01. Who Am I - Where the Journey Began

“Who am I? Where am I, right now? Where am I going?”

These questions followed me everywhere — through every job, every city, every season of my life. I knew I could simply live, the way most people do, without asking. But I couldn't. Nothing felt more urgent to me than understanding who I was. Nothing felt more important. Going to work without knowing. Getting through the days without knowing. It wore on me in a way I couldn't quite name. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought kept surfacing, again and again — maybe I should shave my head, walk into the mountains, and become a monk.

As it turned out, that's almost exactly what happened. I ended up at Woljeongsa — a temple in Korea's Odaesan mountains, with over 1,400 years of history — living alongside monks, eating and sleeping and practicing in rhythm with them, through an entire cycle of seasons. None of this was planned. It just happened, the way the most significant things in life often do. Life, I've come to believe, has a way of surprising you completely.

I was twenty-nine when I walked through those temple gates. I thought I was lost. After leaving my first job as a social worker, I had tried many different paths — but the only work that had ever felt truly mine was that one, and I had left it behind. I didn't know what came next. I wasn't sure there was a next.

For 10 months, I woke at 4:30 every morning for dawn prayers. I studied Buddhist philosophy. I sat in practice, in silence, in the particular kind of stillness that only deep mountains hold. And slowly, quietly, the question I had been carrying my whole life — who am I? — began to loosen. To open. And with it, something else became visible: the path I had been searching for.

The path was never somewhere else. The path was wherever I was standing. I hadn't been lost. I hadn't been wandering. I had been on the path the entire time — I just hadn't known how to see it. It wasn't that I needed to find the right road and step onto it. The road was the stepping.

Wherever I stood was already the way.

It took ten full years for that to travel from my head into my heart.