We are on the cusp of a rare Blue Moon, and the invitation to a once in a life time pilgrimage in the Himalayas goes out into the wider world.
I want to write to you once more before that happens, because there is something I know to be true from holding this kind of work for the last two plus decades, and it matters more than the deadline does.
Most people who feel a pull toward a journey like this imagine the pilgrimage begins when they arrive in Kathmandu.
It does not.
The pilgrimage begins at the moment you decide to find out whether it is yours.
The pattern I have watched, almost without exception, is this. Someone reads a letter like the ones I have sent you and something in them stirs.
They open the letter twice or more and sit with it. They tell themselves the timing is not right, the year is not right, the moment is not right. They wait for a more convenient version of the call to arrive.
And a year passes, and another, and the threshold they were standing at when they first read the letter is the same threshold they are standing at when they finally decide.
I am not saying this to push you. I am saying it because part of holding a circle like this one is being honest about what I have witnessed.
The deciding, the discerning, the willingness to be honestly seen and to honestly see – these are not the steps that come before the journey. They are the journey, in its earliest form.
The conversation we will have after you apply is not a sales call or a vetting process. It is the first place the work of the arc actually happens. We meet, speak and feel whether something true is moving between us.
Not everyone who applies will join the circle. But this is not about credentials or readiness in any conventional sense, and it is not first come, first served, it is about the integrity of the group itself.
Twelve days at altitude, inside silence, held in a container this intimate, requires that every person walking together is genuinely right for it. The depth of what each of you receives depends on the rightness of who is walking beside you. I take that responsibility seriously, which is why we speak before anything is decided.
If it is your pilgrimage, we will both know. If it is not, we will both know that too, and there is no harm done.
What I have come to understand is that the people who arrive in Kathmandu having already crossed this first threshold, having let themselves be seen, having spoken honestly about what is calling them, and having made the small decision to act on the pull rather than wait for a more convenient version of it – arrive ready in a way no amount of physical preparation can match.
The application is here, if you’d like to explore if this is the right pilgrimage for you to take.
With love,
Bronwyn
P.S. If this is not your year but you know whose it is – please send this on before the full moon. The people who arrive through someone they love tend to be the ones the circle is made for.