I Hiked the Himalayas To Get a Grip on My Restlessness

I came back with a template for navigating anything in life

Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal | Image by Author

It was a living hell.

I’m in Thailand, on the island of Koh Phangan, where I’ve decided to kick off my journey, a lush and colorful paradise, I’m sure will get me off to a good start. Instead of feeling relaxed, rather quickly I find myself in the grips of a burning, unnameable discontent. I’m exhausted. Still, I have a hard time slowing down, resting in scattered spurts here, there, who knows where. You’re all over the place, one guy from London also vacationing said with an amused smile on his face. I was also becoming a walking furnace. My body temperature already above average, being in the island heat, caused me to over-heat.

Than Sadet, Koh Phangan | Image by Author

So much for a nature cure, I thought.

Soon I realize this hard-core exhaustion was the precise thing I needed to feel to understand the amount of stress I had been inflicting on my body moving at the pace I was in life. My creative energy was starting to burn me with all the projects I was managing and the ongoing financial stress to keep my lifestyle afloat was beginning to seriously weigh me down. Throw family stress into the mix, and it becomes a party no body would be happy with.

It struck me how easy it is to become unconscious of how tired we are until we stop and step out of the routine. After a month of grappling with this, I am thrilled to leave for Nepal, where my thirteen day hike to the Annapurna Base Camp, 4,200 meters above sea level will begin.

My body begins to rebound. I’m in a cooler climate surrounded by forests and mountains. I’ve always known these kinds of landscapes are more my element and could feel their impact at work almost immediately.

Jhinu, Nepal | Image By Author

I hiked for five to eight hours a day. The physical challenge was climbing up steep slopes and descending steeper valleys on a daily basis for ten days straight. After I reached 3800 meters, the altitude kicked in making it harder to breathe and sleep. On the way, I met dozens of hikers taking up the similar challenge.

After ten days on the trail, while taking in incredible views, gazing at the beauty and vastness of the white covered Himalayas which indeed grounded me as they simultaneously took my breath away, it became clear it wasn’t nature, alone, I needed to feel more at peace.

It was a combination of three things: nature, movement and connection.

The cult of doing is for real but the power of nature is a wonder

I noticed something on the trail I often do in life. Focused primarily on reaching the destination, many hikers including myself were forgetting to stop and smell the roses, whizzing by epic landscapes — forests, fauna, flowers, the divinity of the sprawling, white covered peaks.

The destination was the priority and while that makes sense if you’re trying to set a record, in life living for the goal only is an equation for misery. It made me wonder how many small yet special moments in my life I was missing out on so I made an effort to stop more instead of acquiesce to the surrounding pressure to move.

I’ll never forget sitting on the top of glacier in Iceland seven years ago, how it stopped me in my tracks. Mesmerized, I couldn’t move or think if I tried. I sat for hours in a state of pure presence. Just being was enough. It happened again, here, in the village of Himalaya.

Nature brings us back to our vastness, who we are beyond the beliefs we hold (good or bad) and roles we identify with. As I notice the effects plugging into nature is having on me, my past life as a psychotherapist and energy healer kicks in. I start thinking in terms of energy.

Everything in the universe is made of energy from a mountain, to an organ, to a belief system, to a bad mood. (That’s classic physics). Obsessional thinking, pressure to succeed, excessive fear, unresolved trauma, being constantly plugged into technology or social media, just to give a few examples, are no different. Also energetic states, they vibrate at lower frequencies and feel denser as a result. If maintained for too long, they become toxic for the body, wrecking havoc on our nervous systems amongst other things.

Out of whack nervous systems equal out of whack lives. You might find yourself, like me, living in either flight mode — restless, on the go, unable to sit still, looking for the next thrill, doing anything but digesting the here and now or freeze mode, in a perpetual state of depletion, boredom, apathy, disconnection, or immobilized by depression.

When we come into contact with the energy of nature, vibrating at a higher, more harmonious pace, our nervous systems comes into coherence with it. In other words, we sync with nature by shifting into its state. In the resonance theory of consciousness, this transition is called shared resonance. When two states vibrating at different frequencies come into proximity, after some time, they’ll start to vibrate at the same frequency, allowing for richer states of consciousness to arise.

In nature, I find I care less about who I am and what I’m becoming. That pressure to succeed falls away, and inner peace becomes an option.

When we move our bodies, we change our stories

I’m an overthinker. I escape uncomfortable feelings by analyzing the hell out of things. This means I also have a tendency to disconnect from my body. My solution has been to get more physical. For a few years, in fact, an inner voice has been begging me to do just that. Trash the therapy and move your ass! —  is what she has said, more or less.

Hiking 4200 meters above sea level, I found out a few things about exercise. It’s not just about the endorphins. It’s about finding an activity where you push yourself beyond what you perceive are your limits, something that makes you concentrate on nothing other than your body. Where you stress your body in the right way and the heart starts to race and your internal engines turn on after years of slumber. Toxins get released and your cells begin to regenerate. Your organs and tissues bliss out and they congratulate you with younger looking skin.

I would finish a seven hour hike all sweaty and tired and people were asking if I had just taken a shower I looked so fresh. By the end of the trip, I was seeing everything in HD as if I’d just smoked a joint or micro-dosed on mushrooms. My energy felt endless yet concentrated.

And then there’s the breath. When you push your body to a perceived limit, things feel harder at first and learning to use the breath becomes your most powerful ally. While climbing and descending slopes, I needed to find my balance and deal with pain. The quickest way to do that was to breathe consciously and slowly.

Best of all, using my breath, I began to conquer my fear of heights. When we breathe consciously not only do we decrease painful physical and emotional experiences by calming down our nervous systems, we get into a dialogue with our bodies that over time becomes secure and intuitive. A trust in its ability to move us safely and efficiently develops and as a result, we do things we thought impossible.

And then, the mental noise. Much of my over-thinking during the hike settled — the breathing, the movement, the focus — flushing out the cacophony of uninvited thoughts and feelings, giving me a chance to see what in my life really needed attention. The drama dissolved and the true story emerged without analysis and without words (as that inner voice had been saying).

While I had some writing breakthroughs, the biggest I had was about the importance of slowing down in all areas of my life. That if I could do that, I could move mountains.

Power to the People!

I find it shocking how often I forget this basic fact: Connection heals. Above all experiences we have in life, not having meaningful relationships will make us suffer the most.

Pohkara, Nepal | Image by Author

We are social animals biologically hardwired for connection. That means our brains don’t develop normally without the emotional mirroring of caregivers throughout our early years of life and secure and authentic connections as we grow. It’s a biological imperative. The current scientific research on trauma and mirror neurons has been proving that for decades now.

We need others like we need water and air to stay well.

The thing is, I do relish my alone time. I abhor useless chatter and often feel more at peace when I’m on my own. It’s important to have a relationship with oneself. Though I’ve had many extraordinary moments alone, I’m always struck by the feeling I get after having had a meaningful conversation, one where I allow myself to be seen and engage in what matters.

I feel whole, a sense of completeness that comes from being myself with another but perhaps even more so from realizing I’m something bigger than my singular self with her egoist pursuits. Along the trail, I would stop and chat with others-from small talk to the physical challenges of the trail to life in general. This act of sharing experiences when the going got rough, as one woman put it, kept the spirit alive.

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I returned to Berlin after three month’s time not the transformed, peaceful person I hoped I’d be. Though it helped, nature did not magically take away my woes and I realized that phrase — Wherever you go there you are — applied now more than ever.

I had to figure out a way to stay present for my life in Berlin swarming in creativity and exciting possibilities, for the uncomfortable feelings my family (still in chaos) and my bank account (still depleted) triggered, and to be with my creative fire in a way that didn’t burn me.

But I had a template now, where I could experiment and find the right balance of nature, movement and connection wherever and however I was, to let that golden brew ground me through the whirlwind of life.

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