Chanting is primordial. It can carve through rock. It cuts through dense matter in body, mind and soul. I close my ears so I can hear better. The vibrations on my chest are like taut animal skin drumbeats; like taut ligaments after two weeks of yoga training.

I had to walk. Unshackled now like my now loosened vertebrae.

Lacing my hiking shoes stirs my senses as my body prepares—bristling—for something missed for too long. Two weeks of 5am to 9pm asanas and cross-legged learning has stretched me on the rack of physical and mental expansion.

But, yes, I need to walk now. I need to write. I need to integrate.

I pick a point on a map—Sherabling Monastery—and pack a daypack. My hands tremble as I click the buckles signalling to my body that it is now free. It always was. It needs reminders sometimes … somehow. Everything in yoga comes with its counter pose. This is that.

My lunchtime poori and hot pickle also craves its counter. I stop at a village store—the one with the hessian sack in the back corner. I lift a chunk of jaggery to my face. Sweetness of molasses that conjures memories of farmlands of my youth … riding horses and milking cows. Smell is a superpower; it can pull one unwittingly through portals. It’s how I first fell in love with India over two decades ago—the smell of mud after monsoon rain; the giddy of jasmine flowers dripping from coconut-oiled hair; the merging of street side spices and syrupy sweets invade my nostrils.

Back in the present moment, I invoke my guru’s words, “Mindful doesn’t mean slow.” As someone naturally fast, and often criticised for my seemingly mindless speed, his words return as a whisper as my body finds its rhythm on its trajectory through the forest. I stop to check the map—getting lost is too familiar. What is lost anyway, I wonder. No more cars, bikes, no crunch of gravel underfoot, I hear the silence of nature which in reality is never silent. Eagles shriek over the caressing undertones of the pine trees playing their needles like finely-tuned string instruments. I lift my face momentarily to catch the music. My senses are a funnel and nature fills me; restores me; completes me.

And then I am on the move again in the time and space dimension with that objective in mind: fourteen kilometres … back by 5pm … writing assignment … yoga exam preparations … coffee!.

Sherabling Monastery is the gateway and I am almost there.