Truth: An Irish Girl’s Extraordinary Journey East to Seek Truth and Spiritual Enlightenment

The year was 2009. I was 28, about to turn 29, and I knew there was something more – a supreme truth to life that I yearned to directly experience for myself. So I gave up everything, and travelled east to Nepal and India to go seek truth and find deeper meaning. A decade and a half later, I’m finishing up one of my greatest labours of love – a spiritual travel memoir based on the diaries I wrote during this profound year-long quest through Kathmandu, the Indian Himalaya, and Calcutta.

Not only did this journey change my life, but working on telling its story continues to change and move me deeply. I can’t wait to share this story with the world. Sign up to my newsletter and be the first to know when my book is published!

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Five months before this photo was taken, this girl gave up her job, her apartment, and life as she knew it in Ireland, to go seek answers to life’s biggest questions …

What is the Truth? What is the meaning of life? Why are we all here? What is my purpose?

This girl is me! My truth-seeking quest led me to Nepal and India, where I traveled solo for the year, just me and my backpack, living in Kathmandu for 5 months, exploring the high Himalayan lands of Ladakh just west of Tibet for 3 months, and finishing my journey on the hot humid plains of Calcutta in Mother India.

Such a wildly curious thing I had done. Severed the tethers to all the things I had ever known. And set myself free out into the world.

Throughout this amazingly beautiful and epically transformative time, I immersed myself in Buddhism and received life-changing Dharma teachings from a lineage of Tibetan Lamas. I meditated many long hours in Tibetan Buddhist gompas (temples) and Theravada Buddhist meditation centres in Nepal and India; practiced Yoga; was initiated into Reiki and Pranic healing; had the sweet privilege of being part of a rural Nepalese community in the Kathmandu valley; co-ordinated English Conversation Clubs and classes with Nepalese girls and Tibetan refugees; trekked through the highest mountains in the world; stayed with Ladakhi nuns in the Himalayas; attended the teachings of the Dalai Lama; traced some of the steps of Jesus in his supposed lost years in India; meditated for many many more hours in a Himalayan meditation “cave” on the borders of Tibet; and worked in the Mother Teresa Missionaries of Charity homes for children and for the dying in Calcutta. And somewhere along the way, I happened to also meet the man I am married to today.

While 2009 was a wild and wonderful adventure, the real spiritual odyssey took place within.

The longest journey for me that year was not the flight from Ireland to India, but the journey from my head to my heart. Letting go of the western obsession with doing, and resting more in the eastern way of being. Navigating the territory beyond the conceptual thinking mind, and settling into the true centre of my being, in the deep stillness of my heart.

It is my deepest intention that this book helps people remember who they truly are and why they’re really here. That it leads them out of the exile in their heads, and back into the vast spacious home and wisdom of their sacred hearts.

May this book be the medicine the world needs to bring it back to Truth.

My 2009 Travel Photo Log

Kathmandu, Nepal

Ladakh, India

Kolkata (Calcutta), India

Spiritual Enlightenment Library

Around the time that I was finishing up my master’s thesis in Dublin, I stumbled upon a small spiritual bookshop hidden down one of the city’s cobbled back streets. It was here that I bought my first “spiritual” book. I remember sitting on my bed the following day, taking a break from my academic research, and reading this new book as the light streamed in the window. As I sifted through those pages, it was as if time stood still. I had never quite read anything like this before – soul, consciousness, spirit, awakening, truth. My whole being was thirsty for it. A heavenly type of stillness washed over me, and I knew in that moment that I was exactly where I was meant to be, doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. I looked over at my laptop and the stack of books I had yet to read to complete my thesis. I wished from the deepest core of my being that the thesis I had to write was about spirituality, and that the research books I had to read were all these new illuminating books about consciousness and truth.

Well this is the profound gift I gave myself in 2009. Over 5 years later, I gave up everything and ventured forth on my own self-created higher education journey to find truth and pursue deeper meaning in my life, and built my enlightened reading list as I went along. These spiritual books below were my cherished companions and precious way-finders of truth throughout my year’s travels. They’re ordered in the sequence I read them in, from Kathmandu to Kolkata …

Kathmandu

The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment, Eckhart Tolle (Thomson Press, Mumbai, 2001) (original work published in 1997)

You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Spiritual Fable about Fulfilling Your Dreams and Reaching Your Destiny, Robin S. Sharma (HarperElement, London, 2004) (original work published in 1997)

Siddhartha: A Classic Work Dealing With The Meaning of Life, Hermann Hesse (Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2008) (original work published in 1922)

The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation As Taught by S.N. Goenka: The Ancient Meditation Technique that Brings Real Peace of Mind, William Hart, (HarperCollins, New York, 1987)

The only way to experience truth directly is to look within, to observe oneself. All our lives we have been accustomed to look outward … We remain unknown to ourselves.
S. N. Goenka, The Art of Living

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, Translated by Francesca Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa (Shambhala South Asia Editions, New Delhi, 2000), (original work published in 1975)

The Spirit of Reiki: The Complete Handbook of the Reiki System, Walter Lubeck, Frank Arjava Petter and William Lee Rand (Pilgrims Publishing, Varanasi, 2001)

The Way of the Bodhisattva: An Entry into the Activities of Enlightenment, Shantideva (Shambhala South Asia Editions, New Delhi, 1997)

For as long as space endures, And for as long as living beings remain, Until then may I too abide, To dispel the misery of the world.
Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

What Makes You Not a Buddhist, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (Shambhala South Asia Editions, New Delhi, 2008)

Making Life Meaningful, Lama Zopa Rinpoche (Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, Boston, 2008) (original work published in 2001)

The Joy of Compassion, Lama Zopa Rinpoche (Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, Boston, 2006) (original work published in 2000)

Live with compassion. Work with compassion. Die with compassion. Meditate with compassion. Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, experience them with compassion.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Making Life Meaningful

Ladakh

The Lost Years of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of Jesus’ 17-Year Journey to the East, Elizabeth Clare Prophet (Book Faith India, 1994)

You Can Heal Your Life, Louise L. Hay (Full Circle, New Delhi, 2005)

Light on Yoga: The Classic Guide to Yoga by the World’s Foremost Authority, BKS Iyengar (HarperCollins, India, 2008) (original work published in 1966)

The emptying of the mind of the whole of its illusions is the true exhalation. The realisation that ‘I am Spirit’ is the true inhalation.
BKS Iyengar, Light on Yoga

Brida: A Novel, Paulo Coelho (HarperCollins, New York, 2008)

Masters in the New Energy, Adamus Saint-Germain, channeled through Geoffrey Hoppe (Crimson Circle Press, USA, 2007)

A New Earth: Create A Better Life, Eckhart Tolle (Penguin Books, England, 2009) (original work published in 2005)

You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Cave in the Snow: A Western Woman’s Quest for Enlightenment, Vicki MacKenzie (Bloomsbury, Great Britain, 1999) (original work published in 1998).

Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda (Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, 2007) (original work published in 1946).

Finding the Joy Within You: Personal Counsel for God-Centered Living, Sri Sri Daya Mata (Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, 2004) (original work published in 1990).

… You realize that all along there was something tremendous within you, and you did not know it.
Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

Kolkata

Conversations With God, Book 1: An Uncommon Dialogue, Neale Donald Walsch (Penguin Random House, 1996)

Conversations With God, Book 2: Living in the World with Honesty, Courage, and Love, Neale Donald Walsch (Penguin Random House, 2003)

Conversations With God, Book 3: Embracing the Love of the Universe, Neale Donald Walsch (Penguin Random House, 2011)

There is only one reason to do anything: as a statement to the universe of Who You Are.
Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God

The Existence of God is Self-Evident, Master Choa Kok Sui (Institute for Inner Studies Publishing Foundation India, 2006)

The Ancient Science and Art of Pranic Healing, Master Choa Kok Sui (Institute for Inner Studies Publishing Foundation India, 2009) (original work published in 1992)

Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Malcolm Muggeridge (Collins/Fount Paperbacks, London, 1980) (original work published in 1971).

We have been created for greater things, to love and to be loved.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Something Beautiful for God

Other Solo / Soul Traveling Gals!

Get more inspiration from other women who ventured out on their own to find their truth and reach new heights that they never thought possible. These are two of my favorites …

Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin Books, 2007)

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Sheryl Strayed (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)