I have been in Mozambique for a month and so far nothing is according to plan.

I can still close my eyes and remember driving through the empty streets of Maputo a month earlier. The eery feeling, the slow pace of the vehicle in a city under 24h curfew. A rain of purple flowers from the tall jacarandas bordering the boulevard. I slid a tape in my walkman. “Purple Rain” played while the petals fell.

I thought of Enid that I left in New York. We did not say goodbye but we both knew it was the end.

I came here to review the security and communication protocols for the mission. The cholera epidemic had put a real strain on the team.
A 2h flight to Quelimane. A long and bumpy drive to Mocuba.
Heat, exhaustion, dehydration. Kidney stones. Hospital. Back to work.
Barely recovered, the rebels lead an offensive. Night evacuation to Zimbabwe. Hospital again.
Back to Mozambique. Driving over a land mine on the way to a camp.

A very intense month. I have been living in Africa for over four years by then. I am used to this, but I am exhausted.

Quelimane. This is my last domestic flight. I am ready to go home.

The plane is full except for the seat beside me. Delays are normal for LAM (Linhas Aereas de Mocambique), but we are waiting for a last passenger.
Hot, humid, stuffy. We all sit and sweat patiently. Even the chickens.
The less I move, the more acceptable it is.

Two large United Nation officers in blue uniform enter the plane in company of a tiny old man. Abducted by the rebels and later released, he is being sent back to his village. He is my seatmate for this flight.

The rebels punished him for trying to escape.
They cut off his eyelids. His ears. His nose. His lips.
Everything that makes a human face.

He can’t blink. His eyes bulge, raw and wet, always crying.
His mouth never closes, saliva pooling and dripping.
His gums have peeled back, teeth exposed and decayed.
Where his nose had been, a dark void.
The smell is of decay, something I learned to recognize and never got used to.

It is nearly impossible to witness.
But looking away feels like betrayal.

So I do what I can. I speak, my voice cracked, in broken Portuguese.
Words don’t matter. Not looking away is the only decent option.

The food finally comes in the cheapest plastic tray imaginable, thin, flimsy, barely holding. No one expect better. We are more cargo than passengers.
I am not hungry. I eat what I am given.

I can hear him struggling. His lips can’t close around the fork. He fights to keep every bite in with his hands, trembling, piece by piece.

Then I watch him clean his tray. Reverently.
He wipes the plastic spoon, the fork, the tray itself with deliberate care.
He folds the limp paper napkin as one would fold fine silk.
Each movement slow, precise.
Then he tucks the bundle into a small cloth bag at his side.
As if he has just been handed a gift beyond measure.

I break.

I have seen the most excruciating moments, but nothing tears me open like the way this man handles a disposable spoon.

I mimic his movements, wiping my own tray, my own spoon. Then I turn to him and offer them.

Instead of reaching for the utensils, he reaches for my hands.

I feel the callous skin of his palms, the bony fingers with barely any flesh left. Skin to skin. A shiver. Something moves through me.

Then he leans forward and presses his forehead to my hands.

“Obrigado, obrigado,” he whispers, again and again.

More than thirty years later, I still cannot recount this without crying.

To this day, I cannot pass a trash bin filled with discarded plastic cutlery without thinking of him. Every time.

What kind of world are we living in, where a plastic spoon is a sacred object to one man, and landfill to another?

Post Scriptum

At the time of this story, President Joaquim Chissano was slowly guiding Mozambique out of civil war, attempting to build a republic from devastation. His reformist approach got his government flagged as Marxist, placing it in the crosshairs of Cold War logic.

The rebel group RENAMO was known for its brutality. Covertly funded by Western interests under the pretext of ideological balance, they abducted entire villages. Men were forced into agricultural servitude. Women were used as sexual slaves.

Punishment for attempted escape was unspeakable. Torture was not just control. It was a message. A public ritual of fear designed to keep others in line.

Coming from the West, I still freeze at the thought that even a fraction of the taxes I paid may have helped fund this barbarity. Unknowingly, I was an accomplice. I cannot say “I did not know.”

And I wonder: what about today’s taxes? What barbarity do they serve?

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No Distance Left

Years of conflict in Africa had not prepared me for what was coming in November that year. A two-hour flight could take me to either Belgrade or Zagreb. This time, the war was in the heart of Europe.

Imagine going to war as if on a morning commute. On one side, the coffee is still warm on the tray table, Mozart playing in the airport lounge. On the other, gray rain over a post-communist landscape, soldiers at checkpoints, a country breaking apart.

And still, I looked like everyone else in the street. I kept repeating to myself, I am in Europe, as if to pinch my mind awake from a dream that had gone wrong.

This Europe felt poor and muted, heavy with old anger and ethnic memory. No border stamp, no ritual of crossing, just a wormhole through time, a step into another century.

War in White

Another gray, cold, rainy day.
We had driven a couple of hours toward the Serbia–Croatia border, in a VW Golf rented in Belgrade. We knew heavy fighting was going on; surely the hospitals needed help.

On the way we stopped at a roadside restaurant for food. Always a good place to get the latest information before the front line. Inside the air smelled of wood smoke and boiled cabbage and potatoes.

We had barely started eating when a group of paramilitaries entered.
Their boots were heavy with mud, their laughter silenced the rest of the room.

The one who led them wore a spotless white Stetson and matching white mittens.
Like immaculate trophies. He walked with defiance, a handgun at his belt, eyes scanning the room for something no one wanted to find out.
Everyone kept their heads down.

We all knew who they were, men sent ahead of the army to do the work no one would claim. They called it “cleaning.”
It meant killing whoever was still alive.
Often worse.

I signaled the waitress, got an old newspaper to wrap the food.
We paid quickly and left before they could take notice of our presence.
Yugoslavia had already become unsafe for journalists and aid workers, and these men knew exactly why.

Outside, the air was cold but I welcomed it as salvation, a way to disguise the sweat that had begun to show. Even from the road, their voices and laughter carried out into the damp air. No one else would laugh in a place like that.

Highway to Hell

We’d convinced the soldiers at the roadblock to let us through.
Now we were driving, zigzagging rather, between obstacles scattered across the road.
Inside the car, that familiar thick smell of fear mixed with the cabbage sandwiches we’d grabbed.

Long silences filled the space, each one saying what we didn’t want to admit:
we had no idea what waited ahead.

The landscape was wrecked.
Rows of buildings without windows, black streaks of fire across their facades.
Trees split and leaning, charred to their skeletons, riddled with bullets.
Bodies left in the street.
Rubble, branches, shards of glass everywhere.
And the windows, hundreds of them, each one a possible sniper’s nest.

I was driving fast. It wasn’t a place to linger. It felt like survival demanded speed.
When I saw the unexploded RPG, it was already too late.
I drove over it.
It tumbled and clanged beneath the car.
My eyes half closed, shoulders tightened, time slowing to a single heartbeat.
Waiting for the blast.

Nothing.

I looked at my friend.
We were breathing again.
Lucky.
The grenade must have been defective, its failure a blessing.
A cold sweat slid down my back, under my arms.
I whispered to myself, What the fuck are we doing here?

Nightlife

Back in Belgrade that evening, the city looked almost normal beyond the taped windows. Neon reflected on wet asphalt. Taxis idled outside hotels.

It always stunned me how life goes on in the middle of war.
Yet what else could it do?

My stress was high; the day had been intense. I couldn’t sleep, so I went down to the basement club.
Cigarette smoke, girls in cheap perfume, bad whiskey, better vodka.
A pop song played through the speakers, Let’s Talk About Sex, an American hit that year.

Soldiers crowded the bar, just back from the front.
Their faces young, flushed, already drunk.
A few women in short skirts moved between them, the men’s laughter heavy with meaning I didn’t like. I knew this place too well. A poor substitute for therapy.
Cocaine easier to find than water.

I sat at the counter, trying to drink the day out of my body.
One of the soldiers came up to me, maybe twenty, eyes too bright.
He tried to talk in broken English, about his friends, about revenge.
I caught only fragments: Croats… bastards… they killed my brother.
He wanted me to agree, to hate with him.

I tried to tell him the ones on the other side were just like him, young, angry, used.
But he couldn’t hear me.
The music was loud. The hate was even louder.

I left before the tension could build.
Outside, the rain had stopped.
I walked once around the block for air.
Streetlights flickered on the puddles like candle flames.
I went back to my room.
The empty streets offered no distraction, only the echo of that song still playing somewhere underground.
A strange contrast that stayed with me long into the night.

Eye of Vukovar

In Vukovar, nothing was breathing.
Smoke had stopped only because of the rain, yet the smell lingered low over the streets.
The map was deceiving, but we found the hospital, or what was left of it.

Inside, some corridors had collapsed from shelling.
A generator was humming somewhere, but there was no light, probably kept only for the operating theater.

The smell of blood and concrete dust.
No sign of that familiar disinfectant scent that marks a hospital anywhere.

Civilians were everywhere, lying on stretchers, on blankets, on the floor.
Some moaning, some already silent.
A nurse passed with a bundle of gauze, no gloves left, no mask either.
A once-white uniform she must have been wearing for days.

On one side, the wall had been ripped open by shellfire, safety pouring through the wound. No one cared about the Geneva Conventions here.
Patients lined along the wall, shivering under coats and sheets, wounds wrapped in makeshift bandages, despair filling their eyes.

Yes, the eyes.
Too many of them gone.

Dozens of patients with bandaged sockets, their heads tilted as if searching for light somewhere in heaven.
I thought of the man with the white Stetson.
My stomach turned.

The doctor leading us spoke without stopping, the list of everything missing.
I already knew. It was always the same.
He wanted me to take notes.
I told him we would send kits, already prepared and packed.
No notes needed, just numbers, how many kits, how many people to help, if the place ever became safe.
Right now, I wouldn’t send anyone here. Only the kits.

He showed me the breach made by shelling. I indulged him, but needed no convincing.
They didn’t feel safe, not even here.

Cold wind ran along the corridors.
Rain had left the floor wet and slippery.
Water dripping from the level above mixed with the low complaints of those who still had a voice to expel pain.
For a moment I came back to my breath.
It was a lot to take in.

Everything inside me wanted to leave, but the thought of crossing the city through the devastated streets held me there a little longer.
Even in despair, humanity felt better than the deserted silence outside.

By the time we stepped out, the cold bit harder.
The day was fading.
Once more, the world had turned silent to human misery.
Even the birds were gone.

Ghosts of Europe

No one stopped us at the checkpoint. A soldier waved us through, his face unreadable in the gray light. Behind him, the land stretched flat and colorless, a wide plain dissolving into mist and an early winter night.

The drive back to Belgrade was heavy with silence. Neither of us spoke.
There was nothing left to say.
We both tried to let go of that ball in the chest that builds up when you try to focus and divert the rage, the emotions that bloom from the absurdity of war. The exhaustion you feel facing a lost battle where giving up is not even a choice.

Every time I hear politicians talk about war on the news, all suited and polished with their chosen words, I want to grab them by the neck and drag them through a battlefield. Let them smell the blood and the fear. Let them shit their pants and then send them home. I am furious.

Soon we were on the highway and life looked normal again. A short commute, I thought, with bitter irony. War is always a stone’s throw away.
At the edge of the city, lights appeared through the fog, small and trembling.
The radio coughed with static and fragments of an old folk song. I thought of the men in the restaurant, the patients in the hospital, the young soldier at the bar. Different uniforms, same emptiness behind the eyes.

War takes lives; it takes souls even more efficiently. Mine included.

It felt as if the war would never end, only change location and costume. Europe was rehearsing its oldest lesson.
I realized that the past is never gone. It only waits for permission to return, only enough generations to forget the horror and we begin again.

And the night had fallen over Yugoslavia.
And I carried it home.

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The Crossing

After a few weeks, I passed the baton. Someone else came to assume command.
We had set up three camps: Uzumlu, Çukurca, and Şemdinli.

I boarded a Chinook helicopter with a few British special forces; they were heading toward Şemdinli, closer to the Iraqi border.
I had met the crew before. They loved working here, less red tape, something real to be proud of. They were grateful to help.

The crew chief left the cargo door open and winked, inviting me to join him.
We sat with our legs hanging, watching the mountains roll beneath us.

Above all, they loved to fly, and they loved to share that freedom.

They dropped me near the camp where my friend Hervé had been stationed for some time. He had already found a guide for me.

Nothing official. No papers. No visa.
Just a teenage guide with a turban and a semiautomatic pistol he carried in his hand. He didn’t speak English.
We walked in silence, stepping between green canisters dropped by planes, landmines, hundreds of them.
He walked casually, the pistol swinging, the black hole of its barrel winking at me every few steps.

I had no idea what I would find on the other side, hopefully not Iraqi soldiers.
The plan, if there was one, was to reach Erbil, then Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, and the Iranian border, and make a better assessment of the situation.

First Meeting

By evening, we reached a small tent where a few men offered tea. They had no food themselves. Gunfire echoed through the night, and now and then tracer rounds looked like shooting stars across the sky.

Everywhere, the hospitals were full.
Patients on the floor, in hallways, in courtyards.
Flies thick on open wounds.
Some bodies already cold.
Doctors worked without gloves, IV lines dangling from nails in the wall.
No one spoke of rest. There was no space to think of such things.

I had little to offer, but I checked where the needs were greatest, where it might be possible to open a base for civilian support.
I made contacts, took notes, and prepared what would come next.

From that work, several missions were born.

Fear

The body knows what the mind refuses to hear.
Fear had a bitter taste at the back of the mouth.
Courage to face it smelled like acrid sweat. That scent clung to my clothes, to my breath.

For days I was sick with diarrhea, unsure if it came from bad water or my own nerves, a way to discharge the toxicity of fear.
I never walked so carefully in my life, stepping rock to rock, avoiding the patches of green grass.

The adult version of hopscotch, with higher stakes.
Each step toward heaven or hell.

Anke

I left Iraq taking the road west to Syria and reached Diyarbakir in a day.
I had met Anke earlier, in Ankara, she led another section of the organization I worked for. Instant recognition. That strange vibration that travels through the air before words exist.
We spent a day together, visiting camps, sharing cigarettes, stories, and that quiet electricity between those who have lived through so much.

That night we became lovers, a rare moment of permission to be human again.

We knew something deep connected us, but our dedication came first.
At dawn we parted without promises, knowing love was another frontier neither of us could cross. To this day I remember her as someone from a parallel life, wondering what would have happened if we had let our hearts speak louder than our mission.

Someone sent my bags from Van. Inside, the same plastic bag of clothes I’d washed the day I left Paris, they never really dried.
Another cargo plane circled above. Ankara. Then a Turkish Airlines flight to Paris.
Once again, that almost painful return to civilian life.
Once again, I was just another person, unnoticeable human among others.

Years Later

Years later, the memories still don’t fade, they seep in.
They weave their own network of reflexes and responses, building habits in the nervous system long after the mind has moved on.

The images dissolve. The sensations don’t.
And with them, emotions resurface, intense, unstoppable.
Waves of sadness and despair. Repressed anger. Confusion.

The weight of the air before the blast.
The numbness after.
The buzz in the inner ear.
The sound of tears from men who don’t cry, like rain in a desert.

These are not stories.
They are moments of presence, scattered through time, ghosts of alternate realities migrating back and forth between worlds.

People asked, Why did you go?
“I wanted to see the world,” I tell them. “All of it, not just the filtered version.”
And what did you learn?
That everything can and will collapse, the patient, the doctor, the man who fired the bullet.

We are all equal before pain.

When everything falls away, what matters is simple:
Water. Food. Warmth. A steady hand.
The rest is noise.

And yet, within that noise, something pure flickers.
In the apology of the disillusioned surgeon.
In the scream of the father lifting his child.
In the heartbreak to leave someone fade in the past.
Life spoke through its own ruin, calling for our attention.
But we are too busy to listen.
And the message is lost.

The Perfection of War

War is not the opposite of peace.

It is the echo of our disconnection, like pain to a wound.
The body of the universe inflamed where love has gone numb.

The pain is not a curse; it is feedback, as honest as a wound.
When we forget that we are one, the universe reminds us, fiercely, perfectly.

War is the mirror showing how far we have drifted from each other.
Its perfection lies not in cruelty, but in honesty,
the intensity of the pain proportional to the depth of the wound.

It reveals exactly where we are divided.
And until we remember, it will keep reminding.
For even in war, the universe still wants us to remember.

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Snow was falling when we crossed into Anatolia.

The driver was from Izmir; he had never seen snow before. He gripped the wheel like a sledgehammer about to break free, squinting into the white blur, afraid of the slide. I took over. The wipers squealed against the packed snow. Behind us, darkness swallowed the last of the Silk Road.

By dawn we rolled into Van, a city muffled under a grey sky and piles of melting snow. Our contact was waiting, a man from the Kurdish political movement, owner of a carpet shop that smelled of raw wool and sweet tea. He led us downstairs to a dim Turkish bath where steam rose in thin ribbons.

While my body thawed, he traced maps with his fingers on the wet marble.
Three refugee camps. One main valley near a village called Çukurca.
He did not know yet, one or two hundred thousand people, maybe more.
Barely a road.
Almost no water.
And certainly no permission.

He smiled at that word “permission” like a man quietly claiming freedom against authority.

The Birds Who Only Fly

The next day, a Russian cargo plane circled above the airport, a massive quadri-reactor Ilyushin, majestic even in its noise, a relic of the genius of a fallen empire.
The crew spoke no English, especially when sober. On the ground they moved awkwardly, heavy boots, oil-stained uniforms, men built for motion yet stranded in gravity, and in the meltdown of their own history. Like birds, they only felt free when they flew.

Serguei, a pilot with the eyes of a man who had seen too much, said wryly as he handed me the cargo manifest, “I fly guns, gas, food. I no fly hope. Hope too heavy.”

One reactor exhaled a ribbon of dark exhaust, as if remembering coal. I stood in the cockpit as the mechanic checked gauges with a cigarette hanging from his lips. He muttered an insult in Russian, banged loudly on a pipe, then shrugged.

We offloaded, and they took off anyway, too long to wait for a spare part. At 5,500 feet, sound seems to travel faster. The vibration ran through my ribs as they pushed the plane down every inch of tarmac before lifting into the thin air. This time again, they made it.

I realized then that sometimes you have to bet high stakes to make miracles happen. And I knew we would need that kind of faith for what was coming.

Valley of Dust

Up in the mountains, the snow melted into the earth beneath the trucks’ wheels. Helicopters came and went, rattling the sky. Each descent kicked up a storm of debris. I’d rush out, ducking under the blades slicing the air above my head.

The camp spread like a bleeding wound across the valley, a sea of makeshift tents, canvas, smoke, and human noise. A smell I knew too well: a mix of despair and anger.

We mapped the place, counted people in twenty-by-twenty-meter squares, and estimated one hundred and twenty-five thousand refugees in that valley alone. With a predictable mortality rate of twenty per ten thousand per day, that meant about two hundred and fifty deaths every sunrise. Mostly children.

Water was the first god we prayed to.
Five liters per person, six hundred and twenty-five tons daily.
That’s sixty-five trucks a day on a mountain road that was never paved.

We rented every truck, bargained for containers at the market, haggled for blankets, tarpaulins, cooking pots, and argued for everything with Turkish authorities who wanted their cut.

At night I slept in my clothes, half expecting the phone to ring with new challenges.
When it did, it usually found me awake.

The Sound of Falling Things

The airdrops started on the fifth day.
We heard the low growl of Hercules cargo planes crossing the valley, cargo doors yawning open.
Free-fall pallets of food tumbled from the sky, bursting on impact, spilling their entrails across the dirt.

Beyond the camp limits, only minefields.

When the first pallet fell, the crowd ran, men, women, children, all at once.
The children reached first.

Then came the blasts.
Not one. Many.
The sound doesn’t echo; it lands inside your chest and stops the air.

I was standing by the hospital tent. By the time the smoke lifted, I saw him running from the crowd, a man shouting, a bundle clutched against his chest. Blood seeped through the blanket, spattering his grey tunic. When he reached me, he thrust it forward, pleading, a raw desperation breaking through every sound.

I froze. The air between us thickened. He kept shouting, insisting I take it, the child, certain I could still help. But whatever he carried no longer moved.

Before I could answer, a nurse came, Kurdish too, and wrapped his arms around the father, pulling him back, whispering something low. They turned away together, the father still calling out, his voice splintering against the noise.

I stood there, useless.
Everyone screamed, muffled by the roar of the turboprops, a sound somewhere between war drum and windmill, and the crushing of pallets falling from the sky.

That night, I washed the dust from my hands and watched the red swirl down the drain.
Inside, a heavy emptiness.
I brushed it off.
Feeling was a luxury for later.

Lessons From Hell

Days blurred into nights.
Food. Logistics. Meetings. Dead batteries. Broken promises.
People crashed mid-shift, asleep on tables or against walls.
Exhaustion was convenient, it stripped away doubt.

One morning, a French surgeon stepped out of the hospital tent after a night on duty. A few days earlier he had arrived from Paris, confident and immaculate, questioning every decision I made with the condescending certainty of a man used to command.
Now his clothes were stained. His soul absent. His eyes grey, emptied of spark.

He sat beside me, wordless.
Then:
“I’m sorry.”
“I had no idea.”
“I see what you are doing.”
“I don’t know how you can do it.”
Pause.
“I lost twenty-seven children tonight. More than in my whole career.”

Silence again.
Then he stood, nodded, and left.
I never saw him again.

There are no medals for that kind of defeat.

Next week:

The Perfection of War
Part 2: The Crossing

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Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

Three hours between sky and heat. From the cockpit of the Cessna four-seater I finally spotted the old airfield near Bafata, a scar of orange laterite cutting through rough grass. A shack for a terminal. A truck beside it with a gun far too large for my comfort. I just prayed they’d already run out of ammo.

A few men stood in the shade. They’d heard us for sure, yet I couldn’t catch any visible movement. Meaning: no one pointed anything at us. Not yet.
Heat waves, like mirages, bent the horizon until the earth seemed to breathe. Sweat ran down my back, I wasn’t sure whether from heat or fear.

We circled once. The pilot glanced at me for the sign. I nodded. We dropped fast and hard, the plane bucking as the wheels hit dirt, lifting a flag of dust behind us like a tiny comet.

The soldiers gave no sign, no wave, no move. Hard to read the scene: maybe they didn’t care, or maybe they were just waiting for the prey. My assistant, on his first mission, stayed still. He had that kind of stillness you pray for in these moments, the absence of panic.

The plane sputtered to a stop at the end of the runway. We jumped off quickly. The pilot shouted “Good luck!” with a thumbs-up, then turned the plane around and lifted off as agreed.
Time thickened, the air sticky as syrup. I swung my lean bag over my shoulder and started walking toward the shelter, breathing slowly, preparing for first contact.

Tense, sweaty, dusty, we looked like a pair of ghosts that had just fallen from the sky.

A War Nobody Named

Athens smelled of Mediterranean sun on old stones.
In the MSF office, Alice said, “I’m happy you accepted. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you.” “Same here,” I replied, stepping over the compliment like a slick oil puddle. We’d met before, enough for trust, no small talk needed.

She opened a map, traced a line south from Dakar with her pen. “Casamance,” she said. I nodded and the next day I was flying to Dakar, reading a pile of briefing papers thick enough to stop a bullet.

By the time I landed, the plan had dissolved in smoke.
The fire was in Guinea-Bissau now, a tiny country, and enough oil to kill for.
I dumped all the briefing papers in the hotel bin.

Everyone knew. The coast was oil-rich. Two companies wanted the same field, backed by two different European nations. The president had signed with one; the other financed a rebellion.
They just needed a general with more ego for power than sense for politics. Never hard to find.

The capital barricaded itself while the villages burned and emptied.
Hundreds of thousands fled north, barefoot, carrying sacks that held everything they owned. The border stayed closed, a decision taken over shrimp cocktails by men in elegant suits, in air-conditioned rooms murmuring polite concerns for the big picture.

“Follow the oil,” an executive once told me over whisky in a private embassy club. “You’ll never be lost again.”
He was right. I’ve never been lost since, only more disgusted.

Out there, the map meant nothing. We read the lines by the direction of the guns: on one side when they pointed at our backs; the other when they faced us.
In between, an uneasy silence, our flag cracking in the wind, the acrid scent of sweat and fear. Roadblocks. Nervous laughter from men too drunk to care.

No one sober stayed at the front. Sobriety didn’t belong here. Every army had its way out, just a different name for the same escape. I used to pray the alcohol would numb their fear, but who wants to deal with a zealous drunk?

Between Duty and Despair

Day one.
I sat across from a large man whose honest smile flashed out of his white teeth like a man holding a winning lottery ticket. The district medical officer’s office was a bare, decrepit concrete room — no doors, no windows, the smell of dust and bat guano. We exchanged the expected platitudes ignoring the flies that hovered in circles.

The house we rented cost more than a loft in New York, but I didn’t care. Cash in war zones moves like a cursed magic wand, flick once, problems disappear; flick again, more problems appear.

We hired vehicles, stitched them with white flags. I grabbed the sat phone:
“Airstrip now safe. Contact flight club in Dakar. House and vehicle secured. Send medical teams and initial supply. Will check in tomorrow.”

That night I sat on the empty porch. The frogs chanted from the near pond; fireflies mirrored the stars in the black sky. Peaceful, but not enough to sleep.

Fight & flight are like those guests who never leave the party, ignoring every hint.

My assistant had questions. Many questions. Maybe he just wanted to connect. Today was quite an initiation. I had no answers to share, just disillusions. “Do soldiers ever stop drinking?” he asked. “Why would they?” I said. “I can’t find a reason.”

The bare tree next door was home for a cluster of vultures. My mind drifted to Kevin Carter’s photograph — the vulture, the child — printed in The New York Times beside Tiffany’s ads for jewelry. That juxtaposition described my life better than any diary. The paper-thin space between horror and help. The absurdity of seeing our world devouring itself while we sell luxury to the overfed.

I carried that sensation for years, probably still do. The emptiness that follows the horror. The depression that sits in the back seat, uninvited. The suicidal thoughts that show up at dawn when stray dogs start howling.
And always the same question, looping like static under everything:

What the hell is this show I signed up for?

Diplomats and Dust

Dakar, three weeks later.
I shivered under the air-conditioning. A sleek board at the entrance read Inter-Embassies Task Force for Operational Relief. Inside, the operation ran on gin tonics, Bloody Marys, and shrimp cocktails. I stood there wondering, When did I say yes to this?

Clean-shaved smiles, polite questions from behind serious masks, all fishing for intelligence. I looked around and thought: They have no clue.
No one was covering the conflict.
No one cared about Guinea-Bissau.
Half the world couldn’t find it on a map.

The French and Portuguese ambassadors exchanged empty courtesies, pretending not to know what was at stake or how it started. No one mentioned the oil, though it hung in the air like the smoke in an opium den.

It felt like a game of Risk played on a mahogany table, only here the pieces were real countries, real money, real lives. The same people who’d fueled the war now posed as saviors, speaking of “those poor people” with their mouths full of shrimp.

I gave them nothing. Their intelligence remained as shaky as their moral compass.

The Flight Home

The time finally came. At dawn I stood where I’d been dropped three weeks earlier. The same strip of orange dust, the same heat. Then I saw him, the pilot, he circled above, I waved and he responded. Approach low, align, and bounce once before settling. He turned the plane around, facing the opposite direction for takeoff.

I jumped in beside him.
“Convenient absence of wind,” I said. “Saves us the taxi.”
He looked at me, half amused. “You fly?”
“Not as often as I’d like,” I said, “but I’ve got my licence.”

He smiled, set the heading for Dakar, then handed me the yoke. “Enjoy.”

We flew three hours along the coast, dancing around colossal cumulus that rose like cathedrals of cotton. Under visual flight rules we had to stay clear of the clouds, so we skimmed their edges, tickling them with our wings, weaving through luminous corridors, a cosmic roller coaster in a sky made of silk and sugar. For a moment my shoulders forgot their weight, as if Alice herself had drifted into a white wonderland.

The desert stretched pale and infinite to the right, the ocean a living mirror to the left. The yoke trembled softly in my hands, light as a pulse.

The radio crackled. We turned it off, and the silence returned.

Best flight of my life.
A small reward for a weary soul.

Aftermath

“The flight to Paris is now boarding.”
I sit at the terminal watching the hurried passengers queue as if someone might steal their place. I am back to being like anyone else. I watch them and wonder: What have they lived in the last three weeks? What did they worry about? Is there love in their lives? Passion in their work? No one suspects what I’ve just come from, except maybe the tiredness in my eyes.

The normality of life almost hurts.

It will take me years to understand the perfection of all things, what victim consciousness means, what it means to play savior, what role I played and where I simply contributed to the very horror I wished to resolve. I still believed in good guys and bad guys, and that I knew which side I was on. That seemed simple. It wasn’t.

I sometimes think we all serve the same machine, the corrupt general, the diplomat, the aid worker, the journalist, each believing we’re different. But the lines are only for maps. Inside, I have lost all maps.

I still don’t know what I’m doing here. Why I sought to see all I have witnessed, and what to do with it. I write as if spitting it out before it swallows me. I think of Kevin Carter. I know what he felt. I’m just luckier, walking a different, though similar, path, a witness to the parts of the world others would rather not see.

Tomorrow I’ll stop at the gas station and fill up my car. I’ll sit with that tension without knowing what to do with it. Privileged to be on that side of the pump.

Compassion and survival.
Witness and withdrawal.
The instinct to flee and the duty to stay.

I never thought I’d make it to old age; a stray bullet always seemed a better bet. And even now, when I close my eyes, I still see that strip of red dust in Bafata, the truck, the gun, the men watching us descend, and I wonder, with the same tired question:

How do we keep living with what we’ve seen?

How did Zivorad come into my life? Honestly, I can’t remember exactly.
At the time, I was researching every form of inner work (evolution, personal growth, enlightenment) and I stumbled across a book called The Dawn of Aivaz.

It was the personal account of Zivorad Mihajlović Slavinski, a clinical and transpersonal psychologist from Serbia. His life story was wild and uncompromising. And strangely familiar: I saw echoes of my own journey in his, moving through spiritual systems, extracting their essence, uninterested in dogma.

I reached out to a Serbian friend named Tanja who warmly recommended him. That sealed it. I reached out and arranged a training.

What drew me most was something he called the Gnosis Intensive, a structured process of self-inquiry using the classic question “Who am I?”

Often attributed to Ramana Maharishi, the method had been reframed for western seekers by Charles Berner in California, under the name Enlightenment Intensive. Osho adapted it. Zivorad, too, and over years of practice, he had refined it further into something simpler, more direct, and more powerful.

Belgrade, 2013

I found a quiet Bed&Breakfast on Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra, just a short walk from Zivorad’s residence in Palilula. Each morning, I crossed Tašmajdan Park, covered in snow and silence. The city felt muted under its white coat, like it, had gone inward for winter.

In that frozen hush, I spent three days with Zivorad, learning the processes he had spent a lifetime refining. His apartment was modest, his presence calm. But what we were doing together was anything but ordinary.

Belgrade, 1991

It wasn’t my first time here. See my previous post here.

Twelve years earlier, in November 1991, I arrived during the Serbia-Croatia war. The same grey sky, the same frozen air, but a different kind of silence. Back then, it was the quiet of tension, not peace. The windows were taped against possible blasts. A military curfew blanketed the city each night.

At dawn, I drove west along the E70 toward the front line. I witnessed Vukovar burning only to keep the disturbing memory of a city pulverized by war. Vukovar became the symbol of the senseless brutality of war. At that time, Belgrade wasn’t a place of healing. It was a gateway to hell.

And yet, here I was again, in the same season, in the same city, this time walking toward a man who’s mission was to dissolved suffering.

Two winters. Two Belgrades. One thread.

Polarity and Presence

Zivorad’s work began with a basic insight: we are born in a state of oneness. Over time, we become aware of our apparent separation from the rest of existence. At some early moment, a division appears. Zivorad called it the prime polarity, the original split from which all later division arise.

Most of our behavior, he said, traces back to this first division. We spend our lives unconsciously reacting to it, seeking wholeness through people, goals, beliefs, or pain. But until the prime polarity is made conscious and the tension between its two sides is released, we remain trapped in the same loops.

His method for unwinding this was simple in structure, and profound in effect.

We would identify the two sides of a polarity. For each, we would recall the mental images, emotions, body sensations, and thoughts it evoked. Then we would go back and forth between both sides, activating each layer, dissolving as we moved. The process was supported by gentle finger pressure on acupuncture points across the face, specific breathing rhythms, and a calm verbal rhythm of recall and release.

It was unlike anything I had done before. Psychological, yet also somatic and energetic. Like a clearing system that didn’t try to change the story, only to let it complete itself.

As we repeated the process, inner tensions began to soften. Memories lost their grip. Time lost its sequence. The idea of “me” became more fluid, more spacious.

It was clear: there was no need to control or correct. Only to let go of the charge that had build up over time rather than adding to it.

With each round, another pocket of tension disappeared. It became easier to rest, easier to listen, easier to remain still. The division that had shaped so many of my behaviors was no longer holding.

What remained was presence and in that presence the clarity of the perfection of everything.

The Collapse of Time

On the final day of our training, Zivorad paused and looked at me for a long moment.

“I usually don’t share this process in short trainings,” he said. “But I think you’re ready.”

He called it UCP (Unification Connection Process).
I had no idea what to expect. I only remember the stillness in his voice. The way the air shifted when he said it.

We sat together. I closed my eyes.

He asked me to bring up my earliest memory. I saw it, vague, flickering, wrapped in a child’s sense of strangeness. Then he asked for the most recent. I noticed how fresh it felt, how much more real.

Then we began.

He guided me to feel both memories, one at a time, by tracking four elements: the images, the emotions, the body sensations, and the thoughts. We did this for the early memory. Then the recent one. Then back again.

Over and over.
Early.
Recent.
Back again.

With each cycle, the content got thinner. The images blurred. The emotions faded. The body sensations loosened their grip. Even the thoughts began to fall apart.

Eventually, I couldn’t tell which memory was which. Then I couldn’t tell if they had ever really happened. And then, there was nothing to process.

Just space.

Not absence in a cold sense. This was open. Soft. Alive.
I sat in it for a while, unsure if the process had ended, or if I had.

When I opened my eyes, everything looked the same. But it wasn’t.

The usual tension behind the eyes, the subtle narrative running under each moment, was gone. My body felt light. Time wasn’t stretching forward or backward anymore. It had become still. And in that stillness, I wasn’t trying to be anyone.

I was just here.

Wipe Complete. System memory not found.

After the process, Zivorad asked me gently,
“Can you recall anything else, from your life between those two memories?”

I paused.
I searched.
And nothing came.

Not a single image. Not a scene. Not even a name.

It was as if everything in between had been erased.
Like a disk wiped clean. Blank. Silent.

And strangely, I felt fine.
There was no fear, no grasping.
Just a sense of being completely present.
Peaceful. Empty. Whole.

I sat in that stillness for a long time, marveling at the calm.
But then a thought crept in, subtle and sharp:

Have I lost it all?

A faint panic stirred.
What if I had gone too far?
What if the memories never returned?

Zivorad noticed the shift in my body before I said a word.

He smiled. Calm, steady.

“They will come back,” he said. “All of it. Don’t worry.”

His words were warm and reassuring, like a hot coffee and a blanket offered by a friend after an traumatic event.

I exhaled.

And in that moment, I understood something deeper.
I didn’t need the past. I didn’t need to remember.

I was whole, I existed in peace without all of it.

It would all return, he promised.
But for now, I could just sit in the freedom of forgetting.

And it stayed in that state. For hours. Days in fact.

Echoes of Belgrade

A few hours after the training ended, I found myself walking to Kalemegdan Fortress, where the Danube and Sava rivers meet. The sky was pale. The cold soft. I sat on a stone wall overlooking the water, the old fortress behind me and the city quietly breathing below.

I wasn’t thinking. I was present, listening.

And in that listening, a strange question arrived.

If I could dissolve the tension between the first and last memories of my life, and collapse all the time between, then what about these two Belgrades? 1991 and 2013.
The war-torn city and the snow-covered one.
The fear and the quiet.
The curfews and the coffee shops.
The taped windows and the healing rooms.

Could they also be the poles of a collective polarity?
Could they be processed the same way I had just processed my past and future?

I don’t mean symbolically. I mean somatically. Could I return to the tension of 1991, then back to the peace of 2013, and move between them again and again, not just think about them, but to feel them, to let the images, emotions, sensations, and thoughts dissolve, until something shifted… not just in me, but in the field?

What if healing wasn’t personal at all?
What if personal healing is just a tuning fork that can ring through collective pain?

The Danube kept flowing.
Same river. Different time.
Or maybe… no time at all.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

In 2001, I established residence for several months in one of the most luxurious hotel in New Delhi: the Oberoi. That June morning, with temperatures already climbing above 100°F, I stood at its majestic entrance, waiting for a yellow and black Ambassador taxi, summoned by the chasseur, dressed in full Maharajah-era regalia.

After a short ride by the green of the golf club and the zoo, the impressive ruins of the old fort and the less picturesque power station by the Yamuna river, I arrived at my new workplace: the World Health Organization South East Asia Office.

I appeared relaxed, but inside, I knew this was one of the biggest professional gamble of my life. More than one person on the recruitment panel had doubts about my competence—and honestly, I didn’t blame them. I doubted myself.

WHO was never designed as an operational agency and its antiquated processes hindered the outcome of the department. I was hired for efficiency, to cut corners, to deliver results. Make the polio eradication campaigns in the 10 countries of the region a success.

At my very first staff meeting, I felt the heavy weight of expectation: surely I was due to present a bold, well-structured strategy to address our persistent challenges, not least of them, a chronic multi-million-dollar shortfall in our fundraising programs.

The truth, though, was I had no plan. No solutions. Not yet. And that wasn’t the point. I’d learned from consulting that you don’t come with answers; you trust the solutions are already there, just unseen. So instead of impressing everyone with a grand proposal, I asked a simple question:

"When was the last time you went home at 4pm?"

Officially, 4pm was our end-of-day. But nobody ever left on time. The culture, legacy of North American workaholism, revered long hours, weekend emails, slave-like availability. No one answered. Their faces said it all. No one could remember.

Then I made the first move:
"I want each of you to go home at 4pm at least once a week."

Silence. Disbelief. Maybe even suspicion.

My voice didn’t shake, but inside, I knew this was one big bet. I didn’t know if it would work. But I knew this: if I was going to succeed here, it had to be with a new story—one that went beyond logistics, budgets, or scorecards. A new story of how we could work together.

And in the land of “namaste” surely that story must begins with valuing people as whole beings. Trust, respect, and empowerment were to be the foundations of this new kind of leadership.

Newtonian Model

Most organizations still operate with an old Newtonian model: to move something, you must exert pressure on it. Stop the pressure and the movement stops. It's a system of sticks and carrots. Motivation is something you squeeze or entice out of people through deadlines and paychecks.

But honestly does it even work? For me, it never did. Push to get something and you’ll most likely get the opposite. So I asked: what if there's a path to even higher performance? And what if that path runs through personal fulfillment?

Then my role wasn’t to outdo my team at what they’d already mastered, it was to create the conditions that would make them better at what they did.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs offers a simple but powerful lens. At the lower levels, when a need is met, motivation decreases. I’m hungry, I eat, I stop thinking about food. But at the highest levels, the opposite happens:

The more I meet my needs for self-esteem, purpose, and self-actualization, the more I want of it. Motivation multiplies.

The more we feel seen, the more we want to contribute.
The more we feel aligned, the more energy flows.
The more we feel trusted, the more we become trustworthy.

This is the shift from a Newtonian model to a quantum model where fulfillment isn’t opposed to performance. It’s the engine.

I didn’t use those words at the time, but that’s exactly what I was sensing.
I wasn’t trying to motivate my team with external rewards. I was trying to nourish them form the inside.

I knew they could do the job, they’d been doing it for years. I just saw my role as supporting them to do it even better.

And that started with one simple act: showing them respect in its highest form.
Namaste!

Redefining Success

After a few months, my stress began to ease. I was still working a lot, maybe to compensate for the enormous responsibility I’d taken on, but the doubts had quieted. I knew we were going to make it.

And the rewards started showing up.

The quality of the work produced by our department spoke for itself. Other department intended to poach our best staff, offering higher salaries, enticing promotions, opportunities for upward mobility in the organization.

Most of them declined.
One person in HR even asked me, puzzled:

“What do you do to your staff that they don’t want promotions?”

It baffled other departments. But I understood.

They chose to stay in a place that fed them more than money and status. A place where they felt trusted, supported, and truly seen.

When people are nourished, they don’t need to be managed.
When their work provide the highest rewards, they don’t have to look elsewhere for satisfaction.

Later, the Director of Administration and Finance, by then a friendly colleague, took me aside and said:

“I didn’t think you would make it.”

He had the nobility to admit he had once doubted me. And the integrity to acknowledge that I had, in fact, succeeded.

It was not the praise that mattered most, but the confirmation of what I had sensed all along: in a large system, the best results don’t emerge from control, but from harmony.

Yes, I worked a lot. But I was fulfilled, by the team, by the trust, by the shared story we were creating together.

A story where people mattered.
A story where fulfillment bred loyalty.
A story where performance was a byproduct of belonging.

Something I said often, mostly in my head, since the culture wasn’t quite ready for this vocabulary:

“What would happen if you treated your employees like God?”
(Because they are 😉). And I could have added: Namaste!

Having Skin in the Game

It was not all harmony though, some people still wanted to prove my methods wrong. My efforts towards efficiency weren’t to everyone’s liking. At one point, the administration flagged a technical irregularity in how my main assistant had been recruited. They wanted her to resign and reapply.

But underneath, it was a maneuver to install someone else, someone controllable, more loyal to the system, and eventually to coerce me into the more normative processes of the organization.

I couldn’t afford to lose her. Not only she was absolutely brilliant and she had saved me more than once, but her departure would have meant a loss of trust and safety within the team.

So I walked into my boss’s office and said:

“If she goes, I go. You manage the fallout. It’s beyond my reach.”

He looked at me and knew I meant it. I was willing to walk away from everything, for the principle alone.

When you play this game, you have to walk your talk. You can’t bail at the first hindrance. Putting skin in the game was what truly mattered. The challenged worked, and my assistant stayed.

Sometimes, the only way to protect a culture of trust is to stake everything on it.
And that, to me, is what real respect looks like.

Final Test

December 2004. By then, I knew I’d be leaving New Delhi for Geneva in January. I was coasting, most processes were running smoothly, and the success of our department had earned me a new post at headquarters, helping to design the planning and strategy module for the new Oracle ERP system.

But on December 26th, at 5:30 a.m. Delhi time, a massive 9.3 magnitude earthquake, off the west coast of Sumatra, triggered a tsunami that devastated 14 countries, claimed over 230,000 lives, and displaced millions. One of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.

I made one phone call and within hours, our entire team was back at work on a Sunday morning, without notice, without argument, without asking for extra pay. They came because they knew it mattered.

We did not lose time in negotiations over overtime compensation, we were operational instantly. That’s what happens when people are met in their humanity: they show up with everything they are.

It felt like a kind of parting gift. The ultimate recognition. A quiet nod from life itself. A goodbye wink that said: you trusted your intuition, you defended it, and it worked.

Not Everything Can Be Measured

In the end, did team members start going home at 4pm once a week?

Maybe they did. Maybe not. What matters is that it became possible. And that’s the real shift. That was never the true metric.

The danger of metrics is that we try to measure what we value,
but end up valuing what we measure.

It is difficult to measure harmony. Or coherence. Yet you can feel it. You just know when it’s there—and when it’s not.

What we created was a culture of trust, of belonging. A place where everyone gave their best, not because they were pressured, or blackmailed, or even asked, but because they wanted to.

And while I can take credit for some of that,
I want to give credit where it’s due: to the men who recruited me.

Bruce, who dropped the application on my desk in Geneva one late evening with a quiet, “Apply, please, and we’ll get you there.” A sentence full of unspoken meaning. Brent and Arun, who took a risk on me after that first interview.

Like many others before, they may have seen something I couldn’t yet see in myself.

The irony is obvious as I write these lines. They probably followed the same principle I would later apply. They valued me, trusted me, and with that fuel, they unlocked something deep within me. And it paid back. I owe them my gratitude.

A Culture of Coherence

What do you call a workplace where people show up without being asked? Where trust replaces control? Where fulfillment drives performance, and alignment births results?

I call it a culture of coherence.

It’s not a system. It’s not a strategy. It’s a field, a living, breathing organism where something deeper guides the way.

You can’t command it. You can only invite it.

It begins with a story. A story where people matter. Where needs aren’t hurdles, but doorways. Where leadership doesn’t push, it listens, trusts, and amplifies.

In that space, synchronicity is the norm. Things line up. Energy flows. People bring more than skill, they bring their soul.

And when that happens, infinite potential isn’t just possible.

It’s inevitable.

Namaste:
Meaning “ I bow to you” or “ I honor the divine in you”. When the One in me sees the One in you, we recognize the divine spark that unites us all. In that silent acknowledgment, there is no separation, only the shared truth of our being—timeless, boundless, and interconnected.

Synchronicity:
The simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related bit have no discernible causal connection (Carl Jung).

PS: In Service

After five years with WHO as a consultant advising field projects in Africa, the Middle East, and South-East Asia, I took on a new role in the SEA region, covering 10 countries—India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, North Korea, Maldives, and Bhutan—home to 1.9 billion people.

Our department focused on vaccines and immunizations, with the primary effort centered on eradicating polio. This involved large-scale campaigns using a safe, effective oral vaccine delivered to children.

My role encompassed finance, human resources, and strategic planning, with a significant focus on securing supplementary funding to support national initiatives. The budget was $300 million annually, with thousands of employees and millions of volunteers mobilized for the campaigns.

In a position where 25% of the world’s population would be affected by our decisions, the weight of responsibility was both humbling and overwhelming. To be entrusted with such a role, recognized for the impact of my work, was a powerful acknowledgment, yet it also brought a quiet sense of reverence for the lives at stake. In the face of such responsibility, I felt both deeply honored and profoundly humbled, aware that the true work was not about power or career, but being in service to something far greater than myself.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

October 1984. I was 23, somewhere between Niamey and Timbuktu, just after innocence and before initiation.

The Sahara was behind me, but its emptiness still echoed in my soul. I’d been hitchhiking for 3 months across Morocco, Algeria and Niger, and now Mali, sleeping rough, chasing the ghost trails of my childhood heroes: René Caillié, Mungo Park, Francis Burton. Men who vanished into the unknown, and returned with stories my world could not believe.

I was on my way to visit a friend in Gao but got stranded for days in Tillaberi. The roads had disappeared under the Niger's swollen waters. Cholera was sweeping through the region. Transport was uncertain. Food, even more so.

The desert had taught me not to expect much. Africa was teaching me to be ready for anything, and mostly to expect nothing at all.

Eventually, I boarded a slow ferry headed toward Timbuktu. Cabin tickets were too costly. I laid on the open deck, crowded with strangers and woven with smells, smoke, sweat, river damp. I spread my thin cloth among sleeping bodies, breathing through a cloth, trying to blend.

The heat was thick, sour, and constant. Damp clung to every surface, skin, cloth, metal railings, and mingled with the scents of boiled peanuts, frying fish and plantains, diesel fuel, urine, and my own acrid sweat.

I was the only white person on board. Everyone noticed and no one cared. I paid to be here, they would give anything to escape.

I tried to be invisible, folding myself into the crowd, but there’s no hiding when you are white and everything is Black.

At the bow, men squatted over the edge of the deck, shitting straight into the river. A few steps downstream, women filled buckets from the same water to brew the tea over open flames. The logic was striking and impossible to hold. The Niger didn’t care. It kept flowing, swollen with floodwaters, majestic and brown. Part lifeline, part grave.

The landscape was breathtaking, desert dunes rolling toward the horizon, golden under the setting sun. And yet, death sat openly among us. It traveled with us like a quiet companion. Poverty left its seal on everything, but there was dignity. People shared food. Mothers comforted babies. No one complained.

We were all in it together: the smell, the heat, the dust, the flow.
Africa doesn’t hide life’s edges.

That night, as the boat pushed gently against the current, a woman beside me went into labor. A soldier barked and cleared a patch of deck. I was kicked out with no reverence. I slid a few feet over, grateful to rest beside a man who seemed peacefully still. He made no sound as I settled next to him.

The river was quiet, swollen, glistening under the moon. Desert dunes flanked us on both sides, glowing like they had borrowed some sun to give back. The air was heavy with all possibilities, water and sand, life and illness, silence and blood.

By morning, the boat rooster had started singing.
A baby had been born, crying.
And the man beside me had died, silently.

It was the first time I witnessed a birth. And a death.
And they happened at once, like a message.

But the message was not simple. Not as black and white.
Birth and Death. Poverty and dignity. Desertification and floods. Beginning and end.
All braided together.

The Illusion

Something in me shifted that night. I though I could manage, comfort, distance, identity, yet none had meaning on that deck.
In me something was dying too. And something else was being born.
Looking back, I’ve come to see that truth, in my experience, is often paradoxical.
That the most important secrets are hidden in plain sight.
And yet, it may take a lifetime to uncover the simplest answers.

“It is just right,” Goldilocks might say.

If the enigma were too easy, we’d be bored.
If it were too hard, we’d be disheartened, trapped in despair.

So here we are: it’s just easy enough to keep us going, just hard enough to keep us humble.
Perfect balance.

Yet in that delicate balance, we often reach for control.
We believe control will lead us to safety, success, self-worth, even mastery.
Yet what if that very attempt is what keeps us stuck?

Take my morning, for example.
When I wake up, so do the 50 trillion cells of my body.
(Okay, maybe they never slept, just humor me.)
What’s the first thing I do?
Convene a meeting? Assign tasks?
Supervise every cell’s objective for the day?

Of course not. If I had that kind of control, I’d be overwhelmed, and probably dead.
Instead, I trust. I surrender. The cells do their job. The heart beats.
The breath adjusts.
Harmony reigns.

And the same goes for life.
The world doesn’t respond well to control.
But it moves beautifully when we trust.
Attempting to dominate the intelligence of life is like micromanaging our biology.

Power doesn’t come from control but from surrender.
It is surrender that creates coherence.

Do You Believe in Fate?

“Do you believe in fate, Neo?” asks Morpheus.
“No” Neo replies, “I don’t like the idea that I am not in control of my life”.
The Matrix.

Most of us feel the same.
We don’t like the idea that we’re not in control.

But let’s be honest: we can’t really control our thoughts.
We can’t control our feelings either.
And when I think and feel: I am those thoughts and feelings. Full stop.
Only in deep states of samadhi, typically reached through years of dedicated practice, can one see beyond thoughts and feelings, and glimpse who they are without them.

But does that mean I can’t function unless I’m in samadhi?
Of course not.

Yet trying to control thoughts and feelings doesn’t work much better.
It only feeds the illusion of control.
And anyone who’s lived long enough knows how flimsy that illusion is.

Just as we trust the heart to beat, and the cells to regenerate,
we can relinquish control and begin to trust life.

When we do, we tap into something far greater,
an intelligence that is vast, alive, and effortless.

Holding Two Stories At Once

As humans, we’re engaged in this short, luminous dance between birth and death.

Every moment, something is ending.
And something new is beginning.

A breath dies, and another is born.
A wave crashes, another is forming.
Dusk here, is dawn somewhere else.

Every heartbreak, challenge, and wave of grief echoes a broken attachment.
We hold on to what was, and often fail to see what’s coming.
It’s like clinging to the exhale, refusing the next inhale.
We suffocate.

“If your eyes are full of tears because the sun is gone, you won’t see the stars,” said Tagore.

With every death, something is also being born.
But we rarely see both at once.

Mastery is holding both stories at once.
To honor what is dying, fully. Without bypass. Without rushing.
To honor what is being born, even before it is visible.

Rush toward the new, and we grasp.
Cling to the old, and we despair.
The magic is in the balance.

Feel Forward

There’s a stage in the process of transformation where what’s dying feels far more present than what’s being born. That’s just the truth of it.

The ending is obvious.
The beginning is still invisible.
And in that in-between, the old feels heavy and the new feels distant.

Control says: Let’s plan, strategize, figure it out…
But that wouldn’t be surrender, would it?

Instead, ask:
When the new adventure arrives, how do I want to feel?
Then, start generating that feeling now, through other means.

You want to feel free? Then breathe like someone who is free.
You want to feel purposeful? Then act today like your contribution already matters.
You want to feel loved? Then fall in love with everything that is, now.

By feeling forward, we make space for the future to arrive organically, without control, without force. It’s simple mechanics:
If I want to feel free, but I’m not generating that feeling now, I will grasp.
If I want to feel loved, but I’m not being love now, I will grasp.

And freedom, love, purpose…
None of these arise from grasping.

The Story We Tell Ourselves

At the risk of appearing single-focused,
I believe all changes happen when we chose a story over another.

So what story am I living in right now?
Am I in the story of what is dying? Holding on to sadness, depression, resistance…
Am I in the story of what is being born? Finding curiosity, presence, renewal…

And can I hold both stories equally?
Grieving what is leaving, without contracting?
Allowing what is coming, allowing the expansion?

Our stories are not just fantasies, they are engines of this world.

Change my story, and I begin to change my nervous system.
Change my nervous system and I can relax into the unknown.
Embrace the new that is being born.
Without trying to control the outcome.

My biology will change. My body will change. My reality will change.

The Architect Was Always You

I have never found an architect behind the curtain.
I am it.
I am the unfolding.
I am not separate from the world, I am the universe experiencing itself.
Moment by moment.
Control isolates me from it.
Surrender unifies me with it.

And when I let life tell me how it wants to be lived…
That’s when I am finally alive.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

October 2007. Six months after the Montreux awakening, I return briefly to Geneva to release the last of my belongings. Shifting from clockwork Switzerland to chaotic India is a wide stretch. And in that stretch something cracked further. India completed the fracture, and remade me.

India re-mothered me.
It healed what I inherited from Catholicism: my atheism.

Love it or hate it, India doesn’t leave you indifferent. I fell in love again. The heart chakra in the daily chaos, the stench of sewage and the sweetness of prasad, the heat that drives you mad and the cold that bites, from the shrewd reality of its poverty to the depth of its spirit, everything conspired keep the break open.

India rolled me in the dust like a chapati, baked me in the tandoor, and burned away what was not me. India returned me to the sacred. No dogma, no priest. Me and God. Raw. Direct. Intimate. Just the undeniable presence of Life in everything.

I did not become Hindu. No such thing was required. The eternal wheel, Sanatan Dharma, got me spinning in its wake. And when I spun fast enough, Sanjeev appeared. And the wheel spun faster.

Wanderer and Samnyasin

By all accounts, the years that followed were among the most incredible of my life.

With my partner Val, we traveled to India three times a year to assist in the trainings. The rest of the time, we roamed freely, learning, preparing, exploring.

Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia… each segment a verse in a long Asian love poem.

Nomadic and passionate.
Carried by the winds. Held by the land. Nourished by the soul.

We were being moved, like wandering samnyasins, following an invisible thread through pilgrimages, mountains pathways, and an inner silence louder than noise.
In service and in surrender.

We had found our sacred rhythm, and it was dancing us.

Eat, Pray... Leave

In two years we had undergone a vertiginous amount of trainings, meditations and practices. Travelers of both inner and outer landscapes.

October 2009, we arrived in Dharamshala, a familiar place by now, to assist another teacher training with Sanjeev.

We knew the chaiwalas, the tasty restaurants, the shortcut paths to the temple across the fields. Everything was ready. The machine was well oiled.

Then, one week before the training, I got the call: Sanjeev wouldn’t be coming.

He had been hired as technical advisor for the India portion of Eat Pray Love, a new Hollywood production of the 2006 best-seller by Liz Gilbert, played by Julia Roberts. I had never heard of the book. I didn’t care. I cared about the commitment we made.

I felt dropped. Burdened.
And now, the training would fall on me.
I was angry. And under the anger was hurt.

To me, commitment is sacred.

Trial by Fire

The training went ahead without Sanjeev. And it was a success. I led the whole thing, and nothing fell apart. In fact, something clicked into place.

My emotions settled but the resentment lingered.
“You don’t drop your engagements last minute.”
That story stuck. My Aries loyalty doesn’t bend easily.

What I couldn’t see then and what feels so obvious now:
In two years, I had gone from beginner to teacher.
With only one person to be grateful for.
And without planning it, I had just led my first full Yoga Teacher Training.

Not just delivered it. I thrived in it.
There was a clear path and I was home in that place.

Maybe even beyond home, maybe growing beyond the frame?

But at the time, all I could feel was betrayal.
The story of disappointment was louder than the voice of emergence.

Kintsugi

We spent the winter on Koh Mak, Thailand, in a bamboo house perched above a coconut grove and the shimmering Gulf. A lost paradise.

Until the letter came.

“You are not needed for the next training.”

Shock. Hurt. Betrayal, again.

But in that quiet place, something could shift. The emotional fog lifted. I saw it clearly now: I could never have left Sanjeev on my own. I owed him too much.
But this rupture, this divine discord, set us free.

And so, Yogi-Nomad was born. Our own yoga school. Our own ideas. Our own way. And over the next few years, we would teach many students.

The separation was not death. It was birth.

Eventually, I wrote Sanjeev a letter of gratitude.
I saw it now: the pain was the portal.
The anger was needed to break the bond.
And freedom… the gold we fit in the cracks.

Full Circle

Fast forward to August 2017. I live in California now. My yoga path has shape-shifted, repackaged as “life coach”. New words, same meaning.

I am planning a trip to Europe, so I reach out to Sanjeev to whom I have spoken a few times. Peace is restored. He invites me to stay with his family in Bonn.

I have something for you, I tell him “Have you heard of 5-MeO-DMT?” His voice lit up. "I’ve been researching it for a while” he admits. I smile. “I’ve been serving it. I’ll bring it along.”

Serving Sanjeev was one of the most profound ceremonies of my life.
A quiet act of reverence. A chance to give back a small part of the gold I received.

He emerges from the journey, radiant and still.
“All has been said, right?” he whispers.
I nod. No words needed.

Perfection as tangible as matter. Student. Teacher. All roles dissolved.
Only the dance remains, perfect in its design, even we lose control.
Especially when we lose control.

Blowin’ In The Wind

India had whispered it all along:
“To be free, you must be like the wind, untied, ungrasping, everywhere and nowhere at once.”

Life never once made a mistake.
Not when Sanjeev dropped out.
Not even when I burned in my resentment.

Life is right in every case.

What looked like breakup was space creation.
What felt like loss was the gift.

Now I see it so clearly: the roles, the reversals, the rupture, the return,
all just wind-blown chapters in a story written by something bigger than me.

No one to blame. No one to thank. Only awe.

The illusion was perfect.
The circle was complete.
And the wind keeps blowing.

Because everything is perfect. Always.

Hence, as Sanjeev said so often in classes: “I resist nothing that occurs.”

To this day I have remained in contact with Sanjeev and you you can contact here through his website if you’d wish to work with him. He is a deeply genuine Indian master. If you chose to connect with him please let me know. Not only I’d be happy to help could also make an introduction for the right person.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.

It took me a lifetime of searching, a relentless torrent of questions born of a scientific mind, and one eternal minute beneath the desert sky to crystalize my understanding of God, consciousness, and the universe.

It was not quiet; it came like a detonation. An annihilation.

In the Nevada desert, I tied myself to a rocket, lit the wick, and was launched into the infinite.

My identity dissolved into an all-encompassing stillness, and beyond the veil, I encountered a presence that was everything and nothing.

In that moment (a direct experience of truth) I understood: the divine is not separate. Consciousness is the thread that weaves through all existence. And the universe is its boundless expression.

Everything I believe today began with that defining instant, where the infinite and I were no longer two.

At Burning Man in 2014, I understood the meaning of ineffable. After one inhalation of 5-MeO-DMT, my carefully constructed reality dissolved.

I have since then made a point to speak of the ineffable, yet rather than try to explain it here, let me take you there with me, for an instant, into an experience that would reshape my understanding of everything. I've guided and travelled hundreds of times since then. I stopped keeping track after a few hundred. Yet no experience has ever been as mysterious and profound as the first.

The Groundless Ground

I enter a room so full of light that it blinds me. The brightness is overwhelming, saturating everything, leaving no shadows, no edges, no sense of depth. I can’t see where I am or where to go, only the overwhelming, all-encompassing brilliance.

Then, without warning, the light is extinguished. Not dimmed, not faded, but erased entirely. I am plunged into an abyss of absolute darkness. I reach out, but there’s nothing, no walls, no objects, no door to orient me. My footing feels uncertain, but then the deeper truth hits: there is no floor beneath me either.

If there is no floor, I am falling, or it feels like falling, but there’s no rush of wind, no sound of descent, no sign of acceleration. I simply exist in this infinite, groundless void. The mind scrambles for some anchor, some boundary to cling to, but there is none. No up, no down, no end.

But then, something shifts. The tension, which gripped me for a fleeting moment, begins to loosen its hold. It is as though the ego, sensing its own futility, exhausts itself in the struggle. It doesn’t vanish in an instant; it pulls away like the tide, revealing something far deeper beneath its surface.

I realize there is no ground to brace for, but neither is there any danger. There is no end to this fall, but also no harm in it. A profound stillness emerges within me. I stop searching for something to hold onto, for there is nothing to hold.

I stop resisting the fall, for there is no fall, only infinite presence.

The tension in my mind dissolves, and in its place arises a trust so deep, so ancient, that it feels like remembering rather than learning. I let go completely, not just of the tension, but of the very need to cling to anything at all.

And in that surrender, I see the truth. A knowing so absolute that it doesn’t require explanation. I can’t fall because I am the void, I am the emptiness. The abyss is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, empty and full all at once.

I am the darkness. I am the light. I am the vast, infinite field that holds it all.

I am consciousness, pure and boundless. I am God, not the small-human-like figure above, but as the essence of all that is. There is nothing outside of me, because I am infinite. I am emptiness and fullness, infinite potential and infinite presence, all at once. And in this realization, I feel only a profound sense of homecoming.

Safe. Worthy. Whole. I am reunited with the truth that was never lost, my core essence, the eternal stillness at the heart of all existence.

There is no need to search anymore, no need to grasp, no need to fear. In the boundless expanse of myself, there is only peace, only love, only presence.

A Yogi’s Surrender

In 2014, I was still living in Kathmandu, Nepal, and had come to Burning Man at the invitation of one of my yoga students from San Francisco. Someone offered me a “ceremony” as a gift for my help in supporting the camp build up.

By then, I had done years of yogic practice, not a couple of hours twice a week, no. Something more like full time. Either practicing, studying, teaching or preparing the next teaching or on a pilgrimage, a retreat, sitting in silence in a monastery...

I had prepared daily for the deepening of experience in altered states. My first was in March 2007 in Montreux, the second in 2010 in Shanghai when the first signs of Kundalini began to show (I still have to recount these experiences...). Then, of course, the full Kundalini awakening in Singapore in 2013. And now Nirvikalpa Samadhi*.

There were many more experiences, more subtle, less dramatic, but each one building upon the next.

I had been teaching future yoga teachers for a full seven years. I had a clear conceptual understanding of what Nirvikalpa Samadhi was, but no direct experience. The scriptures say it may take many lifetimes to reach such a state, so I had mostly abandoned the idea that I would ever experience it myself.

I had also been sober for years, and I certainly did not expect a substance to offer what I had stopped seeking through practice.

The experience, as described above, was very short in earth-time, yet since it happens beyond time, its length is irrelevant.

In the seconds that followed the inhalation, just before the great leap, I remember uttering: “Oh… Nirvikalpa Samadhi!*” with a deep sense of honor and gratitude.

A few minutes later, I opened my eyes. I was still sitting cross-legged. I looked at the person who facilitated the experience. He looked back, silent, present. I then looked toward the small container of whitish powder. All I could see was my arrogance. The contempt I had held for years, thinking "I knew best." An immediate wave of humility and gratitude washed over me. My respect for plant medicine was born in that instant.

An old story from the yogic lore came to mind. When yogis wanted to validate their understanding of the universe, they would enter a philosophical debate with another yogi. Inevitably, the one who lost the debate had little choice but to become a disciple of the one who won.

I had just lost the debate. So in that sacred moment, still spiraling between the human and divine realms, I bowed to the little container and respectfully said: “I will serve you.”

I had no idea what those words really meant at the time. I only knew that they were the truest expression I could offer to acknowledge my arrogance and surrender to the natural realm that jut gave me a reason for both humility, gratitude and pride that I was worthy of the most valuable gift ever being given.

In the years that followed, those four words changed everything. They uprooted me from Nepal and brought me to California to fulfill a vow I hadn’t fully understood when I spoke it.

The Temple Between Worlds

Years later, I sit for another journey. My temple is a small cabin in the woods, just ninety square feet of sacred space nestled between four ancient pines. Their roots run deep beneath the floorboards, anchoring this portal to the earth. When you journey beyond space and time, you need somewhere solid to return to. The cabin’s embrace, snug as a monk’s cell, welcomes me back from the infinite, every time.

Everything in the temple is intentional. Every detail has been the subject of conscious effort to make this space as comfortable as possible and the journey as easy as it can be. Everything is padded and soft, blankets are so plush they feel like clouds. The colors, soft white and calm, desaturated blue, evoke comfort and simplicity, like fabric weathered by sunlight and sea breeze.

A purifying fragrance fills the space. A bold, spiced symphony of clove, cinnamon, and rosemary, evoking an old legend: a protective herbal blend crafted by cunning thieves during the 1700 plague epidemic in my native southern France.

A soft, modern temple melody breathes gently from unseen speakers, blending so seamlessly with the space that the room itself seems to pulse with music. As I open the container safeguarding the sacrament and handle the tools of the ritual, the subtle, evocative scent of the medicine ripples through me, sending a shiver down my spine, a clear sign that the process has already begun.

Something is pulling me toward the experience again and again, and that is certainly not addiction. Fear makes sure of that. Every experience is new. Different. When asked, I have often said:

“It is an experience you will not forget, but that you can’t remember.”

Today I ask myself: “Is it because I don't remember that it feels different every time? Or is it calling me to see something I have not seen yet? What draws me to the edge again and again?”

The question swirls in my head. I’ve seen this movement before. My mind is trying to find reasons for what is about to happen. It resists. It wants to keep control, or convince me to do something else instead.

I go back to breath. Silence the mind. I focus on the detailed steps of my ritual. I think: “A lot is at stake. It is not the moment to be distracted.”

I know this experience will be different from any other. It always is. That is the scary part somehow, facing the unknown again and again.

No certainty. Just trust and surrender. Not unlike life itself.

I have sat in this cabin hundreds of times. “If the walls could speak,” one of my clients once said. Indeed, I think, if these walls could speak, they would tell tales of the unseen, experiences that few humans witness. From transcendent dissolution into bliss to primal screams that shake the foundations of existence. They've held space for both ecstasy and terror, for encounters with heaven and confrontations with hell.

These walls know that the medicine doesn't discriminate between light and shadow, it brings forth whatever wants to emerge.

My preparation ritual is over. I stop everything for a few minutes. Pray. Utter my usual final mantra: “Don’t ever think you know where this is going.”

I inhale, start my timer, and lay down with my eyes closed.

The medicine strikes like an earthquake. Only a few seconds to realize something big is happening. Then comes the overwhelm, a cosmic tornado spinning up from my core. I feel a moment of tension, then remember: I've died a thousand deaths on this medicine. Each time, I've returned.

My breath becomes very shallow. “Am I even breathing?” I lose track of breath. My body dissolves too. A last thought crosses my mind: “Sat-chit-ananda*” truth-consciousness-bliss, and evaporates. I am in.

After each journey, I face the same challenge: how to describe colors to someone who is blind? How to explain infinity with words designed for measuring finite things? Our everyday language, shaped by the mundane needs of our trade, crumbles when faced with these experiences. We need the language of poets and mystics here, words of warm clay shaped in the hands of a blind potter.

The Story Rewritten

If I could offer you anything from all of this, it would not be a belief, a method, or a destination. It would be a memory, one that lives inside you too.

The memory that God is not elsewhere. Not above, not behind, not in some distant past or posthumous reward. God is not an idea to defend or a power to fear. God is not watching. God is not waiting. God is being.

What I encountered in the light and the darkness, in the detonation and the stillness, is not a God that judges or divides. It is the field from which all things arise. The breath behind the breath. The silence inside every sound.

The God I know does not require worship, prayers or meditations. God is hidden in plain sight for us to remember. To remember we are God.

The old story says we fell. That we must climb back. That we must earn our way through obedience or purity. I never believed that story. Today even less.

We never fell. Neither do we have to do anything to go back. It is already here. All the time. It never disappeared, we just stopped seeing it, distracted.

My journey didn’t begin at Burning Man not did it it end in that cabin. It continues now, in these words. In the telling. In the clumsy hands of a writer trying to shape the ineffable into sentences. For the remote possibility, that through the eyes reading these words, a distant echo stirs, a subtle vibration propagate and memory awakens.

And if you remember, if only just for a breath, that what you are seeking is already what you are… then this was worth writing.

God is not the answer to our prayers. Prayer is the voice of God, the presence within us seeking to be found. The silence we hear when we listen deep enough.

And in that silence, we return home.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.

📖 Nirvikalpa Samadhi

A Sanskrit terms referring to the highest state of meditative consciousness in yoga. When the mind dissolves completely, all sense of individuality disappears, and only pure awareness remains. There are no thoughts, no sensations, no distinctions, just boundless, silent, undifferentiated being.

“There is no one left to observe the experience, only the experience itself, indivisible and eternal.”

📖 Sat-Chit-Ananda

Another Sanskrit phrase, often translated as:

• Sat – Truth, or pure being

• Chit – Consciousness, awareness

• Ananda – Bliss, divine joy

Together, they describe the essence of ultimate reality or the nature of the self in its liberated form. When you rest in your true nature, you realize it is not something you have, it’s what you are: Truth. Awareness. Bliss.

“Sat-chit-ananda is not an experience you witness, it is what remains when there is no one left to witness.”

At 45, I thought myself to be in my prime: I was living what many would call “an ideal life”. I had spent nearly seven years working with the World Health Organization and the last two in Geneva on a major global program. I drove around on my fancy BMW motorbike, skiing on weekends in Zermatt, vacationing in the French Riviera, and living with a wonderful girlfriend one minute walk from Lake Léman (also called Lake Geneva), while making a positive impact on the world. From the outside, it looked like I had it all. But deep down, something was growing unsatisfied.

Comfort lead to complacency,
Complacency to deception,
Deception to delusion.

I had always believed my work in humanitarian aid was an act of service. Yet over time, I began to sense a misalignment between my original intention and the reality of the structure I was embedded in. The more I looked, the more I saw that something deeper in the system was broken, and no amount of money, brilliance, or goodwill seemed to affect it.

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A Whisper from the Soul

By mid-2006, I was increasingly restless. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but my soul was whispering. For a decade I had been practicing Aikido and had found a great teacher in Patrick C. in Montreux. On a Sunday night at the end of a weekend workshop, ready to head back to Geneva, my friend Olivier looked at me and said:

"If I were you, I’d leave that job."

It was a shock. I hadn't said much about how disillusioned I was, but clearly, my energy had spoken.

The Unexpected Sign

Scott, my boss, was a busy man —he wouldn’t come into my office unless it mattered. That Monday he entered, which was a surprise in itself, to apologize: my new contract had been issued for six months instead of the expected year. He wanted to reassure me that he would get it corrected.

In response I found myself calmly saying, "It’s fine. In six months, I’ll be gone." The words came from somewhere deeper than reason.

At the same time, I had been pleading to get a six-month leave without pay— to breathe, reflect, and realign. The organization pushed back. They offered more money, shorter leave. But I wasn’t asking for money. I was asking for time.

Time is the true wealth of life; we trade it for everything, and that is the delusion—for nothing matters more.

The Leap

I resigned in January 2007. It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff. I signed up as an uchi-deshi, a live-in student in Montreux to train full-time in Aikido and to earn my black belt. It still thought of it all as a sabbatical.

“You will learn while falling," he said, and I did.

Before I could begin training, I had to be accepted. When I told Patrick Sensei I wanted to study with him full-time, his response was both piercing and unexpected: "What makes you so sure I want to be your teacher?"

He asked me to write him a letter explaining why I wanted to train with him and what I truly wanted in life in general. What followed was a month-long exchange—each letter from me met with a deeper question from him. It became the first phase of training: peeling layers, touching something raw and real. In this place where I had it all, something was missing, and I wanted that although I could not name it.

In the end, he asked: "Are you ready to stand naked at the edge of the cliff and willing to leap?" When I told him I could not fly, he replied: "You will learn while falling."

Living in the dojo, sleeping in the changing room, training six hours a day, cleaning, running, biking, and swimming in the freezing lake—it was a time of intense physical discipline and radical self-inquiry. I was seeking to answer the real questions: Who am I? And how shall I live?

The Fall and the Flame

Then came the accident. A dislocated shoulder ended my Aikido training in a single moment. But in the dojo culture, everything is a teaching. "Don’t even think of resigning! Sit and reflect on how this is the best thing that can be happening to you right now," Patrick Sensei said as I sat on the couch in agony.

In the pain and stillness that followed, something broke open.

On the night of my 46th birthday, March 22, 2007, I had what I can only describe as an awakening. As I was trying to fall asleep, I was swallowed by a vortex—a vertiginous, engulfing spiral that threatened my sheer existence (or so it seemed). A powerful energetic event overtook my body. Time disappeared. The next day, words flowed without searching. Everything was perfect—and had always been.

The puzzle of my life rearranged itself. Every piece had a new place. Every pain, every joy, was part of a deeper order. Each of them leading to now in pure perfection. One thing became sure: I was not in charge of the puzzle—a deeper intelligence was!

I experienced a profound sense of peace, clarity, and love.
And I knew I would never be the same.

India Beckons

After the awakening, I could no longer go back. Aikido was not an option anymore, but yoga was. I followed Val, my girlfriend, to India. While she studied Ayurveda, I explored yoga. In October 2007, we enrolled in a Yoga Teacher Training at a Jain Ashram in New Delhi, led by Sanjeev B. of YogaLife.

Four weeks later, Sanjeev asked me to become his assistant.

When life closes a door, it opens another one.

The New Road

In less than a year, I had gone from WHO officer to an employed yoga teacher. Without effort, without planning, simply by listening to what life was asking of me next.

My colleagues at WHO, who had warned me I was being foolish, began calling me brave. Some even confessed their envy—not for the path I chose, but for the freedom they saw blooming in me.

Aligning with life liberated me from trying to figure it all out, what a relief: I was free!

In the End all is Perfect, Always

Alignment is not a plan. It’s a surrender. It’s not the absence of fear, but the presence of truth.

I did not know what I was doing when I left WHO. But I knew that staying would cost me more than I was willing to pay: my soul. That single decision cracked my life wide open, not into chaos, but into clarity.

Ask yourself:
on your death bed, looking back, which choice do you want to have made?

I see clearly now in retrospect: the push and pull between the mind and the soul. The mind is the known—time and space, money, logistics. The soul lives in the part I don’t know I don’t know. It cares nothing of time—it is eternal. Nothing of space—it is infinite.

My mind was trying to figure out, to find a solution. But from that place I could only fix a problem; I could not create out of the sheer ecstatic beauty of life itself. To move from one to the other requires a leap of faith—a jump of the cliff into the unknown. And to the mind, it is terrifying.
But if the soul does not live in time, we humans do, and the best time to jump is always now.

When the pain of being a bud was more than the pain of becoming a flower,
I bloomed. — borrowed from Anaïs Nin

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To this day I have remained in sporadic contact with Patrick Sensei and you can contact him through his website if you’d wish to work with him. Patrick Sensei is a genuine master and his skills go way beyond Aikido. If you chose to connect with him please let me know. Not only I’d be happy to help, but I could also make an introduction for the right person.

Post Scriptum

Some parts of this journey—how the awakening was meticulously prepared by Patrick Sensei through physical, energetic, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual overwhelm—deserve more space than a single paragraph can hold.
The same is true for the awakening itself: the experience, the integration, the aftermath. To do them justice would require a full telling, like the post I once wrote about the kundalini rising in Singapore.
That story will come—in time.

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.

At twenty-four, on a crisp Monday morning heading to work, my life changed due to five inches of road that vanished overnight. With the natural confidence of youth, I thought I understood some things about life. Nature was about to teach me otherwise. As my car hit that sudden drop on the hairpin turn, it pitched skyward, and time suddenly stretched like a melted marshmallow. My hands still gripping the wheel, I watch everything float up as if in zero gravity. A strange calm settled over me as the windshield framed the treetops spinning against the blue sky.

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A Symphony of Chaos

My mind, suddenly lucid and detached, whispered the inescapable truth: this is it. Life ends here, in this space, at this time. Yet, instead of fear, I felt an unfamiliar calmness, a serenity. The first impact came with a sound like a bomb - metal screaming, glass exploding into diamond dust. The roof crumpled, pinning my hands on the wheel. Shards of fiberglass from my shattered ski gear danced in slow motion inches from my throat. Each roll had its own terrible music - the crunch of metal, the tinkling of glass, the hollow thud of impact.

Finding Peace Amidst Turmoil

Outside was pure chaos, the world tumbling like clothes in a dryer. But inside, something extraordinary happened. Instead of fighting the motion, I became it. Like a leaf caught in a whirlwind, I found perfect stillness in surrender. The boundary between my body and the spinning car dissolved. Two final bounces, then sudden quiet as we settled upside down. Blood pulsed in my ears. Snowmelt dripped everywhere. I hung suspended in my seatbelt, intact except for a few scratches on my hands. The bucket seat had cradled me like a mother's arms, the rollbar holding death an inch from my spine. The wet meadow had cushioned this dance of destruction.

The Eye of the Storm

Later, a police officer would stare at the wreckage and say, 'No one survives crashes like this.' He meant it differently, but he was right, no one survives. The person who crawled out of the car was not the one that entered it. The difference is that I had found something in that moment of surrender - the eye of the storm, where chaos and stillness kiss. This passage is an extract of a book I have been working with for some time. It is also and most importantly my first encounter with death. In my life, I will meet death many more times, a few other times with the same unprepared spontaneity that life keeps the secrets of, and hundreds more times within the more prepared framework of induced NDEs offered by psychedelia.

Learning to Coexist with Death

I have come to value death’s company. Death can be our greatest ally. So much is lost in the tension we create by fearing it. Day dazzles us with sunrise and sunset, and night unveils the Milky Way and the mysteries of astrology. Can one exist without the other? Death is not the absence of life—life has never ceased because of death. Life extends far beyond it. How is death informing your life right now? Life is a journey of trust and surrender—trusting life itself. Who would you be, how would you live, if you trusted life completely? Without the fear of death?

This is surrender.
And death is the master teacher.

PS: I wanted to share a few ways that you can also benefit from death’s presence. You will find more resources and practices behind the paywall!

1/ A Simple Trick from an Experienced Coach

I often ponder the notion that when we pass away, our entire life flashes before our eyes. Whether this is true or not, the symbolism it holds is profound. This concept serves as a guiding light, especially when faced with tough decisions. From the perspective of any given moment, it's challenging to fully grasp the outcomes of our choices. However, by projecting myself into my final moments and reflecting back, I find that decision-making becomes significantly clearer.

Practical Exercise: The Life Review Technique

Step 1: Find a quiet place and lay on your bed. Close your eyes and imagine that these are your last moments. You are about to leave this earthly plane, and your life is about to flash before your eyes.

Step 2: Take your time to review your past, your relationships, the memorable moments, and even those you might be trying to hide. Reflect deeply on each aspect.

Step 3: Ask yourself, "When my life flashes before my eyes in those final moments, what do I want to see?" Allow yourself to visualize what you'd really like your life to have included. Is it the book you wanted to write? The person you wanted to connect with? The places you wanted to visit? The projects you wanted to bring to life?

Step 4: Once your visualization is complete, take actionable steps towards these visions. There's no guarantee of how much time you have left, so start now, without hurry.

Decision-Making Simplified

For decisions, this method offers clarity. Whether you're contemplating job offers, relationships, or significant life changes, reflecting as if at life's end can illuminate what truly matters, bringing much-needed clarity in moments of uncertainty.

2/ Exploring the High Road: Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

Of course, exploring near-death experiences (NDEs) through certain psychedelic substances is another profound dimension. Many individuals report transformative insights where, at the moment of a simulated death, the truth of life reveals itself. While some of these substances are controlled and their legality varies, the experiences reported are often described as miraculous. If you're interested in exploring NDEs where legality permits, connect with me for more information, I’ll probably be able to direct you to the right resources.

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From 2007 to 2016, I followed a seasonal migration route between India, Nepal, and Thailand. My life was punctuated with delivering yoga teacher training, pilgrimages and treks, meditation retreats and monasteries, and escaping cold or monsoon rains.

By 2010, my partner and I moved our yoga school to Kathmandu, Nepal, making the Himalayas my more permanent home while continuing my regular travels across this South East Asia triangle. It was a blessed chapter of my life. Asia spoke through the sweetness of mangosteen, the warm gold of mangoes, and the fragrance of lychees—a time I will always cherish, just as these flavors linger, forever etched in my memories.

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In Nepal, I built a network of expertise to complement the training we were offering—particularly Ayurveda and Astrology, the two sister sciences of yoga. Traditionally, yoga is for the mind, Ayurveda for the body, and astrology serves as a guide—bridging the physical and spiritual realms.

It was through this journey that I met Dr. Rishi Koirala, an Ayurvedic doctor unlike any other.

A Master Healer

I sat in the waiting area of Dr. Rishi’s clinic, Ayurveda Health Home in Dhapasi, a suburb of Kathmandu. I would let myself drift, immersed in the signature aroma of Ayurvedic oils and herbs, watching the staff move like bees in a hive—graceful, harmonious, each with a radiant smile. There was a buzz in the air, something almost intoxicating in its vibrancy.

A sign on the wall caught my eye:

"Health is the absence of all conflict."

Here, diseases weren’t seen as something to be "fought"—they were conditions we were given, invitations to dance with the forces of the Universe, moving in and out of balance.

Over the years, many have asked me how to find a true yoga master. My answer was always the same:

Don’t look at the teacher. Look at their closest assistant. If the assistant is not enlightened, run!

If the person closest to the teacher has not awakened, what are the chances that you would? At the clinic, the vibe was so high I was ready to receive from anyone. But I digress.

A consultation with Dr. Rishi was unlike anything else. He never asked why I had come—he would insist that I let him find the answers. And he was always spot-on. If I had questions, they would be answered before I even spoke them.

By the time our session ended, I always left lighter, elevated, as if infused with light. It wasn’t just a consultation—it was vibrational healing at the deepest level. Something those familiar with the Indian sub continent culture would recognize as Satsang: sitting near the truth.

We would share personal projects, exchange ideas close to our hearts, and the meeting would end in an aura of magic. As I reached the door, without fail, he would always say:

“You are a very healthy human. Your practice is working. Please, don’t forget to love yourself.”

I would bow with a namaste, acknowledging his words, and move on.

Singapore

In July 2013, I was traveling through Singapore after a long journey that had taken me to India, Hong Kong, and Bali. In the days leading up to my encounter with Ama Lia (see my post "The Rise of Shakti"), I was wandering in the streets near the Sri Krishnan Temple, when I noticed the office of a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) doctor.

Curious about the modality, I made an appointment for the next day.

The doctor was a sweet, middle-aged Chinese woman, calm and soft-spoken. She moved through her protocol with precision, her presence reassuring. I was fascinated. It reminded me of Dr Rishi’s practice.

Just as I reached the door to leave, she stopped me.

"You are a very healthy human. Yet, if you allow me, I would say—please, don’t forget to love yourself."

A strong shiver flowed through my system. It was as if the universe had momentarily glitched—a wormhole had opened, connecting a space beyond this reality.

For the rest of the day, I wandered the streets of Singapore, profoundly shaken. The words weren’t new—I had heard them countless times before.

But I had never truly listened.

I knew what the words meant, but I did not know what they meant for me.

And in that moment, I understood:

I was too hard on myself. I had failed to love myself in some way.

It was suddenly crystal clear—a superior intelligence had found a way to break through my resistance, to deliver a message I had refused to hear before.

The Place of Discipline

Does this mean that discipline and austere practices had no place in my journey? Certainly not.

Earlier in my path, my ego was too strong, too out of control. I still remember the first time my Aikido teacher asked me to fold his hakama.

I was fuming.

“How dare you? I am not your servant!”, I thought, but these thoughts were so strong I am sure he heard them.

My ego went into full resistance, completely blind to what was really happening. I failed to see it for what it was:

A privilege—a gesture of trust from the teacher.

A sign of reverence—the silent invitation to become his number one apprentice.

And hunch—I would soon have to fold my own hakama so it was time to learn.

I could not see it then. I was unable to surrender, unable to recognize that discipline was necessary—that it was the fire needed to break through the thick layers of ego I was carrying, without even knowing they were there.

Yet at some point, the pendulum had to swing.

I needed to switch gears—or rather, to balance discipline with self-love.

I had been living under the subtle influence of ego-driven striving—pushed by unseen forces within me. And when I failed to hear the message from Dr. Rishi, the universe sent another teacher—one I never expected.

A random Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor became an unsuspecting emissary, shaking me awake from my sleepwalking habits.

The signs were always there. I just hadn’t been listening.

A Turning Point

The timing of this realization could not have been more perfect.

I had come to Singapore questioning my next step—whether to go to India for a three-year ascetic retreat. This moment prepared me for the answer to come through Ama Lia in the following days.

I had spent years pushing myself through severe disciplines, believing that transcendence required control and austerity. And I had harvested many fruits from this work. My meditation was deep and undisturbed.

But now, I saw the hidden trap of asceticism—how it could become a refuge for the self-critical voice.

I don’t fully love myself, so I practice hard to make myself better.

It was a cycle of striving—a subtle denial of my own wholeness.

From there on, I would walk a different path.

A Door That Never Closes

Dr. Rishi passed away in August 2021, and I cannot help but feel his absence. Or perhaps, more truthfully, I feel his presence in ways that transcend the physical plane.

I can still feel the knob of his office door in my hand, still see myself turning back over my shoulder to say goodbye, only to hear his voice one last time:

"Don’t forget to love yourself."

That door will never close.

The connection he built between us remains, unshaken by time or distance. The depth of his message still moves through me—a whisper woven into my days, a presence that lingers like the scent of herbs steeping in warm Ayurvedic oils. Slowly, gently, it infused itself into me, not through force but through patience and grace, until it became a part of my very cells, my DNA.

So if you’ve read this far—

Can you hear Dr. Rishi speaking to you through my words?

Please, don’t forget to love yourself.

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July 2013. I was on my way from Bali back to my home in Nepal, with a brief stop in Singapore. My computer’s sound card had died, and I knew I couldn’t get it fixed in Kathmandu. But that wasn’t the only reason I was here.

I had just ended an eight-year-long relationship, and the weight of it sat heavy on my chest.

Supposedly, I was heading to Rishikesh, India, for a long retreat, but doubt was killing me. Was this really my path?

A friend in Bali had mentioned a guide to help—Ama Lia.

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Singapore was smoky, hot and humid. I was walking around the city a lot. After a month of peace in Bali, the intense buzz of the city, the heat and the smoke from the forest fires in Indonesia were challenging. I found a cheap lodge in Little India and dialed the number. She picked up.

"I'm in Singapore for a few days," I told her. "I just ended a long relationship, and I feel quite shaken. I’m supposed to leave for a 3 year retreat, but I don’t know if it’s right. Can you help me figure myself out?"

She replied without hesitation, "I was waiting for you. Let's meet at the Botanical Garden."

A flicker of doubt crossed my mind. Waiting for me? How is that possible? This sounds like a setup. But my friend had vouched for her, and I trusted him. So I went.

The Himalayan Tradition

As I weighed my decision to meet Ama Lia, my mind wandered back to the path that had led me here.

For six years, yoga had been my entire life. I had moved to India, teaching yoga teacher training to Western students. The year before, I had taken my school to Nepal, seeking the Himalayan roots of yoga.

Swami Rama (1925–1996) was an archetypal yogi, and his stories, like that of Yogananda or Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had fueled the fire of my imagination with tales of enlightenment and yogic feats. He left behind two main disciples—one leading the Himalayan Institute in the U.S., and one in Rishikesh, India: Swami Veda.

Studying with a direct disciple of Swami Rama was a dream come true, an opportunity to learn from one of the last great Himalayan masters.

But the commitment was absolute. Three years of complete dedication, including celibacy. I had been selected after a long process of referrals, and I was silently proud of myself. And yet, the moment it became real, my relationship ended. Suddenly, the certainty I once felt was clouded with doubt.

Ama Lia

They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. If that’s true, then Ama Lia arrived exactly when I needed her.

She was a white witch from an extraordinary lineage—her great-grandfather had been the personal physician to the Sultan of Selangor. What was meant to be a single afternoon session, a paid consultation, turned into three days of ceremonial magic, free of charge.

She never attempted to answer my questions. She simply worked. I often wondered what she saw in me that invited her for the deep work she did, pro bono.

But I know now. Like many others I have met, she was a servant of the great Goddess, Shakti or any other name you wish to use. Whatever she saw in me is irrelevant, she heard the calling of the goddess, her own guide, and she responded.

On the last day, I stood in her Singapore apartment, surrounded by rare beauty—ancient relics, sacred artifacts, tropical plants, objects humming with unseen energy.

She kept my eyes closed, bending my mind into surrender, she wrapped me in mantras and star languages, embalmed me with incense smoke and sprinkles of holy water, fed me a magic potion, electric blue, shimmering like liquid sapphire. She touched something deep within my core.

The Lion City, had embraced me in its own way, with heat and smoke, like in a crucible, preparing for the fusion. A fusion of Asia, stretching from China and Malaysia to India and the Arabian Peninsula. Some places you pass through. The places you awaken, you never forget.

I had come looking for answers. What I found instead was something far more unfathomable.

Kathmandu

On the fourth morning, I woke early in my hostel on Jalan Besar, packed my bags, and headed to the airport.

As I settled into my seat on the nearly empty Malaysian Airlines flight to Kathmandu, a chill ran through me. A deep, involuntary tremor. My muscles tensed. Then the shaking started.

A full-body shiver, growing stronger, uncontrollable.

I clenched my hands into fists, pressing them into my thighs. If anyone noticed, they might ask me to leave the plane. Breathe. My yogic training kicked in. Breathwork, concentration—contain it.

I learned later that trying to suppress kundalini only makes things worse.

The energy doesn’t like to be tamed. If you hold it down, it waits. Then, when you’re exhausted from the fight, it explodes.

For six years, I had knocked on the door of the great Goddess. Now that she had answered, I could not look away. And she certainly didn’t care about the fasten seat belt sign.

The Awakening

The vibration originated from my pelvis and pulsed rhythmically along my spine, shaking me from the inside out.

For five hours, I drank nothing, ate nothing, barely moved. I focused all my energy on containing my body, which seemed to have a life of its own.

Upon arriving in Kathmandu, I secluded myself at home.

For three days, I barely ate or slept. The tremors surged unpredictably, peaking in waves of what I could only describe as dry orgasms. With my eyes closed, the world around me would dissolve entirely.

When the energy subsided, I would sit at my altar and meditate. But the moment I made any effort, the shaking would return. It took three days to regain enough control to function in the outside world. It took years for the tremors to transform from a violent, physical expression into a subtle, silent current of energy.

Spinal alchemy

I had spent years studying the anatomy of the subtle body—chakras, nadis, prana.

Now, I no longer needed books.

I felt the energy move. A spiral along my spine. Two currents dancing, intertwining. Whenever they aligned perfectly, the shaking would start. The energy surged upward, blasting through resistance. The higher it climbed, the more the world around me faded.

And when it reached my crown, the final threshold—orgasm.
Not the kind tied to the body. Something else entirely.

Since that day, I have never needed to open another book on Kundalini. Much of what I once read no longer made sense. But my experience—that, I understood completely.

My yoga teaching changed. Before, I studied and shared my findings in a way that was uniquely mine. After this, my teaching came from direct experience. It was transmission.

The Departure

I share these experiences because I have received so much.

In my classical yoga training, it was said it takes lifetimes to reach enlightenment, so having started my journey at 46, I did not hold much hope to ever reach. It filled my head with doubts despite the fire of my commitment. Ama Lia strange witchcraft triggered many other doubts, yet, commitment to the experience eventually led to breakthrough.

If these lines inspire you to seek your own magic, buried deep in your cells and DNA, then they have served their purpose. Some things cannot be taught. They can only be lived. And the rewards, when they come, are truly ineffable.

Singapore was a delight for the senses—cuisine, art, beauty, the rich interweaving of cultures blending like a perfectly spiced Malaysian curry. I had spent years disciplining my body and mind through the rigors of ascetic yoga, believing transcendence lay in renunciation, control, and austerity. But when I asked Ama Lia what practice I should be doing next, she simply smiled and said,

“What are the three things you desire most? Just go and do that.”

Her words shook something loose in me. It was a far stretch from the severe disciplines I had subjected myself to—a direct challenge to everything I had believed. That moment was a departure, a turning point.

I never made it to Rishikesh. Instead, I turned my gaze towards Tantra—towards embracing life rather than renouncing it. I flew to Thailand, not India. But that is the beginning of another story.

To this day I have remained in contact with AmaLia and you you can contact here through her website if you’d wish to work with her. She is truly special, not your average spiritual teacher. If you chose to connect with her please let me know. Not only I’d be happy to help could also make an introduction for the right person.

Illuminating perspectives from the Masters: Swami Rama: Living with the Himalayan Masters

This is just the beginning. Continue the adventure in The Chakras Archetypes

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Life, in its most unpredictable moments, often teaches us the deepest lessons.

In April 2014, I was in Thailand, preparing for a significant evaluation that would culminate months of intensive training. With just a few days to go, I contracted dengue fever. If you never heard of it or experienced it: it is brutal with no cure nor mitigation.

For days I lay on the floor of my bungalow, each bone in my body aching as if broken—a sensation so accurately captured by the Spanish term for dengue, “fiebre quebrantahuesos” or “bone-breaking fever.” Forget eating or drinking, I was sipping this awful bitter papaya leaf juice hoping it would help. The pre-monsoon heat was oppressive, making even breathing a challenge. Sometimes, the fever intensified to the point of hallucination, blurring the edges between reality and pain.

On the day of the test, utterly depleted and barely able to stand, I began to deliver my lecture. At that very moment, the fever, which had relentlessly tormented me for days, began to recede. By the end of my presentation, not only had the illness faded from my consciousness, but I had also delivered what my main teacher would later describe as the best presentation on the subject she had ever heard.

Against all odds, I was led to surrender to the experience and trust in something deeper within myself. I learned a memorable lesson from chaos: in the worst, expect the best!

The subject of my lecture was True Love.

Have you ever heard of “chaos theory”? It proposes that in complex systems, particularly when unstable, small changes can have large, unpredictable effects—what is known as the “butterfly effect.” In the example above, the complex system was my body, and the chaos was dengue fever; the subtle and small change was my surrender.

Chaos theory teaches us that within the apparent randomness of chaotic systems, there are underlying patterns and deterministic laws that we might not immediately perceive. My experience in Thailand was a testament to this.

Interestingly, I wrote a post in October called "Crazy Wisdom: a needed agent provocateur" where I explored how Crazy Wisdom serves as a potent antidote to our collective delusion. Crazy Wisdom, by introducing paradoxical and chaotic actions, shocks us out of habitual patterns and complacency, forcing us to confront the deeper truths of our existence.

Without noticing the connection, my New Year message to my friends started with “Chaos is here, my friend, and it’s not going anywhere. In fact, my sense is that it’s deepening, darkening. The world feels like it’s teetering on the edge of some great unraveling.” Just a few days later, the Los Angeles fires plunged us into chaos, and on January 20, another form of chaos began.

Like Crazy Wisdom, chaos doesn’t just disrupt; it transforms. It compels us to look beyond our conditioned responses and see the larger dance of the cosmos. It teaches us to embrace life’s uncertainties and to find the still point in the turning world, where true wisdom resides.

I had no idea in October and January that my posts about chaos would become so relevant today. It's as if there was a hidden order at the heart of chaos that was guiding my pen.

My experience with dengue fever in Thailand taught me to surrender to the moment, to trust the deep connection I had with my subject, Love, and to let go of my fears and preconceptions. It showed me that sometimes, the most chaotic moments can lead to the clearest insights. I see now that any other road would have led me to speak from my head rather than my heart.

Whether it’s through the lens of chaos theory or the practice of Crazy Wisdom, we learn that embracing chaos is not about courting disorder but about recognizing the opportunity for profound transformation.

As we navigate the complexities of the current political scene, may we all find the courage to face chaos with open hearts and minds, trusting that even in the midst of turmoil, there is a pattern waiting to be discovered, a lesson waiting to be learned.

In June, I visited an old friend in Europe, a journalist deeply committed to the integrity of journalism and very aware of the global scene. As we discussed the US political landscape, he dropped a bombshell: “Trump is your best chance!” I was stunned. Knowing him for years, I trusted he had compelling reasons for such a statement. He explained that while the Democrats present a polished front, they might only perpetuate a dysfunctional status quo, whereas the disruption the alternative brings could catalyze faster, deeper change—not the superficial changes we see being implemented today, but something more profound that eludes our current government.

And what if this chaos is absolutely perfect? What if it is the way towards the change we have been waiting for so long? What if this chaos prepares us for the most perfect outcome? This chaos might be the wake-up call we need, compelling us to confront our limitations and evolve.

So in the meantime, let’s all be butterflies and flap our wings, let's remember we were once caterpillars and unconsciously ate everything around us, unaware of the metamorphosis to come. Let's stay centered in our heart and trust in the greater process at play. There is a deeper intelligence that underpins the universe, one that has crafted the incredible beauty surrounding us over billions of years on this planet alone. I am not advocating for passivity or merely observing from the sidelines. Instead, I am suggesting we move with the perfection, not against it. Let us recognize that our tendencies to despair and lose momentum are often just reflections of our limited perspective, which does not allow us to see the perfect order at the heart of chaos.

As we navigate these turbulent times, let us not only adapt but also align with the rhythmic dance of the cosmos. By embracing the uncertainty with courage and maintaining a clear vision of trust, we actively participate in the unfolding of a greater design—a design that invites us to grow, transform, and ultimately, to thrive in the whirlwind of life's infinite possibilities.

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It was a cold night in January 2010 in Varanasi. I sat silently at Manikarnika Ghat, one of the holiest and oldest cremation grounds in the world. The Aghori—ascetics who meditate on death and chaos—are known to frequent these sacred grounds, confronting the rawest truths of existence. They do not seek to avoid suffering but to transcend it, embracing discomfort as a path to liberation.

The cold seeped into my bones, a relentless force that refused to be ignored. Despite the many fires burning all around me, I shivered uncontrollably. The humidity from the Ganges seemed to creep into every pore, making the night feel colder still. The contrast was striking—surrounded by flames, yet trembling, cold to my very core. I was motionless, my body frozen but my mind aflame with the raw truth of what lay before me.

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Enveloped in the acrid smoke of burning pyres, I sat in a corner, vulnerable, aware that I was a guest here—allowed only because I was willing to bare my naked soul to the truths of this place. There was no escape from the rawness of existence. The air hung heavy with the mingling scents of sandalwood, camphor, ghee, and burning flesh. The chant of *“Ram Nam Satya Hai”—The name of Ram is truth—*rose into the smoky air, signaling the arrival of another body. Bells and mantras clashed in chaotic harmony with the crackling of fire. It was a space where life and death dissolved into one another, where flames had burned ceaselessly for over two thousand years, perhaps longer.

Earlier, I had sat in the small room where the eternal fire is kept. This fire, used to ignite all the pyres, has burned for as long as memory stretches. The Dom caste, whose sole duty is to kindle this sacred flame, guards it vigilantly. Legend holds that the fire was started by Lord Shiva himself, a gift from the god of destruction and transformation.

For one of the many pyres outside, the fire had been burning for hours. Family members stood by, their presence quiet yet heavy with grief. A stern young man, his head shaved and his white clothes marking him as the chief mourner, stepped forward. He circled the pyre three times, then stopped by the head of the corpse. With deliberate steps, he turned his back to the flames and smashed a clay pot filled with water over his shoulder. He did not look back. His movements, precise and solemn, were more than ritual—they were a profound symbol, a declaration that his attachment to the form of the departed had been severed. The soul was free, and so must he be. Still without looking back, he walked away, leaving behind the last ties to earthly connection.

Watching him, I felt the weight of the ritual echo through my own spirit. Manikarnika is not just a place of endings but also of beginnings. The fire consumes, but in doing so, it clears the space for something new to emerge. It is a cremation ground not only for bodies but for attachments, illusions, and identities.

I thought of another fire: the one lit during the initiation of a swami. When a seeker steps into monastic life, they perform their own symbolic cremation. This ritual declares the death of their former self—the self tethered to family, wealth, and worldly concerns. It is not a rejection of life or love but an act of radical surrender. By severing those ties, the swami is reborn into freedom, able to love and serve unconditionally. They rise from the ashes of their past, unburdened and fully present.

At this stage of my journey, I had been fully committed to the yogic path for years. Becoming a swami had been a consideration, one that brought me to the threshold of profound inner inquiry. How deep did I want this journey to go? Could I sever my attachments so completely, as the swami does, or was my path different—one that honored love and connection while still seeking transcendence? The fire at Manikarnika mirrored my inner fire, revealing the depth of my inquiry and the intensity of my longing for clarity.

These rituals—one steeped in physical fire, the other in symbolic death—are a mirror to the path of the Aghori. The Aghori does not shy away from flames. He meditates in the cremation grounds, not to glorify death but to transcend it. He sees through the smoke of illusion and finds the unvarnished truth. Pain is not an enemy to him but a teacher. Discomfort is a discipline. Fire a purification from the illusions.

This truth has revealed itself in my own life. When the fire event came to Los Angeles, chaos engulfed me. But instead of feeding the flames with my own fears, I chose to lean into care and nurturance. I let go of my attachment to how the story should unfold and stood still amidst the pyres, allowing the fire to burn away all that was unnecessary. Like the son who breaks the pot and walks away, I left behind the weight of expectation and found the freedom to move forward.

Suffering, discomfort, and chaos are not obstacles to be avoided (and not to be invited lightly!); they are forces to be embraced and transformed. They are the fires that refine us, the waters that cleanse us, the rites that break us free. Even the Dalai Lama, the apostle of compassion, once said in a lecture I attended, the West needed “more suffering” to evolve—not suffering for its own sake, but the kind that awakens us, forcing us to transcend complacency and numbness.

This is the Aghori’s way. To stand in the fire, to accept the chaos, to burn away all that is false and emerge whole.

Aghori once. Aghori forever.

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