Arms of Love

“Mount Kailash is spoken of as the center of the spiritual universe... I am not Buddhist, never heard of doing prostrations around Mt. Kailash…

It did not occur to me that my journey was dangerous. None of this cluttered my simple preparations. I began to exercise to develop more physical stamina and did more prostrations in my daily practice, until I was able to prostrate for several hours a few days in a row. To protect their bodies from the constant contact with the ground, Tibetans wear heavy leather aprons and a kind of wooden clog on their hands. A friend made me the leather apron and I designed the hand clogs… I bought duffel bags, a plane ticket, wired money to my travel agent, got travelers checks and cash, and off I went…

What drew me to my pilgrimage most was a spiritual passion. It is said that doing khora around Mt. Kailash will dissolve a year of karma. For me, it dissolved my life. On the first day of khora, I wrote in my journal: ‘Tossing and turning for an hour, sorting things through in my thoughts. I am so afraid. I am so afraid to set my foot on Mt. Kailash. . . . It’s not going around the mountain. I think I can do that if I choose to. It’s that if I go around the Mountain, it never stops. There’s no escape from all this Love. There’s no escape, and that’s what terrifies me . . . Mother/Father Kailash, receive me, teach me in the way I need to be taught. Despite my ignorance, despite my blindness, I have come to you. I have come to receive your blessing and your teaching and your empowerment. I have come to love you. I have come to love me.’

The reception I received from the Tibetan people, day after day, was overwhelming to me. Every day people gave me food or money… However, the ones that touched me most deeply were the Tibetans who were clearly so very poor but who insisted on giving me what I am sure was their dinner. One day as I prostrated up a particularly steep mountainside, I saw a young man tracing the Tibetan letters of a mantra on a boulder and then chiseling them into the rock, making a mani stone. As I headed toward my camp and guides that evening, he was sitting among the boulders, also at the end of his day. He had a small campfire, and through sign language, he invited me to a warm meal… I was touched at his generous invitation and at his devotion to turning the boulders into prayers.

Although everyday was the same, I never got in a rhythm. I never felt stronger, oriented, confident, or like I had gotten it down. I never got better at breathing the scarce air nor was I less tired. Every day was hard, physically hard, and it never got easier. Since I did not know how to do this, I simply moved at a pace that respected myself and my body. I never pushed or judged. Although there were days that my issues walked with me, that depression, discouragement, and despair were available to me, I never chose to go there. There was only the doing of each prostration.

On day 13, I wrote: ‘Though Khora is not a goal, it is an experience, perhaps that is why it never becomes easier. It is always a teacher. It is never about the lesson, which could be mastered, but about the teacher, which is always present in the new moment. The Khora is a teacher, not a goal. I’m beginning to not know where this Khora is taking me. That’s a good sign.’ When I reached Drolma La, we sprayed and drank Cokes in celebration. In the fog, snow, and cold, I stood there touching Milarepa’s rock, hanging prayer flags and katas for my loved ones at home and my newly loved ones in Tibet, while drinking in the pleasure of this sacred site. The Pass itself is a very short space from edge to edge. I prostrated across it and began a precipitous descent downward, almost immediately seeing Shiva’s sacred lakes as I rounded a corner on the narrow, rocky path.

As I came through Darchen, a man with a somewhat ragged child standing just behind him was watching me. He disappeared then reappeared and greeted me with a short bow, which I returned saying Namaste. He then reached behind and drew out one child who was holding a cellophane bag of noodles and a second child with another package of noodles. I am sure they were offering me the family’s dinner for two nights.

I met the Bon lama again when was I was nearing the end of khora. I did not know I was near the end because the wilderness has no markers in it. I knew Tarboche was ahead, but did not know how far. That particular day I was quite ill. I prostrated most of the day continuing around the edges of wash-outs and gulches, when the lama appeared from around the edge of one gulch. He looked so surprised to see me still doing khora. He and I stopped to greet each other. He held my hands and took off my clogs. He seemed concerned at how dirty my hands were and brushed them tenderly. He then looked at me with extraordinary kindness, pointed over his shoulder and said, ‘Tarboche’. It was clear to me that he was offering me encouragement, telling me that although I could not see the end of my journey, I was close, that Tarboche was within reach.

I did finish khora with prostrations. It took me twenty-eight days. I will always remember the last prostration when I finally reached where I had begun at Tarboche. It was unbelievable to me that khora was ending, that there was not another prostration to do. It was all I wanted to do for the rest of my life’s time, to stay at Kailash, prostrate, and pray. But there came a time when the circle was closed and my task was to move forward, not around.

I must speak of the Void. A great blessing of khora with prostrations was the ignorance with which I approached my task. I sought advice from more experienced friends, from Rinpoches who knew the terrain and tradition. But no one could tell me how long to prostrate for each day; or when the hailstorm was too heavy or too cold to prostrate in; or how hot or cold it would be that day as I left for the day’s prostrations. What did I know of what was reasonable in such conditions? All I had was myself.

The khora path looks the same everywhere. Sometimes it is going up a mountainside, sometimes down, sometimes along or through a river. But none of those things ever told me where I was. After six hours of prostrating, I had no idea if I had gone five hundred yards or a kilometer. I would prostrate for hours and then walk back for half an hour to the camp and my guides, wondering if I had gotten anywhere at all. I did not know if my body would hold up. There was nothing to encourage myself, nothing to gauge progress, and really, this is as it should have been. There is no progress, no goal. There is the experience and there is surrender to the invitation to attempt this. Doing khora was not my idea; it was an invitation that came to me in prayer. I felt that my role was to show up and do the best I could each moment. Khora is surrender in the not-knowing.

The Void filled me. It rang in my ears. It wrapped itself around me. It was inside and outside of me. It was infinite, it was everything. My intellect did not even try to analyze the Void. It would have been a silly endeavor, like a gnat wanting to navigate outer space, and it never occurred to me to attempt it. I let the Void hold me because I just did not know; I could not assess or control my experience; I could only show up or not show up. There is an enormous freedom when we let go of the illusion of knowing. After all, life is enacting itself along some pattern, some dance, but that dance is not for me or you. It is for itself, it is dancing itself. I am invited to participate, but I should not have the arrogance to think that it is my dance, my design. It is infinitely beyond anything I will ever grasp. My choice is to play at the hem of its skirt, or to sit aside while it dances.

Khora was a crushing spiritual experience. On every level, it was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life and the most joyful. It would not surprise me if someday, when I die, I look back and know for sure that it was the most meaningful and most important thing I have done in my life. After I returned, a very kind Rinpoche in Nepal repeatedly told me that I might not understand the meaning of what I had done for some time and should not worry about it. He said that in time, it would become clear to me.

It has been just over a year since I completed khora and the truth of his words remains with me. Although I better understand the magnitude of what I undertook, my depth of understanding is that of a layer of paint on a huge block of wood. The wood will rise to meet me, but I cannot yet let it in. Tibet was singing out signs to me that I was welcome, that she had made a place for me to be there, that she was supporting me in this step into the Void, in this effort of which I had no conception. She would take my life while holding me together and dissolve me while carrying me forward. I believe that the unfolding of her lesson will continue for the rest of my life, dissolving and re-shaping me according to her wisdom.

Six months after I returned, despite my efforts to come back to the life I left, it finally became clear to me that I would never be back again. That moment of life had become my home. Very, very slowly, through each relentless day, I found myself changed, as if pieces of me that had been missing were rising again to support my feet. I am returning, more mature, more open, less knowing, more conscious, more loving, more humble, and more confident...

The circle is inside me. It is the circle of my word, the circle of how I live my life, of how present I am in my moment, of how open my heart is. Mount Kailash was an enormous, diamond-studded door through which I stepped. And now, the opening will not stop. Door after door opens, drawing me deeper into the heart of love, devoured and comforted in the infinite heart of love that is Kailash, that is Tibet, and that is me.”

~ Tracey Alysson, Ph.D., Dying and Living in the Arms of Love: One Woman’s Journey around Mount Kailash