I had several possible titles to this piece, from “What Nepal did (and didn’t do) to me, “ to “I Went to Nepal to Facilitate. Nepal Had Other Plans,” to “Something Softened. I’m Not Sure What.” You get the idea.

Realistically, I have been trying to write this post for weeks. Which, honestly, is information in itself.

Every time I sit down to capture what happened in Nepal – what happened to me in Nepal – I find myself reaching for words and coming up slightly short, like trying to hold water in my hands. Something slips through. Something essential. And I have been around long enough to know that when words don’t come easily, it usually means the experience is still integrating. Still doing its quiet underground work.

So let me try anyway. Incompletely. Imperfectly. Which is, I am learning, the only way some things can be told.

What I Expected

Here is what I thought would happen: I would co-create and co-facilitate a beautiful transformative experience for a group of extraordinary humans in the Himalayas. I would hold space. I would offer wisdom. I would do my work as a guide and facilitator, and the participants would be changed, and I would return home tired but satisfied and already thinking about the next iteration.

I mean, I have done this before. Right Livelihood Quest for 12 years. Yearlong awakening programs. Navigating transitions. Numerous others. I know how to hold a container. I know how transformative group work can crack people open. I know the arc.

What I did not fully account for was that Nepal doesn’t particularly care what I thought would happen. The mountains were not impressed by my professional credentials. The temples have seen far too many seekers arrive with their plans and their certainties. And the Annapurna foothills, it turns out, have a way of rearranging things quietly and without apology.

What Actually Happened (Sort Of)

There is a particular kind of humbling that happens when you are simultaneously the facilitator and the participant, as well as an unplanned guide of many things Nepal. When you are holding the container while also being held by it.

I watched a participant arrive carrying what they called “complex grief” and witnessed something in their face shift over the days, like light changing in the late afternoon, almost imperceptibly, until you look up and realize the whole quality of the room is different. I watched another move from stagnancy to something alive in them, something I don’t have a word for, only an impression of. I watched several other participants each encounter their own particular threshold – one they had perhaps been circling for months or years – and step across it, or at least closer to it, in the context of trekking through the foothills and sitting in silence and being genuinely witnessed by one another.

And meanwhile, I was being witnessed too. Which I kinda suspected might happen yet did not entirely plan for. How can one, anyway?!

Here is a confession: I am an Enneagram Type 8. My instinct, even in the most sacred of spaces, is to be competent, impactful, solid. To manage the energy of the room with the casual authority of someone who definitely knows what he is doing. (See? I can’t even write that sentence without a smirk.) And Nepal asked me, gently but persistently, to set some of that down. It was not any profoundly dramatic manner, or some cinematic moment of breakthrough where I wept on a mountaintop and surrendered to the cosmos. It was quieter than that. Subtler. More like… a gradual exhale I didn’t know I had been holding.

The Thing About Subtle Changes

I have been sitting with the participants’ words since we returned. They write about the exceptional balance of personal reflection, group dialogue, cultural immersion, trekking, silence, movement, and spaciousness. They write about becoming “more calm, wiser, and more intuitive.” They describe how something is continuing to unfold weeks later.

That phrase. Continuing to unfold.

It is the one that most resonates with my own experience. Because the change I feel in myself is not the kind I can point to clearly, not the kind that makes for a satisfying “before and after” narrative. There is no dramatic plot twist. No sudden clarity about the next chapter of my life, neatly packaged and labelled. No explicit 5-bullet point sequential Start Here map.

What there is, instead, is this: something has softened. I notice it in small things. In how I respond when life does not cooperate with my preferences (which, as my close friends will tell you, is a growth edge of some vintage). In how I sit with uncertainty, not gripping it quite so hard. In how I feel less urgent about resolving the questions I have been carrying and more… curious about them. More companionable with them. More compassionate towards the one carrying them too.

Everything is becoming lighter. Not because the weight has been lifted, really. It’s still here. I seem to be carrying it differently. I am more permeable, somehow. More willing to let things land rather than assess them from a safe distance. More inclined to pause before I know what I think, and to sit in that pause a moment longer than is comfortable.

This is, for a Type 8 who spent decades building impressive walls with great personal pride, actually quite something.

The Mystery Continues (It Always Does)

Before we left for Nepal, I wrote about not knowing how this would come together. About the vulnerability of creating something that might not work, in a country on the other side of the planet, with all the beautiful and maddening uncertainty that came with us on this journey.

And then it came together. Beautifully. The seeds grew. (I’d gloat about this, but the mountains taught me humility. Also, my dear friend and a co-creator of this experience, Karni, would never let me hear the end of it.)

What I find myself sitting with now is something like wonder. Mind you, not the shiny, performative kind to report back in enthusiastic Instagram captions. The quieter kind. The kind that makes you look at your ordinary life and find it, suddenly, more interesting than you remembered. More layered. More worthy of your full attention.

Nepal did not give me answers. It gave me something better: a deeper appetite for the questions. A more willing relationship with the mystery of my own life. A growing trust that I don’t need to know what comes next in order to be fully, genuinely here for what is now. There is no one thing I can point to and say, “That. That is what changed.” It is more like the whole quality of the room has shifted. And I look up, and the light is different.

A Bow of Gratitude

To the extraordinary humans who said yes and showed up in the fullness of their humanity, their courage, their complexity, and their extraordinary willingness to be changed. You changed me too, which was not in the job description, and I am deeply grateful.

To Karni, my dear friend and co-facilitator, who has somehow survived decades of friendship with me and still thinks it is a good idea to create things together in a foreign country we both have not been to before. You are either very wise or very stubborn. I suspect both.

To Nepal itself – your mountains, your temples, your ancient and unhurried presence, your food, your people who greeted us with a warmth that made my chest ache in the best possible way. You held us well.

And to this work. This strange, sacred, utterly unglamorous-at-times work of helping people find their way through the in-between spaces of their lives. I am still, after all these years, in awe of what becomes possible when people gather with intention and honesty. It never gets old.

The next Sacred Transitions in Nepal is already quietly gathering. And if something in these words is stirring something in you – if the Himalayas are whispering – I invite you to pay attention to that.

You don’t have to know why. Especially if you are not sure. That is usually where the real journeys begin. The mystery always keeps its promise!