Quite a few friends and blog readers have asked for a follow up post about the ten day Vipassana Meditation course that I took in Nepal…the journal chronicling my ten day Vipassana course was very raw and there was no room for reflection at the time…
Vipassana Meditation in Nepal
I dubbed my time in Vipassana meditation as my “ten day stint in solitary confinement”- it’s how it felt at the time, and, in jest, I do still think of this intense mediation course as one of my wackier decisions. But now, …

Just wanted to give a quick update on what’s going on with me. First off, I have a guest post this week at ThePlanetD on Dave and Deb’s weekly Giving Back  to the community series. I have so many fond memories of the boys at the Manjurshri Di-Chen monastery in Nepal (here’s some of that story if you haven’t read it yet). Volunteering was an incredible experience so I am honored to have the opportunity to share some of the story and my thoughts on giving back to local communities …

Having Jenn join us for this leg of the trip has really given me a bit of perspective about the months spent traveling in developing world. For me, after five months of backpacking I really lost track of the delineation between my developing world experiences and life back home in the states.
Jenn though had no such confusion when she arrived with shiny-clean clothes and a backpack that smelled distinctly better than mine (what is that funk!?!). Jenn knew two things about herself when deciding to join a leg of …

There is a very distinct rhythm to life in the developing world –things happen day after day often enough that you just forget that life could be lived any other way. For me, carrying toilet paper in every pocket of my clothes was just second nature. My whole days in Nepal were built around the timing of electricity for the day. Another fun part of traveling throughout India and Nepal…hand-washing laundry. Ahh, that is one of those things that just becomes a part of the routine.
In India we were …

The time-line in Nepal was a little disjointed on the blog, but basically, the weekend after our trip to Chitwan Helen and I said our goodbyes to our monasteries, gave Amrit a huge hug, and headed to Pokhara to do the Poon Hill trek through the Annapurna region and subsequently my stint in solitary confinement (ie. the pain-staking mind-purification process known as Vipassana meditation)
I was really sad to leave my monastery… the boys are so extremely welcoming and I felt like I was actually making a difference for them. …

We rounded out our weekend in Chitwan with a ride through the local villages standing up in the back of the jeep with the wind blowing through our hair as we took in the last of our experience on our way to the Elephant breeding center. I don ’t really know how I feel about the breeding center –mixed really. Because the elephant population in Chitwan is not endangered they breeding center is used to breed the elephants that are raised to either do hard labor in the fields …

Ok, so I have to admit, I never actually got the chance to..well.. dodge a wild rhinoceros…but I did see one! And according to my guide throughout my three days at the UNESCO listed Royal Chitwan National Park, wild rhinos are the least of our worries – it’s the wild elephants that will charge you and attempt to rip your limbs apart by stepping on you with a foot and then wrenching your body apart with their trunk. This was essentially my welcome speech when I arrived at Chitwan. …

The Nepali New Year dawned bright and early our third week in Pharping and Amrit invited all of us volunteers staying at the guesthouse to celebrate the New Year with his family up a nearby hill. Both of the monasteries were closed for New Year festivities; so, without the invitation from Amrit we would have been just four lost souls living in a fishbowl…wait…ack…rather four decidedly white people wandering on the periphery of the familial festivities of the New Year.
Instead, Amrit, Carna, and a team of his Nepali family members …