As we prepare ourselves for the forthcoming Pad Yatra, we are also preparing ourselves for a great time and excitement ahead. I am always thrilled whenever I think about being close to nature. We spend or rather waste a lot of our time making useless inventions that put such a huge distance between us and our nature. After that, we have to take so much pain to return to our nature. Our life is like this, creating problems we don’t need, and then wasting time to undo them. Doing things, saying words that we regret later. That is why we always have to be mindful and responsible for ourselves and others.

When we are completely honest and aligned with our own nature, then we become spiritual. This is a very natural process. “Nature” means free of fabrication, free of nonsense. Most of us cannot be close to our nature through passive methods, so one of the best ways is to be actively in touch with nature. When our feet touch the earth, we make a direction connection with mother nature. With this connection, we will appreciate mother nature more. With this appreciation, we become more aware of the environmental hazzards some of us humans have created due to our ignorance, our egoistic and careless way of living. If we don’t care about future generations, then this is not an issue. If we don’t care about our own life, that is also not an issue. But we do care, because we all wish to live happily and comfortably in this world, yet we are doing everything in the opposite direction. All of us are looking for happiness, even an ant, a small being, is also looking for happiness. But most of our activities are driving us away from happiness, because we are driving ourselves away from the nature, not only from the mother nature, but also from our self nature.

I too enjoy and appreciate all the conveniences that modernisation is providing us. But we should not be carried away and become disconnected with the nature. Therefore I feel a great responsibility to revive this old spiritual tradition of Pad Yatra, and also to start another form of Yatra, cycle yatra or bic yatra. We should be creative in being connected with mother nature and our own nature. It would be such a great fun.

Since there was such a positive response from everywhere regarding having a group retreat from time to time, I have accepted Khamtrul Rinpoche’s request to have a short retreat in Druk Amitabha Mountain, similar to the one in October, right after Tibetan New Year. We can join together during my lunar birthday, to connect spiritually. We can continue to have a 2 day Bic Yatra after that, followed by the annual Zangchod Boom. See the schedule.

I may not be able to write much during this whole month of the Pad Yatra. I am sure you will continue to get news about us on Facebook, Twitter and all sorts of communication channels. For those of you, who will be joining us in different options, see you soon!