The Tibetan medicine doctor wrapped his fingers around my wrist, closed his eyes and felt my pulse. The small, dark room was silent except for the faint hiss of a single candle. Its shelves were lined with glass jars of dried roots, bark and powders, each labelled in Tibetan script. Within minutes, the amchi, an 11th-generation Tibetan medicine practitioner named Tsewang Gyurme Gurung, began to speak.
“You have a problem with your right shoulder,” he said in English, his fingers still resting lightly on my wrist. “There is a restlessness in your mind; your thoughts jump.” Then, almost casually, “And you have struggled with a fertility issue for a long time.” I nodded slowly, aware of how improbable it would have seemed anywhere else – and how entirely plausible it felt here, in the barren highlands of Nepal’s Mustang region – that all of this could be deduced from my pulse.
Amchis are trained in Sowa Rigpa, a centuries-old Tibetan medical system practised across the Himalayas that sees the body as inseparable from the mind, environment and spirit. In remote regions like this, one of the most intact Tibetan cultural landscapes outside Tibet, they remain central figures. As the keepers of ancestral medical knowledge, practitioners like Gurung treat imbalance as much as illness. The one-page prescription I left his room with included everything from a herbal remedy to a mantra I must recite daily.
His accuracy rattled me. Then again, becoming a bit discombobulated was part of why I’d wanted to travel to Mustang for my 40th birthday in the first place. I’d reached this age without a child, largely by choice. My husband and I were trying to inhabit the life that decision had made possible. Celebrating the day in a remote Himalayan region that we’d dreamt of visiting for almost a decade felt like a kind of promise to ourselves: that we would keep shaping life on our own terms.
Shinta Mani Mustang was also part of the draw. From the moment we arrived at the 29-suite lodge the previous day, set in the village of Jomsom in Lower Mustang, it was clear this was a place in which to mark milestones.
Two tall, wooden gates painted with the “endless knot”, a Buddhist symbol of infinite wisdom and compassion, swung open to greet us, revealing a central courtyard lined with poplar trees. The U-shaped, two-storey lodge rose up around it, built from local stone and timber, drawing on Mustang’s traditional Thakali architecture. After being shown to our suite by our personal butler, we spent our first hour doing little beyond taking in the details.
Tibetan tiger rugs, a traditional symbol of protection, lay underfoot. A white, yak-tail chamara, a ritual whisk used in shamanic and Buddhist rituals, hung from the door. An orange, cashmere blanket, hand-embroidered with details of the region’s famous blue sheep, lay on the bed. Even the bathroom curtains were meaningful, printed with the “auspicious cloud”, a Tibetan symbol of interconnectedness. The design, a collaboration between Nepali hotelier Namgyal Sherpa and renowned hotel architect Bill Bensley, managed to feel simultaneously theatrical and deeply rooted in place.
It took a concerted effort to leave our room at all. Eventually, though, we were lured downstairs by the spa. We slipped into the large hot pool, set in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the snow-capped peaks of the Nilgiri range. Rotating between the pool, sauna and steam room while waiting for my massage, I wondered whether this sort of pampering might need to feature more heavily in my 40s, as a form of preventative healthcare.
Nothing, however, can make one’s body and brain feel better than a robust hike. Next morning, after a breakfast that felt more ritual than meal – juices, fruit and granola, fresh muffins and crispy potato parathas, served with wide mountain views on the terrace – we headed off.
Striding out along the mountain pathways, we passed craggy cliff faces of unfathomable scale reaching into the hard blue sky, as vultures circled above. Many of the cliffs had “sky caves” bored into them. Our guide told us these had served as burial sites, meditation chambers and monasteries since Neolithic times.
After crossing a hair-raising suspension bridge one hour later, we reached Lubra. The 800-year-old village was home to a huddle of whitewashed mud houses, the doorways marked with talismans made of goat skulls, painted motifs and scraps of prayer flags. These “ghost trappers”, or keni, were protective markers intended to trap wandering spirits before they entered the house, said our guide. They seemed like a sensible precaution in a place this ancient, where the past mingles so freely with the present.
Lubra is one of the last remaining villages in the world practising Bon, a spiritual tradition predating Buddhism. After lunch on the rooftop of a local home, a simple thali of dal, curried vegetables, pickles and tsampa (roasted barley flour shaped into balls), we set off towards a cave monastery above the village. Inside the ochre-washed structure were elaborate thangka, paintings of Buddhist deities and teachings. Butter lamps flickered and, in the far corner, there was a natural rock cavity, used by early practitioners for long retreats. I sat briefly in the cave’s darkness, trying to absorb what the place was offering, before stepping back out into the high Mustang sun.
That afternoon, following a second round of spa treatments, came our consultations with the in-house amchi. My husband went into the same small room after me and emerged looking pale and a little unmoored. Later, over a four-course dinner in the lodge’s Nilgiri restaurant, he told me that, after feeling his pulse, the amchi immediately sensed the acute burnout he’d been experiencing over the past year. He said its source wasn’t what my husband thought it was (work), but unprocessed grief from eight years ago. “When Mum died,” he said.
We sat with that for a while, eating our Tibetan momo dumplings, unsure what to make of it. When we tried to describe what had happened in that room, language kept slipping away. Diagnosis felt too clinical. Intuition too vague. Pattern-reading, coincidence, none of it quite fit. Whatever had taken place resisted neat explanation. And perhaps that was the point.
The thought followed me into my birthday. After two nights of shallow sleep at altitude, I woke before dawn, the day already feeling faintly dreamlike. I sat soaking in the bath, steam smudging the mountains beyond the window, my notebook perched on the rim.
I wrote, almost feverishly, about what might loosen if I stopped trying so hard to make my life make sense. For years, I’d carried the conviction that a life without certain markers needed extra explanation, even to myself. That I should be able to defend it, to smooth its edges somehow. Watching the sun slip a blazing white cap over the mountains, I felt something in me let go. I didn’t need to explain my life. I only needed to live it – without apology.
The rest of the day became a study in unapologetic indulgence. A private lunch for two on a 500-year-old monastery rooftop, the table laid with wildflowers and bowls of handmade ravioli, the mountains unfurling in every direction. At Muktinath, one of the world’s highest pilgrimage sites, we cleansed our sins beneath 108 icy water spouts shaped like small, brass cow heads.
Afterwards, we traded hiking boots for e-bikes and dropped into a series of precipitous switchbacks to make our way back down to the lodge. The landscape opened and collapsed around us as we rode, scanning the hillsides for blue sheep and, improbably, snow leopards. At first, I went slowly. But by constantly pumping the brakes, I kept skidding and getting snagged on rocks. So I let go. I sped up. And soon, I started to really enjoy it. “Woooow!” I found myself hollering, the sound tearing out of me and disappearing into the mountains. At that point, I stopped thinking altogether and just let momentum take over.
The writer was a guest of Shinta Mani Mustang.
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