3 Crucial Things I Learned About Finding Inner Peace While Hiking the Himalayas
On the power of nature, movement and connection.
For the past couple of years I’ve been feeling restless. Although working as an artist and writer are anything but grounded occupations especially when it comes to financial stability, I grew tired of feeling like I was always walking on water.
Since Jesus wasn’t around to teach me how to master that feat, I decided to return to Asia and head for the mountains. The Himalayas were grabbing my attention and living in nature seemed to be what I needed to quell my inner restlessness.
Since old habits die hard, I started in Thailand first. By the water. I lived on the island of Koh Phangan for several weeks.
It was a living hell.
I felt exhausted and unhappy. I wasn’t depressed, just tired and when I get tired I get moody. Despite the fatigue, I still had a hard time slowing down.
(Have I mentioned old habits?)
I was also becoming a walking furnace. My body temperature is already too hot and being in the island heat for that amount time caused me to over-heat.
So much for a nature cure, I thought.
Soon I realized this hard core exhaustion was the exact thing I needed to experience to see the amount of stress I was inflicting on my body moving at such a fast pace in my life.
It struck me also how easy it is to become unaware of how tired we are until we stop and step out of the routine.
Needless to say, I was more than happy to leave for Nepal where after a week in Kathmandu, I left for a ten day hike to the Annapurna Base Camp, 4,200 meters above sea level.
My body began to rebound. I was in a cooler climate surrounded by forests and mountains. I have always known these kinds of landscapes are more my element and could feel their impact at work almost immediately.
I was at home.
I hiked for 5 to 8 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 sleep and breathe all of which passes if you take it slow.
On the way, I met dozens of hikers taking up the similar challenge.
After ten days of this, while seeing some incredible views and spending a lot of time gazing into the beauty of the white covered Himalayas which indeed grounded me as they simultaneously took my breath away, I understood it wasn’t just the nature alone that I needed to feel more at peace with myself.
It was the combination of three things: nature, movement and connection.
1. Back To Our True Natures.
I noticed something on the trail that I often do in life. Focused primarily on reaching the destination, many hikers including myself were forgetting “to stop and smell the roses”, a.k.a. 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 future is an equation for misery.
It made me wonder how many small moments in my life I was missing out on so I made a special effort to stop instead of give in to the surrounding pressure to move.
The cult of doing is for real but the power of nature is a wonder.
I’ll never forget sitting on the top of glacier in Iceland seven years back and how it literally stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t move or think even if I tried. I sat for hours in a state of just being. It happened again in this spot in the village of Himalaya:
Nature brings us back to our true natures.
Want to know why?
Let’s think in terms of energy for a minute. Obsessional thinking, excessive fear, the brain on social media overload-just to give a few examples-are energetic states of mind that vibrate at very low frequencies. If they become our “normal state”, they begin to wreck havoc on our nervous systems.
I think we all would agree overthinking and excessive fear generally leave us feeling depleted and often depressed.
When we come into contact with the energy of nature, vibrating at much faster pace, our entire system comes into coherence with it.
In other words, our systems sync up with nature by shifting into its higher (and purer) state. In the resonance theory of consciousness, this transition is called shared resonance. In a nutshell, when two states vibrating at different frequencies come into proximity, after some time, they will start to vibrate at the same frequency, allowing for richer states of consciousness to arise.
Fascinating! Excessive fear or overthinking doesn’t just get drowned out, energetically it melts away giving space for us to get in contact with what is true.
Alas, we get a taste of what it’s like to live free from our mental prisons.
2. When We Move Our Bodies, We Flush Our Garbage.
For the past six months, my inner voice has been shouting at me to get physical. That getting physical, in fact, is the answer to most of the anxious spells I find myself in.
What I found out: it’s not just about 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 7 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.
Now, that’s my kind of meditation.
Because you know what? Inner peace doesn’t always come from sitting in silence cross legged while ohm-ing.
The Good ‘Ole 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 the best of all: through working with my breath, I have begun to conquer my fear of heights.
So simple!
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 intuitive. A trust in its ability to move us safely and efficiently develops and we can do things we thought were impossible.
And then there’s the…
Mental garbage
I don’t know about you, but uninvited not to mention unhelpful thoughts sometimes like to hang out in my head. With regular exercise, much of that useless chatter gets flushed out before the mind has a chance to have its feast and spin back more stories.
Most of my over-thinking during the hike melted away. The uninvited visitors left in other words enabling me to see what in my life really needed my attention.
3. Power to the People!
I find it shocking the ease in which I tend to sometimes forget this basic fact: connection heals.
Above all other experiences we engage in while alive, not having meaningful connections will make us suffer the most.
We are social animals.
And did you know? Our brains won’t develop normally if we don’t receive the emotional mirroring of caregivers throughout our early years of life. In other words, we are hardwired to connect. 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 the air to stay well.
Okay, so I do relish in my alone time. And to be honest, often I prefer not to hear people talk-especially those who have no clue another human being is present.
(I’m also working on my patience.)
It’s important to have a relationship with oneself. I’ve had many extraordinary days on my own but I’m always struck by the feeling I get after having had a meaningful conversation.
I feel whole again.
Being alone gives me that sense of completeness too but with peeps it’s that plus an added one akin to having just finished the most fantastic meal of your life.
It’s a mind-body-spirit kind of feast-y fullness.
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 as one woman put it: kept the spirit alive.
And one thing I know for sure: when my spirit is alive and happy, I am definitely in peace.
*This was originally published by Better Humans.
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Much LOVE,
Danielle
Really enjoyed this. I think there's something really powerful in realising that meditation is more about space than stillness. The space of meditation can be accessed through movement and deep connection (with nature and self) and this path is oftentimes more accessible to more people than the conventional "definition" of meditation.
With all of these points I think there is a beautiful synergy with the philosophical and spiritual teachings of many asian traditions as well as the performance practices that act as physical manifestations of these "ideas". Many performance forms exist in relationship with nature (inspired by and explored within), while also using movement as a tool towards deeper connection with ourselves, others and the space we share.