Early Days 1996

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I was twenty years old when I first made it to Bodhgaya, India in 1996, as a student on the Antioch Buddhist Studies Program semester abroad, which allowed me to immerse myself in Buddhist culture and philosophy, live and study at a Burmese monastery, meditate pre-dawn, visit various temples around town each in the classic architecture of their representative Buddhist countries, circumambulate the Mahabodhi Stupa, and sit beneath the Bodhi Tree, where 2500 years earlier prince Siddhartha became the first human to achieve enlightenment.

It was brilliant, and hard, in equal measure; pilgrimage always is. But what most stole my heart were the teachers, my first, Godwin Samararatne, was a lay vipassana master from Sri Lanka, and the second, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, a Tibetan master whom I took refuge with. Meeting them and through them my own awakened potential, was like coming home. It made such a life-long impression that I pursued a career as a Buddhist psychologist and journeyed back to India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to be with these masters and around these sacred sites five more times between 1996 and 2014.

After teaching a four-year-long course on the lam-rim in 2016, I curated and led my first pilgrimage to Bodhgaya with my own students, offering them a taste of the magic that inspired me twenty years earlier. Life comes full circle.

Once I understood that pilgrimage was a powerful form of therapy, I knew I had found my calling to help others transform through sacred journeys. — Dr. Miles Neale