Sacred Pilgrimage In The Age Of Distraction Part 1
Episode 22 with Redesigning The Dharma by Sahaja Soma features a conversation with Dr. Miles Neale, a psychotherapist and Tibetan Buddhist teacher. They explore Dr. Neale's multi-disciplinary approach of integrating Eastern spirituality with Western psychology. The conversation dives into his latest book, 'Return with Elixir,' and delves deep into the concept of pilgrimage as a profound spiritual practice.
Dr. Neale shares insights from his years of experience leading pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world and discusses the transformational potential of these journeys. The discussion also touches on the integration of alchemical principles, the convergence of various religious and mystical traditions, and how pilgrimage can lead to inner and secret realizations. This enlightening conversation offers valuable perspectives for anyone interested in spiritual growth, therapeutic practices, and the intersection of ancient wisdom with modern life.
Episode Highlights:
00:00 Introduction to Dr. Miles Neale
01:52 The Intersection of Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism
06:41 The Role of Pilgrimage in Spiritual Practice
16:56 The Significance of Pilgrimage and Sacred Sites
24:01 Understanding the Pilgrimage Mindset
28:07 Pilgrimage as Transformational Travel
34:57 Personal Pilgrimage Experiences
42:11 Inner Pilgrimage and Psychedelic Journeys
Guest Bio:
Dr. Miles Neale is a psychotherapist in private practice, teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, founder of the Gradual Path for inner and outer journeys, author of Gradual Awakening, and co-editor of Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy.
His latest book, Return with Elixir: Four Maps for the Pilgrimage of the Soul Through Death and Rebirth (Inner Traditions, 2025), integrates Joseph Campbell’s mythology, Carl Jung’s psychology, Tibetan Buddhist alchemy, and the precession of the equinoxes.
Over the past twenty-five years, Miles has fused Eastern spirituality with Western psychology. He earned a Masters in meditation research from New York University, a Doctorate in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and trained in long-term mentor-student relationships with preeminent American Buddhist scholars Professor Robert Thurman, PhD, and Dr. Joseph Loizzo, MD, PhD as well as Tibetan master Geshe Tenzin Zopa.
He has taught psychology and meditation at the integrative medical clinics of Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell universities, designed and led the two-year Contemplative Studies Immersion certificate program based on the Tibetan gradual path (lam-rim), offers courses and workshops internationally including at the Tibet House, US, and has initiated service projects supporting nunneries in the Himalayan region.
Miles curates and leads life-changing pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world and lives between New York City and Bali, Indonesia.
Full Transcript:
Adrian Baker: Welcome to Redesigning the Dharma. I'm your host Adrian Baker, and today I have a very interesting guest on.
Dr. Miles Neal is a psychotherapist in private practice, a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, founder of The Gradual Path For Inner and Outer Journeys, and a co-author of Gradual Awakening.
His latest book is Return with Elixir: Four Maps for the Pilgrimage of the Soul Through Death in Rebirth, which is integrating Joseph Campbell's mythology, Carl Jung's psychology, Tibetan Buddhist alchemy, and the procession of the equinoxes.
Over the past 25 years, Miles has fused Eastern spirituality with Western psychology.
He earned a Masters in meditation research from New York University, a doctorate in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and trained in long-term mentor-student [00:01:00] relationships with preeminent American Buddhist scholars Professor Robert Thurman and Dr. Joseph Loizzo, MD, PhD, as well as Tibetan master, Geshe Tenzin Zopa.
Miles has taught psychology and meditation at the Integrative Medical Clinics of Harvard, Colombia, and Cornell University, designed and led the two year contemplative studies immersion certificate program based on the Tibetan gradual path, Lam Rim and offers courses of workshops internationally at places such as Tibet House US.
And Miles's current focus is on curating and offering life-changing pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world.
And that theme of pilgrimage is the focus of much of our conversation today so, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Miles, and please leave any questions or comments with what you enjoyed about the conversation or questions that you'd have or like to be addressed in coming episodes. Thank you.
Miles, I want to thank you so much for reaching out and for being willing to come on Redesigning the Dharma because I've been following your work for a little [00:02:00] while and you're really the ideal guest to have on in so many ways because you're into Vajrayana and the importance of pilgrimage and, Jungian psychology and really all these things that are at the heart of my own path.
Welcome and thank you for making the time.
Dr. Miles Neale: Thank you for having me, Adrian, and I'm equally pleased because, and I did reach out to you 'cause there's so few people that really enjoy conversing about the intersection of all these things. So for me it's a great delight because conversations like these are really stimulating and who knows where we go in our micro pilgrimage together.
So I'm always up for one.
Adrian Baker: Absolutely. And we're gonna get into those different layers of pilgrimage. I'd love for you to talk about that with folks, but um, let's start just for folks who don't know, you and I will have read your bio, an introduction to the podcast, but just saying, briefly at this point in your journey, describe your background and what you do now and what you offer.
Dr. Miles Neale: What I do now, I'm a dad of two kids, so that's
my, primary mirror that shows me all my imperfections.
Adrian Baker: Uh
Dr. Miles Neale: If you ever wanted a good master to point out [00:03:00] your flaws, just have a couple of kids. There's no escaping
Adrian Baker: yes. That's the fear for some people. The no escaping. Yeah.
Dr. Miles Neale: Yeah, so I mean, I've been in a psychologist for 25 years and, I've done a lot of work on myself in therapy, but also offered therapy in a very conventional way at first, and then migrated by incorporating Buddhism, and incorporating somatic work, incorporating trauma work, and then eventually incorporating Jung and stitching along the journey of my career, different kinds of perspectives and lenses so that I really, I work in a very integrative way and along and parallel with that journey of being a traditional psychologist, offering services mainly to people who are interested in dharma or meditating or going on spiritual retreats or doing developing a niche, if you will.
I also, I was a student for a very long time and a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. And that journey I started when I was 20. I'm now approaching 50 on, this year. So it's been a 30 year journey of really being immersed fully in all kinds of traditions, but mainly [00:04:00] focused on the Tibetan tradition.
And about 2018, I wrote my first book, my first solo book on the Lam Rim, which is a tradition of all four Tibetan schools of Buddhism follow a curriculum of sort of. condensed cookbook, if you will, step by step curriculum that's very comprehensive, but also systematic, a presentation of the dharma that I found very accessible.
And so I had one of my teachers do a 14th century Tsongkhapa text, a translation of it. And then I used it as a scaffolding for my first book. And since then, I also for about 15 years now, have been leading pilgrimages. So I started very early on in my career at 20 in India as a student and was very influenced by a pilgrimage I took to India about a five month trip where I was based in Bodh Gaya, India, where the buddha enlightenment.
And that was so informative that I think it, it really put me in a kind of trajectory of the kinds of study and practice and immersive experience that I would then follow for the rest of my career. And then when I finished teaching [00:05:00] students about a four year college length curriculum in Tibetan Buddhism, it was about 2016 when we finished this, I said, let's do a capstone.
Let's, cap this four year contemplative study program with a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya that I would lead and design and curate and bring people back. And that was my 20 year anniversary. So from the first time I was in Bodh Gaya as a student at 20 years old, 20 years later, I led my first group on pilgrimage in 2016 to offer people this deeply immersive and transformational experience.
At that time, I had invited in one of my teachers, Geshe Tenzin Zopa, who is also 50, but a highly realized being, I invited him in on the pilgrimage to give the initiations and to give teachings and to be really immersed with a master because, let's not kid ourselves, who am I? I'm just a joker. And, but when you meet these great masters, you really get to see what it means to be really evolved and highly realized. And it puts a lot of humility and a lot of awe and a lot of inspiration into your deck.
And so I was very happy to introduce my students to a really [00:06:00] realized being. And he did such a wonderful job that at that moment I said to him, I would love to do more of these with you. And so, post 2016, we've now run trips together from Indonesia to India to Nepal, and last year to Japan, and this year to Bhutan.
So I have the great privilege and honor of curating and spending probably about half my time curating pilgrimages now so that people can have access to the dharma with this really beautiful wise teacher. And I carry bags and I serve tea, and I, I, I do all the setup behind the scenes. And then when the, when the, real teacher's present, everybody bows and we go in and I'm very happy to do that. All the legwork for that. It's a huge honor for me. It's also, it's like my Ngöndro actually,
Adrian Baker: I could see that. Yeah. Explain what the Ngöndro is for might not know.
Dr. Miles Neale: That, so for people that enter into the Tantras, which are the esoteric teachings of Buddhism, these are considered the accelerated techniques or power tools. And very complex.
They're, people may know about visualization on deities. They may have seen the Tonka before, [00:07:00] paintings of deities, mandalas and these kinds of things. These all part. And if they've listened to your podcast, they've heard Ian and other people talk about the Tantras, which I'm a big fan of. I think they're very timely into the Aquarian age that we're entering.
Anyway, once you take initiation or to receive initiation, you have to be prepared. And basically this is a preparation for the mind in which you undergo a hundred thousand prostrations, a hundred thousand recitations of a particular mantra, a hundred thousand of this, a hundred thousand of that.
And most people's eyes go like this, especially this generation. Now, they don't wanna do a hundred thousand of anything. They will, they wanna go to tantra because tantra is billed as this accelerant like, being on a rocket ship. It's like you're on with Elon Musk jumping up to Mars.
But then when the teacher says, but before you do that, you have to do a hundred thousand sets of this. And it may take years.
Anyway, I haven't actually embarked on the sets, the formal sets of the prostrations and all of that. And part of the reason is I have a wife, I have family, I have kids, I have books to write, I've [00:08:00] had clients to see, and also I'm developing all these pilgrimages. So in a way, my Dharma efforts get focused in, and my offering gets focused into the pilgrimage.
And so part of what the preparation of the Ngöndro do now, I don't know if my teacher would ever accept this. Okay? So this is between you and me, but at least from my part, developing a pilgrimage is a headache. It's a lot of work. there's no thanks and there's no appreciation for the micro details.
And when you have a star, heavy hitter Allstar lama, like Geshe Tenzin Zopa, you have to have a lot of humility. There's nobody who's gonna recognize your efforts. And so it strikes to the ego to put a pilgrimage on. It's a lot of effort. It's a lot of actually obstacles. For example, in Japan, I went through five or six different tour operators and had to fire them one by one on this timeline in conversation through dialogue in different languages, spreadsheets, the rest of it, finding and curating and going for the really high bar, the really custom trip.
I don't settle [00:09:00] for anything off the shelf. I want this once in a lifetime thing and I will kill myself to do it. And actually last year in Japan, I honestly did, I was starting to affect my mental health. It was starting affect my relationship with my wife. I was really exhausted. I was like almost in a way addicted or consumed with getting all these details right.
And the conditions or circumstances of the pilgrimage were so utterly difficult. And then I look back and I think, yeah, man, I put a lot of effort in. If you see these guys doing prostration for three months straight in Bodh Gaya, under the Bodhi tree. That's not fun. That that, that creates, blood marks on your foreheads.
It gives scrapes and rugs and bruises... it's designed to test you. It wants to see if you're willing to let go of your comfort. It's wants to make sure that you're willing to let go of your ego. That you're willing to let go of all your pleasures and the fantasy of how you hold yourself and the fantasies that you have of what you think you deserve and how your life should be.
And so [00:10:00] from that point of view. Your orientation towards Dharma service, your orientation towards enlightenment for the wellbeing of others, there are stories in the zen tradition of people who are cooks and sweepers and people, who are bus drivers and people of modest means, but secretly in their heart, they put themselves in harm's way or they do some chore menial tasks that no one wants to do and they're cultivating all the right intentions and all the right view and all the right vision. And inevitably it's a difficult grind. and it's supposed to be. And that's a bigger, it's a bigger thing that I write in my book about you can't have light without the darkness. You can't make it to the summit without doing your underworld journey.
We can get to that later, but just to close the full loop, for me, tantra are exquisite, but they do have a huge upfront investment to prepare those who think that they're ready. And then these kind of trials are designed to really challenge your, thinking that are you really [00:11:00] ready?
do you really have the proper motivation? Do you really have the wherewithal? Do you really wanna operate machinery? That's, considered a power tool that has some inherent dangers. It's not designed to be a punishment. It's designed to be a preparation.
Adrian Baker: Right.
Thinking about conditions because we're talking about taking these technologies and traditions from a very different cultural context, and so you alluded to it actually with yourself, you know? Um. It wasn't just simply monastics, even yogis, then they were in a different culture where they had a lot of time.
And people in a modern developed society, not just Western, but East Asian, Singapore, whatever, they don't have this kind of time. You don't have that amount of time. So it's also thinking, how do we honor the wisdom of these traditions, but adapt them in a way where it feels appropriate for a householder in this age and still get the essence.
How do you think of that tension between tradition and innovation?
Dr. Miles Neale: I mean, I the, yeah, it's a great question and I've been trying this out in different forms across my career because I [00:12:00] straddle the worlds of psychology and science with Tibetan Buddhism, so I'm always about, you know, I'm not a scholar. I'm not someone who just preserves the tradition, learn the language, reads the text. That's not my thing. On the other hand, I'm not just a psychologist. I'm someone who's trying to be integrative and try to push the envelope of what's possible while respecting the traditions in both ways.
When it comes to the Tantras, my sense is that the Tantras are particularly well suited for our current zeitgeist for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they are of the ways that I see a tantra is a little bit like a CrossFit program.
So they train different aspects of our being simultaneously, like in one exercise regimen whereas sutra or public teachings, you do your compassion training, then you do your study and your wisdom training, and you meditate on one topic at a time. Whereas in the Tantras it's fully embodied, it's fully immersed, it's visual becoming somatic. It's multi training so you have to train [00:13:00] your compassion with your wisdom at the same time. And so in half the time, you can do two things or more. It's multidisciplinary. And it's very visual.
And so I think with all accoutrement with how we love VR and how we love all these technology and all the rest of it, I actually think at some point we're gonna use augmented reality to enhance, for example, visualization practices.
I think that's inevitable if it hasn't already happened. If someone like you probably knows a lot better than me, but I can imagine one of the limitations is that the visualizations from the sadhana or the text can be very intricate,
Adrian Baker: Yes.
Dr: but if you had a, a set of goggles on very tailored to the text detail, I imagine you could, prime yourself to see the visual, then you could, you could do your breathwork, you could do the mantra within the context of a virtual reality simulation.
I think that would enhance and augment the procedure. Anyway, all of this to say, I think we're in a particularly condensed contracted time, accelerated time period, and [00:14:00] Tantras maximize time. That's one way I see the utility.
But the other is also, we're heading from one epoch into another, and I don't know where, if you wanna talk about this now or later, but I'll just preface it now.
We're heading from the Piscean age into the Aquarian Age, and the Aquarian age is somewhere on the order of 2,150 years. And it is essentially has its own kind of characteristic or signature. And those signatures are very in line with the Tantras actually. In other words, the context in which we're migrating or moving into calls out for us, the use of tantra, because it fits well with the zeitgeist that we're heading into.
For example, the age of aquarium has a lot to do with energy and the way that energy will be used and the way that energy will be manipulated, and I'm talking about resources, natural energy, like we will harness the power of the sun. We'll definitely have a quantum leap.
We have within our capability now the [00:15:00] conditions in which we could have infinite energy. The only hurdle is power and greed. But this next chapter could be about all about harnessing energy, but that it also about harnessing inner energy. And I expect also simultaneously in the Aquarian age that will we, we will rediscover and reutilize very powerful medical technologies such as the Tantras and such as Tibetan medicine and other kinds of esoteric medicines that incorporated the subtle body.
It's almost like we're sitting on the greatest pharmacopia we could ever ask for. Like a complete set of chemical prescriptions or available in our nervous system. We just don't know really how to access it. So then we outsource our power to big pharma and we get all these chemical pills that then need, if you haven't noticed, if you prescribe one pill for the side effects, you need another, and you suddenly have a daisy chain of medicine. Whereas if you talk to a Tibetan doctor and they like, smell your urine and put their hand on their finger, they got it right away.
The actual, and then, but what do they [00:16:00] prescribe? They prescribe mantra, they prescribe breath work, and they prescribe me meditation. And they may prescribe some sort of behavioral, lifestyle change. And then for the deeper issues, they say that it's more chronic the actual hindrances and obstacles and causal, Problems come from a very deep energy blockage.
And so I think once we understand that, oh my God, who knows how capable, incredible, we'll be able to re-engineer ourselves. But that's basically the Tantras are technologies to re-engineer human being, not only from the software point of view, but from the hardware point of view as well, which I think is mind blowing.
Adrian Baker: Totally. And there's so many parallels there with I think Ayahuasca and Soma in particular, the regeneration aspect that parallels very closely what's going on with the subtle body. But I wanna bookmark that and bring it down to a, a much more level one conversation just to bring folks in.
So I want to talk about the pilgrimage, and if you [00:17:00] could explain like a brief summary of the thesis of your most recent book, Return With Elixir, as a way to lay the context for this 'cause I think that will help explain to people why in this day and age we have the need for pilgrimage.
When we have this kind of meaning crisis. So why don't you do that as a setup and then we can go into pilgrimage?
Dr. Miles Neale: it's not as easy as you say...
Adrian Baker: No, I'm asking you like if someone asks you to summarize the thesis in Yeah. It's overwhelming though. Yeah.
Dr. Miles Neale: It's a 450 page book took me almost five years to write, represents 20 years of my research in four different disciplines. But the, essentially I would start with this. There is a motto in Alchemy, an a Latin motto which says, solve et coagula. It's a motto that describes a process of breaking down elements or dying or dissolving or dissociating a part and then entering into a process of [00:18:00] rejuvenation and then the further arc of reintegration. So it's dying and being reborn. It's dissolving and then coming back together again. Solve et coagula.
I became fascinated with that topic and started to look through the lens of all of these various traditions 'cause I'm a person that has a wide variety of interests. And I have a background in trauma. I have a background in psychology and Jung. I love Tibetan Buddhism. I'm interested in psychedelics.
So that's, I'm not an expert in psychedelics like you are. But if you start to look through this lens, you'll start to see that there is a kind of journey of dying to be reborn that underlies every mystical kind of tradition. The world over and in every kind of epoch.
And probably very well there. It would probably be in quantum physics. I imagine it would be there in mathematics. I imagine it would be there in economics. If we started to have a cross section of disciplines and we asked people to go for the most [00:19:00] esoteric process or journey that underlies all these disciplines, there we would find Solve et coagula.
And so for me, I took a map, like a series of dials, and I started to superimpose one on top of the other. And sure enough, all of them described the same kind of journey. Jung called it the process of individuation, which starts with a basic reified or rigid sense of ego. You go on an underworld journey into the psyche, into the unconscious and then the collective unconscious. And then you make your way into the discovery of universal principle that he called the self.
In Joseph Campbell, he had the same, kind of motif and more people know about Joseph Campbell because it's become, in a way, iconized in Disney, for example. But you go on a heroic journey. You start with a departure; a way of leaving your comfort zone. You enter into the initiation which often involves a confrontation with the ego or a confrontation with an adversary, a confrontational with the foe. [00:20:00] And through triumph, you then make your your outward bound arc back home in which you bestow your discovery or your gift onto your community.
And in Tibetan Buddhism, in the Bardo teachings, they also have the same arc where you follow a disillusion of the elements of the body and mind until you hit this beautiful, luminous, clearlight space, which is our natural condition. So you go on a, an inbound journey, but then you re-arise as the deity in order to reconfigure yourself as more altruistic agent of change in the world. You see yourself as much more capable, much more loving, much more skillful. And then you rehearse that so that when you return to your ordinary sense of self, you have what's called divine pride and pure view, and you're basically operating as an avatar altruistic agent in the world.
So all three of these traditions are, in essence, saying the same thing. So that's the scaffolding that I use for the book. And now maybe you can ask me some [00:21:00] things about pilgrimage because I think that would inform...
I wasn't able to capture it in two minutes.
Adrian Baker: No. But totally. That's very helpful and I think that's very unclear what the role of pilgrimage is. It's this need to step out of our normal, just as the Buddha or Odysseus or whatever, you know, on a much, not so grand of a scale. But we need to step out of our normal context to have that confrontation a lot of times and to shift our perspective as well.
Dr. Miles Neale: Exactly.
Adrian Baker: And so let's talk about that and please talk about pilgrimage also in not just the outer sense, but the way that pilgrimage can happen. Yes. Why it's important to go somewhere else and do a sacred land, but then also even get into other ways of thinking about pilgrimage.
Dr. Miles Neale: Yeah. So the Tibetans have this nice cartography that they discuss the outer pilgrimage, the inner pilgrimage, and the secret pilgrimage. Of course, all three are happening simultaneously, depending on the level of initiation, but they're all important and they're all beautiful.
People are very accustomed to tourism and [00:22:00] travel. They pay a lot money. They go to France or they go to Venice, or they indulge their senses. They usually really eat well. They relax their body after a, a crazy level of intense working. And it's kind of a time to indulge yourself and take a rest.
And there usually there's a lot of expectations about the money you paid and how much you get and, it's very transactional. It has a lot of benefits. I'm not knocking travel or tourism, but pilgrimage is a little bit different. It has a different ethos. It does involve travel, but it has travel with a different purpose.
And the Buddha was very clear when he laid out at the time that he was dying in front of the Sangha members who were sort of anxious about what would happen for them when their great teacher would pass on. He said, if you wanna be with me after I die, travel to the places that mark my, the journey of my life.
So in other words, go on a journey and go to special places. And as you do that, the associations that are bound with [00:23:00] those places will reactivate my presence in your mind. Which is an unbelievable last gift to your students. In fact, in the preface to my book and the dedication, I dedicated my book, my five-year journey to my two boys, 10 and eight years old, Bodhi and Pema.
And I said to them, after I'm gone, I said, when I'm gone, go to Bodh Gaya and you'll find me there. You'll connect with me there. Because I believe that I've been to Bodh Gaya so many times, not just in this lifetime and in the lifetime. When I go and my kids have no place to go and they don't see me and they don't feel me, they will make a sacred journey and they will find in those places people that are caring and loving and sincere and open-hearted and, and well-intended and all the things that I aspired for in my life and they will feel me there.
And so I think it's a beautiful thing, what the Buddha did. I think pilgrimage is powerful in this way because people start with a different intention. The idea is [00:24:00] not to indulge your senses. The idea is to accumulate merits and to purify karma.
I mean, you have to get this right about pilgrimage. Otherwise it's just, it's more of the same. You can wear beads, okay? And you can dress with the robes or scarfs, and you can go to India. But if you don't have the mindset of the pilgrim, then it's just kind of, you're kind of kidding yourself.
The two main hallmarks of the pilgrimage are to journey in order to accumulate merit, and the other one- it's like two wings of a bird- the other one is to purify your karma.
Okay. The accumulate merit part is that at these sacred sites, they actually are imbued not only with relics of the Buddha and his heirs and great masters, but also a thousand years or 2000 years of pilgrims, also imbuing them with incredibly focused energy, altruistic energy, and so there is something external about them.
There's something different from [00:25:00] Stonehedge than there is about the rocks in my backyard over here in Detroit for sure. And there's something different about Bodh Gaya than the Eiffel Tower in France for sure. Why? Because of the intentions. The accumulation of intentions of people who have gone there.
And so the idea is when you go to these power spots, you should involve yourself in activities of body, speech, and mind. Whether you do prayers, recite texts, pray, meditate, do prostrations, do physical activities, make a lot of offerings there. These are all kinds of accumulations of merit, which is a kind of way of galvanizing energy.
You're kind of building energy, a storehouse of energy. Now that energy, good karmic energy, can be deployed in any which way. I mean, you could use your good karma to find a good partner if you want. You could deploy your good if you really want a nice house. If you really want a good job. You could accumulate a lot of really good intentions and you could pray and hope and direct your [00:26:00] energy there. And eventually something would ripen.
Or you can do it in the way that the Buddhists do it, which is accumulate a vast data bank of positivity, and energy, and set your sights on one goal, which is to gain enlightenment for the benefit of others and so a pilgrimage is like nonstop.
You are surrounded by the most ideal conditions because all the power places and the masters and the practitioners are all aligned for you to collect this good mojo. On the other side pilgrimage is never easy,
Adrian Baker: No it's not.
Dr. Miles Neale: And it's filled with debacle and filled with challenges, and it's filled with trip interruptions and it's filled with weird people that you have to sleep and snore next to. It's weird and, things go wrong and
Adrian Baker: especially when you're used to, I'm sorry to interrupt, Miles, it's, it's from our perspective as well, because I mean, it was always difficult, you know, even more so you could say Tibet and how arduous it was and the treks they were making. But when you're used [00:27:00] to life in the United States, or Western Europe or Singapore and how everything is streamlined and efficient, and it's designed to eliminate friction...
This is, it's very different than that going to a country like Nepal or Bhutan or India in general, and then especially in pilgrim on pilgrimage in more remote areas.
Dr. Miles Neale: I think you're bringing up a great point, which is all the more reason pilgrimage is a separate category and all the more reason our culture that has been acculturated into comfort and pleasure and high expectation could really value and benefit from reorienting.
Because the former is never enough. You can never have enough beautiful spreads in Greece of that beautiful food or vistas of the ocean. Enough excitement, enough entertainment. You can never have enough, but it's temporary. And then you always have the syndrome of now it's time to go home. And in a way, your life hasn't changed all that much.
How many of us take a two week break? [00:28:00] We sit on the beach. We get a suntan. We relax. We eat some good food, and then we come back to the mess of our lives. Not much has really transformed.
Pilgrimage falls under a category now called transformational travel. Which the priority isn't on comfort or ease, although that might be nice to have a little bit of. It's not that you have to be so austere, but the intention is that the traveling transforms you on the inner side. Transforms your value set. Transforms your mindset. Creates more resilience. Creates more compassion.
So to come back to this other point so I can finish the loop, the accumulation on the one hand, the purification on the other. The reason why we're saying pilgrimage is difficult is because you don't judge the tour operator that it didn't go well. You don't pound your fist and demand a refund when it doesn't go well. Of course the tour operator is responsible for the degree, which they said that they were in their marketing statement.
But for everything else, that's out of our control in the wild, crazy wooly wilderness of [00:29:00] samsara. The difference between a tourist and a pilgrim is when that moment of impact happens and your karma reaction fires and it's causing you inconvenience and discomfort, and it reveals your expectations and it reveals your erroneous fantasies and it disturbs you and it unhinges you. They consider this the activation or the ripening of negative karma.
And so what do you do? You rejoice. The lamas tell you when it doesn't go well and you hit a landmine, rejoice. If I told that to the casual observer who's ready to sign up for a pilgrimage to, to, Venice or a trip to Venice, they might look at me funny and rightly so because of the contrast of our ethos in our culture.
But the idea is that you have a storehouse of all these negative landmines since beginningless time based on aggression and based on desire and based on ill will. And based on all these kinds of negative intentions. You've accrued a, a data bank of landmines that haven't gone, gone off yet.
And when you go on pilgrimage, you hope, you [00:30:00] hope, you hope that they go off. And once you go off, once they go off and you don't react. You don't stamp your feet, you don't yell at God. You don't yell at the tour operator. You let the landmine go off and you feel the sting. I call it, feel the sting or feel the burn.
It's extinguished. And so you imagine if we, had a group of people who are really well-trained, trained so that they could, this is what the beauty of my teacher who I'm drawing on right now. He says, can you take all of life as your spiritual path? Can you take all your life as the path?
What does that mean? The path isn't like this weird thing you do on a meditation cushion with your mala beads and your robe draped around you in front of a Tonka. That's not the path. The path is life. Life is pilgrimage. The pilgrimage is a microcosm for your life. It's a metaphor for your life. Can you move through life so that when the good things come, you rejoice and you celebrate and you collect merits and you offer [00:31:00] it to others.
The beauty to others. Your awe, your reverence, your gratitude is, is boundless. And when things don't go well, you celebrate. You say, oh yes, this hurts. This doesn't feel good. I'm not comfortable. I didn't get my way. Instead of saying I'm angry at these people and outsourcing all of your entitlements. You say, oh, this thing that was inside of me has been released. I'm off the hook for it. Thank God. Thank you. Can you imagine?
Then in life, the big lesson is in life, you're not trying to shortchange anything. You're not, oh, I've gotta go for the pleasure over here, and I want someone to say something nice to me over here, and I'm really, but when they don't say anything nice to me, I've gotta avoid it. Or I've gotta protect myself. And then everything in life becomes like, I have to go this way, but I can't go that way.
No. Pilgrimage. You just go and whatever happens. You say this was by design. I accept by design. And you think about the net effect on your life if you're saying yes to life. [00:32:00] Yes I'm skilled enough to say yes to the good things and yes to the bad things.
And I don't have to maneuver one way around them. I can go straight into life with an open heart, amazing preparation. That is a true and a true, what I call a pilgrim's mindset is that inevitably there will come a moment where you don't like something, the tourist yells and screams and asks for a refund. The Pilgrim says yes. What can this do for my internal world?
Adrian Baker: I love that. I love that. One thing that I was thinking about as you were talking about it as well, and it's started off the whole talk on this topic, which was the notion of alchemy. And one of my Shakta Tantra teachers, Sally Kempton would say again and again, that awakening was a kind of inner alchemy.
And so I think that is also not only what we're doing in practice, especially tantric practice, when we're on the cushion, it's a kind of churning, right? The churning of the milky [00:33:00] ocean, right? And then we're learning to alchemize it like Shiva and hold it in the throat and transmute it.
But it's also getting off of the cushion, out of the comfort of that room, and really seeing what comes up in the mirror of awareness, and testing our practice when we're in these more challenging conditions. But also, there is something about the way in which these sacred spots can be a kind of portal, whether it's the way that art can be a portal and you go to an art museum, so that's something perhaps folks can relate to if they've haven't been on a pilgrimage or to Bhutan, but they've been to an art museum. There's something about art that can really touch something deep inside and evoke something in the unconscious.
And that can happen in some of these sacred spots, whether it's in the temple in Bhutan, or whether it's in the mountaintop. And we go to be provoked in a certain way, not only by the uncomfortable interruptions, but also the kind of [00:34:00] welcome provocations through the beauty, the awe inspiring, the overwhelming, of nature. Of the temple, all of that as well. And it's that alchemizing process. And I know you've talked about this a lot.
As difficult as this might sound for some people, the hardest part can be coming home.
And then how long it can take to digest and metabolize it. So one of my teachers, Douglas Brooks, will say, after we go to India, don't feel the need to talk about this for a few weeks. Don't try to explain it, just kinda let it settle in.
Dr. Miles Neale: Well, you have great teachers, Sally Kempton and Douglas Brooks. No wonder you're so astute. It's a pleasure talking to you and I should give you more time to describe or discuss some of your key experiences on pilgrimage, just so this is more conversational.
Adrian Baker: Oh no. It's a back and forth and there's a reason you're on so people get to hear me all the time.
Dr. Miles Neale: Before we end, if there's one experience on pilgrimage that stands out, I'd love to hear about it.
Adrian Baker: Yeah in terms of, for me, I'll say this, there are [00:35:00] two, and I wanted to ask you this question. So I'll give you my answers and I'd love to hear yours.
There are so many great ones. . The few that stand out for me are Chidambaram, which is the Temple of Nataraja, of Shiva, and the form of Shiva as the dancer in Chidambaram, India in Tamil Nadu, then Tiger's Nest and Bhutan. Those are have been my top two for the last few years though I'll also add, I went to Machig Labdrön's Nunnery in Bhutan last year,
Dr. Miles Neale: Oy...
Adrian Baker: That's a very special place.
Yeah. I'm a big Bhutan person, so I'm all about going back more and more there these days because it's, it's not only the wild tantric vajrayana artwork and I'm a big loving Shiva, I love Guru Rinpoche because archtypically it's that very similar Rudra kind of energy.
But um, I love not only the temples in Bhutan in the way it's so well preserved, but I also love the nature there as well, and the way I really [00:36:00] feel that kind of wild yogi, non monastic dzogchen tradition alive in Bhutan, So yeah, Bhutan is really my favorite, my favorite spot. But those three for the specific sites.
So how about you? What are your um... what are your favorites?
Dr. Miles Neale: Well, it's It's interesting. I'm looking forward to going on my first trip to Bhutan in October with Geshe Tenzin Zopa. I also wanna frame this part of the discussion to go back to the idea of outer, inner, and secret; so we're talking about outer, and there's such beauty about the outer.
Adrian Baker: Correct.
Dr. Miles Neale: It has its own thing. It's not like we should disparage between outer is not as important as inner.
I mean, outer is incredible, right? incredible,
Adrian Baker: And I figure we're going from gross to subtle, so
Dr. Miles Neale: Yes, that's true.
Adrian Baker: So we're still on the
Dr. Miles Neale: So I have to say like I've been to all the major Buddhist countries and I'm just coming off the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and I had such a wonderful experience.
So I have to just say that, I just, I had 14 straight days walking through Spain on the Camino de [00:37:00] Santiago, which is a thousand year old pilgrimage, which I basically used as a kind of therapeutic journey, or I used kind of technique that I call, walk, and talk, which, because you're walking 10 to eight hours a day, I basically stayed at the back of 20 people who were walking at their own pace.
And I basically opened up to discussions like a Socratic dialogue or a therapy session on the road. What came out of it and how it was like, and what it was like to be embodied and to be moving and to be around sacred sites and to be on a path where pilgrims of the Christian tradition sacrificed absolutely everything to arrive at Santiago de Compostela...
I was absolutely moved by the power of the whole combination of the outer pilgrimage. It was really a wonderful, beautiful intersection of landscape, and beauty, and the Spanish culture, and the Spanish food, and the trail, and the meaning, and the temples, and the churches.
And then what we did on the, on the pilgrimage together, these [00:38:00] very deep, intimate conversation amongst strangers in which space was held and emotions were processed and a lot of transgenerational trauma was discovered on that. half the group, I was surprised, had some past life regression or some past life trauma or some transgenerational trauma impact or imprint come through into clarity, which I was just blown away
Adrian Baker: And they weren't aware of this before?
Dr. Miles Neale: They were the either not aware, some of them were, but it was fully articulated. Some of them were not.
But what I was struck by, by half the group?
I mean, to me, what that signals is that that trail in which people made very arduous pilgrimage journeys for over a thousand years, which were much more rustic and difficult and challenging.
No equipment, no, you know, nowadays we have all the equipment and the hotel choices and the food. I mean, people died. There's stories of Atisha, for example, getting to Indonesia on a 13 year pilgrimage and, and spending decades there.
I mean, these stories are so harrowing. I [00:39:00] think what that does over the centuries is it creates actually something physical in the ground and in the stone and in the temples and in the churches that helps to activate something in us.
So I do think that there's something to the outer pilgrimage. Of course, I love Bodh Gaya. It's symbolically to me, Bodh Gaya is the mecca of Buddhism.
It's, it's where I took refuge when I was 20. And in a way, I reconnected with some past life experience that I had there, and then I it was a catapult for me, a karmic catapult for the entire trajectory and career path of my life.
So I can't say that that's not the top destination. But I've been very fortunate to travel to all kinds of wild and wooly places. With the writing of Return with the Elixir, my latest book, I really opened the scope of where I could go and what I could do, and with whom I could intersect.
It didn't have to be Buddhist only. Buddhist practices with Buddhist people on Buddhist sites. It was much more eclectic. And that alchemical motto really did it for me because once you understand that every spiritual tradition has a [00:40:00] kind of journey of dissolving and reconfiguring, you can start to see that it's in a prostration, but it's also in a Christian prostration.
It's in a Christian practice too. The mystical traditions of Christianity, of becoming God-like, or becoming Christ-like, undergo the same process. And so I said to myself, why should I be tethered or tied to just one region or one location or one tradition?
And so Camino de Santiago was a huge confirmation for me that once you understand this underlining universal principle, you can go anywhere. You can intersect with any kind of person. You can adopt the mindset of any kind of mystical tradition, not the dogmatic religious the mystical one.
Then you can blow everything wide open. Everything collapses into the universal. So that I'd say Bodh Gaya, I'd say the Camino de Santiago is, and then I'd say Kumano the Japanese version of the Camino.
Which is so ethereal and mysterious and like there's a crazy yogi that lives in those forests that we intersected with. And actually, I brought my two teachers [00:41:00] together, Geshe Tenzin Zopa, who's a Vajrayana Yogi and this mystical Shugendō master who is a lineage holder of a syncretic tradition that brought together the streams of Shintoism and Japanese tantra together and is a mountain yogi.
And they got together for this fire ceremony that was so powerful and so dramatic in the middle of the forest. It blew everybody's heads right off their shoulders. So I can never forget that experience either. Anyway, we could go on and on, but pilgrimage, pilgrimage is in a crazy,
Dr: I,
Dr. Miles Neale: I like to say one word about pilgrimage from the outer point of view.
It has reference, and maybe this could be a segue to the inner one, but it is meant to be disruptive.
Adrian Baker: I hope that's come through to listeners by now. This is, that's part of the alchemy. It's meant to be disruptive. Absolutely. That's part of the churning.
Dr. Miles Neale: yeah. It's meant to be. If it's too, laissez-faire and too easygoing and everything is predictable and everything is highly curated and you have all these beautiful things, there's no potential for sparks to fly, and then there's no alchemical [00:42:00] process.
So yeah it's just enough comfort. And then you have to be open to all the, you know, life as life is, and then that's where the work is. That's where the confrontation with the shadow is. That's where the alchemy starts.
Inner pilgrimage is just the mirror inverse. You don't necessarily have to venture out to a sacred destination. Although when you do, there are two things that are happening simultaneously.
One is that physically you are moving through space and time and surrounding yourself in a particularly unique context in which the people and the places are imbued with this energy, as I've described. But also people come to pilgrimage with a internal intention. And maybe they're in transition, maybe they've just been divorced, maybe their partner died.
Maybe the world undergo a massive transformation during the pandemic. Maybe they're trying to up their game. Maybe they're trying to have a breakthrough. Maybe they're trying to break an addiction. All the kinds of reasons that someone might go on a psychedelic pilgrimage, which I find is a complete parallel, and I know we're holding onto that because that'll your bread and butter.
Adrian Baker: And I wanted to [00:43:00] ask, 'cause I, when I was preparing for this podcast, hearing you talk about pilgrimage, I realized I'd never thought about, but a yahuasca or so much a kind of inner pilgrimage. Would you describe that as inner or is that secret?
Dr. Miles Neale: Hundred, a hundred percent inner pilgrimage. Yeah, a hundred percent inner pilgrimage. It could be secret- we'll get to the distinction- if it evolves movement of prana, then I think it would be secret pilgramage.
Adrian Baker: It would definitely be secret then, at least specifically with Ayahuasca and Soma, but we'll get to that. Yeah.
Adrian: Thank you for listening to this podcast. If you enjoyed it or found it helpful, please consider subscribing to Sahaja Soma on YouTube, rating the Redesigning the Dharma podcast on Apple or Spotify, or sharing this episode with someone who might benefit from it. Any and every little bit helps.
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None of this represents medical advice or [00:44:00] advocacy and should be construed as a recommendation to use psychedelics.
There are serious legal, psychological, and physical risks. Psychedelics are not for everyone. They can exacerbate certain emotional problems, and there have been, in very rare cases, fatalities.
Thank you very much for listening, and I hope to see you on the next episode, or elsewhere on the SahajaSoma platform.