Initiation into Oneness – The Himalayan Journey

Before the mountains, there was the unraveling.
A year of confusion and heartbreak, a toxic relationship that arrived suddenly as if summoned by my own unhealed parts. It stood on my doorstep and, for a time, I let it in. What unfolded was strange and consuming, a mirror that showed me all the ways I doubted myself and all the places where I had mistaken attachment for love.

By the time I finally stepped out of it, I was both exhausted and relieved, like escaping a storm I had not realized I had been standing in. Yet even in freedom, I was fragile. I did not trust myself. I questioned my ability to discern truth, to listen to my own intuition. I longed to feel whole again, but I did not know where to begin.

Then, life, in its quiet wisdom, called me to the mountains.

I found myself on a motorcycle, winding through the sacred roads of the Himalayas. The air was alive with silence and prayer flags. Each turn demanded surrender, and every breath whispered a lesson I did not yet understand. I clung to the back of that motorcycle as cliffs fell away beneath us, fear, awe, and exhilaration blending into something ancient and wordless.

There, in the vastness, my small self began to dissolve. The mountains were not just around me, they were within me. The rhythm of the road became the rhythm of my breath. I could feel the power of life itself moving through me, fierce and tender all at once.

My teacher spoke of trust, not as something to be earned, but something to be remembered. “You are not separate,” he said. And for the first time, I truly felt it. The wind, the sky, the roar of the motorcycle, everything was part of the same pulse. I was not holding on to survive. I was being held by existence itself.

Healing came quietly then, not as a sudden miracle, but as a soft, undeniable truth.
That power is not about control. It is about harmony.
That transformation begins when we stop running from the dark.
That oneness is not something to reach. It is what remains when everything false falls away.

When we returned to the academy after the journey, I was preparing to enter silence, two weeks of meditation and solitude. Just before my sangha departed and left me in retreat, news reached me that a dear friend had been brutally taken from this world.

I was stunned. There was no one to hold me, no outside world to reach for. Only stillness, and the echo of disbelief inside my chest. I sat with it, the grief, the rage, the unbearable tenderness. I cried, I wailed, I prayed. I meditated and asked for guidance, for meaning, for breath.

And then, in the deepest ache, something vast opened. I felt Her, the Great Mother, surrounding me. Not as an idea, but as presence. She wrapped her arms around me, not to take the pain away, but to show me that it, too, belonged. That beauty and tragedy were not opposites but threads of the same fabric. That even in death, love remains, raw, radiant, eternal.

There, in that sacred silence, I understood what oneness truly is.
It is the place where joy and grief meet and bow to each other.
Where love holds both the birth and the ending.
Where nothing is separate, not even the sorrow that breaks us open.

I went to the Himalayas searching for trust.
I returned knowing that everything, even loss, is love in another form.