About six months into being on the path, Sunyata sent me off to travel the world on my own. I had been around for a while, had been introduced to her teacher Rama via his talks, and was showing up to everything. I knew that this was where I was meant to be, but I also had no sense of what was really happening there.
I knew Sunyata’s talks inspired me, and I was getting an inkling of my own aspiration. But much of that early time was looking around me at everyone else and trying to understand ‘How am I supposed to talk about this stuff?’, ‘What kinds of experiences should I be having?’ I was busy looking around me for how to be instead of looking within to learn how to feel my own truth. I had gotten by much of my life on my ability to wrap people socially, but that didn’t work in the sangha. My little ego games and habitual ways of getting by had no ground to stand on there.
By this time, I had also been on two desert trips. The most recent one had been in early summer over my birthday. The trip had just been me, Sunyata, and her three older students. It had been a beautiful, bright trip: meditating under a full moon in the desert, feeling the wind blowing through me and helping me shed old ways of being. But I was still a clueless college kid, taking these experiences as just another thing happening in my life. I drove back from the desert with one of the older students, and didn’t have work for the next couple days. I packed up my little car and went off to my next adventure. I don’t think I even texted Sunyata thanking her for the trip.
A week later, Sunyata invited me and one of the other new students to visit her in Marin. She had us do a writing prompt: what do I definitely want to experience before I die? And, on another sheet of paper: what am I afraid of? After we wrote our lists, she had us rank them, and then connect each thing we wanted to do with the fear that was holding us back from doing it. My experiences list included a lot of travel: seeing the lavender bloom in Provence, visiting different countries I’d always felt drawn to. Afterward, Sunyata drove us to a bench on Mt Tam and we sat to talk. She told me that she’d had a seeing that I was supposed to go travel, that this was a task she was giving me. I was, for all intents and purposes, being kicked out of the nest.
I was in the midst of reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and remembered an analogy he shares with his students. I said, ‘Wait, but I’m still a new little seedling!’. In the book, Sri Ramakrishna describes new students on the path as small seedlings - they’re still tender and fragile. They need a fence built around them so they can be protected as they grow their roots and get established. Later on, once they’re established, the fence can be removed. I was still in the new stage - why was my teacher sending me away?
Sunyata explained that I didn’t really know why I was there. She said she’d had another student like this, an older student who wasn’t around right now. He also hadn’t known why he was there, but had stuck around anyway and ended up struggling for years before he finally went off to figure it out. She said she had learned from that and didn’t want me to go through the same thing. So, she was sending me off to go on this adventure. When she’d had the seeing, she shared, she saw that traveling was going to shift me in huge ways that I couldn’t conceive of right now. As she was explaining, she said casually, ‘Maybe you’ll come back here, maybe you won’t. Whatever happens is perfect.’
So, I started to prepare for my travels. My spiritual teacher had given me a task, and I didn’t take that lightly. In my experience, when a task like this is done properly, it becomes a doorway into a new, brighter, more real self. So I started on all of the logistics - getting various vaccines for tropical diseases, giving notice at my restaurant job, telling my landlord I was moving out. The month that followed was a flurry of things to do - who was going to hold onto my car for me? Where was I going to store my belongings?
I also wrestled with the fears that came up - fears of violence abroad, of getting sick in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and of being alone. Up until then, I hadn’t really ever been alone. I’d been in back-to-back relationships since high school and had always been surrounded by people who knew me. This adventure was the opportunity of a lifetime, another jump into the deep end that both excited and terrified me.
I boarded a plane in early September with my backpack, ukulele, and passport. I didn’t know when I’d be coming back - my ticket was one-way, and I’d figure out the rest later. I had a vague sense of the countries I wanted to visit and the order I’d visit them, but beyond that it was a blank space stretching out in front of me. I traveled through Southeast Asia, India, Morocco, and Europe. I ended up being gone for nine months.
During that time, I faced the fears I had set out with. I faced my aloneness and learned to love it. I got terrible food poisoning in Cambodia and got myself through it. I learned how to move through the world as a 22-year-old girl, often in countries that were considered dangerous for women, by blending with the surrounding culture and trusting my own instincts. Throughout my travels, I stayed in touch with my teacher. I sent her weekly updates on what I was experiencing and learning, and sometimes we’d talk on the phone when I had WiFi access and the timing lined up.
Those nine months changed me profoundly. I moved through a variety of cultures and landscapes, enjoying the friendships I made with others and learning to navigate a million and one tiny things that came up. I watched my ego react to people I met, noticing my own judgments as they reared their heads. I started to notice the same issues arising again and again with different people on different continents. I slowly began to realize the issue wasn’t with others; it was with me. Those were my habitual ways of being and seeing that were getting in the way of connecting with others with joy and an open heart.
And, I got to learn on that trip what was actually me and what wasn’t. The best way I can describe it is that what was familiar to me - the places I’d lived, the people who surrounded me, my family and friends - had all defined and reinforced very specific ideas about who and what I was. Those ideas had created a shape around my being, and without knowing what I was doing, I had conformed to it. During my travels, all those old shapes were gone. I was far enough away from the places and people I knew that I found a new spaciousness - I felt my being stretching out and finding new breathing room where there had once been something pushing back.
I also encountered people in my travels who were seeking in their own way. Everyone - no matter the culture or the language, or the specifics of their milieu - was looking for happiness. They wanted to be comfortable and safe, to raise their children, to be successful and at ease. Some people were looking for a spiritual teacher, traveling through India or other places in the hopes of finding one. Most of my fellow travelers were living this way because it felt more meaningful, closer to the heart of life.
When I’d first left to travel, some part of me was looking for something. I was trying to see if the world held anything for me that I hadn’t already found. But as time went on, it became clear to me that I had stumbled upon a great treasure in my life, something I hadn’t fully recognized but was beginning to understand more clearly. I remember once while I was in Rishikesh, the teacher Mooji was giving a talk. I had a chance to go see him, and I felt no desire to. I felt in my heart that I’d already found my teacher and didn’t need to see any others.
That trip helped me see that no matter where I went in the world, I kept encountering the same fundamental things. Maybe a different language and culture, different ways of being, but at its core it was the same. Nature, life, and the human beings who inhabit this world - seeking, hoping, dreaming, suffering. I felt the universality of the human experience, and I also felt how no matter where I went, I still brought my own baggage with me. I had changed, yes, but there were still so many aspects of ego that I could sense, that felt acutely painful, and that I couldn’t shake myself free of yet. One of the quotes that Rama repeatedly says in his talks is, ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’ This was the adventure that helped me see that very clearly.
By January of that year, I had gotten a bit of a clue. I booked my return ticket for May, and sent Sunyata a gleeful email saying ‘I’m coming home!’ I savored those five remaining months, having beautiful, profound moments in different places, dealing with my own emotional ups and downs while managing the day-to-day chaos of constant travel, and connecting with life and my own practice. Before I’d left, I was ‘meditating’ regularly but I wasn’t really. I was trying to meditate. During my travels, I started to connect to my meditations in a new way, as this beautiful pause in my day where I got to practice silencing my mind. I saw that I emerged from my meditations feeling bright and joyful, able to weather difficulties more easily. My practice started becoming personal and real for me.
Looking back, I can see that when Sunyata gave me this task, she didn’t know how it was going to go. I could very well have jumped on a plane and disappeared from the path completely. I could have gotten wrapped up in a new culture and decided to move to Timbuktu. Who knows? But I didn’t. My own aspiration and connection to my teacher and the path kept me on my line. Sunyata had been right: I didn’t really know why I was there. I needed that push towards freedom and my own adventure in order to realize what was waiting for me back in California.
When she’d given me this task, I’d told her that I was a new little seedling - I thought I needed the protection of the sangha to grow. But Sunyata trusted me to venture out and find out for myself. She understood, perhaps before I did, that there was something I couldn’t be given, something I had to discover through experience: my own knowing that this was where I wanted to be. I had to leave the shelter of the sangha, venture out into the world, and discover for myself where my roots wanted to grow.