We couldn't enter the innermost sanctum, but the outer complex alone was enough to sit with for a long while.

Two days in, and Kathmandu has already given more than I expected — a walk, a temple, a vow, and a thread on the wrist to carry it all forward.

If Kathmandu was the doorway, today we walked through it. The real sojourn starts now — Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and with it, the mountains proper.

The day began well before the sun did. An 8:30am flight meant waking at 3:45am, reporting by 4:30am to check out and gather for a Guru Pooja before heading to the airport at 5am. Watching seventy of us move through that pre-dawn choreography — bags packed, ritual done, buses boarded, all without a wasted minute — was its own small marvel. That kind of discipline in a group this size doesn't happen by accident; it comes from a shared trust, a faith that's carrying everyone toward something worth the 3:45am wake-up. Every sadhak here seems to be reaching for the same thing in their own way — something larger than the self, a way of seeing beyond the ordinary frame of a life.

The packed breakfast and lunch were, against all expectation for airport food, genuinely delicious. But the real nourishment of the morning was a conversation — with a fellow pilgrim seated beside me on the flight, a young woman in her late twenties named Kaylash — a name that echoes the mountain we're all walking toward. What struck me most was how spiritually evolved she already was at such a young age, carrying a genuine hunger for exploration rarely seen this early in life. Her story stayed with me. She described her younger years as a cycle of two steps forward, five steps back — a kind of quiet, meaningless churn she knew she had to break out of. She went looking for something with real substance beneath it, and found Sadhguru: someone who could not only explain the "why" of things with total logical clarity, but could also point toward a path — and walk ahead of her on it. Hearing that kind of clarity from someone so young, already this far into her own search, was a genuinely humbling thing to witness.

The flight and arrival into Lhasa were smooth, touching down at 3,656 meters (11,990 ft) — a serious jump in altitude, and the first real test of acclimatization ahead. Two days here before we push further, letting the body catch up to where the spirit has already arrived.

A free and easy day for sightseeing in this beautiful city — first Potala Palace, then Jokhang Temple. But before any of that, the day opened the way every day here seems to: with invocation, prayers, and a Guru Pooja satsang, 6:30 to 8:30am.

Sadhguru spoke this morning about the land itself — Tibet, one of the largest plateaus on Earth, sitting at roughly 12,000 feet, and by his account one of the most spiritually charged spaces anywhere, carrying nearly 3,000 years of history. It made me want to actually understand the layers beneath what we were about to walk into.

The land's own faith, Bon, predates Buddhism here by centuries — it was Tibet's main spiritual tradition across the plateau before Buddhism arrived, believed to have originated in western Tibet and spread eastward until it became the spiritual foundation of the whole region. Some accounts trace organized Bon back to a teacher named Shenrab, said to have brought the tradition from a legendary land in the distant past, with its earliest roots tied to the region around Mount Kailash itself.

Buddhism's real turning point came in the 7th century CE under Songtsen Gampo, Tibet's 33rd king and the first to unify the plateau into a single empire. Before his reign, Tibet was shaped mainly by Bon's animistic and shamanistic worldview, with only limited outside contact with Buddhism. Songtsen Gampo became Buddhism's key patron, credited with building numerous temples — including, most famously, the Jokhang, which remains the spiritual heart of Tibetan Buddhism today. He and two later rulers, Trisong Detsen and Ralpacan, came to be remembered as Tibet's "three religious kings," each associated with one of the great protector bodhisattvas.

It was Trisong Detsen, the second of these three, who invited the Indian tantric master Padmasambhava — Guru Rinpoche, the "lotus-born" — to Tibet specifically to work with, rather than simply override, the existing Bon tradition, and to help establish Buddhism more firmly. Together they founded Samye, Tibet's first Buddhist monastery, and ordained its first Tibetan monks; a few decades later, Buddhism was formally declared the state religion. Centuries after that came Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school — the lineage from which the Dalai Lamas themselves would eventually emerge. It's a lineage that runs in a fairly direct line from a 7th-century king marrying foreign princesses to bring Buddhist images into his court, to the very palace we stood in front of this morning.

We spent close to three hours at the Potala Palace square, taking in the structure itself — thirteen storeys, rising over 300 meters above the Lhasa valley from atop Marpo Ri, the "Red Mountain." Construction on the Potala as it stands today began in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama, and it served as the winter residence of every Dalai Lama from 1649 until 1959. The building's two halves carry their meaning in their color: the White Palace, once home to living quarters and monastic study halls, and the Red Palace at its center, holding the stupas and relics of past Dalai Lamas. Red and white, standing together on the same mountain, in the shape — Potala's namesake suggests — of a boat: the coexistence, quite literally built into the architecture, of politics (red) and spiritualism (white). The message I took from it is a simple one, but worth carrying forward: politics and spirituality were never meant to be separated. At their best, they walk hand in hand.

The afternoon took us to the Jokhang Temple — 7th century in origin, and among the most revered sites in all of Tibetan Buddhism. Inside sits a Buddha statue said to have been made when Buddha himself was twelve years old, sculpted while he was still alive. Two companion statues once existed alongside it — one made at age five, another at twenty-five — but both were destroyed long ago, leaving this one as the sole survivor of the set. Standing in front of a statue with that kind of provenance does something to your sense of scale; the outer building itself is "only" 17th century, and even that felt ancient by the time we walked in.

What stayed with me most, though, wasn't the statue — it was the people circling it. The outer corridor of the temple was full of local devotees doing kora, the ritual circumambulation, many of them prostrating full-length on the ground, over and over, for the entire circuit. Among them was a person with an amputated hand, and another with an amputated leg, both moving through their prostrations with an unmistakable smile. It's the kind of thing that quietly rearranges your own sense of what you're entitled to complain about. Watching that devotion, unforced and complete, I felt distinctly how much I take for granted — and how little real reason any of us have to carry unhappiness around as a habit.

A worthwhile day, in the fullest sense — history and spiritual significance, walked through rather than just read about.

A later start today — 7am — for invocation, prayers, and Shambhavi Kriya. There's a particular charge that comes from this practice: the breathing exercises of Sukha Kriya combined with Om chanting, followed by meditation, seem to lift the energy in the room in a way that's hard to describe until you've felt it. It struck me again this morning how underappreciated breath is as a life force — something so automatic that we rarely notice it's also the thing capable of pulling mind, body, and soul into alignment, and grounding you fully in the present moment.

From there, straight into the road — a 300 km drive to Shigatse, climbing to around 12,585 ft (3,845 m). Eight hours expected, with a hoped-for arrival by 5pm. Tomorrow looks even longer: 450 km to Saga, with a serious altitude gain up to 15,223 ft (4,640 m). The mountains are starting to ask more of us with each passing day — which, I suspect, is exactly the point.

The evening unwound gently in Shigatse, Tibet's second-largest town. Almost no one here speaks or understands English, and yet it was genuinely heartening to watch how hard people worked to bridge that gap anyway — gestures, translation apps, sheer patience. We checked into the Jove Mountain Hotel and, by sheer luck, fell in with Doma, a Nepalese-Tibetan woman fluent in five languages — Hindi, English, Nepali, Tibetan, and Chinese. She turned out to be exactly the kind of guide you hope to stumble into: took us to a lovely local Chinese restaurant for lunch, came shopping with us, and finally dropped us at the famous Tashilhunpo Monastery. An unexpectedly wonderful evening, the kind that happens only when you let a place surprise you.

Dr. Ratna Kumar. I want to use this day to introduce someone whose presence on this trip made a real difference: Dr. Ratna Kumar, from the US. He's a deeply humble, endlessly helpful man who cares in a way that shows up in how he speaks — affectionately, warmly, without any pretense. He carries a kind of childlike energy that sits oddly, wonderfully, alongside the fact that he runs a large chain of clinics back in Chicago. What genuinely lights him up, though, isn't the scale of what he's built — it's helping people, doing his duty quietly and well, and, by his own admission, playing with his newborn granddaughter, Anjali.

A couple of small moments told me everything about his character. In Saga, when he noticed that the heart rate and oxygen monitors we were using for our daily medical checks weren't giving consistent readings, he simply went out and bought better ones himself. And when it became clear that Dr. Ujwal — the one Isha volunteer doctor carrying medical duty for the entire group — was stretched thin, Dr. Ratna Kumar offered to help run the morning and evening vitals checks himself. That's no small thing: it meant delayed breakfasts and dinners for him, and real patience, night after night, with a group increasingly strained by altitude. I was fortunate enough to spend extended time with him on our last day in Kathmandu too — lunch, some shopping, a bit of sightseeing — and came away with the same impression each time: a genuinely happy-go-lucky man, quick with real concern for others, and fully willing to show up for the causes he believes in.

Up again at 5am, into Guru Pooja and Shambhavi Kriya between 6 and 7, and then a properly sumptuous breakfast to fuel what's ahead: a 450 km drive to Saga, gaining more than 800 meters of altitude over roughly 10 hours. Somewhere along this stretch we'll cross 15,000 ft for the first time on this journey — a genuine threshold, and a reminder that the easier days are behind us now.

The drive itself turned into one of the most scenic stretches of the whole journey so far. For the first time, we saw raw nature in its full, unedited beauty — and with it came that particular, humbling reminder mountains are so good at delivering: how small we really are in the larger scheme of things. These ranges have stood for hundreds of millions of years, long before humanity arrived on the scene, silent witnesses to the entire unfolding of the natural world. They are the guardians of history in the truest sense — enduring every fury and every tenderness nature has thrown at them, and remaining, through all of it, solid, firm, unfettered. That's a message worth carrying long after the trip ends.

On our coordinators. It feels right to pause here and write about the three people who've been quietly holding this entire sojourn together — Vinod, Sabina, and Firu. Vinod, originally from Malaysia, has been a full-time devotee at the Isha Centre in Coimbatore for eleven and a half years now — a teacher of the Inner Engineering program there, and today a regional coordinator. He carries himself with a calm, sincere authority that puts the whole group at ease; his devotion to a divine and purposeful life shows in nearly everything he does, without him ever needing to say so. Sabina and Firu both come from Romania. Sabina is an active Isha volunteer who lives with her life partner in the Romanian countryside, and she brings a kind of grace and quiet calm wherever she goes — always the first to help, always with a smile, deeply diligent in her service. It says something that she was specially invited to volunteer on this Kailash sojourn despite having been with Isha only a few years and having made this particular journey just once herself. And then there's Firu — a young man in his mid-thirties, a full-time Isha devotee at the centre for over six years, and joy personified. He's proof, in the best possible way, that spirituality doesn't have to be solemn — it can carry humor and laughter right alongside a steadfast commitment to the path. Blessed to have the three of them steering us through these fourteen days.

Back to the road: the 450 km stretch took a full 13 hours in the end, counting bio-breaks, checkpoints, and a properly satisfying Chinese lunch along the way. The roads were well paved and the route was scenic almost the entire distance — we stopped constantly for photos, and at each stop did the recommended breathing and stretching exercises, given how fast we were gaining altitude, crossing 5,000 meters at points along the route. Mountains, plains, valleys, and rivers rolled past in a sequence that looked almost too composed to be real — nature, it turns out, is still the best artist working. We even spotted a few yaks along the way, the region's beautiful native animal, unbothered by the bus rumbling past.

Firu, true to form, got the whole bus playing games to pass the miles — one called Bobby's World, where you have to pass through an imaginary "green glass door" to enter, and another that involved "killing mosquitoes" with either a clap or just a thought. Equal parts silly and genuinely fun — the kind of thing that turns strangers on a long bus ride into something closer to old friends.

I also managed some real one-on-one time with a few fellow travelers along the way, and each conversation left something behind. Vishal, celebrating his birthday on this very trip, still young at 37 and full of an adventurer's appetite to explore life to its fullest. Ameya, 38 and single, shuttling between Mumbai and Sydney while running his own consulting practice and caring for his aging mother — waiting, with quiet patience, for the right life partner, and carrying a genuine hunger to understand what life is really for. And Prakash — 60 years old, originally from Goa, now a successful professional running his own firm in Canada. His wife left him sixteen years ago, and he raised his two children alone from that point on, eventually quitting a demanding, travel-heavy career specifically so he could show up fully as both parents. He never remarried, by his own choice, staying devoted to that role. He came to Isha only a few years ago and has since become an active volunteer across events in the US and Canada — a living example of devotion expressed through service. His mother, 85 now, is by his account fiercely independent, an avid traveler, and deeply religious in her own right.

Three very different lives, three very different lessons — the pull toward adventure and self-discovery, the practice of taking life one step at a time, and the quiet discipline of simply doing one's duty as well as it can be done. Kudos to every sadhak walking this path in their own way. Glad, deeply, that our paths crossed here.

A day meant for reflection, for turning inward, for meditation — and it started with a question that's stayed with me since.

Journey as destination. Anjali, my wife, asked me something simple and pointed: is all this really worth it? Twelve-plus-hour days on the road, a full week just to arrive, the cold, the altitude sickness, the far-from-hygienic facilities along the way? It sent me somewhere I didn't expect. Isn't the journey itself the destination? Why do we need to "arrive" somewhere before we let ourselves feel arrived? Why can't each step — journey or destination, it shouldn't matter which — carry its own joy, its own complete experience, the very thing a seeker is actually seeking? There's so much to be grateful for in any given moment, so much to notice, so much to learn, if we're willing to look. I've started to think milestones are overrated. Life isn't really built from a handful of big arrivals — it's an aggregate of countless small ones, created fresh in every moment we manage to be fully, wholeheartedly present. Life, in the end, is just a collection of such moments. Whether that moment happens on a bus somewhere between Shigatse and Saga, or standing in front of Mount Kailash itself, doesn't change what it is.

Someone in the group asked a related question: why is it always so difficult to reach places of real spiritual weight? I think that difficulty is by design. Before you can arrive somewhere like this, you have to prepare — to leave behind what isn't necessary, to internalize what actually matters, and to open your mind wide enough to receive what's waiting there. You have to empty yourself first, so there's room to be overwhelmed by whatever abundance is offered. That landed as one of the clearer insights of the trip so far.

Four remarkable women. Continuing what's become a running theme — meeting people and learning from the shape of their lives — I spent the last twelve hours getting to know four extraordinary women: Shirley, Archana, Nurgul, and Anca, each from a different corner of the world. Shirley, a senior stewardess with Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong, carries a huge smile and an infectious fullness of life — the very picture of joy without a trace of self-consciousness, always ready for a conversation and a good laugh. Her closest friend on the trip, Archana, is enthusiastic, deeply committed, and clearly spiritually evolved — the kind of person who's first to step up and take responsibility. Her devotion to Sadhguru is visible before she even speaks; performing a simple Guru Pooja on behalf of the group brought her to tears of gratitude. Nurgul, a doctor originally from Turkey and now based in the UK, showed all of us what it looks like to find real joy in duty — she volunteered to check everyone's vitals twice a day, every day, listening patiently to each person with a warm smile, swift and precise in her work but never rushed with her attention. And then Anca, from Scotland but born in Romania — thankfully without much of a Scottish accent, which gave us a good laugh when she admitted she herself sometimes struggles to understand the local brogue. She has a way of looking straight into your eyes when she greets you, warm and unhurried, with a face that carries curiosity rather than worry.

Four remarkable people, and between them, a small masterclass in joyful living — in finding real pleasure in small things, small instances, and the ordinary texture of a shared journey.

On the road again. The day itself started gently — up at 6am, after a rough night's sleep that didn't settle in until around 12:30am, thanks to a combination of the herbal tea I'd taken at 10pm (meant to help with acclimatization at Saga's altitude) and a heavily snoring roommate. Did my 20-minute Shambhavi Kriya right there in the room this morning, followed by a properly sumptuous hotel breakfast. By 8:45am we were on the road in our yellow Bus No. 3, bound for Lake Manasarovar.

The next four days are, by every account, the most important stretch of this entire sojourn — the days where the spiritual weight of this journey is meant to properly land. But before Manasarovar comes into view, there's a beautiful eight-hour drive still ahead, one that I suspect has its own memories and lessons waiting inside it. Let the day unfold.

The day unfolds — longer than planned. True to form, the journey had other ideas. What follows turned into one of the fullest, most unpredictable days of the sojourn so far — and that unpredictability, I'm learning, is its own kind of beauty.

We stopped along the way out of Saga County — known locally by its Tibetan name, but recorded in Chinese as Sajia — at the banks of the river the world knows as the Brahmaputra. Here, in its upper reaches, it goes by the name Tsangpo, or in Chinese, Yarlung Zangbo — a river that begins not far from Kailash and Manasarovar themselves before its long journey east and south, through Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, into Bangladesh, and finally out to the Indian Ocean. The setting was serene beyond words: a calm, wide river of real magnitude, moving gently, ringed on every side by magnificent mountains. I bowed to it with real reverence — this is no ordinary river, but a lifeline for the plains it eventually feeds, and one carrying deep mythological weight of its own. I sprinkled some of its pristine water on my head and drank a few drops. May this river's qualities — its constancy, its quiet generosity, its willingness to simply keep giving — find their way into how I try to live.

Then came the detour nobody had planned for: the road ahead toward Manasarovar was blocked for upgrade work, and we were told we'd be stopped for four hours. What was meant to be a 7pm arrival at the lake now looked more like 11pm. It is what it is — and the group, to its credit, took it in stride. We chose to focus on what was actually in front of us: the beautiful weather, the lovely hills all around, a well-arranged lunch, and — as it turned out — some genuinely memorable encounters with local Tibetans, a monk, and a group of young Chinese motorcyclists riding in from Chongqing, some 5,000 km away, on a month-long journey to Manasarovar.

Before any of that, though, there was a hill — roughly 400 ft high, and we were already sitting at 15,600 ft. Sandeep and I decided to give it a shot. We made it to about 15,900 ft, a 300 ft gain, before being called back down; pushing further into high-altitude stress wasn't advisable at this stage of the sojourn, and we knew better than to argue with that logic once it was pointed out.

We picked up a few local Tibetan greetings and took selfies with rural Tibetans who looked remarkably youthful for their years — tall, weathered in the right ways, seemingly defying age altogether. I was told the region has particular local herbs believed to guard against gout and certain cancers, though the more likely explanation is the obvious one: clean air, an active and low-stress lifestyle, and a deep, steady spiritual inclination running through daily life.

The local monk we met was a striking figure — around 40 years old, having taken his monastic vows at 16, following in the footsteps of his own mother, who is also a monk. He spoke about the purpose of life as he understands it — liberation from the cycle of birth and death — and about this year in particular being the "fire horse" year in the Tibetan calendar, considered an especially auspicious time to visit Mount Kailash. He himself had already made the pilgrimage three times this year, with more visits planned before the season closes. He had an endearing dog, whose Chinese name translates roughly to "more money," and a car with a name meaning "grow wealth." His view was that having sufficient resources is essential to sustaining and growing spiritual teaching — and while I could see the practical logic in that, I'll admit I came away a little skeptical of quite how central money seemed to be in his framing of it, coming as it did from a monk.

The three young motorcyclists, on the other hand, were simply inspiring — a month-long, 5,000 km ride at a young age, in pursuit of this same mountain. Despite the language barrier, they were wonderfully open: letting us try their powerful bikes, posing for photos, laughing along with us. As we parted, one of them kept repeating, in halting English, that we were a very kind and nice group — a small moment, but one that stayed with me.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, time slipped by faster than expected, and the road reopened an hour ahead of schedule, at 4pm. With a real sense of relief, satisfaction, and building excitement, we set off on the last leg of the day's journey toward Manasarovar — six more hours before the divine, quite literally, unfolds in front of us.

The day opened with something I'll carry for a long time — our first, full darshan of Mount Kailash, followed by the walk down to Lake Manasarovar itself. The lake carries its own mythology, including stories of extraordinary, otherworldly presences said to visit and bathe in its waters. Whatever one makes of the legends, there's no arguing with what the place itself does to you: vast, serene, and somehow genuinely capable of settling a mind and restoring a sense of equanimity just by sitting beside it. We paired up and did a short kriya with the lake water, around 30 minutes with a partner — a simple practice, but a deeply beautiful one in that setting.

The afternoon and evening were left free and easy, a welcome pause after the intensity of the morning.

Then, as the day was closing, news reached us that changed the entire mood of the group: reports of flash floods, apparently triggered by an earthquake near the Tibet-Nepal border, with early estimates suggesting over 150 people may have died and hundreds more still missing. Among the reported missing was an entire Isha group of 77 pilgrims.

It's hard to write plainly about something like this. A heaviness settled over our own plans and sense of certainty going forward — though that's a small thing next to the unbearable loss facing the families still waiting for news of their own. Our thoughts and prayers go out to every one of them. For the past twelve hours, many of us have been fielding a steady stream of worried messages from family and friends back home, checking that we were safe.

Closer to home for our group: our team doctor, Ukawal — a soft-spoken, deeply kind man of Nepali descent based in the US — may have lost his wife, who was traveling with the Isha group caught in the floods. It's a strange, unsettling thing to sit with, knowing we ourselves were scheduled to pass through that very stretch of road on the 31st. There's nothing to do now but wait and watch how things unfold, and hold him, and everyone connected to this, in whatever way we can from here.

Life moves on, even when it doesn't feel like it should. Tomorrow begins the trek to Kailash itself — a 14 km walk toward the mountain's north face. We start now.

If the entire sojourn has been building toward something, this was it.

We walked 14 km from Darchen up to the north face of Kailash — said to be the most powerful of its four faces for spiritual growth — and spent two full days there, simply soaking in the presence of this mountain. As it happened, both days fell on the full moon (August 27–28), and the sight of moonlight pooling across Kailash's snow-clad face at night is something no photograph is going to do justice to.

The mythology of the mountain. So many stories orbit this place, and hearing them here, in front of the mountain itself, hit differently than reading them ever could.

Kailash is held to be the abode of Shiva — who carries many names, and is spoken of by Sadhguru as the Adiyogi, the first yogi, and, in his telling, a living reality rather than a myth. Shiva is described as having no lineage, no recorded childhood, no old age, no death — forever young, and the ultimate symbol of virility, almost as if he arrived from somewhere entirely outside our usual frame of reference. The story goes that he transmitted the science of yoga to seven great sages, the Saptarishis, over 84 years, across what's counted as 112 chapters of knowledge. When their training was finally complete, Shiva asked them for guru dakshina — the traditional offering a student makes to a teacher. Having nothing of their own left to give, since everything they possessed was knowledge he himself had given them, they offered the only thing available: they returned all 84 years of that knowledge back to him, and walked away with empty, silent minds. It's said that this willingness to empty themselves completely of everything — even the knowledge that made them who they were — is what allowed them to become "Shi-va," meaning, roughly, "that which is not," and it's precisely that emptiness which let them go on to carry and transmit the full 112 chapters in their entirety. Complete surrender, then, as the first real step toward knowing anything at all.

Other stories followed, about Shiva and Parvati's two children, Ganesha and Kartikeya. Ganesha, in the telling, was created by Parvati entirely on her own. Kartikeya's origin is stranger still: Shiva's potency was said to be too intense for any single being to hold, so it had to be carried by six celestial beings — apsaras, not of this world — and even they could only bear it for three and a half months before the resulting fetuses had to be merged into a single body, becoming the six-faced Kartikeya. Different tellings bring in Agni and the river Ganga as intermediaries along the way, but the core of it stays the same: something too potent for ordinary vessels, requiring extraordinary ones instead.

Then there's the story tied to Kailash's south face, and one of Shiva's most devoted followers — Ravana. As the story goes, Ravana was singing Shiva's praises with such devotion — a thousand and eight hymns, by some counts — that Shiva, seated atop the mountain, became completely absorbed in listening, so much so that he didn't notice Ravana slowly climbing toward him. Parvati saw him drawing near the summit and kicked him back down. Ravana fell, and his damru — the small hand-drum associated with him — struck the mountainside on the way down, leaving a mark that, as the story is told here, still streaks across Kailash's south face to this day.

Meditation in the mountain's presence. We did a special meditation directly in front of Kailash, which included softly and lovingly calling out "Shambhu" — one of Shiva's many names — while holding the mountain in focus. It's hard to describe what that does to a room, or in this case, an open field at 15,000-odd feet, without sounding like I'm overselling it. I'm not.

The rest of the time went into more meditation, collecting a small amount of Kailash's holy water, and — the mountain being fully, cloudlessly visible both days — no shortage of photographs. The second day carried much the same rhythm: more reflection, more quiet introspection, letting the sheer glory of the place settle in rather than rushing to process it. Some experiences, I'm learning, aren't meant to be understood quickly. They're meant to be sat with.

More on Anca. I wrote briefly about Anca earlier, but a few more chance encounters with her over these days left me wanting to say more. Her approach to negotiating in local markets is its own small philosophy: pay the full displayed price, no bargaining. She fell in love with a painting in Saga — expensive by local standards, at 1,450 yuan — and wanted to take just the canvas, rolled up, without the frame. When I asked if she planned to negotiate the price down, she said no. If anything, she insisted on paying more than what was asked. She went on to share other threads from her life that fit the same pattern: being blessed, by her account, with the chance to see rainbows at random moments across her life; a visit to Spain where she crossed an entire town on nothing more than a feeling that she needed to see one particular old temple, arriving just as a religious ceremony ended, where a nun embraced her as though repaying a debt from some earlier life. Her path to Isha began just as unpredictably — a chance conversation with a dune-bashing driver in Dubai who, noticing something calm and reflective in her, suggested she attend an Inner Engineering program. She later realized that this same man was connected to Sadhguru — whose Om chants, she told me, had helped pull her through a severe Covid infection in early 2020. A woman, it seems, genuinely tuned to something larger, finding her way one unplanned step at a time.

Payal and Prashant. A couple traveling with us, clearly deeply in love and comfortably, happily married. Payal is the reflective one of the two; Prashant is the doer, always ready to take charge or pitch in wherever he can be useful. It's been genuinely lovely watching how they've aligned themselves on this path together, with Prashant following his wife's lead without any friction at all. They have two teenage sons back home, and in all the time I've spent around them, I never once saw either of them lose their temper or argue — only smiles, and a steady, quiet care for each other and for everyone else in the group.

Asha. Asha, from South Africa, is soft-spoken, middle-aged, and carries a deep, settled faith in the spiritual path. She's jovial by nature, and love seems to just pour out of her toward everyone she meets. She and I developed a real bond over these days — she started calling me "Sharad bhai," and on August 28th, she hugged me and wished me a happy Raksha Bandhan, marking the occasion even here, thousands of kilometers from home, in the shadow of Kailash.

A long drive today, from Darchen back to Saga — but first, one more trek: 14 km down from Kailash, roughly four hours, back to Darchen itself. A quick stop at our hotel there to collect our luggage, and then onto the buses for the journey to Saga, our overnight halt for the 29th.

The drive itself carried a different energy than the ones before it — long, but genuinely enjoyable, in the relaxed frame of mind that comes only after completing something you've been building toward for days. We had lunch on the banks of Manasarovar, with a clear, lingering view of Kailash's south face — a fitting send-off from the place that had held us for the better part of a week.

But relief wasn't the whole picture. Underneath it sat a real and growing uncertainty about the three days of travel still ahead, back to Kathmandu. The floods near Kyirong from the 26th were on everyone's mind, with reports now suggesting more than 500 people dead or missing — numbers that made our own planned road route feel genuinely uncertain, even risky. The forecast for the next three days called for heavy rain, with real fear of landslides on the Nepal side of the Nyalam border. Some of us started exploring an alternative: routing back through Lhasa and flying out to Kathmandu instead of driving. But the logistics of shifting permits and travel arrangements for a group of 70 people proved genuinely difficult. Isha's team and the travel agents worked hard to find viable alternatives, but some in the group were understandably anxious about committing to the land route, and for a while, tempers ran a little hot — a breakaway faction even started looking into switching travel agents altogether.

I was part of some of those conversations myself, and while I was genuinely drawn to the idea of flying out via Lhasa, the more I looked at it, the clearer the tradeoffs became — the uncertainty of permits coming through in time, and the real risk of ending up stuck in Tibet for several extra days if they didn't. On balance, staying together as a group and following the route recommended by our travel agent, The Trekkers' Society, looked like the most sensible option available, even with the land transfer's risks factored in.

The ten-plus-hour drive to Saga passed to a soundtrack of old and new Bollywood songs. By this point in the trip, most of us had grown genuinely comfortable with each other, trading family stories and life histories freely. Between fielding worried calls from home and reassuring everyone of our safety, we leaned hard on two things to get through the uncertainty: surrender, and belief in the process we'd put ourselves into.

A message from Anjali, my wife, arrived at just the right moment and helped put everything back into perspective:

It landed exactly where I needed it to — right as this sojourn was drawing toward its close and I'd started, almost without noticing, to turn my attention toward my own growth through it. If there's one line from today I want to carry forward, it's this: release the fear, trust your inner guidance, and remain open to what is unfolding.

We rolled into the hotel at 11pm to a warm, welcoming room — and a hot water shower, the first in four days. It's hard to overstate how good that felt. A good night's sleep followed, readying us for two more arduous days of road travel toward Kathmandu.

An easy day, at least on paper — a long but unhurried drive from Saga to Nyalam, the border town in Tibet. We started late, around noon, after a relaxed morning, and reached Nyalam by 7pm. It's a quaint little town, notable as the starting point of China's Highway 308, which runs all the way to Beijing, some 5,500 km away.

We walked around the town in the evening and took photos with some local children, who seemed genuinely delighted to have us there — the simple pleasures of small village life, unhurried and unfiltered. The temperature had dropped below 3°C, with a beautiful mist hanging in the air, the whole town ringed by mountains and threaded with flowing white streams. It felt like a scene composed rather than simply found.

This was meant to be just a short overnight stop before setting off the next day, August 31st, on the final leg back to Kathmandu.

I used some of the quiet evening to write out my thoughts for Anjali — what this trip has revealed to me, and a few personal commitments I've decided to make to her as a result. Some things are easier to see clearly from 15,000 feet away from ordinary life, and I didn't want that clarity to fade once I'm back in it.

We also tuned into a live telecast of Sadhguru speaking from Kathmandu, addressing those affected by the floods in Nepal. It was genuinely difficult to watch — the scale of untimely loss, set against the plain fact that nature's fury, and fate itself, isn't something anyone can predict or control. All we can do, in the end, is accept it with as much grace as we can manage. There was a son on the broadcast who had lost his father, and a sister trying to make sense of how her elder sister had been taken, leaving three young children behind. Sadhguru's response to it all stayed with me: this could happen to anyone, at any time. We are, all of us, living on a kind of lease. The point isn't to live in fear of that — it's to actually live, fully, while the lease is still active, rather than frittering the time away on pursuits that don't really matter. Do what genuinely counts. Spend time with the people who bring real meaning into your life. Follow what your heart is actually pointing toward — the things that bring true joy, not the things that merely look good from the outside. And maybe the simplest version of it all: we don't need to strain to be good, or to be compassionate, as separate projects layered on top of ourselves. Being joyous is the fundamental thing — and a genuinely joyous person moves through life in a way that's naturally meaningful and impactful, almost as a byproduct.

The day to finally bid goodbye to Tibet and begin the journey back to Kathmandu had arrived — and we approached it with far more apprehension than any earlier leg of this trip, given everything still unresolved: the route, the weather, and the shadow of what had happened on the 26th. Word of bad weather, possible landslides, and long queues at the makeshift immigration posts on both sides of the border had already braced us for the worst. Anywhere between 12 and 17 hours felt like a reasonable estimate, and we tried to hold that loosely rather than count on it.

We started early, at 6am, and left the beautiful town of Nyalam promptly by around 7, just before sunrise. All 71 of us pilgrims carried the same quiet prayer and the same good vibrations into the day, placing our trust in destiny for a safe crossing.

The drive to the Chinese immigration point took two hours, and — against every expectation — immigration on both sides moved quickly, wrapped up within two hours total, against the four-plus hours we'd braced for. There was one genuinely tense moment at the immigration post itself: someone shouted that floods were coming, and the whole crowd scrambled up the nearest hill for safety. With the memory of the Kyirong flash floods from the 26th still raw in everyone's mind, it was an entirely understandable panic. Even the buses meant to collect us on the Nepal side turned around and sped back toward Kathmandu, never to return. Thankfully, it turned out to be a false alarm, and everything settled back down soon after. We grabbed a quick lunch and, with the buses gone, switched to SUVs, seven of us to a vehicle, for the final stretch to our hotel in Kathmandu — 90 km that took seven hours over hilly, winding, muddy roads. Reaching the plush comfort of the Radisson Kathmandu, after a full two weeks of this sojourn, was a genuine relief — the kind that settles into your shoulders before it even reaches your mind.

On Sandeep. I want to use this day to write properly about Sandeep, my roommate for the entire trip. He's a simple, quietly smiling, largely silent man — the kind of person who gives off a settled, comforting presence just by being in the room, the sort of friend and confidant you don't realize you need until you have him. His cool, calm composure made him a genuinely stabilizing force in any setting we found ourselves in, and I feel genuinely blessed to have shared these two weeks with him.

We talked, over the course of the trip, about all kinds of things — but one conversation in particular stayed with me: what our real priorities should look like once we're back from this Kailash yatra. We talked about continuing to explore and discover, as a way of preparing ourselves for the one reality none of us can avoid — our own death. Out of that came an idea Sandeep called a "death folder" — a single, organized file holding everything that matters practically: investment and account details, insurance policies, medical history, emergency contacts, and the names of any agents or advisors involved. Not something to hide away, but something to actively share — with a spouse, children, or close relatives, to be opened only when needed, but also, perhaps, with one close friend who could help take care of the practical, worldly matters once you're gone. Death is a reality worth acknowledging honestly, rather than avoiding, so that when it does come, it can be met with composure rather than fear.

That idea found its sharpest expression during the flood scare on our way back on the 31st. In the middle of that scramble up the hillside, Sandeep said something simple that's stuck with me since: if death is coming, he doesn't want to meet it scared and running — he wants to embrace it calmly, on his own terms.

This trip has taught all of us a great deal — surrender, acceptance, and the practice of adapting to constantly shifting circumstances while still holding onto a steady sense of purpose underneath it all. We made friends along the way, traded stories that will stay with us, and came out the other side with a strengthened commitment to this path of self-discovery and liberation.

The last day of this beautiful sojourn. We woke up warmly tucked into our beds at the Kathmandu hotel, at the end of what had easily been the most exhausting journey of my life — physically and mentally both. And yet, in the same breath, the most liberating. Every single day asked me to step past my own comfort zone, to learn something from someone else, to actually feel nature rather than just observe it, and to sense the divine in places I wasn't expecting to find it.

The morning brought one last satsang, watching a video of Sadhguru. A few lines from it landed and stayed:

1. Life can't be enhanced through accumulation — only by going inward.
2. The spiritual process is a movement from bondage toward something beyond it.
3. Accumulating material success was never the point of being alive. What matters is continuing to move, to explore.
4. A pilgrimage isn't an achievement to be checked off — it's an attempt to lose something.

Sitting with that last one, I made a few promises to myself, about the parts of myself I want to actually let go of. To keep exploring, and never let myself settle into stagnation. To stay connected to who I actually am, underneath the noise. To trust this path and hold to it without wavering. To be a genuinely passionate, joyous person. And to keep caring for and loving the people around me, without needing a reason to.

The satsang closed with some beautiful, unguarded sharing from other participants. And inevitably, our thoughts turned back to the S3 group of 80 Isha pilgrims who lost their lives in the flash floods at the Kyirong border on August 26th — a loss that had shadowed the back half of this journey for all of us, and one that felt impossible to simply set aside on our last day together.

Gratitude, before we go. To the masters who, over generations, quietly paved the way that made a journey like this even possible. To Sadhguru, for his blessing over the whole of it. To the fifteen sherpas, guides, and cooks who carried us through every arduous stretch of this trip with steady hands and steadier smiles. And to the Isha volunteers who held this entire sojourn together — Vinod, Firu, Sabina, and Dr. Ujwal.

We closed, as a group, with one shared promise: to carry a little bit of Kailash with us — in the heart, and in the mind — long after this particular journey has ended.