This is the memoir of a slipshod yogini. May it make you smile and book a flight to Nepal.

What the Buddha taught 2,500 years ago is “live” in Nepal, a crazy-quilted land of prayer, terraced rice fields, lazy hazy afternoons and cows that know they are sacred and sit in the middle of the road directing traffic. The country’s northern border shares Mt. Everest with Tibet and offers a sojourner jaw-dropping opportunity to experience just how dreamlike life is.

“I can’t count mantra.” I confess this out loud in the shrine tent amid the gathering of three hundred of Sogyal Rinpoche’s senior and most devoted students from around the world. I didn’t know how to use a mala—Buddhist beads for counting sacred syllables, a method to pacify discursive thoughts. Nor did I particularly want to use the mala…

How does a nice Jewish girl, raised in the sheltered suburbs of New York, convey to a Tibetan Buddhist master her culturally conditioned phobic reaction to the very sound of the word nun and its implied austerity? I can’t say why monk doesn’t sound as forbidding, lackluster, or as humorless as nun, but I do know my discomfort with the word was an expression of fear that had no real basis.

My 7:30 a.m. flight to Phaplu was on hold—its time for departure anyone’s guess—and all afternoon flights at Tribuvan were cancelled. My useless thoughts scurried across the deserted lobby and crashed into the stacked metal rows of empty baggage carts. I sat on my bags and prayed for a clerk to appear behind the Nepal Airlines check-in desk. Nepal is the ideal country for teaching Westerners patience.