The Rich Roll Podcast - Wasfia Nazreen On The Spirituality of Climbing The Seven Summits

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Wasfia Nazreen is the first Bengali and Bangladeshi to scale the Seven Summits and K2, and a mentee of the Dalai Lama. This conversation explores Wasfia’s extraordinary journey from childhood trauma to spiritual expansion through mountaineering. We discuss her unique perspective on personal evolution, which blends extreme physical challenges with deep inner work. She offers insights on healing trauma and transforming obstacles into opportunities for growth. Wasfia inspires. This conversation is a facility for anyone seeking to climb their inner metaphorical mountains. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Peak Design: Get 20% OFF thoughtfully crafted sleek carry solutions 👉PeakDesign.com/RICHROLL Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉boncharge.com Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL 👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL Whoop: Track your sleep, strain, recovery, stress and more w/ personalized insights that help you reach your goals. 👉join.whoop.com/roll On: Enter RichRoll10 at the checkout to get 10% OFF your first order 👉on.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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every single moment. Nothing is going to go according to plan up there. A lot of people can't deal with that. Of course physical training is needed. Of Of course, physical training is needed. Of course, the high-altitude training is needed. But if you don't have the mindset, you're not going to last out there. Wasfi and Nazreen is a trailblazing force of nature.

Patience is the biggest thing that you need up there. Like Mother Earth can just toss you out in a fraction of a second. I've seen it over and over. I've seen earthquakes, avalanches. Anything and everything that you knew could be gone in a fraction of a second. could be gone in a fraction of a second. The first Bengali and the only Bangladeshi to summit K2 and the seven summits, Wasfiya is a National Geographic explorer

recognized as one of the most adventurous women of the last 25 years, who has shattered countless records and stereotypes as both a mountaineer and an activist. We all come here for a very short time, and we must make this a very purposeful time. Don't ruin it. As much as Watshiya's feats are extraordinary, it's her backstory that's even more remarkable. It's one of courage, it's one that's marked with resilience,

and just unbelievable fortitude in the face of almost unspeakable hardship. It's also deeply spiritual in nature and one that has been heavily influenced by her very special friendship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And it's one I'm deeply honored to share with you today. Whatever circumstances we're in, we're all suffering and we're all climbing our own mountains. But there is no mountain high enough for us to climb. If I could do everything that I've done from the background that I came from, anything is possible. Super nice to meet you. Delighted to have you here. And as I was wrapping my head around your story

and digging deeper into who you are, what struck me beyond your accomplishments, which are certainly impressive, is really the story behind it, which I think is even more extraordinary. We're gonna talk about the summits and all these amazing things that you've done, but I'm really interested in the depth of that experience and the experiences that you had, the formative experiences that kind of led to these accomplishments, which are really just external manifestations

of this interior journey that you've been on. Climbing our inner mountains. Yes, that's right. It's an honor. The metaphysical mountains. Thank you for having me, first of all. I've been looking up to you for many years and it's a real honor.

And I think this is karma too, how we got connected and all that. Yeah, real pleasure to be here today. Excellent. Maybe we should just start at the beginning, growing up in Bangladesh. Paint a picture of what that was like. I mean, we all know of Bangladesh, but I think at least in the Western world, there's a lot of confusion or misunderstanding or an incomplete understanding of what that experience must have been like for you.

So people who might even not know where Bangladesh is, it's on the left side on the map of India. And before my, like during my parents' generation, so pretty recent, what is now Bangladesh, Pakistan and India used to be one country. So 71 was when Bangladesh Liberation War happened. And I was born in, you know, the first as the first generation of as a Bangladeshi. And I paint that picture first because we grew up with a lot of stories. Every single person that I know growing up, well, were rebels, like freedom fighters. I think that was very instrumental in the foundation aspect of it and teaching me how to stand up for myself. But personally speaking, my parents, and this is a long story, so I'm going to make it short.

So, you know, I was born to a musician mom and she's also a school teacher. And my father worked in the ships in Bay of Bengal, which is the largest delta in the world. And near that delta is the Sundarbans, which is the largest mangrove forest in the world where the Bengal tigers are from. So because of my dad's work, I guess the fact that I was literally in touch with nature from the very beginning. And this is a region in the world where cyclones, floods. I mean, we used to, I still remember growing up, make fun of Americans freaking out over a storm and we're going through the word cyclones. And I've seen stuff from the earliest that I can remember. Like nature, we just knew nature was the God, regardless of which

religion we came from. And I grew up in a very secular community. My mom, you know, predominantly Bangladesh is Muslim, but it's a very secular Islam. Our whole constitute like when Bangladesh, what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan separated, we were East Pakistan. And what is now Pakistan was West Pakistan with India in the middle, which was already independent. So we have our language, Bengali mother tongue, when Pakistani government government basically or army made Bengalis speak in Urdu which is their language and this is when hundreds and thousands of my parents generation students came out when they brush fired and that day was 21st February when, based on which the mother, International Mother Language Day was formed. Anyway, these are just little stories to say that we grew up with

this. And then at the age of 13, one fine day, I found out that my mom left the house. That's all I knew. We didn't know if she was going to come back. I was hoping she would, but it was kind of because it was such a small town where we were living. You know, we call this cities, but they're very kind of like a rural city. And she was the teacher in my school. So I, and it was such a scandal that I just stopped going to school. And my father was at work the whole time. My brother was out. And you were how old? 13? 12 going into 13. And so, like, I had nobody. And so, after being absent in school for almost nine months and just being on my own,

I wrote or called an aunt in Dhaka, which is the capital of the country, and saying that, you know, like I asked my father first because he had no choice. He had to work. He had to be in the ships. So we took a decision together that it's probably best for me to move with her. And then I requested her, like, can you please put me in an English medium school? So till that age age I didn't know how to speak English so in our country we have two modes of schooling one is English and

one is Bengali so I moved to Dhaka city and from the age of 13 to 18 I went through rigorous like discipline of because I knew the only ticket out is my education. Cause if I could educate myself and provide for myself, then I can cut through this. At that time, there was this whole pressure of like, who the hell is gonna marry this girl? She has her mom's shame. Right. So your mom splits, your parents get divorced.

They ultimately go and create new families. You're left betwixt and in between with nowhere to go. You end up with your aunt in this English speaking school and you start, I mean, you're an athlete, you're playing volleyball and handball, but you're also doing theater. Like you're kind of an artistic, but also athletic kid at the same time.

But I would imagine having a bit of an identity crisis, trying to understand how you ended up in this place, while at the same time, having a deep understanding of how important education is going to be in terms of your trajectory. Because Bangladesh isn't exactly getting an A-plus on the women's rights report card, right? So talk a little bit about

what it's like for a young woman growing up in Bangladesh in terms of access to opportunity and being upwardly mobile. To be frank, at that time, like that period was just survival for me. Like, I didn't think of these things like logically, I was just doing to just survive and get the hell out of there. So for example, I went to that school, but then as soon as I was in the school, I was in my mind, I was like, okay, I have heard of my older cousins be going for study abroad. And so I need to get the hell out of here. So I was aiming, even without telling my aunts, that at the age of 18, as soon as I graduate, I'm going to apply to colleges and that's my ticket out. Because I knew that if I stayed in Bangladesh, I would not be able to choose life as I wanted for

myself. Also, I think that one incident, just to give context, every other aunt of mine was married off as a teenager. So that, I'm the next generation. So- In arranged marriages. So that, I'm the next generation. In arranged marriages. Majority, yeah. Well, I have one aunt from my dad's side who had a love marriage, but from my mom's side was arranged. Yeah, so before my mom left, I was the most timid, silent kid.

I did nothing. I would walk and follow, like I was clumsy. I was very vulnerable. That one incident overnight made me completely opposite spectrum. It's like, I need to stand up for myself. I don't want to end up like her. I don't want to end up like any of my aunts. So when I started applying for colleges, I went to my dad for money. And then my stepmom told me that they had only enough money for

the son, which was her son, which wasn't true, first of all. But I was so pissed off with that one answer. I went back and this one college in Decatur, Georgia, gave me a hundred percent scholarship. I wrote to an uncle who lived in London at that time, my father's older brother, for enough money for the ticket. And I think he gave me

a few hundred bucks extra, sent me a few hundred bucks extra, and then that was it. I bought a ticket, came to Decatur, Georgia, thinking it was going to be like New York because that's all I knew.

And then I landed. That must have been quite shocking, you know, in terms of a cultural shift. Can you imagine as an 18-year-old good girl from Bangladesh arriving in America thinking she was coming to New York? In the South. And then Decatur, Georgia was very different back then. My first, in my, within my first semester, I almost got gang raped. It was like in the middle of violence.

And I was like, holy shit, where did I come? Wow. And then I applied right away for study abroad. And I got into another college in Scotland. And I left for six months and ended up staying in Scotland through my college, Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, who was paying for it. And I kept extending it. Six months went into a year, into two years till Agnes Scott wrote and saying, hey, if you want to graduate with a degree from our college, you need to return. So then I came back and then by that time Atlanta had changed a little bit.

By that time Atlanta had changed a little bit. And then during my final year, I got another grant to go to India to study how women were using art as therapy because it was double majoring in studio art and psychology at that time. And that is the trip that changed my entire life. Yeah. You're a survivor.

Like you figured all that out on your own without any kind of like help or support. Past karma. Yeah. But this call to activism, was that always part of your kind of internal makeup? Like this sense that the first thing you wanted to do when you finished university was go to India.

Oh, I hadn't even finished university. Oh, you hadn't yet, you were still. In my senior year, yeah. I actually never came back for my graduation. Oh, you didn't? You did graduate, you just didn't go through the thing. To the ceremony. Yeah.

So you went up in India. So I go to India and we had like, I think, 12 to 16 regions or locations we had to go and Dharamsala was the last in that. I had no idea about Dharamsala. This is pre of tibetan um the fact that tibetans even lived in india i was not familiar with it um so this group of women who some of whom were former prisoners in chinese prisons um both lay practitioners um and nuns they had by foot came out of tibet um you've been to dharamsala and i have so many questions about that but in dharamsala on the main road parallel to the temple road there's the refugee center that's like one of the main places where refugees come in when they cross

the himalayas and the second place is nepal so these women you were using many practices. One practice is called Tonglen, which is the whole act of taking in your enemy or perceived enemy's karma, negative karma, and sending out your merits to them. And these women were sitting and radiating the type of glow that I had never seen. And I still remember like they were, I wanted to be them because I thought I had it wrong. And I was in a very negative space. This was kind of like where if these women didn't come at that time, I don't know if I would be alive because I was really contemplating that kind of like, okay, I had no father to look up to, mother to look up to, no older brother to look up to. I have no role models. I struggled so much through college trying to, you know, just struggling. And then I thought I

had it wrong. But look at these people. They've lost their motherland. They've lost their holy places. They've been stripped naked, taken their nuns and monks vows of made to do things. And all of them physically brutalized. Some of the women were sterilized. But they have one inch of hate towards their so-called enemies. And it was so freeing just witnessing that joy. And I was bawling my eyes out throughout the whole time. And these women are sitting in their full power, you know, just.

So on the way back on that flight out, I took the bus from Dharamsala to Delhi. And in that flight back from Delhi to Atlanta was, I just knew instinctively I have to go back. I don't know what is there, but I remember my professor at that time and my dean was like, you're in your elements. I have never seen you like this. And then I came back. This is post 9-11. International students were having a very hard time getting work permit. And my name sounds very Muslim, but I had a work permit. I had a confirmed job in San Francisco that I was going to go to after graduation. But in that trip back, in that flight back, I decided, hell no. And I came back, had a yard sale, just about enough money to buy a ticket back to India,

Delhi. And I did that. And then the embassy informed me that I had to go back to Bangladesh to return my work permit because you cannot go around the world with a valid work permit if you're not working in the US. So I had to go back to Bangladesh first, go to American embassy. And I still remember the guy was like, are you sure? He asked me thrice. And I had to say every time, yes, yes. So he refused it without prejudice. You have to just put a stamp on it. And then I took a flight out to Delhi and moved to Dharamsala

and ended up living there seven years on. Seven years. And you just showed up without any idea of how this was all gonna work. Yeah, and I had 250 bucks in my pocket. And it was those women. I mean, what was, you know, can you explain a little bit more about what that pull

was all about and why you felt so strongly about returning? I think whole growing up, I never felt like I fit in. And when I arrived in Dharamsala for the first time, I felt everyone I knew and everything i knew i didn't at that time could i couldn't understand tibetan but tibetan was more familiar to my ears and like we say now it's all past karma yeah i was gonna say it's just some past life thing yeah i've had so many past lives so so many past lives in tibet um anyway but at that time as soon as i moved to dharamsala not knowing not having any guarantee of if i gonna ever get a work here can i stay

within the first week i got a job offer within less than two months i met i'll get into all that but you like as a journalist, right? That was the job that you got? Yeah, so the first paid job, because there's a lot of work you can do in Tharamsala. A lot of it is volunteer work. And I was volunteering with several nonprofits, all related to human rights work with Tibetans.

So the group of women that I met was through this organization called Guchusam. It's an ex-prisoners organization. I'm sure you passed through it. There are only two main roads in Dharamsala. But Payul, which means motherland in Tibetan, is the news archive that was, especially at that time, because it was pre-Olympic Games, which happened in 2008. It was way before that. But getting right information from Inside Tibet is very, it's a big deal because of the way the Communist Party controls news and everything. So my job was to,

basically, the informer. I had a pseudonym. All my publication during that was under a pseudonym. So I was the informer going inside Tibet, out Nepal, wherever Tibetans lived, refugees or inside Tibet. And I was a special correspondent for Dharamsala. So the most famous person in Dharamsala is, of course, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. That's the main news coverage. Perhaps the most famous person in the world. Yeah, so. And he lives in this little village,

Dharamsala is sort of, it's not like some booming metropolis, it's a tiny little mountain top village. Well, it's grown so much now. When I lived there, there was no, none of these bars and the fancy resorts. And like, it's crazy how much development that has happened. Yeah, that's all to accommodate all the people that pilgrimage there to visit with him.

Yeah, and then when I, you know, Payul, I was working with it. And then I would meet, you're familiar with the temple, right? Like right in front of His Holiness's house. So he would come walk from the house to the temple. And during that walking time, there were many times he would just, within thousands of people, just straight look to me and wave. And there was always a direct darshan. And sometimes my Tibetan journalist would put me in the front

because he paid so much attention to me just to get that shot and use me as the bait and so I was just happy with that and also now that now I look back and I realize that just being around him brought so much healing just the light and the touches you know like they were instrumental during that time and then for my healing at least and then one day i'm getting ready to go to work super early uh i get a phone call that uh you know we didn't have smartphones then i don't recognize the number and i say hello i said miss nazreen no one calls me miss nazreen uh so i knew it was an official call so i said yes she yes. She's like, oh, I'm calling from holiness's office. At some point, did you express meeting him? I said, of course. She said,

do you still want to meet him? And then I was like, this is a prank call because who's going to call and ask if you want to meet the Dalai Lama? I said, of course, I still want to meet him. He said, oh, can you come now? And I'm like, shit. Like I was in Upper Dharamsala, my home at that time near Tipa. You've been to Tipa, I think, the cultural center. And it was pouring raining outside. So I had to get from Tipa to there.

And I know his holiness was super particular. If he says eight, he's there at 759. So I was just rushing while still holding the phone to get a sorry like this is the supposed to be the first meeting and i had only 30 minutes left to go meet him so i went and that was my first meeting and he was waiting there uh i think it was sharp at eight that meeting um i was barely 21 at that time. Why do you think that he felt compelled to reach out to you? I think he heard of me from his brother, who I had worked with earlier, or not worked with,

just knew through Payul. He heard that there was a Bangladeshi woman in town who's working for Tibetan human rights. That's why he called me. But when I met him and had the first meeting and before I was leaving the first day, there are several exchanges that happened. But when I look back now, that was my first teaching on karma. I was in my mind thinking, wow, just last week, I checked out this spot where I could fall from. I was looking at locations, but I was kind of scared. Oh, that's going to hurt.

Maybe I'm not going to be able to leave. What if I get paralyzed for the rest of my life? You mean you were exploring some self-harm options, like that's the mental and emotional state that you were in. And as that thought came into my mind, His Holiness looked at me and just said, "'My old friend, we're all here because of our karma.'" And I don't know if you've heard his laughter yet

but a lot happens during that laughter and it was like a thunder that just striked me on my chest and then the next line was you have a precious human birth which is the first concept which i didn't know in in tibetan studies like to value how long it took us to come to this human form. We have six realms of existence. And the human realm is the most, how to say it? Human realm is the only realm where we can ascend into enlightenment. There are humans who are living in the God realm. Like they have no,

a lot of people in Hollywood are in the God realm. They have no, you know, they have endless money, everything that you need in this world to survive. But they're so, like their desire is so much with it and they're enjoying it so much is that they're not going to work towards they don't have enough obstacles to work to transform them and seek enlightenment does that make sense yeah i understand that yeah so um so yeah he told me that and then

um went back to his he has a small office inside the main room and then brought me in there and then gave me my first amulet. I have many amulets from him, but that was the first. He said, you're going to be needing this one. And you don't understand what he meant at that time. And that amulet is related to, you know, in the Tibetan texts, there's a lot of deities. And technically they're all energies or avatars within our own selves. Palden Lamo is the protectress of Tibet and Dalai Lama. That's his principal protectress, a feminine entity, very wrathful.

So he gave me the protection amulet related to Palden Lamo and taught me the text that I'm supposed to read. This is like all in the first meeting. And I'm trying to wrap my head around everything. I'm so young. And he gives this and so then instructs his assistant to give me the prayer to call her in and said, you're going to be needing that. And then he sent me off. And then since then, I mean, I don't remember how many times I've met him, but- But the inference that you're making

about this first meeting is that on some level, he had an awareness of what you were going through and felt like he could be a benefit to you in solving this wound. Perhaps, but also one specific thing that he said is like, you're here because we have karma. I mean, he didn't say we have karma. He said, because of your own karma.

And so karma, which we can extend into later, but I feel like the first few years of this life, none of it is karma from this life. Like the connection I have with, let's say, Dalai Lama or any other Tibetan teachers, that didn't come from this life. It's accumulated karma from many, many, many past lives. That's why he called me as his old friend when I walked in. I think it was needed for me to meet him at that time, the way I met him. And he could see that this woman, somehow I need to detour her from this. Because I was going back to my past and I was not willing to leave Dharamsala.

And I was so heavily involved in Free Tibet. And this, when I shared the later stories, like he would constantly call me and just say, this is not your fight. And I would be like, no, I'm freeing Tibet this lifetime. You don't understand Kundun. We refer to him as Kundun, which means the one with the presence. And in my mind, I would be like, what the? Like what? He can't appreciate that I'm serving his cause?

Like I've never met a leader who's like removing me from his cause, but he saw the danger that I was gonna get into. And to be very frank, like he's the one who brought me to the mountains. I had no goal to be a mountaineer. He was the one who said, your path is in the mountains and it's not with freeing Tibet.

It's more to do with the mountains and also the women of Bangladesh. Like he sort of pointed, he sort of tuned your compass to that. Yeah, but I was fighting with him. Even when he said, you're supposed to be leading the women of Bangladesh. I was like, what?

I'm freeing Tibet. I like that you were mixing it up with him and pushing back on him. Yeah. But you developed this like pretty deep relationship. Like it was a mentorship that went on for many years. I mean, you became, from what I gather, like pretty close with him, yes?

20 plus years now, but a lot of, I mean, you know, holiness was much more active before. Now he's almost 90. So he can't give that much time. And I haven't seen him for a long time. But whatever mountain I'm on, even when I was on K2, I got a message that, you know, blessing was there. And every single mountain in life that I've climbed, Holiness was behind it.

So I have three more teachers that are in the Tibetan world. I'll mention their names just in case someone recognizes. So Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who's a very prominent teacher, Tibetan teacher. He was a lay practitioner. And I share this because I think a lot of people put Tibetans as like, oh, only a monk can do this or a nun can do this. What the teachings of Buddha is for all humans. And the fact that lay people can do it with, you can be a rock star and you can still reach enlightenment. I'm not, I mean, that's not a, that's a weird

example. Yeah. But I'm just saying that the techniques work for any human mind. Buddha was a scientist. He was a medicine man. He figured out the mind and taught 84,000 techniques for different kind of mindsets. Right. So we were talking about Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and he was Dalai Lama's teacher. So right now we have the next incarnation of the who's um slightly younger than me but he shapeshifts between the previous and this one um but he so why i mentioned him is when his holiness leaves this incarnation uh alongside several other lamas will be holding the region

because the teacher can identify the students. So the next recognition of the 15 Dalai Lama, if he chooses to come back, which he will, hopefully, because, you know, the next one is going to be very complicated because Chinese government is going to choose their own Dalai Lama. Yeah. And Mongolia also is sort of involved in that discourse. I mean, it's God knows what kind of shit show is going to happen. I know.

So someone's going to have to hold it down. So like this one, this amulet was made by Dilgo Kansir, which was my main protection for K2. But no, so just to say that there's, even if I don't have a direct talking relationship with him being so far away, our minds are always connected. I know that when, and he says that all the time, because in the first few years, I got very clingy to my teachers,

you know, not having any kind of family role models. And then you get these like powerful teachers. So they were the whole time trying to send me away, you know, and this is one thing that as someone who's practiced or like during my college years I was I've tried out every single faith just to like from Baha is to Christian mysticism to uh mystic Judaism and all everything I just wanted to learn. And what really appealed to me is like, there is no, or at least how Tibetan Buddhists teach it,

is like, ultimately, you are your own guru. Yes, we have a teacher, guru meaning teacher, teacher-student, teacher-student oral tradition from Buddha's time. But ultimately, you'd learn from us and then find your own guru. The power is within you. Pretty much Star Wars,

which was based out of Tibetans. George Lucas actually went and spent six months in Dharamsala and came up with Star Wars. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, Yoda is one of holiness's teacher. I'll send you the article. Oh, really? That's interesting.

It's not surprising though. You know send you the article. Oh really? That's interesting. And you know- It's not surprising though. You know the part in the Ewok village? Gunda. Yeah. If you hear it, it's rewind. How do you say it? Like Tibetan stocking.

And then he put it back in reverse. Played backwards. Wow. So it's like, it's encoded. Everything that you see in Star Wars was taken from the Tibetan pantheon,

the oracles. There's a whole living tradition of oracles in Tibetan diaspora. They're the, what is the other one?

And within the oracles, there are different kind of, like there's a female, there's only three living oracles right now. Back in Tibet's blooming time, there were so many flying oracles, all types of oracles. Have you met the oracle in Tharapasala, the female one? That's a whole other realm.

There are shapeshifters of all kinds. Maybe I did and I didn't know it. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I own a bunch of spectacles, and I made the grave error the other day of donning a normal non-roka pair on my indoor trainer when I was riding my bike indoors. And I got to tell you, it was a disaster. Every three to five seconds, I had to take my hands off the handlebars and push my

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Like it's about empowerment and a transmission of teachings and wisdom, but not for the sake of advancing about empowerment and a transmission of teachings and wisdom but not for the sake of advancing the interest of the guru but in empowering the individual to go on their own journey with what's been transmitted to that person. Yeah, and that every individual have, like we all have our own specific karma.

You know, I live in LA and often see bumper stickers that says karma is a bitch. But I feel like here people only talk about karma when it comes to negative stuff. But this too is karma. The positive, the negative, the neutral. Karma, the word means action. And all actions actions start like so we have body speech and mind action things we do physically things we say through our speech and then things that arise in our mind the most important is what arise because the first two depends on what arrives in the mind and all of it from time immemorial since our souls have existed

is being recorded in kind of like a database like iCloud or Google+, whatever you use, like infinite. There's no unlimited capacity. But the Tibetan word for mind, for example, is not mind, it's mind continuum because the karma is every instant. I could be talking to you right now, very pleasantly, and have very negative thoughts about, oh yeah, your t-shirt looks ugly, or I'm creating negative karma, even if I'm... And it's moment to moment, and it's constantly being recorded.

And when we die, our root mind, which remains in our heart chakra, And when we die, our root mind, which remains in our heart chakra, so the brain is the cognitive mind and the soul's mind, which we call the root mind, is here. And only that, let's say it's like a chip that just, like a light chip that passes away with that information. And then whichever body we go to, that's what's passed on. I don't know if it's karma or divine timing, but there's something interesting about the fact that you're here today right now. I mean, even the timing of it is extra fascinating to me because I am right now in a moment of reflection and sort of deep inner work

that was catalyzed by my experience visiting the Dalai Lama six weeks ago. Oh, wow. And is also related to some of the inner work that you've done. So going to Dharamsala, spending time with him, having the opportunity to receive Darshan and his wisdom in a very structured kind of environment. Arthur Brooks was hosting it and he had a series of questions and a sort of arc of experience he wanted to take our group on.

But as you know, the Dalai Lama doesn't necessarily play ball with that. Like he's gonna tell you what he wants to tell you or what he thinks that you need to hear or are capable of hearing. And over the course of these two days, pretty much without fail, his response to almost every question

that was asked of him was the same. Like it was the same answer, which I'll track back to love and compassion, of course, but also this idea of the mother's love for the child. And I'm sure there's a version of that transmission that you've probably received many times. And I'm curious about not only on a higher level, like what you've learned from all the time

that you've spent with him and what you've taken away from that, but also how this relationship that you have with him has informed how you've navigated your own healing over the trauma of being abandoned by your mother. So when he says, when you're challenged to feel love or connect with love or to receive love or to give love, reflect upon the mother's love for a child. I'm sure when you, at least at that time, were in a position of

reflecting on the mother's love for a child, all that would produce for you is pain. And it did. Yeah. So it's like, what am I supposed to do with that? Like basically it's the opposite of what he's trying to tell you because you have this experience that is blocking you from being able to kind of embrace that message. I remember his face when I snapped,

like he said something very similar, like all women are mothers and mothers love, because he has had a beautiful mother loving relationship with his mother. His thing with his mom is like intense, right? So he shared that with me and he said, and this is before I actually told him that what happened to me.

And I was, I could feel like, cause I'm on Mars, I'm ruled, but my ruling planet is mars my i'm fire so it's very it was my biggest uh thing that i had to get rid of my anger like if you met me in my 20s and late 20s at least i was a different being i would i couldn't control the anger within me different version of anger uh the whole spectrum and then he was very shocked to hear after that and he just went you know as these tibetans do this all the time to express disapproval and then um was it that meeting no it was a different meeting when he said but your real mother is mother nature, no? And at that time, I had already gone back to Nepal to climb some smaller mountains,

which are in Nepal, 5,000, 6,000 meter peaks, which is also a blessing for me. Like I, by default, started in the Himalayas, which is unusual for other mountaineers. Yeah, they go to the Himalayas after they put their time in with a lot of other mountains. But by default, I started there. So I realized on my own that nature, just being in this pilgrimages, because climbing, because I learned from Tibetans

and Sherpas, it's a very different approach how we climb a mountain. We never go without seeking permission from the mountains. But throughout those process of taking these long journeys in the mountains, I was, I could see that how I was healing. It was, it was really like a healing pilgrimage for me, every single mountain. And so I, at one point he did instruct me to think of like good memories from both my parents and I really struggled at that time to think of anything good positive with my mom now I can but at that time I couldn't see anything and then at that time he had with my father I had a lot of positive memories

and I shared that. And then so he was, you know, just encouraging me to reflect on that during analytical meditation and really give birth to gratitude. Because this is a time when I forgot how to smile. Like I was dead inside. And holiness has done so much things for me, but one of the best things that he's done is made me realize that I can laugh even during my hardest struggles.

And this freed me up. And I can't technically explain how he did it, but the reason why I make fun of all my tragedies today with an open heart, and it's because he showed it showed me the way. Anyway, so over the months, I, you know, I was going back and forth. Usually it was because of work, but he would ask on how I was doing with those kind of meditation. And I kept telling him like nothing is coming up with my mom. And then he just kneeled and politely said,

but she carried you in her womb for nine months, no? And as he was saying it, I saw myself as a fetus, like baby. And so I went back and I would just try to, it was tough at that time because my body was reacting. But to really just even if, so he told me to start at short times and then create a habit every day, even if it's for a minute. So I went step by step thinking of myself as a baby in her womb, thanking her for everything. for the everything but it took years for me to really free from you know sending them gratitude for the life they've brought me in whereas right before that before meeting holly is like why did you bring me into this life when you couldn't take care of me and so it was just again polar opposite perspective do you feel like you've healed that wound?

With my mom? Yeah. I feel so. She's still alive. When I reached the summit of Chomolungma, Everest, at the age of 29, she was the first person I called to thank. She didn't pick up.

It was 6.26 a.m., to be fair. But, you know, just because not taking away anything from what she's done, I'm not saying it's okay what she's done and there's a lot more into it, which the details of which will be in my memoir. But I am so happy she did what she did because if she hadn't left, it wouldn't have created the domino effect of series of events that I had to go through and not make me, I don't think I would be who I am today

because if she hadn't left exactly how she left. Yeah, there is a perspective that she is perhaps your greatest teacher. Yeah. Yeah, and developing gratitude and appreciation for that in light of everything that happened and this, you know, story that has, you know, led to so much pain and hurt, right, to be able to transcend that is a beautiful thing.

It's beautiful and I kind of lived with that till I almost died in COVID and it reappeared and we can get into that later. Yeah, we're gonna work up to that. Meaning it flared up and you realized there was still work you had to do around that. No, because she came back into my life for a different reason.

And yeah, it was a lot of things just came up. Things got messy. Yeah. Well, when I came was every both sides of my family were fighting on who to take credit and there's a specific point in kumbu icefall where i stood and i looked back towards the summit and because my satellite phone was beeping with all the news of what was happening in bangladesh step-mom at that time was in the front page of every newspaper.

So these people that essentially abandoned you were suddenly showing up to take credit for everything that you had done. Yeah. That's the comedy of the human condition. Had I known climbing one mountain would change so many things for me, then I would have probably strategized

climbing that mountain much earlier. So, but no, it's not just parents. I had more relatives appear in my life that I hadn't even known of. Everyone came back into my life. And we can talk about that later. What is the essence of, you know, what you learned from your time with the Dalai Lama?

Like if you could condense it down into a few pearls of wisdom that have been instructive and formative for you. Oh my God, this is so, I could write a whole book on that, but I would say transforming obstacles into opportunities, lesson number one, and the concepts of karma. Like once I, you know, my first teaching of karma started at the age of 21.

And throughout my entire 20s, I would get a lot of, this is like a very young mind to comprehend such vast teachings, right? And a lot of the teachings that he gave me on karma in my 20s I only absorbed it after moving to LA in my late 30s and so because when you're next to the teaching itself not that I took it for granted but it was so much in a very short time it was so much that was passed on to me that I didn't really, I wasn't fully able to digest it, see it. Well, you have to sort of leave the metaphorical cave and go live your life. Exactly. And when things come up,

that's when you have the opportunity to practice those ideas, right? Otherwise it's just theory. Yeah. If you stay in Dharamshala and immunize yourself from those kinds of life experiences. They sent me to the hub of samsara that is Los Angeles. I know you're here, right?

It's all gonna come up, right? Plenty of opportunity to practice. I also, it did resurface a lot of things because for once I was out of, whether it's Bangladesh or the place that I got sick and becoming a national figure in Bangladesh, life got really messy for me. And I couldn't heal in that environment. So for me to take this distance and also finding so many different practitioners or healers in this city. Like that was life-changing for me. So I know that even though I struggled the first few years of being here in terms of work and finding my community and just like, it's a huge city, you know,

like it's hard to fit in here from a place like, I always lived in small towns, Kathmandu, you know, the entire city I know by heart. Dharamsala, it's not even a small town. It's, what would you call it? I don't know. You called it a village. Yeah, I mean, it's a tiny place. Yeah, I'm used to that kind of place. So that's why I live in Venice, because I know the two mile by two mile route.

That kind of is my- And it is kind of its own thing. Yeah. But it's a bubble. And I realize every time I leave LA, how bougie and how pampered we are in this world. This is so cushioned. For sure.

I mean, there's no question about it. When you're in Dharamshala, I mean, if you go anywhere in India, I mean, it's such a mind fuck because it's like traveling to a different planet, you know, as somebody who's lived in Los Angeles for a long time. And you can't help but have a different perspective

on, you know, just how much we have and also how different our relationship is with spirituality and perhaps like what's most important. Because when you spend time with people who have nothing and are more joyful than most of the people that you encounter in the Western world, you can't help but sort of begin to deconstruct like, you know, the priorities of life. I was also like, it was eyeopening for me to see how many people

who I used to look up, whether they're A-listers or like big names, they're really suffering, man. Like people are really suffering in this town. And I still don't understand why you have so much money, everything basically, everyone has so much resources here, but still can be so unhappy. Well, they're trying to stuff the God-shaped hole with all of those things. And the more you do it and it doesn't like deliver on that implicit promise,

the more suffering you're gonna reap upon yourself, right? Until you have a reckoning and you decide that you're gonna approach your life differently. And that's an affliction of the Western way of doing things and all of the messaging that we kind of absorb every single day, as long as we can remember, that tells us that the path to happiness is built on this path of accumulation and power, property, and prestige. And this is a town where there's a lot of people that have a lot of those

things, but what they're missing is any kind of relationship with faith and spirituality, relationship with other human beings that they care about. Like all of these things that we know are integral to living a meaningful, happy life, but they become deprioritized for the sake of these other kind of goals. And that's what's producing all of the pain and suffering, I think, for too many people.

And it's just writ large in this town because of just the nature of the business here, et cetera. When you're in Dharamsala though, you're nestled up against the Himalayas. You can see these snow-capped mountains. It's quite beautiful. But what you might not immediately understand or appreciate is that those are just, that's just the first range.

These are tiny foothills, like the real Himalayan peaks are like two ranges behind that that you can't even see. And those mountains that you see from the village, you're like, wow, those are huge mountains. Those are nothing compared to the mountains that you see from the village, you're like, wow, those are huge mountains. Those are nothing compared to the mountains that you've climbed. And the culture just is, you know,

you said like climbers and mountaineers have to work their way up to, you know, climbing the Himalayas, but people in Northern India, they're just out on those mountains all the time. So it's not surprising that you found it sort of natural to begin there and did it through like joining those people. Yeah, every time in Nepal, have you been to Nepal yet? No.

You gotta go. I've only been to India that one time. Wow, well Nepal's next because that's a whole level of like so much spirituality just in one place and it's buzzing. I think you're going to love it. And also you need to go to Everest at some point. I don't know if I need to do that. There's too many people up there already.

No, we go on a season when that shit show is not happening. I never take people up there anymore during spring season. Anyway, but when I was going to Nepalal because tibetan the second biggest largest refugee community is based in nepal because that's another route to come in from tibet all my colleagues that i was working with happened to be just outdoorsy mountain people so it literally was like hey like over the weekend you go for a pub or drink. We didn't have that back then. Let's go to the mountains.

So it was just, I was friends with Sherpa people. Sherpa, originally, like Sherpa means coming from the east, implying east of Tibet. So technically, they're Tibetan origin that migrated over 15th and 16th century to this side of the mountain. So Everest, which is a British dude's name. Yeah, you mentioned the Tibetan name for it. Can you say that again? Chomolungma. And that means?

So mother goddess of the universe. It's a very feminine entity. That's a much better name. Yeah, and the goddess is called Myolang Sangma. And she's the goddess of inexhaustible giving. Only if you respect her and go abide by her tradition. And there's, I forget how many centuries ago this text was acquired, but it's a text or the prayer that bows like humbles everything in her feet so we do this puja or a ritual prayer ritual in base camp before approaching the mountain asking for her forgiveness first saying confessing that we're about to step on you for a long period of time

so we even bring in our crampons and ice sacks all kinds of objects that we're going to take up ask for forgiveness beforehand for hurting her promising that we're never going to leave trash or not hurt her in any way and there's a series of things and you know the chanting goes on for hours and hours and you just keep repeating. And then the Lama, local Lama looks for signs, positive signs from her. There are many ways to decipher it, whether it's a raven sitting on the flagpole or something, things like that.

And only after those approvals come, we have a celebration. And that's basically- And the green light to go. Wow, that's very cool. And we did- And that's passed- And the green light to go. Wow, that's very cool. And we did- And that's passed down- Centuries.

Yeah, through the Sherpa lineage. Yeah. Yeah. No Sherpa will approach any mountain without a puja, even if the client doesn't wanna do it. So in K2, which is in Pakistan, in a very predominantly Muslimlim society we did there there is no culture of doing this kind of puja but we still did it i did it i took in like i said i

had two of my main teachers like supporting the whole climb of k2 and we re um so k2 again thanks to the british the dudes came in and was like rename k1 k2 k3 k4 g1 g2 very creative what is what's the original name of k2 it's called chaguri uh king of all mountains so it's a masculine entity and god is he a masculine entity he's freaking like just brutal i i the whole time i thought like there was a god sitting on the summit and saying oh you want to come to the top let me just throw you a rock and see if you can prove prove me anyway so we did a puja asking for forgiveness from choguri and that puja was attended by people from all faiths, including local Muslim people,

which are the Balti people in Pakistan. All that to say is like, so I'm very grateful that my introduction to climbing was that before I came out into the world and went into every other continent where I climbed with Westerners and other people. But it's very hard for me to approach a mountain without the rituals.

Like it's just, we call it the approach, how you approach a mountain. Cause you know, also we function in a very, if I may say white cis dude, like predominantly it's all male and the energy is very different. Yeah. And meanwhile, none of the Sherpas are appropriately sort of,

credited with just how extraordinary they are. Like we're in Hollywood, they're sort of the Sherpas are sort of the stunt men of the climbing world, right? Like they do all these incredible things and they're just sort of overlooked because they're in service to somebody else who gets all the credit.

But these guys are going up and somebody else who gets all the credit. But these guys are going up and down these mountains like all the time. Not just that, they're carrying the load. They're overlooked. Of course. I mean, the whole history of mountaineering is like colonizers. It was a very colonial approach. We are going to conquer the British and the Italy fighting, different countries fighting to get to the top of mountains. Who's going to take credit? The first successful ascent that happened, it's called the British Expedition,

even though the person who climbed, two person who climbed, two people, Tenzing Norgay, Nepali, he had four times gone up to that level. And that's why he was so important in the British expedition. Before Hillary. Before Hillary.

And Hillary was, Sir Edmund Hillary, he was one of the most kindest human beings. I've never had the luck to meet him, but I know his, I just actually returned from a trip recently with Peter Hillary, his son. We were guiding in Antarctica. They're one of the most

humblest families I know in the mountaineering tradition. They've done so much good for the region. Aside from him, like there's, and he's always given credit to Tenzing Norgay, but Tenzing Norgay till his death didn't get credited. His grants, you know, three generations have passed by. Pretty much 70 years after his ascent, there's finally a movie being made about a person who's died. And so that just shows how far behind we are in terms of giving these people credit. But the other thing I wanted to say is like, yes, we don't give them credit. But as an audience, every spring season, when we hear of, if I may use the term, Tom, Dick and Harry climbing up the mountain, fucking ask, who the fuck took you up there? What are their names?

Don't just say 50 Sherpas went up. It's like cattle, you know. Tenzing Sherpa went up. Sonam Sherpa went up. Give them credit. It doesn't take away from it. My friend, you know, between two brothers, they have, I think, 56 total summits of Everest alone, just one mountain. Kamirita Sherpa, the younger one, he did, he just broke his own record of climbing the mountain 30 times.

Wow. No human in the world has done that. Imagine a white man doing that. He would be plastered. Yeah, it'd be such a big deal. And this guy does it. It's like, oh, well, that's what they do. No, nobody even knows about him. Nobody knows the person's name or anything.

But this is- It's wild. But this is, whose fault is it? Who doesn't give the credit? I mean, I myself within National Geographic has been fighting for this for almost 10 plus years now. It only started changing from 2018 when we did our first, I don't know if you've seen National Geographic magazine, the one, sorry for our racist coverage. We did one cover, but that took a lot of work.

And then BLM happened and all this talk started happening. It's the Westerners who hasn't been crediting the Sherpa people, you know, majority. I'm not saying all of them. But so it's, and as an audience, now that the world is so open, we can always ask, who's the one who's led you up there? Who was carrying your oxygen? Who was your base camp manager? The freaking base camp, which is almost one hour to one and a half hours of walking, like it's almost like a little village that itself is on a moving chunk of glacier.

And I have footages that happen of, you know, what happens before clients go in. It's built on the back of Sherpa people. It's really hard work to make a freaking base camp out of a moving glacier. So that itself is made by Sherpa people. So when Westerners come in and say, oh, I did this climb unsupported. Hell no. There's no fucking way you could, even if you spend half a day in base camp, which is not usual, it's way longer, you've taken support. So, yeah. Sorry, this aggravates me a lot. And listen, like, a lot of work remains, you know, to tell those stories. And they're incredible stories.

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and we have a lot of laughs along the way. So subscribe to Soul Boom on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Of all the mountains that you've climbed, seven summits, I mean, I have to think that K2 was the most challenging and difficult. Well, all the mountains in life that I've climbed, seven summits. I mean, I have to think that K2 was the most challenging and difficult. Well, all the mountains in life that I've climbed. The seven summits happened when, it was also a different time in my life.

Yeah, I mean, that was 2012 to 2015. Yeah, well, I finished. So the first five of the seven, including Everest, I did back to back in one and a half years, just like I was going like crazy till I ended up with a frostbite in Denali. And this finger, which was cut up to here, it literally grew back.

You can go to Siddharth Saini and see my nails, how this case study, they call it a miracle case study. Anyway, we can talk about that later. Your finger grew back? Yes. Like I have pictures. Like a lizard? Really?

I mean, it was cut off? So this whole part was cut off. This all grew back. Including like the nail, the part with the nail and all of that? Yeah, so nail was chopped off. I have pictures of, in case you don't believe me. So this is again-

You re-grew your finger. No, this is blessed by his holiness. I've worn this since I have pictures of in case you don't believe me. So this is again- You regrew your finger. No, this is the best blessed by his holiness. I've worn this since I have had- What is that, an emerald, an opal? Emerald and opal. An emerald. Yeah. Wow.

Turquoise and what was the other one you just said? Opal. Opal. Yeah, it's beautiful. And that's on the finger that grew back. Yeah. So the finger grew back because it was super powered through the ring

and the energy of the Dalai Lama. And nine surgeries. Yeah, and Cedars-Sinai, the best of Western medicine, all cooperating to regrow a finger. But you know, like when you get a frostbite, let's say if you get it in January, there are every chance that you could be amputated in august like you don't know how it's going to develop so they so the first choice citizen a doctor gave me was like we can chop it off right

now so that because it was already damaged up to here but it's gonna uh and then he was giving me options of the different types of uh what do you call them like bionic different ways i could have a prosthetic finger and i looked at him and i said do you have like a wolverine claw because i was i thought he was joking and he looked at me and said waspia this is really serious like you can damage rest of your hand if you if you don't measure it properly the The other way is to live it out, go through the pain. It's going to be intense pain, but we can, you know, because it was like microscopic level, you know, they had to do it in slices. It's kind of like the opposite of burn injury. So they didn't want to chop off different parts,

like because some cells were damaged and some weren't. Anyway, so all that to say that when that frostbite thing happened, Karmapa, who, I don't know if you know of him, but he's another very prominent teacher in Tibetan Buddhism. But he's very like, he's not angry, but when he talks, it's very like it pierces through all your lives. Like, you're just like, ah. So he just looked at me and he said

you're doing it too fast uh and as he was saying it i realized wow you're right like i was just going banging out the summits yeah without not not yeah not really living through the journey and so the frostbite happened it basically stopped me for almost a year like because I couldn't the recovery was nine months so I couldn't go back to cold cold zone with that finger but during that time I really you know and by this time my whole life had changed you know because after Everest everything had changed and I was a national figure which brought in more harm than good. Being a single woman and, you know,

doing what I'm doing in a country like Bangladesh isn't, you know, fame isn't the best thing for us. I'm not- What do you mean specifically? I mean, you become this national, you go from, you know, somebody nobody's ever heard of to literally becoming like your country's

biggest national hero, right? Yeah, I mean- Yes, is that true or no? Well, yeah. I mean, I did Kili, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, and then Everest. So that was the timeline. Aconcagua, which is the highest mountain of South America, is also the highest mountain outside the Himalayas.

That got a lot of coverage because I somehow timed it on the victory day of Bangladesh. So the whole campaign of climbing the seven summits was done to celebrate 40 years of Bangladesh's women's progress. And Akung Kago was in December and Everest started in March. So when I started going for Everest, there was a lot of publicity about it because it was Everest but I also knew that nobody believed in me like everyone wanted me to fail and there was a lot there was so much media pressure but I really didn't want that I wanted to just have my own

spiritual time and climb the mountain a lot of other shit shows happen and then when i came down and there's a specific point in kumbu icefall when the cell reception and the sat you know i was checking um news so when you're coming down you gotta be as quick as possible because this is all already monsoon season coming so everything's starting to melt so from you know the crevices that have ladders for example those ladders fall in. So a lot of rerouting has to happen. So you want to make sure that you have enough energy, food, everything to come down very fast. So we came down, summited on 26 May, came down by 28th.

Me and Neema Sharpa, who was my brother, he's passed away, and my climbing teacher. And so we came down and in that cell reception, the first 50 messages was like, you're so-and-so is on the front page claiming to be your mother. You're so-and-so like, no. And I remember looking at the new, like, can you imagine coming down 29,029 feet, hypoxic, you're still, you're hungry. You just went through like avalanches and this whole three months long expedition. And the first news is like your two sides of your family is fighting and I at that point I look back you can't really see the summit but kind of towards the summit I look back and I was like should I just go back because I don't want to deal with this right now and from that

time when I came back to Bangladesh I mean in the VIP section there was my father's side was one side you know every there were two village like two sorry there were two buses full of people that came from my village my so even though we live in the city we all come from particular villages and my dad's village is one of the most conservative part of bangladesh and these people have all like my pictures on their crown buses and drums and just like before i was uh i was um because i got into a lot of trouble as an activist and i was the i was bringing shame for my village a lot happened with the chinese government that's a whole nother story but for my village. A lot happened with the Chinese government. That's a whole other story. But so my village people actually didn't recognize me at that time.

They were ashamed because intelligence went into the villages looking for me, Bangladeshi intelligence. And now the same people traveled all the way from my village to the capital in buses with food. And they brought pajeros to take me. And like everyone was there and you know in the pictures you see me smiling because that's then I had to be Wasfya out there but internally that was probably one of the lowest moment in my life like externally I'm having to be Wasfya

and Azreen but internally having my parents come back everyone who came back to my life, yes, it was great. But I also knew the reason was wrong. I knew why they came back. And so that kind of, yeah, I didn't realize how big it was going to, like, I didn't think it out. And also because I think it was a lot of people doubted me and it was kind of like a slap on their face. Like I told you I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna do it and I did it. Because people in Bangladesh speak a lot.

They don't, not everyone is a doer. We generally- They talk a lot of shit. Yeah. Yeah. And then- Do you find that, is that motivating for you? No.

When you hear that, you sort of think, well, I'll show them or is that dispiriting? No, I think my personality, I'm a doer. I come from the karma family or I'm ruled by Mars. I don't know if you're familiar with the Vedic astrology. My wife is very familiar, but you'll have to fill in my gaps. Yeah, if you give me your birth time, I can figure it out for you.

But it was very important for me to understand what planet I'm ruled by, which is basically, it's called the Ascendant Lord or your Lugna Lord. So I am ruled by Mars. It's the energy of pioneers, athletes, doers. Everything should have happened two days ago, that kind of energy. But the fully embodied positive part of being ruled by Mars is the commander in chief who doesn't fight himself or themselves. They sit back, send off warriors to fight, which I didn't know before. I was the wounded. I was functioning from a wounded warrior stage.

And my progression has been to learn how to be a skillful warrior, which I don't think I've been there yet, but I'm learning and I'm getting there. So I don't fight anymore. I don't do my activism anymore like how I would have in my 30s or 20s. And I think 40 was a major turning point also of realization, thanks to Los Angeles. In other words, this wounded warrior incarnation of the Mars energy, in your case would be one

that was fueled in part by this pain body over the abandonment, right? Like this latent anger that gets translated into action. So that being sort of an impetus to these challenges that have like served you well and given you this platform and all the good kind of things that have come from that, but recognizing that there's still healing to be done

so that you can ascend into a more of a commander in chief energy. Like that's a cool way of thinking about it. What do people misunderstand about Everest? We all see the photos of the train of people going up to the top now and how it's littered with what people leave behind there. Yeah, like, and I know that you,

I mean, you like had to kind of walk past dead people, right, that you had spent time with in base camp. Yeah. But it's easy to make presumptions or conjure an idea of what that experience is because so many people have done it and they talk about it and we see these videos and these photographs. But where are our kind of assumptions about that wrong? I would say you don't need $180,000 to climb Everest, first of all. Do not pay these Western companies to take you for

that much money or even locals. There are local people. End of the day, it's the local people who's doing the work. So you might as well better off going with a local company with Sherpas, giving them credit and paying way less. So when I did Everest, for example, I did it all like in a very small team. I knew I was going to climb with Nima. I hired everything separately because I already knew the cost structure of what happens. The permit is $13,000. That's the main chunk of money. Every single person going past base camp, whether you make it to camp one or two has to pay 13 000 that goes straight to the pockets of uh politicians or locals uh but it doesn't go to the locals of the region it goes to katmundu

so sherpa people are still not benefiting from that most your uh foreign companies i would uh let's say even if they charge you 180 000 or 20 000 or whatever number the maximum that would go to a sherpa person which is pretty much their whole year's earning six thousand dollars maximum and these these each of these sherpa mostly males have number of children to feed you know and they're the main bread earners so i would just say structure it in a way i i think everyone needs to yes there is the commercialization of it but sherpa people do need that money that's their living so i don't think we can change we can you know at one point everyone's like just barricade Everest, don't let any more people in.

No, this is always going to be attracting people. We cannot stop that. This is the highest summit of the world. But we can bring in regulation, right? But the stuff that you see out here in news, I will say that does happen, but that's only a very small time on the mountain i can show you two hours of presentation of how remote and silent of this mountain is in different parts of the year so before i used when i used to guide for everest base camp um i've now moved

everything to fall season like i only take clients towards the end of the year. There's not a one person on the trail. And it's so nice and pleasant. Weather is much better. Then how come that's not the crowded time? That's never portrayed in the media. Because the weather season up on the top part of the mountain,

May is really the perfect time. Fall season can be cold up there. So a lot of, very few, if anyone is climbing the mountain at that time, it would be like the rough Europeans trying to do cool stuff, like in a two-person team. So it's only in a very specific time window in May when you see that like the traffic jam going up.

So if you notice everyone's summit days, it's usually all like Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay summit in May 29th, I summit in May 26th. It's all towards that last week that people start summiting 1920. And, you know, with the current, the way things are planetary wise,

climate crisis wise, the weather window is like the year that I summited, there were only three nights you could go to the summit. Whereas even like less than 10 years ago, it was much wider window to go reach the summit. And, you know, like the monsoon weather that happens in lower region, in Bangladesh, and this, in my talks, I show this without the borders is like whatever is happening in Bay of Bengal,

that kind of predicts how the wind is gonna form above Everest during the summit season. It's all connected. Yeah, the interconnectedness of everything, which is very Tibetan Zen Buddhist, right? Yeah, and the other thing that really fascinated me is like when you have the orbital perspective for off- Like being on the summit.

Or just from space, just looking at the Himalayas, Ketu, which is a masculine entity, and Everest, which is a feminine energy, they're kind of like the head and tail of this kind of backbone that's going all the way from Nepal to, it's just so beautiful. K2 isn't as high as Everest, but technically much more difficult.

And in your case, there's quite a story around your ascent of K2. Yeah, so we are currently filmmaking a feature doc about it, which would give the more inner journey of K2. But geopolitically speaking, K2 is in a very, it's one of the most dangerous zones of the world. Dangerous. I mean, if you're climbing K2, nothing else can be dangerous.

And I remember, so it took me, I was the first Bangladeshi to get a permit to climb the mountain 50 years after Bangladesh was formed. So to get the permit, so you need two, one is a trekking permit and a climbing permit. And I needed to acquire two for k2 and also broad peak so i climbed broad peak before climbing k2 which is another 8 000 meter peak um people underestimated but it's such a long mountain it's like it it can so many people have died in broad peak i saw with my own eyes one guy just falling, like when he sat down just to rest and he couldn't hold and he just fell on the Chinese side. Fell to his death.

Yeah. Right in front of you. Yeah. I mean, on K2, the shit I've seen, I'm still waking up from it two years after. More than, yeah, literally two years after. So that's also another story. Like I have PTSD and stuff that I have been dealing with. But K2, I've seen so many dead bodies in my entire career. I actually have an album in my phone called I See Dead People.

And so, sorry. Of all that, oh my God. That's so heavy. The type of dead bodies I've seen on K2 is crazy. It's like all broken because, you know, the body freezes overnight. It becomes super heavy, super hard. So it's very hard to, first of all, move it. You need more than 8 to 12 people to carry a body.

But when the winds come and it's like tossing the body, the first thing that happened, it breaks the neck. So there's a lot of headless bodies on these mountains. Majority of them are headless because this is the most, you know, like thinnest part of. And they're just up there because there aren't eight to 12 people to retrieve the bodies.

And so they just persist up there. Usually on Everest, you need, so Nepal climbing scene is much more logistically advanced, whereas compared to Pakistan. Pakistan is almost like 50 years behind. There's no logistical infrastructure to do anything out there. But in Nepal, usually your family has to come with the request. No one's going to move anyone's dead body unless you ask for it. the request no one's going to move anyone's dead body unless you ask for it um so for example before i went i left a will saying if i die in death zone death zone is 26 000 feet up where

human bodies basically stop reproducing any cells you lose brain cells at a rate faster than it can be replaced so your body's basically eating yourself out. So you spend as less time possible in dead zone. So that 26,000 to 29,000 feet is the hardest push given also that you've already been on the mountain for almost so many weeks already. So your body's all dying. So I left a will saying,

if my death happens in dead zone, do not worry about bringing me back because I'm already A, probably left with the best view. B, I don't want to, you know, endanger my shepherd brothers bringing my body from up there because it's one of the most riskiest job to bring.

Can you imagine holding a frozen body through a steep hill all the way from, like, why would I let anyone go through that and the cost of it is super expensive um but then i also knew that if i died below dead zone my brothers would come and get me so i mean nepal's been my spiritual home from so long ago so i had that in the back of my head. But to answer your question, the bodies aren't being brought back because the families probably preferred them to be there. How many dead bodies are up there then? Over 250 dead bodies.

So up there, you're hypoxic. So this is also part of the trainings, like meditation and the mind training part of it, because I knew what I was going to face up there. But in that low oxygen level, your mind is so fucked. It's like you don't have energy or the capability to make rational decision.

So when you see a dead body, even from the side of your eye, automatically your mind starts this negative conversation. Am going to be next of course who i could be next or it's just spiraling down and so to really bring myself out of the spiral and like saying okay do not focus over there sometimes it's just a hand like sometimes you'd be like oh is there is there trash? And I have pictures of this. Like, no, it's a dead body of the back without the head. Like it's kind of like being on a shroom trip where you're seeing stuff

and you really don't know what the hell that is. And you look closely and it's like, oh shit, it is what I think it is. In terms of making sure your mindset is dialed in for those kind of super acute situations, how important is or has been your meditation practice? Like what is the relationship between meditation, how you bring meditation into your daily life

and how does that inform like your ability to kind of navigate such heightened experiences? I always say meditation or mind training stuff is 90% of the game. Because I've seen world-class athletes, I've seen Olympians go up there. K2. Even Everest. Camp 3, this woman, I won't mention her name, super famous athlete. This avalanche happening in a different mountain.

And she freaks out saying, oh, I left my daughter at home. I'm like, oh, all this time you didn't know your daughter was at home. No, it's just Everest gives you, mountains like Everest gives you an excuse to give up every single moment. So for your mind not to, because nothing is going to go according to plan up there. You can prepare as much as you can. Because nothing is going to go according to plan up there. You can prepare as much as you can. And, you know, there's a saying that as a mountaineer,

you have a backup plan of a backup plan of a backup plan. But also go in knowing that none of it may not work. And you have to be adaptive next day if you wake up and see this. And a lot of people can't deal with that. So, yes, of course, physical training is needed. Of course, the high altitude training is needed. All those is required. But if you don't have the mindset to deal with it, you're not gonna make it out.

You're not gonna last out there. And forget about K2, like just getting to base camp of K2, 90 kilometers. Like most people get sick just going in. And this is not with the tea house lodge situation like Nepal. This is all remote as part of the karakoram and if you have to define what that mindset is the mindset that is going to allow you to to succeed

in that environment what is that number one positive just that and that there's a solution to everything no matter how things are turning out. And that, you know, there are some days when people wake up and then the things that it's doomsday, nothing like people give up, but really patience is the biggest thing that you need up there and wise decision-making skills. But you can't make those wise decisions unless you're in a calm, neutral state, right? So, so much of it is about adaptability and, you know, being able to have some equanimity or neutrality amidst, you know, chaotic, shape-shifting circumstances. The other thing that really, it's not formal meditation, but really helped me was having a connection to Goddess Chamul Nungma. That started months before that through His Holiness Dalai Lama. formal meditation but really helped me was having a connection to goddess chamulungma that started

months before that through his holiness dalai lama and he told me who she was and really whether you're in a dream state physical like waking state like having that connection with her and she will welcome you if you reach out and you'll hear many sherpas say this over and over they've had so many dreams about her the kam Kamirita Sherpa, who I was just talking about, who is the highest record holder, 30 climbs. He quit his 26th, I believe, 26th or 27th push because he woke up with a dream in camp four, I believe, where the goddess was telling her, no, you're overdoing it. And she backed off. Like that's how respectful Sherpa people are. And I also think it's important to state here,

like in the Western media, especially in Western media, in all media, but especially out here, people just say, oh, these Sherpas, like Sherpa has become, and I have been called a Sherpa in my life. Oh, will you be my Sherpa? Right, it's a monolith. But it's a derogatory term because not all Sherpas are climbers.

Not all Sherpas are porters. Sherpas are also doctors. Sherpas are also engineers. So for the current generation, so I know it's said in a good way, positive way, when like someone told me, oh, you want to be my Sherpa? Like, oh, you're someone who's going to guide me or help me that's how it's said but from their perspective or if you were a Sherpa person like a lot of my Sherpa friends they don't want their children to be ever going back to the

mountains they don't want to do that work and they don't want to be identified with that work anymore because they started as porters, right? For the British. And then they did all the work. It's hard work that never been recognized for. So Sherpa is the ethnicity name, but it's also the culture name. So it gets all muddled up.

There are many other ethnicities that are working in the mountains. There are Magars, there are Gurus, there are Rais. The media just porters everyone as Sherpa people and it's important because in Nepal there's so many different ethnicities and unfortunately there's a class system uh there's kind of like a hierarchy and so Sherpa people don't like from their angle they're very proud people and so calling a Rai a Sherpa or a different ethnicity a Sherpa, it's kind of insulting. That's interesting. I didn't know anything about that.

I mean, I suspect the use of the word, there's no intent to be using it in a negative way. It's just a lack of education around that. Yeah, but i won't mention people from a certain country but there's specific group of people that also use that term not from western world in asia there's a one country that treats sherpa people as like as if they're slaves like the term sherpa means oh you're supposed to be helping me but um so yeah this uh i have a great article on it i can

send you later but just really because there's the new generation of sherpa people they're all in new york they're they're they want to be uber drivers rather than being in um the mountain they don't they don't look at that job as um you know so what i'm trying to say there's many sherpas that are just engineers or doctors or in so many different professions that are, I guess, from an angle looked more respectfully at. Yeah, understood. With respect to your K2 attempt, the thing we haven't talked about is the fact that

you had a really severe case of COVID prior to that. Like not, I mean, not that long before you made the attempt, right? Yeah. So originally I meant to go in 2021 because I wanted to time it with 50 years of Bangladesh's independence. In 2020, March, sorry, end of february march ish um i was coming back from hawaii after doing like 19 back-to-back talks 17 or 19 and i was very tired my immune system was down and i hopped into a flight back to la and as i entered the plane I instantly knew that half of that plane was coming from Asia and they were all affected. And then that was the night that-

Was this in March of 2020? When was this? March of 2020. So this was like- Before America officially closed everything. Wow. And then hospitals didn't know what to do. They didn't know anything about COVID. But there was this one night when I believe it was Trump who called all Americans in Europe

back to come back to the country. And that group had just come in. And in LAX, I was stuck in this group of people just back from Europe with the Italian virus. I forget which version of it was like the first one, the lethal one that was killing everyone in Italy. So everyone was coughing and I think I was exposed to it for a long time. And so I got COVID, I went flatline. Yeah, your heart stopped actually. It was that bad. But I entered, you know, doctors or my friends, everyone out here was freaking out.

But that was one of the most profoundly enlightening time for me when I went out. I was, you know, a practice called, are you familiar with Tibetan Book of the Dead? So we study, I have a long way to go still, but we prepare for death from, it's part of our practice. And if you study the Tibetan Book of Dead and a lot of the things that are there, it didn't actually work out for me of what I thought it was going to be a tunnel vision, you know, like the typical description. The light. but it was for me and a detailed version of it will be in my book but it was a profound kind of like a floating light and I it was I could feel it was me but there was no physical version of me

and my teachers all four of my main teachers were there and I could hear their voice. But I couldn't see them, but I could feel them. And it was just vast as the ocean. And, you know, holiness was speaking, Dalai Lama was speaking, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who's my root teacher, he was there. And this one line from my another teacher, Karmapa, he said, you have work to do still. And I was so, I was, because I had suffered so much physically, I think that light really was healing.

So I didn't want to come back. But Karmapa, I think, was it Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said something from the side? No, Asphia. A very gentle way he was trying to bring me back. But then Karmapa was very like sharp and just says things that just jabs you in the heart. And he said that and that's when I woke up. You snapped back into the body. So you literally flatlined.

Yes. How long were you flatlined? It's not finished. Then I got diagnosed with pneumonia and my heart wasn't like, they didn't even tell me that I had pneumonia because my Chinese doctor who I was who I had prescribed his she's a herbalist she was coming to see me and she said if we told you that your heart was really struggling like

with everyone dying in the hospital like people were dying at this time they didn't know what the hell to do said we I don't think you would, you had so much. And I think I was like, I had a lot of anxiety at that time. I was all alone. Like all my relatives, everyone was at home. And lockdowns were happening at this point. And then they won't keep me in the hospital. You're in Venice, so far away from home, yeah.

And also people treated me like I could kill them because they didn't know what the hell was going on. They didn't know at that time that if you come, you know, like even getting grocery or anything. Right, this is when we were spraying our produce and all that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. Early, early days.

Yeah, so long story short, it was a huge recovery, 18 months recovery, but my left side. Hold on a second, you're jumping ahead. So you flatlined, do you know how long you flatlined for? No, but it should be there several seconds, I think. But for me, it was a long time. Right, your experience of it was different from like the actual amount of time.

Yeah. But it wasn't like they pronounced you dead or anything like that. But like, did they have to like put the, what do they call those things, the paddles? What do you call them? The paddles. They had it ready, they were about to zap.

And I was so disappointed seeing, like I was just hanging out with my teachers. I hadn't seen for a long time. And then I'm out into this reality. I was disappointed to be alive again, to be very frank. And so what do you make of that experience? I don't know yet. But that experience didn't stop there.

It prolonged into an 18 months long recovery where my entire left side was you had bell's palsy yes but also paralysis my kidney was stopped not functioning well my spleen had gone like entire left side was dysfunctional i couldn't walk to the kitchen by myself everything was really hard and that was my physical injury. But that period of 18 months was probably the most inner work. So the left side is related to mommy wounding

or not necessarily wounding, but mommy side. So it's all coming up. Everything came up. It's all spilling out. Yeah. And you thought you had healed. I thought I was healed. So this is like a reckoning. But also at that time, I was still in contact with her.

And so it was aggravating me a lot every time she checked in. And so that is the time when I cut her off from my life, 2020, when I was healing. So this is a time when a lot of, from 2020 onwards to now, I've somehow gotten connected to a lot of shamans and healers around LA.

And now I know why my teachers send me in. Because I was, I really struggled in LA and I was always like, every time I would talk to my teacher, I was like, is my karma over now? Can I go back? Like, can I leave? Yeah, haven't I done enough to my teacher, I was like, is my karma over now? Can I go back? Like, can I leave? Yeah, haven't I done enough?

Like we're done with this, right? So from that perspective, there is this idea or this perspective that COVID is this gift, this very challenging gift that's been delivered to you and this very long recovery as a way of slowing you down, like to your point earlier about, you know, being impressed with the idea of patience, right?

Patience is something you resist. So you contract this virus. You have a very difficult time for a long time, but this is forcing you to stop, right? So that you can actually confront this thing and finally heal it. Yeah. So I think healing has to be like, it's not like we reach a summit and just remain there. It has to be step-by-step. And up to that point, whatever healing work I had done, especially concerning my mom was from the time that she

had left me to then whereas I never addressed the little girl that yeah that was there when she existed and was still in our lives so and I that moment and or the period made me realize how entire like since 29 to now, or then, I was overcompensating, not just for my parents, in every work that I did, because I was still functioning from a wounded state. So the hyper performance, like all of that is like a product of this unhealed wound.

Yeah, the short version of why I went to, how I went to the top of all mountains is unresolved childhood trauma. It's true though, right? Which is majority of people on top of their game. Yeah. But so that period made me, and I was finally ready to like just heal like I'm just done you know and so I really used

that time to deep dive into every work that I could have done and like my teacher teacher said that you know you've cleared almost 20 years of karma in that one year 2020 and had I not like before I moved so I moved to LA permanently right before pandemic end of 2019 not knowing that the pandemic was gonna hit before moving here I was almost for years I was just every continent like I was performing performing performing achieving running away the whole time, kind of. Not necessarily running away. I think the environment in Bangladesh, being the figure I was, I couldn't really do the work. You cannot do the work where you've, you can't heal in the place that you got sick.

So I think it was, it was all meant to happen. I was sent here so I could heal properly. I could create the community or find the community of healers and practitioners who would help me. So it's been, I mean, I'm still healing. Like I said, we don't reach a summit and just exist. What are some of the modalities

that have been most helpful? Well, somatic therapy. I went to therapy since I was a, you know, late teenager, but, and talk therapy does help. But I had a lot of stored trauma in my body from 2020 with this physical illness and all the work that I did. Like my body is so light now like i can't tell you rich like in 2020 up to 2021 i was carrying so much baggage in my body my everything cleared up like i look younger now than i looked in my late 20s because because i just let that out and you know there are many ways I've done it uh and it's a bit esoteric I mean very esoteric so um I went to all kinds of practitioners but the other cool part of it is like when I because I couldn't go back to Nepal at that time no traveling was happening but when

I ended up going to Nepal in 2022 I hadn't even discussed anything with my Tibetan teacher, Digo Khyentse Yangsir Mpishay. But when he saw me, he told me the version he saw. And it was literally like he watched me throughout the whole thing. He knew everything that I was going through and he was doing his prayers for me. It's just crazy. From the time that I entered the dream state or not dream state, death state and came back. Like this was all just divinely orchestrated and he knew how it was gonna unfold the whole time. No, I mean, they were worried as hell. There was no guarantee of,

even the medical system here, like it took me, like I had to figure all of it out. Bangladesh has better medical system than America, I have to tell you. Like if I was in Bangladesh, I would get VVIP treatment and just the way insurance and shit works here, it's crazy. Anyway, that's a whole nother topic.

But what was I gonna say? So then 2022 summer is when I ended up climbing the hardest mountain on the planet. I mean, during that 18 months 2022 summer is when I ended up climbing the hardest mountain on the planet. I mean, during that 18 months, when you're trying to physically heal, you have kidney issues, a variety of issues. Also nerve damage.

You have the Bell's palsy, all of these things that you're trying to heal, was there lung damage also? Oh yeah, lung was the main, my left lung was main. And I didn't feel it till camp two in K2, it hurt like hell, but they're still great. Yeah, I mean, you have to have unbelievable lungs to do something like that and to go in impaired,

still trying to, that's like wild, man. You know, the stitches that you're trying to breathe in. But what happened was in K2, there were boulder-sized, like humongous rocks that were falling and just knocking people out like while you're hanging. And mind you, I'm also filming at this time with another guy, like Ming-Ma Sharpa and myself. We film our entire like two-people camera team.

If climbing K2 wasn't hard enough, like filming the entire journey was a much harder task but i had this rock fall coming and that's when i had a second or an episode of major panic attack and just ptsd rush after a long time and i thought i had dealt with it uh and you know first when you experience that it's like guilt and just anger or for me it was like why the fuck is this coming up again and in high altitudes it's very hard to you know your mind the air energy within you it's very hard to control that so I had to actually go back down to base camp and just like sit with myself and have a talk and just just come back again

i feel like now and then the last episode was in this march in antarctica another incident happened that uh resurfaced some things like just um i didn't know till coming to la and going to somatic therapy that i was uh living with survivor's guilt for a long time even though because I've I've not killed them personally but I survived just the people that you survived on these no my best friend died on I mean I've lost really like close people on the mountains and I somehow survived and in 2015 in the earthquake that gave, you know, the biggest avalanche, that took my best friend, Dan, my biggest climbing partner, brother of life. And, you know, just visuals from the bodies and everything.

Nima, who was my climbing partner, died in a motorbike accident. Like all these deaths happened and people just left. And coming from that place of losing so many people already in our life in my life um yeah but what i was gonna say in antarctica i feel like because it's in iraq have you been to everything is slow like if time stops there is no concept of time or space uh so things are already happening slow-mo in your mind or at least for me it was but I think this time because of the work I have done in the last three years specifically I was able to bounce back way faster half of my mind could you know I get paranoia and anxiety

kind of feeling in half of my mind and half of my mind is like no you've done this before like there was this courageous aspect where like no just breathe in do this do that so i was able to process the whole thing i was actually talking to conrad about it because we have similar um you know incidents about losing people and stuff and it's just it's we never we're never gonna he like be at a place where never comes back um it's just, we're never gonna be at a place where it never comes back. It's just how we manage it and how we deal with it on a daily basis.

Your commitment to this healing journey, that was really inspiring to me. It is, it is. And as I said earlier, I'm kind of processing this experience that I had in Dharamshala, and I'm very of processing this experience that I had in Dharamshala, and I'm very confronted by this idea of the mother's love for the child,

because I have a very tricky and challenging relationship with my own mother, which is trifling in comparison to like what you've had to contend with, but it's been an impediment to me kind of embracing what the Dalai Lama had to share. Like it's a block, right? And that block obviously is exactly what I need to be seeing because that's where the work sits, right?

I was just gonna say that. That's probably why he said it in the first place. And this has been a thing like, you know, for many, many years. Like I know that I have to heal this thing, right? But I've lacked like the proper way to approach it. Like I don't really, like there are many times where I thought

that I had kind of transcended this issue. Clearly I have not. It's that same thing when you think that you've kind of managed it and then it comes up again. And this is like my mountain to climb, right? And I'm trying to figure out how to do it. And then here you arrive, who has had this exact same experience,

except super heightened in comparison to mine. And I'm like, oh my God, this woman is gonna give me all the answers that I need to figure this out for myself. It's like unbelievable. And it all, and it like, I can't help but think like, this is part of some kind of design that exists outside of myself.

Like there's a divinity and a mysticism to it that's quite extraordinary. And when I think about all the things that you've done, you didn't sit down and say, here are my life goals and I'm gonna write it out and here's how it's gonna happen. Like, no, this has been this unbelievable, fantastic, mystical journey that you've been on

that is deeply spiritual and patient zero is like the Dalai Lama who says, go to the mountains and like you go and then look at all these things that have happened. It's really quite extraordinary. Thank you. As you were talking, I just, I wonder if there's a lot of it stored in your body, which I know it is.

So much of it is. But when those blocks, what helped me in my journey is removing those blocks because when those blocks are still in your body, our nervous system cannot function properly 100%. So there's no point forcing yourself to release it before you. Somatic therapy changed my entire life. Thank you, LA, because I didn't even, are you familiar with that term?

No, but you're gonna tell me who I'm gonna go to and then I'm gonna go and you're gonna be, I'm not gonna say you're gonna be my Sherpa. I now know better, use that word, right? But maybe you can be my guru or my teacher here. No, it's just a- Can I enlist you? Healing sister in your healing journey. Yeah. All right.

You're all healing in some way. I'll go with that. But you're gonna help me out, right? But I can assure you that what he said to you was meant for you. Yes, I know, right? And I'm like sitting with it and I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this?

You know, I know I'm supposed to do something. No, I think, you know, I think when, and I was talking to my wife about this, like right after the experience, like when he's like, well, you know, in order to like experience love and give love, you have to just, you know, embody the mother's love for the child. And when I think about, You have to just, you know, embody the mother's love for the child. And when I think about, when I reflect on, you know,

my own mother, I don't experience compassion. I experience resentment and misplaced anger and all of these complicated like emotions that obviously are impediments to the solution, which is love, right? And so how do I break down those impediments? How do I deconstruct that wall and find a way forward? Like this is really,

like this is like the biggest thing that I'm trying to do right now. And then suddenly you appear. That's really interesting, because it's very similar, like when i was telling you that he was telling me to do this and in my mind i was like yeah just like fuck that but over time the more i sat with the one minute practice of imagining myself in her womb and what she was going through and the trauma she came from, the generational trauma she till today carries. Reflecting on that, being her, not as Wasfya, not as Rich, take your mom, embody your mom

at where she was. Do you know much about your past history, like your grandfather's? A little bit, but I could learn more. Yeah. So that really helped me generate compassion towards her and ultimately get really forgive her. Like I really, from the bottom of my heart, want her to leave very peacefully. Like I don't want any kind of suffering. And I know I mean that,

but I never felt like that even 10 years ago. And how do you feel? You said you feel lighter. What is the feeling that you have? I always lived with pain. Like really owning that. There was a lot of chronic pain and I would get injuries all the time. And I think I've cut that pattern.

I released all this stored trauma. And like, I think it was TR who said, how the fuck did you, TR is our- He's the guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My trainer. He's like, how the fuck did you climb all this mountain with all this trauma in your body?

Your leg is separated from, like this thing he only fixed after K2, which is post 2022. This is last year mainly but um so yeah just energetically just so much lighter like it almost feels like i've lost 50 kilos like from my like this backpack i was carrying it's just out and and more free just mine was very free just i'm i'm under no captivity yeah and maybe you can draw yourself a map on what that freedom might feel like and have a goal like oh i'm doing this because this is what's going to give me your ultimate freedom yeah i like that i will also say that doing that

work towards my mom like when i um not just mom parents anyone who's hurt you like when I started you know step by step doing that work it changed my entire pattern of people that I used to attract to because when we still have our that mother wounding and operating from that mother wounding or father wounding. So I'll just give an example. I had a lot of narcissist people around me. Therefore, with the wrong agenda, starting from my previous trainer to like only friends because they could gain something from me because that's what my mom was. So it's attracting all these people because somehow I was probably also codependently,

you know, trying to recreate friendships. Like they were all versions of my mom. Right, you're seeking validation and acceptance in people you perhaps look up to, right? To solve that wound. But I would also imagine, I wouldn't be surprised if also those abandonment issues show up in any kind of attempt at a romantic relationship

where you're gonna push people away before they can push you away. Well. Anytime it feels like perhaps the relationship is teetering, you're gonna be the one to break up to protect yourself. Fight or flight. Yeah. Right.

Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I dated my mother for, I think, 15 years in all seven continents, literally. A version of my mom. Yeah. Till I started doing work. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, not, like I said, like my work, work people, trainers, people around me, so many of them were versions. And then the people who would actually be the right mutually benefiting relation, those people started pouring in from. Yeah, because you have to heal yourself. You have to be the person that those types of people would be attracted to before those people come into your life. And then also, every now and then, the universe is is gonna send you a version of her again to see. To test you? Yeah.

How's that going? It has, I was like, oh yeah, now I know my boundaries now. No, I laugh at now when I see a version, it was like two years, even two years ago, it fall for this shit. But now I know better. I love how you frame your climbing in the context of humility.

Like people like to say you conquered a mountain and you're always quick to say, like nobody conquers a mountain. Like it's a surrender, you surrender to the mountain. What are some of the lessons that we can learn from your experiences on you know being on such you know incredible peaks yeah from the very beginning i found that word and even now media says wasp fear concrete this i hate i just my whole body's like why do you still use it because

the view before the summit is like everyone's begging the mother to go up for even a split second. Even it's like one second, please give us one moment on the summit. As soon as you come down, you're like, no, I freaking conquer. Like the ego steps in and some of our mountaineers egos are bigger than the mountains they climb themselves. So I feel like not just with mountains, but any part of nature, like even with the environment, climate crisis, especially in America, I hear often, save Mother Earth. Like, oh, please. Like Mother Earth can just toss you out in a fraction of a second. I've seen it over and over.

I've seen earthquakes, avalanches, anything and everything that you knew could be gone in a fraction of a second if a tsunami comes. So we know we need to be healing ourselves. We need to be saving ourselves and Mother Nature will heal herself by itself. So having this ego state of higher ego state over the mother i feel is really wrong and another practice is i think when the internal elements within us are balanced and when we are calm and this is a very buddhist practice as well the external elements settle on its own when so many of us humans are functioning in anger, jealousy, all this negative greed, whatever you wanna call it,

that creates a lot of these outer dimensions. The microcosm produces the macrocosm. Exactly. I've read that you said, mental health is planetary health. Like there is a nexus between like how we treat ourselves and the outer manifestations of our interior world is what's creating what we see around us

that needs to get fixed. Yeah, absolutely. Which is also a very Buddhist thing, right? Like the way you save the world is you save yourself or if you wanna fix the world, fix yourself. If we all focused on mental health and our own health, I think half of the world's problems would be gone. Like we don't have to do anything.

If we were in full control of our mind and our bodies. It's empowering to hear that. I truly believe that. But mental health right now is not, we're not doing well with that, are we? Collectively. No. At least in the West. Well, in the East, it're not doing well with that, are we, collectively? No. At least in the West.

Well, in the East, it's a shame to talk about, like, what? Mental health? Like, I think in West is ahead a little bit. LA is for sure. But yeah, that's my focus too. I was just thinking coming up here, my podcast is going to be called Climbing Inner

Mountains. Yeah. Well, that's what we've been doing today. Yeah, but it's like nothing impresses me, like your world, like whether you've gone to space or whatever, if internally you haven't done the work. Yeah. What is your relationship with gratitude look like? Oh, every moment, every day. It's honestly like this past couple of months have been hard.

Not even the last year to really go back to a state of gratitude. But I think, again, going back to karma, there's positive karma, neutral karma, negative karma. And when we don't have gratitude, it often goes automatically to negative because we're we are not appreciating what what like this the fact that we can sit with food three types of drinks on with such a nice environment talking to you this means already that both of us and those people associated with us have done a lot of good work in the past, good merits for us to come.

Sit in a time like this when so many people in the rest of the world are suffering, that we can have this positive experience. Rejoice. We use that word specifically and rejoice automatically when you look at other people's good things, good achievements and rejoice on it, especially on things that you don't have. That's what multiplies your positive karma. And enough people don't reflect on that, that there's a way around multiplying your positive and, you know, putting the negative, like subduing the negative karma. I think we should do a course in that, but- Yeah, I know. I'm interested in the formal practice of cultivating it

when you notice like you're not experiencing it. Like, is there something that you do or like a tactic- 4 a.m. every morning to 6 a.m. I have a two hour period. Two hours. Before heading to the gym. Walk me through that before you morning to 6 a.m. I have a two hour period. Two hours. Yeah, before heading to the gym. Walk me through that before you go to the gym, wow. Well, now he has made the time 5.45,

so I have to be at goals at 5.45. Be where, oh, at the gym, okay. So you get up at what time? Usually I'm on the mat by 4 a.m. Wow. Yeah, I haven't been sleeping properly, I must say. But 4 a.m. and that's, you know, that's practice has been going from Dharamsala days. So the first part, I mean, it's not same every day, but usually it's the several texts that we study.

And it's different every, like right now I'm finishing certain practices. So it's more the mantra chanting. So clearing your speech. So the, you know, we have so many mantras that we do, but, and I'm not the most highest expert to explain mantras, but I would say that it really refines your inner karmas and it really helps me. And we all have different body types so what speech practices are going to do for me might not do the same for you if that makes sense so then after that I have sitting meditation which is which is both analytical and just like you call it insight meditation i guess here which is vipassana um and then sometimes

visuals like um so let's say i'll just give a stupid example if i'm working on a certain project really planning it out visually and how morally ethically rightfully i would do but also projected visually and then you know people who are not familiar with tibetan practice might get confused with it but like the deity practices we do i'll just say like it's almost like having those deities are avatars so these are the deity practices are more in which is called the tantric practices. And it's hard to explain over a podcast, but the specific deity that I'm practicing with is ultimately the avatar within me. It's the energy quality. So I'm trying to develop that within myself.

And at the end of the practice, the deity merges into my heart chakra, which is where my mind lives. And we become one. And then mind lives, and we become one. And then, yeah, and then closing ceremony. Wow. And are you doing this with the counsel of a teacher or a guru? Yes, everything has been passed on. So I have four main teachers. Both the Dalai Lama and Karmapa are so busy now. So Karmapa is often considered as the second most important lama

after Dalai Lama. But I don't think you can hierarchically put it like that. This is again the Western media description of it. Karmapa is the second lama in Tibet, which is not true. Often they portray him like that.

But Karma, Pa, Pa is his father, Karma is action. So father of all actions actions so he comes from the action family we have five different families i i am of the action like do do right yeah so so this makes him the perfect teacher for you yeah so he was my uh i found him second after dalai lama uh but he's the knower of all times. Like he literally saved me from earthquakes, saved me from gun violence, saved me, pulled me out.

He's the one who talked you off getting on a plane, right? Yes. Yeah. So he's clairvoyant like- And that you were going to Kathmandu and that's when the earthquake was, right? To meet Dan. What's that? To meet Dan. What's that? To meet Dan who passed,

who was the first dead body to come. Wow. My last text to him. And he just called you and said, don't get on the plane. Karmapa did, yeah. He knew, I didn't even tell him. He didn't know that you were about to get on a plane.

He just said, come back. No, I was fighting with him. He said, don't go. And I said, why? I have No, I was fighting with him. He said, don't go. And I said, why? I have like, I was very stubborn. Still am. That's shocking. But I was fighting.

I was like, oh, I'm not going to miss my flight. But also a number of, so Karmapa and Dilguken Sirimpushi, they're both kind of similar age. So I kind of have a very friendly best friend version of it. Like not a lot of people would fight with these high lamas, but I always argue and they kind of love it because debate is part of the Tibetan culture. I think you went and visited or saw some- We saw a debate.

We got to spend a lot of time with some of the monks who I just love, I loved hanging out with those guys. So even Dalai Lama, he would always say, come and challenge me, question me. There's part of my teaching that you don't, he told me personally, there's anything in the text or teachings that I give, don't just believe because I'm the Dalai Lama,

question the Dalai Lama. You must question the Dalai Lama. And if it's not working for you, don't practice it. Like you would, so. Yeah, yeah, that is part of it. I remember this debate, it was funny. It was Arthur Brooks and all these social scientists, you know, and then you have like the-

The llamas. The llamas on the other side. So we're kind of laughing the whole time. Like you guys are so up your ass and in your head, you know, like it was very entertaining. Actually, go ahead. Sorry. No, I was going to go into my teachers.

We were talking about. We were talking, well, we were talking about how he talked to you off the plane and that you have this jocular relationship with them where you push back and debate and argue. And then he hung up when I was like, no. And then the text I got is come see me. And then I texted Dan saying-

And you were where at this time? Almost near the airport. So I have- The Dharamshala airport? No, no, no, no, in Bangladesh. So Dhaka to Kathmandu is less than an hour flight. It's like, it takes longer to get to my home in traffic than get to Nepal. It's literally like if India allowed us that 30 minutes of road on overland,

it would just be a small car, short car ride. So I go back and I forgot where he was and I call his assistant and he's like, oh yeah, come to New York. I said, wait, what? He's in New York? I'm going to fly to New York to meet him? And next day I got a Qatar flight. Woke up in Qatar.

Like it was a layover. When my phone started, Qatar or Dubai? Somewhere in those two hubs. And then my phone started beeping with messages of the earthquake. The earthquake. But I had a flight to catch. And by the time I landed and saw him, he was already in meditation.

So when the earthquake happened, both Dalai Lama and Karmapa went into deep meditation. And they don't say it, but they try to take on as much of the suffering that they can. And so I think it took us three days to, took me three days to see him. And by that time-

You were just hanging out in New York, waiting for him to be done meditating? No, I knew by that time, I kind of just, because I had already gotten Dan's news and I knew. But then when I saw him, I didn't know. Like I was angry, but I was also, I guess, fighting with guilt because I was recreating the whole scene of if I was there, I could have maybe saved him.

He died basically in base camp doing nothing. You know, he wasn't even climbing and so i was replaying it which is again a version of survivor's guilt um because it was his big sister and though he was older than me it was like we always watched each other out on the mountain so yeah it was just i and then i had so i saw him and then i went back to Nepal from America and I ended up staying there. And there were 360 plus aftershocks after that. So it was a very tragic time, but one of the most powerful time in my life where we spent almost a year rebuilding. We all from poor to rich to all walks of life people and only in Nepal this could happen

coming out living under tents holding each other random strangers just out in the street while the aftershocks are happening like everyone watching out for everyone the amount of community collective work that happened post-earthquake and I've been in other earthquakes. I feel like in Bangladesh, people wouldn't have behaved like that. So just like seeing people who just lost everything still like going and recovering or just doing what was necessary at that time was very powerful. Do the mountains still have the pull and the allure?

Like, do you feel like you still have some things you want to do there? Or do you feel like you've learned what you needed to learn from those experiences? I think till my last breath, I would wanna return to the Himalayas. There's this longing of like, this is the longest time I've been away from Himalayas. My ashes are supposed to go to the Himalayas.

So I have a connection there that it's more like, it's almost like therapy, like annual therapy kind of a pilgrimage. Like if I'm not in touch with the rocks and the vibration that you feel. What is it that's so unique about the Himalayas that makes them different from other mountains, irrespective of like how high they are.

They're just so alive. They're like living beings. So there's this territory within, so Everest and all these mountains, it almost like curves out in the Nepal side, like almost like an embrace, like a mother. And when you put a camp in there and sleep on the ground, let's say base camp on glacier,

if you're, i'm not talking about these crazy people who are just like doing stuff but if you're in tune with your body you'll you'll within three days you'll be attuned with the mother and i there's a chapter in my book called avalanche lullaby and it was about an episode in my life where post everest i couldn't sleep anywhere like in Bangladesh I had insomnia never struggled so much with sleep I would be up all night till I went back to base camp the next season and you know officially speaking you're not allowed to stay in base camp without a permit but I have enough Sherpa friends where I just put up

it wasn't sneak it was I mean all the official people knew that I was coming. But I stayed there just to sleep. And while you're lying down, whether it's morning or evening, it just goes from... So it's like a whole layer in the embrace. There's so many big mountains, just avalanches happening. And that was so calming for me because I slept with that sound for so long. Like that became my lullaby.

And it's only in that lullaby that I could fall back into sleep. You can't fall asleep unless you're listening to avalanches. But it was so sweet. It's not like the wrathful, even though they were wrathful, they could take in the whole village. But that sound was so pleasing. And so I felt so protected in her embrace, I would say. And also a lot happened while I was climbing Everest.

Like my entire Camp 3, which is on the Lhotse face, went off with an avalanche and right before summit push so i had to recreate so if people who aren't familiar with how the climb goes you basically don't climb the mountain all at one go you acclimatize you go from camp one camp two carry i'm talking about people who are actually carrying their shit and then you go back carry more stuff but this is a that's why it takes so long to climb these mountains and so by the time we reached camp three it was almost summit push time and summit push time is a window we we never know when that's going to come till much later in April. And then we do several, you know, satellite.

So there are two main satellite readings that you can do very costly. One is Swiss, one American. So I bought the American one, someone else bought the Swiss one, and then we exchanged. And anyway, long story short, I saw that there was one window on 26th. The second window on 27th was a no-go. And 25th could be a window. And if I can touch base on camp three. So me and Nima, we were already up there. We had our supplementary oxygen that we were going to carry to camp four and then go for the summit push food was there and it took weeks you know to it took weeks to bring them up and then nima just came in to the tent it's like didi didi means sister

older sister we're not sleeping uh we're not going up tonight so do you wanna just go to camp two and sleep there because the idea is as much as you can, you sleep at lower realms. There's no point losing your stuff. And I just shrugged and I don't know what. I just said, yes, let's go. And as we were rappeling down Camp 3 to Camp 2, we heard this clack from the top and I thought it was an avalanche. And it was an avalanche, but it happened on another side of the mountain that made a humongous like building size rock and we're

watching it come straight took my cam took the next cam two sherpas where it had to be airlifted out with their backbone injury and so my entire how long after you had left camp three we were still on the rope coming down and then next day nima and i uh when we go back to the place because we were like okay if we could have say one oxygen cylinder something nothing was there and then a cracked uh amulet the one his holiness had given me for everest that was just there with a crack and broken everything else is gone except this amulet the the there's some like little stuff left but the main stuff like food oxygen everything was taken so i took those broken pieces and later gave it to the guy this happened and that happened and then he just looked at me and he was like time for a new one and he went back and gave me another one i keep asking this question but like what so what do you

make of that like what what is this what does this mean to you the way this series of events unfolded well i think that was chomolungman's way of because the first night that people started going up it was a total shit show I would have died in that line there were over 250 attempting I didn't I didn't make that uh crowd a lot of people died in that crowd by the time I reached the night of me reaching the summit I crossed over seven dead bodies out of which there were people from that same season who I had tea with. And those people died in the just previous summit window. So that was the time when I was like, okay, I was looking at them. But also I must say, when I went back to Camp 2, automatically,

it was very depressing. Like, I still didn't know if I would make it. I had to go back to base camp. My supplies came on a helicopter from Kathmandu. And we, me and Neema had to re-carry back. Can you imagine the energy loss, the mental thing? But as soon as I reached back to camp two and settled my mind, I'm going to go. I felt like someone, like a mother a mother a goddess fearless energy was like you're gonna come up and was just pulling me we reached dead zone um camp which so dead zone starts above 26,000 feet so camp three above technically speaking is dead zone you spend as less time there and you have basically no appetite in dead zone i went

into camp four i was so hungry after eating my food that i ended up eating nema the next camp next tents all the sherpas left over food and all everyone was like didi what happened to you like i had this newfound energy that I couldn't explain and then throughout the night of climbing I felt like someone was pulling me like just this big energy and it was as cliched as it kind of sound that climb itself was probably one of the most profound spiritual experience for me and I'm so happy that it happened because if I was in that shitshow line before, I wouldn't be having this experience. And the other thing that happened, Nima. But hold on a second.

So profound how and why? Because I was constantly like I knew mother was there. She was protecting me. She was pulling me. And then my entire life at that time, was only 29 but my entire life flashed through the last couple of hours of reaching the summit and everything from very life-altering moments to insignificant memories like random people crossing in Heathrow airport or like just but it was happening at a rate faster than the speed of light like everyone just passing passing but the overriding feeling throughout that was of gratitude like i was so i was like bursting with

gratitude i was like wow and you know there was this last ridge line um before the summit so i i studied the mountain obviously like the maps so i had i knew of what was there but you're at nighttime climbing it you know you have no concept of how high how high you are high low you are just going up up up and then all of a sudden from my right side from literally below me you know how sometimes you fly in the plane and you can see the curvature of the earth so just like that the curvature of the earth and the sun started coming up and i looked down and i was like holy shit like how high i was and and i knew that was tibet so the mountain summit literally goes on the border of tibet and nepal so on that on the summit that side is Tibet and this side is Nepal so I was even joking

like you know with Nima is like oh if you fall like in this place we have two places to die two countries to die in we have a choice if you fall on the right you fall in Tibet if you fall on the left you die in Nepal and Nima was like yeah don't fall on the right didi we can't get your body out from China so we were just joking non-stop about that and then we finally reached the summit at the time when sun was literally sunrise was happening and I got to watch that from top of the world with Nima alone there was no bloody single person but I must say here Nima if it wasn't for Nima he he was one of the very few there were at that time this is 2020 2012 he was one of the 18 Sherpa people to have learned English and he was pursuing the international uh guiding certifications he was very skilled in the

head so he he climbs like a ninja like without rope or anything, oxygen. And he had seen what could have happened on the balcony and other places. So he brought extra rope with him, which is abnormal because the ropes are already set up. So when we hit a traffic point, he detoured me through a rope and we basically bypassed the traffic. And that's how I could. And I was fast. And I was so surprised. Like, how is this happening? It's the mother, you know,

she's the goddess of inexhaustible giving. And then I bawled my eyes out on the summit, just like, and Nima was like trying to, cause like your cornea is going to freeze. Like, just don't cry right now. But it was just overwhelmingly, I don't think I've felt gratitude in that way ever before you were being looked after and you were being looked after by the great mother

who is expressing love for you when you needed it most and And then I did a naughty thing after that. What'd you do? So I was banned from Tibet in 2007, five years before the climb. And it was because of a book that I was carrying. It was a meditation book called Art of Happiness with a very smiley picture of Dalai Lama. And I got caught. That'll do it. So the officer,

he ripped it looking at me like this and then he threw the cover like this on my face. And this is, I mean, yeah, it's a meditation book, but it's a spiritual scripture for me. So I found it, I mean, he just literally ripped the cover with my teacher on it and through it and uh through my passport through the rest of the book and the last line he said was you can never step into tibet again and i was so pissed with that line so i carried that cover to the summit just as a backup knowing that the border of Tibet lied over there. And I, after watching sunrise on top of the world, I was like, Nima, are you ready? Do you feel good? He's like, I think you're doing very good. Let's go. Cause you know, you have to also remember that summit is only

half the way and you still have a mountain to go down. So we rappled down Tibet side and I put the cover of Dalai Lama inside Tibet. And I said, I stepped into Tibet again. And then I gave a picture of me holding a picture of him. So there's a picture of Dalai Lama holding a picture of me holding a picture of him inside Tibet. That's hilarious. What was his reaction when you told him that story?

He had so much, he was like, wait, what did you do? Like, he was just so shocked. And, but then I also took a zoom lens to, I took a three, like 180 panorama in several sections as far as I could. And I also gave him that, like the view of Tibet from top of the world and just how much the glaciers have gone out. And I don't think

I've ever seen Kundun this sad when he was looking at those pictures. Those are in his home, all of those. Yeah, that was very sad, but yeah, that was the naughty thing I did. And then we came back. Did he ever reflect back to you like his thoughts on what you accomplished? Not yet. You know, this idea that he's like, go to the mountains and then you go and you go to the mountains and then some

and then you go back to him. What does he say to you about like this arc? He never takes any credit and he doesn't like when any time i've gone back and said remember when you told me that and because he counsels so many people and also it's a very tibetan thing a thing to not you know just everything don't don't take credit none of my teachers ever want credit but uh so i i in my 20s and 30s i was i had this karma with authority figures in pretty much every single country i was getting into trouble with the army the intelligence and a lot of this shit show that was happening in china inside china and

so he would one was concerned um that a this girl is going to get into a lot of trouble and probably get killed. I already got banned and profiled. And so he was always, you know, I was going to him for protection and said, like, can you do something? Almost like, can you call up the gods to remove this? So he would be very serious and then wanting to know what happened back in Bangladesh when I would go back. And then somehow something, oh, it was basically after Everest, every single politician to intelligence, they all became my friend because they had to claim me for their parties, right? And so when I went back and told him that he was just going from his home to Sukhla Kang, which is the temple. And we met in the street and I was like,

Oh, yes, there's no more trouble anymore. Like, I don't know what happened. Like, and he looked so disappointed. He made this very disappointed face. He's like, oh, like he made a disappointed face and said, I must go back into prayer now to cause you more trouble. Because the whole concept is if there are no obstacles, then you're not going to learn anything. Yeah.

So what's the point? Yeah. But to answer your question, to go back to your question, I think my memoir would be the good way to let him know. And that because there's so every chapter has him in some way or other. So I think I got to finish it soon and give him a copy. The clock is ticking. You've been working on it for a while, right? No, because I know why, because a lot in my, the first book proposal I got was after Everest, 20, when I was only 29.

I'm going to be 42 this year. And my story hadn't finished at that time. So this one is now finishing at 40 when I leave for K2. And that's where it should, because I hadn't gotten the healing, the mother wounding stuff we talked about. All of that work only happened in 2020. There's so much more I wanna talk to you about,

but I'm gonna have to release you back to your life, but I'm not gonna let you go, I think, until we kind of land this. And the way I wanna land it is with a little reflection on what you might be able to share about the many transformations that you've undergone. Like somebody can look at your story and be inspired by all the things that you've overcome to achieve all the things that you've achieved.

And I wanna leave people with some thoughts on how they might reflect on where they are in their life and what's standing in the way of them achieving some aspiration for themselves and how to go about perhaps manifesting that dream or that goal. to really make people realize that we're all climbing our own mountains, regardless of whether we are an A-lister like we spoke about, or whatever circumstances we're in, we're all suffering and we're all climbing our own mountains. But having a purpose, having honesty and really working at it,

there's no mountain high enough for us to climb. If I could do everything that i've done from the background that i came from anything is possible it truly is it's not a cliche line uh but we gotta work hard for it you know we really gotta be prepared and train ourselves for it but there is a way out and we only get one chance at this game none of us know when we're going to exit this planet the likeness of me dying on a mountain is way less than me dying in the streets of let's say Dhaka city or LA city I don't like civilization and I don't function well in but just to give that like we cut we all come here for a very short time and we must make this a very purposeful time.

Don't ruin it. It's like what the Dalai Lama told me in different ways in our first meeting. What do you say to the person who says, I don't know what my purpose is, or I don't know how to find purpose, or I know my life could be larger or more expansive, but I don't even know where to start. Yeah, that I think, I mean, that's how I was questioning in my mind when His Holiness gave me the purpose lecture on my first meeting. But I think we all need to go on our own journey in our own ways and really dive deep into understanding what karma is. And I don't mean, again, karma is, even though the word means action,

what is the purpose that we came in? But no one else can find it out for you. We all have to find it on our own terms, in our own ways. And that journey will teach you so much, like it did me. I had to find my own ways. And that journey will teach you so much like it did me. You know, I had to find my own purpose. And oftentimes, you know, we go through journeys and it never makes sense, but ultimately in the end, it all makes sense.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense when it's happening. Later on, you look back and you're like, oh yeah, of course. But you don't get to see or have that feeling when you're in it. It's not, it's just sort of rigged that way, isn't it? Mm-hmm. you don't get to see or have that feeling when you're in it. It's not, it's just sort of rigged that way, isn't it? That was beautiful.

I don't normally get to talk like this with a lot of people in LA. How do you feel? Do you feel like we did it? Do you feel okay? Yeah, I think we covered them a lot in the short time, but I think we could talk for days. Yeah, I think we covered them a lot in the short time, but I think we could talk for days. Yeah, I think there's more.

I think we're gonna have to do a part two at some point. Yeah, in the meantime, I need to go to this somatic healer. We can do all our somatic work and come back and have a different episode on the inner work. You really inspire me with your example. We didn't even go into all of your activism and the kind of moral compunction and ethical way that you go about showing up in the world

to speak truth to power and to address the causes that are important to you. So I think that would be something we could go into next time as well. I just think it's beautiful how you do that. It's really powerful. It's inspiring as an example of service. And I'm just so glad we had a chance to meet. Thank you for what you do

and for coming here today to share. Thank you so much for having me. And you need to get that book done and you need to get that documentary done, right? Yeah, we're working on it now. Yeah, good. If people wanna learn more about you, where's the best place to direct them?

To your website, to your Instagram? Yeah, I mean, I gotta step up my game on Instagram. That's all my LA people are disappointed. But yeah, Instagram. It's all my LA people are disappointed. But yeah. It's all Maya, right? It's just an illusion. Yeah.

My Instagram is Wasfianazreen. Website is Wasfianazreen.com. Either of those. Facebook, same. Wasfianazreen. People still go to Facebook? I have so many people. Globally?

Yeah. No, I mean, all my American, all the Nat Geo people are there. It's a different crowd. But Instagram is short attention span. Facebook is more like long version. Yeah. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you. like long version stuff yeah cool um thank you thank you appreciate you what is the um what is the word that you use in closing that is uh it's not a goodbye but it's um oh it's in bengali

yes it starts with an a right what does that mean so mean? So in Bengali, we have a culture of saying ashi, like I'll be back or coming back shortly. So we don't say goodbye. We say ashi. All right. So let's end it with ashi.

Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was great. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources

related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast,

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