Reflections From My First Pilgrimage to Ma India

Travel had been part of my working life for many years. Conflict zones, aeromedical evacuations, teaching overseas, airports and movement and constantly adapting to unfamiliar places had once felt normal to me. And then, suddenly, I had spent eighteen months in one place.

In that time there had been grief, burnout, moving house, changing careers, caring responsibilities for family, and the slow shedding of identities that no longer seemed to fit. Most weeks I worked six days. Christmas was to be my first break in a year, but things went awry, and it was suddenly filled with caring responsibilities.

By the beginning of this year, I was more exhausted than I had been after a five month tour of Afghanistan during the height of the conflict there with no R&R.

Very few people around me really knew except for my partner.

Outwardly, I was coping well enough. Inwardly, I felt like I could barely breathe.

And somewhere beneath all of that noise, India began quietly calling my heart.

Not dramatically. Not in some cinematic Eat Pray Love kind of way. More like a gentle but persistent tug somewhere deep inside me.

I had no strict itinerary. No carefully curated spiritual journey. Just a couple of places I felt drawn towards — Rishikesh, and maybe Kainchi Dham — and a strong sense that I needed space. Space to breathe. Space to think. Space to simply be somewhere where life felt closer to the surface. It turned out that the "maybe" Kainchi Dham would be an absolute MUST and the place I felt most at home. 

People often say India confronts you.

Maybe it does.

But honestly, it felt more like home than I could have imagined.

Not because it was peaceful. India is gloriously alive. There are horns sounding constantly, monkeys trying to steal your food, temple bells ringing through the streets, incense smoke drifting through the air, chai brewing on roadside stalls, dust, colour, noise, movement, devotion. Life is not hidden away there. Nothing is polished into perfection.

And somehow, in the middle of all of that chaos, I felt more comfortable in my own skin than I had in a very long time.

Part of it was the openness of devotion.

In the West, conversations about God often seem wrapped in embarrassment or softened behind safer language. We speak about “the universe” or “consciousness” because it feels more socially acceptable than simply saying God.

But in India, devotion breathes openly.

A taxi driver will greet you with “Ram Ram.” A stranger will sit beside you and speak

naturally about God and devotion over chai. Entire families gather on the banks of Ma Ganga for ārati while children run around playing and monkeys weave through the

crowds looking for snacks.

No one seems afraid of the sacred there, and no one seems embarrassed by love for God.

What struck me most was how naturally those conversations unfolded. People spoke openly about Hanuman, Shiva, grace, karma, suffering, and devotion in the same easy way we might discuss the weather over a cup of tea.

There was no awkwardness around it.

No sense that spirituality needed to be hidden behind intellectual language or immediately turned into a political discussion.

It wasn’t performative, it was simply woven into ordinary life.

And after years of feeling slightly out of step with modern Western culture, there was something deeply comforting about being in a place where conversations about God did not feel strange.

I didn’t realise how much I needed to be around that until I arrived.

Every morning in Kainchi Dham, the security guard at the temple gates would greet me with a smiling “Sita Ram,” hands pressed gently together.

By the second day I found myself smiling before I’d even reached the gate.

Tiny moments, really... but somehow they felt deeply nourishing.

There were so many moments during that trip that now feel woven together into one long exhale.

Bathing in Ma Ganga in the midday heat in Rishikesh.

Singing the Hanuman Chalisa beneath the banyan tree at Kakrighat where Krishna Das once sat singing years before me.

Drinking sweet chai from little clay cups on roadside steps while the world slowly woke around me.

Sitting quietly at Maharaj-ji’s takhat with tears rolling down my face for reasons I still can’t fully explain.

Nothing about it felt performative or dramatic.

It just felt honest and kinda quiet.

And somewhere during those weeks, something inside me softened.

For much of my life, I have carried responsibility heavily. As an officer, a nurse, a team leader, a medic, a manager, a business owner, and often as the person trying to hold everything together for everyone else, I had become so accustomed to gripping tightly onto life that I no longer realised I was doing it.

India didn’t magically solve that.

But it did gently show me another way of being — one with a little more trust, a little more surrender, and a little more grace.

It reminded me that perhaps I do not need all the answers right now.

That not everything can be controlled.

That some things unfold in their own time when we stop trying to force them.

Living in our modern day Western culture often feels, to me at least, like when my gran used to make me wear a frilly dress on a Sunday as a kid... I usually lived in dungarees.

It's like being asked to squeeze yourself into shapes that feel unnatural to your spirit.

My soul was always offended!

In India, I felt able to take that costume off for a while.

I came home with a little less fear and a lot more trust.

More certain that closing the studio is the right next step, and more willing to create space for rest, practice, pilgrimage, and a slower, more devotional way of living.

Somewhere along the way, I think I had started believing that rest needed to be earned through exhaustion. India reminded me that perhaps grace works differently than that.

राम राम 🙏