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Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan the Happiest Kingdom on Earth Read online




  Copyright © 2010 by Lisa Napoli

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Napoli, Lisa

  Radio Shangri-la: what I learned in the happiest kingdom on earth /

  Lisa Napoli.

  p. cm.

  1. Bhutan—Description and travel. 2. Napoli, Lisa, 1963—Travel—Bhutan.

  I. Title.

  DS491.5.N37 2010

  954.98—dc22

  [B] 2009049176

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45304-4

  Title page photo by Lauren Dong

  Jacket design by Laura Duffy

  v3.1

  For Kinga Norbu and all the children,

  may they find a happy path in a peaceful world

  For my friends,

  may they feel as much love and support as they’ve given

  For my parents,

  who taught me that family doesn’t have to be biological

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface: Three Good Things

  Chapter 1: THE THUNDERBOLT, PART ONE

  Chapter 2: “WELCOME, JANE!”

  Chapter 3: RADIO SHANGRI-LA

  Chapter 4: BEWARE THE EMADATSE

  Chapter 5: GOD OF THE NIGHT

  Chapter 6: BHUTAN ON THE BORDER, OR, THE START-UP COUNTRY

  Chapter 7: THE SYMPHONY OF LOVE

  Chapter 8: MY BEST FRIENDS IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW

  Chapter 9: THE THUNDERBOLT, PART TWO

  Chapter 10: DAWN OF DEMOCRACY

  Chapter 11: AMERICA 101: “THAT’S COOL”

  Chapter 12: BABY WATCH

  POSTSCRIPT

  Epilogue: LOOSE MOTION

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Grant your blessings so that confusion on the path may be eliminated.

  Grant your blessings so that confusion may dawn as wisdom.

  Please bless me so that I may liberate myself by attaining realisation.

  Bless me so that I may liberate others by the strength of compassion.

  May all connections I develop be meaningful.

  —HIS HOLINESS THE TWELFTH GYALWANG DRUKPA,

  The Preliminary Practice of Guru Yoga

  We are the station that makes you smile.

  We can help you walk a mile.

  And even when you stop and think

  We can make you dance and sing.

  Always do your thing, on Kuzoo FM.

  Always do your thing, on Kuzoo FM.

  —KUZOO FM PROMOTIONAL JINGLE

  PREFACE: THREE GOOD THINGS

  THE APPROACH TO the most sacred monastery in the Kingdom of Bhutan is steep and winding and, especially as you near the top, treacherous. You are sure with one false step you’ll plummet off the edge. Had I been here during certain times over the last few years, I might have hoped I would. It is a cold winter’s Saturday, dark and overcast. Misty gray clouds, pregnant with snow, hug the mountains.

  My companions are several of the twenty-somethings who staff the new radio station in Bhutan’s capital city, where I’ve come to volunteer. Kuzoo FM 90: The voice of the youth. Pema is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and flat white dress shoes, the kind you might put on with a demure frock for a tea party. Ngawang’s wearing the same stuff on top, but she’s got sneakers on her feet. Each woman carries a satchel stuffed with her kira, the official national dress, requisite attire for Bhutanese who reach the summit. Kesang is already wearing his gho, the male equivalent. Over it, he’s carrying a backpack filled with ten pounds of oil to fuel dozens of butter lamps, offerings to be left for the gods. Me, I’m twenty years older, and practicality reigns: I’ve got on my thick-soled boots, an ugly long black down coat with a hood, and six layers of clothing underneath.

  So much for the strength I’ve gained from my daily swimming regime; I am huffing and puffing against the altitude and the intensity of the climb. My new friends modulate their sprints to let me keep up.

  Bhutanese are hearty in many matters—they are used to living off the land, the hard lives of farmers—but they are particularly strong when it involves making the trek to this place called Takshang, built on a sheer cliff that soars ten thousand feet into the sky. The depth of their devotion becomes abundantly clear when, out of nowhere, a radiant twelve-year-old boy scurries down past us, stark naked, completely unaffected by the temperature and the incline. He’s trailed by a solemn entourage of grown men. Not one of them misses a step. Later, we learn this beatific adolescent is a reincarnated lama on pilgrimage from the remote eastern reaches of this tiny country.

  A pilgrimage to Takshang is the highlight of a trip to Bhutan, but it is commonplace for the Bhutanese. They are carried here from babyhood. Slight, frail seniors navigate the twists and turns and inclines deftly from memory, in a fraction of the time it takes foreigners half their age. Tales are told of people with physical disabilities who labor for twelve hours so they might reach the top, where a cluster of temples awaits. The most sacred of the altar rooms there is open to the general public only once a year.

  It is believed that meditating for just one minute at Takshang will bring you exponentially greater blessings than meditating for months at any other sacred site. If you travel here on a day the calendars deem to be auspicious, the merit you accumulate will be even more abundant. Ngawang tells us that the first time she remembers visiting was two decades ago, when she was four years old; her mother had died and the monks sent her here to pray.

  What Takshang promises all who visit is cleansing and renewal. Into this valley in the eighth century a sage named Guru Rinpoche rode in on the back of a tigress. Then he retreated to a cave for three months and, with the most powerful weapon there is—his mind—swashbuckled away evil spirits. In so doing, he persuaded the Bhutanese to adopt Buddhism as their guiding light. Hundreds of years later, to mark the feat, a colony of structures was built in this precarious location—testament to how the people of Bhutan have long revered him, this being they consider the Second Buddha.

  As we climb higher and higher, and as the gold-topped Takshang comes into view, I can feel Guru Rinpoche’s strength bolstering my own, diminishing demons, softening my heart.

  THIS IS THE STORY of my midlife crisis—and how I wrestled with and then transcended it, thanks to a chance encounter that led me to a mysterious kingdom in Asia few have visited. In the march of years leading up to my fortieth birthday, and on the rapid ascent into that menacing decade, I’d found myself Monday-morning quarterbacking every step of my life, haunted by the revisionist history of regret. A near-continuous looping chorus of “what ifs” and “if onlys” became my soundtrack:

  Why had I failed to have a family with a man I loved?

  Why had I squandered my youth so haphazardly?

  Why had I stuck with a profession that infuriated me so intensely?

  What could I do with the second half of my life to make it more meaningful than the first?

  How was I going to grow old gracefully?

  Inhaling the cold, clear air on that trek up to Takshang, on the other side of the world from home, the pain and noise of those questions began, finally, to melt away. To mo
rph into a sense of acceptance and peace. No longer did I feel stuck on a treadmill of emptiness; now my life story read as full, exciting, wondrous—with limitless possibilities for the future.

  And we hadn’t even reached the most sacred spot on the mountain.

  THE GROUNDWORK FOR this awakening had been laid months earlier, when I had only the vaguest of ideas where this place called Bhutan was on the planet.

  Every Wednesday evening, I headed west on the clogged I-10 freeway in Los Angeles for an experimental workshop in positive psychology. In classic therapy—where you endlessly review all your personal history—you work to gain a better understanding of why you are the way you are, have done what you’ve done. But it isn’t necessarily designed to help you move forward, much less reframe the way you look at the world. By now, with the help of various counselors, I’d navel-gazed a giant gaping hole in my belly button, dissecting my own personal history the way a Proust scholar did Remembrance of Things Past. And yet I still found myself swirling in a vortex of despair.

  I summoned a sense of optimism about this “happiness” class and hoped that it might at least be a salve, if not a cure, for how poorly I’d been handling the approach into middle age. It seemed unlikely, though, that a six-week class could possibly jolt me into contentment, or anything approximating “happiness.”

  Since the workshop wasn’t yet fully developed, the teacher, Johnny, asked for our patience. We’d be acting as guinea pigs for this program, he said, and there wouldn’t be any charge. A romp into positive thinking—gratis? I couldn’t resist.

  One of the first things Johnny taught us was a Zulu warrior greeting. Everyone paired off, standing an arm’s length across from his partner. Then we looked deep into each other’s eyes. When you felt a connection, you were supposed to say, “I have come to see you.” The other would respond, “I have come to be seen.” The gazing would continue until that person felt the click and proclaimed, “I have come to see you.” Then, you moved on to the next classmate. Each session began this way, to affirm that we were here for real, pure, honest interaction, heart to heart. You weren’t supposed to say you had come to see and be seen until and unless you really meant it.

  Doing this exercise made me want to stare right into the eyeballs of every single person I encountered, to make up for all the times I’d distractedly engaged in “conversation.” Gazing intensely at people I hardly knew reinforced how rarely I looked directly at the people I did know. We were all perennially distracted, attempting to triage the various competing demands on our time, multitasking our days away. Almost worse was communicating with the family and longtime friends who lived in other zip codes and time zones altogether. Static-filled cell phone conversations and emails were the hollow tools that connected us, eye contact sorely lacking. I craved meaningful human contact.

  Other simple assignments from Johnny were crafted to help us discover what we appreciated in ourselves, and what inspired us about others.

  “Describe in detail a person you love—and why”; “Write a toast to four difficult periods in your life, and how you handled them”; “Summarize your life story as if you were ninety and telling a child.”

  The themes were the same for me each time. I could see that it was a triumph to have made my way in the world, despite various misguided choices with men, the random steps that comprised my career, even an act of violence I’d experienced as a young woman. I saw how fortunate I was to have been cloaked in love and support all along. How, in the absence of creating a traditional family for myself, I’d cobbled together an army of dear friends around the world with whom I enjoyed rich, textured relationships. It moved me how many of the people I knew ended our conversations with the words “I love you.” That counted for something. It counted for a lot.

  No, it wasn’t perfect. What was that, anyway? No one I knew would say their choices had yielded an ideal existence. Maybe my life wasn’t conventional, by some old-fashioned definition of convention. The years had been flawed, but they had been leavened with much good. Such were the ingredients of a life.

  At the end of the third session, almost as a throwaway, Johnny assigned an exercise that really started to bring the jumble in my brain to order. It was a simple nightly ritual, and it taught me how to appreciate life in the most basic terms.

  “I want you to keep a notebook by your bed,” he said. “And every night, before you go to sleep, I want you to review your day. Make a short list of three things that happened that were good.”

  “What if three good things didn’t happen?” several of us asked in unison. Clearly, we weren’t naturally wired with a positive way of looking at the world.

  “Well, that’s the point,” he said. “This exercise challenges you to find three good things in each day. They don’t have to be big things. In fact, most of the time they’re not going to be big things. Big, important things don’t happen to us every day. Winning an award, getting married, starting a new job, going on vacation. It’s the big spaces of time in between those monumental events that make up life. Right? The idea here is that little things have power. An interaction with someone in an elevator, or a clerk in a store. Small victories, like fixing something that’s been annoying you in the house. Going for a really long run. I want you to see that every single day, three good things do happen. It will help you discover that goodness exists all around us, already.”

  You could feel the more skeptical of the class participants sigh. They wanted a different formula for happiness than that, the equivalent of a diet pill for the spirit. A “do this, do that, don’t do this” list of action points, where they could just fill in the blanks and come out on the other end in a matter of weeks, angst-free—blissful. But what Johnny said resonated with me, immediately. An image of my UPS man popped into my mind’s eye, one of the few consistent characters in my life; each day, he delivered packages to both my apartment building and the office complex just across the street that housed my employer, a public radio show. Even though our exchanges rarely amounted to anything more than pleasantries and chatter about the weather, his kindly presence was often one of the day’s highlights. Especially when I was working the graveyard shift and trying to adjust to sleeping during the day, he was often the most pleasant human interaction I’d experience.

  People wouldn’t be all I’d consider for my three good things. Since I’d moved to Los Angeles, no matter how uneventful or difficult the day had been, I’d marveled at the dance of light at sunset from my apartment on the eighteenth floor. That would undoubtedly make it onto my lists.

  One of the more optimistic in our group asked, “What if you have more than three good things?”

  “Lucky you!” said Johnny, laughing. “Well, write them all down. But try to pick the top three. Over time, you’ll start to see which things make you happiest. It probably isn’t what you think.”

  That night, I couldn’t wait to go home and go to bed with my notebook.

  THREE GOOD THINGS

  Chris the sound engineer saying he was looking forward to working with me again

  My friend Michael, who I never get to see because of work schedules and L.A. geography, taking me to a pre-birthday lunch

  Happiness class

  Throughout the next few days, I found myself taking mental notes of the interactions and experiences that might make my written list each night. There were many bedtimes when I had to search for the good things, when the three items of note might simply be my daily swim, the Goodyear blimp gliding by my building on its way to nearby Dodger Stadium, and the taste of a pork chop I’d fried up.

  Food items, the glow of the magnificent Southern California “golden hour,” and quick, often silent exchanges with strangers frequently made my lists. So did shared meals, especially shared lunches, which I got to have only when I worked those overnight hours. Writing down that the food and the friend I’d enjoyed it with were great countered all that wasn’t about having to get up and go to work at one in the morning as o
ften as I did.

  And, of course, this was the point. Something good actually happened, even on the crummiest, hardest days. And those good things, the simplest things, were the most nourishing.

  The ritual of this nightly exercise worked like a gym for the brain; over time, the lists started to strengthen me, to reverse my march of distress. I began to reframe the way I’d been thinking about life the past few long, heavy years, excavating the positive developments that had come out of it: How, after a painful end to an engagement when I was thirty-seven, I’d learned to swim, and now made the activity an essential part of every day. How, during a long period of unemployment, I’d taught myself to make soufflés, so I could continue hosting friends for dinner while not breaking my very tight budget.

  Most important, I was learning to slow down, to sit with myself and the uncertainties of the future. To enjoy not knowing what was next, instead of fearing and panicking over what might be. To appreciate the successes I’d had, instead of dwelling on my failure to have accomplished more.

  As I sat in bed each night with my notebook, I didn’t completely understand what was happening. I didn’t see that I was making peace with myself, relaxing after a long war. Then came that day on the mountain in Bhutan, when my fog began to lift, and my life began to focus.

  1

  THE THUNDERBOLT,

  PART ONE

  HARRIS SAID HE’D BE AT THE COOKBOOK PARTY BY 7:00 p.m., which gave me an hour to hang out with him there before I headed uptown to have dinner with another old friend and his family. The party was a bit out of the way, and I almost skipped it, but since I was only in my hometown, New York City, on rare occasions, I figured I might as well get out and see as many of the people I loved as I could. What had brought me here from Los Angeles was the chance to fill in for a month at the New York bureau of the radio show where I was on staff as a reporter. I bolstered my energy for a busy evening of flitting around the city in hyper–social butterfly mode—a way of life I rarely indulged in anymore.