Return from Within

By Daniela Hoyle

A raw and honest journey out of the rat race and into spiritual no
man's land. This is a no punches pulled, deeply personal experience told
by a young woman with spunk, drive, and a contagious lust for life.
Irene L. Pynn, author of From Light to Dark

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462846887

Daniela Hoyle

Daniela grew up in Lima, Peru. At the age of 18 years old she moved to the United States. She graduated from Florida State University with a degree in International Affairs and Journalism. Since an early age, she developed a strong passion for traveling and writing. Without even knowing why, she had a natural instinct for grabbing a pen and a piece of paper and write what was on her mind – writing journal after journal, year after year- for over 15 years. She has been traveling all over the world interacting with new cultures and learning from them, but her real lesson came from within. In one of her social services journeys, Daniela went to Nepal for two months to stay at a Buddhist monastery teaching English to the monks. In her memoir Return from Within, Daniela shares her experiences, her lessons, how she applied them in the Western world, and how her life changed degree by degree.

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Copyright © 2011 by Daniela Hoyle.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011911465

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-4687-0

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4628-4686-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-4688-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Background

Chapter 2 On My Way to Nepal

Chapter 3 Chitwan

Chapter 4 Back to Kathmandu

Chapter 5 Monastery

Chapter 6 Trekking through the Himalayas

Chapter 7 Four Years Later: Changes in My Life

Bibliography

To my mom

Thank you for your support,

for always believing in me,

for your unconditional love

Thank you for the lessons!

Return from Within

INTRODUCTION

Aren’t we all craving more control over our lives ?

This book is where everything starts. When I became aware that I was a piece of the puzzle. Aware of the connectedness of everything that happens around me. Aware of the experiences I had, the lessons I learned, and the people I met. I came back from Nepal aware and ready to take action in my life. I’m aware that I’m the master of my destiny. I’m aware I have control over my life.

A story created from a mix of journals from my travels and the lessons I’ve learn from the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had. I have changed some of the names in the story for privacy reasons. In order for me to better understand Nepal’s culture and live at the monastery, I read several great books on the subject (see bibliography). Buddhism is a broad subject that I couldn’t cover all here, but I relied on most of the books I read to give me a better depth of the experiences I was having. It’s been hard to let go of my writings but I did it to entertain some people and hopefully to inspire some others to create their own stories. I would love to hear where their inner voice took them and what they got from it.

I want to thank my family, and friends for believing in me, for being excited about my adventures. They encouraged me to write it. I thank them for lending me an ear and listening to hours of my adventures and ideas.

Thanks to my best friends Adriana, Maribel, Guillermo, Frank, Carlos, Danny, Nader, Colleen, Travis, Xiomara, and Miguel. Thanks to mom and dad for their unconditional support. Thanks to my dear friend Irene L. Pynn who helped me in my essays since I was in college, and now many years later read and corrected this manuscript.

Thanks to everyone at Xlibris publishing for their patience, for answering my endless list of questions, for guiding me through the long process, for not giving up on me!

With the first light of dawn, we were again ready

to proceed with our journey.

—Lobsang Rampa

CHAPTER 1

Background

My parents are from Peru. When my mom was pregnant with my brother, my dad got his residency through his brother to get into the United States. My grandparents suggested my parents should immigrate to the United States so that my brother could be born there and have a better future. But my mom wasn’t very sure about the idea. She liked living in Peru with her family and friends, she didn’t know English, and she wasn’t comfortable raising my brother without the support of her family. She hesitated so much that time went by and my brother was born in Peru. About five months after my brother was born, my mom became pregnant again. This time the pressure from my grandparents was more intense, so my parents decided to move to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where I was born.

Living the American life wasn’t pleasant to my parents. It actually put lots of stress on their relationship. My dad worked all day, and my mom was alone with two babies. She didn’t know anyone, she didn’t have a car, and she barely spoke the language. She felt lonely, sad, and very homesick. A few years later, my mom had had enough, and she took my brother and me back home to Peru.

According to me, this is how my predestination started. Now that I am an American citizen, I had all the expectations from my family to move to the USA as soon as I finished high school. I grew up knowing this. I grew up knowing that one day I would leave to a strange land. And I believe that because of this, I was obsessed with traveling.

I’ve wanted to travel to places all my life. My mom loves traveling as well, and every time she had an opportunity, she would take me and my brother to travel around Peru. I remember feeling excited at the adventure coming up every time we would go on a trip. Since the first trips when I was very young, I remember feeling a deep intense thrill of excitement that I can’t describe with words. I was constantly daydreaming and contemplating the idea of being on the other side of the world (literally). The thought of being in a place so different from what I was used to made my heart beat and created a deeply intense feeling of being alive, of excitement. There have been many times when I’ve felt ready to leave everything behind and just take off.

The song Starter from the Cardigans describes perfectly clearly how I felt:

This is a start that I know I’ll believe in so I’m leaving everything behind. Keeping the parts that I know I’ll be needing and I breed to be a better kind And I’m leavin’ everyone behind.

If I were given the opportunity, I would sell everything I have and leave in a heartbeat.

I graduated from high school at eighteen years old. A few months later, I packed my stuff, had a huge good-bye party, and on May 5, 1997, I left for the USA. My first stop was Miami, Florida, where I went to college and met what would be my group of friends forever. Nader and I moved to Tallahassee, Florida, to go to college. Here I was, for the first time in life, completely alone. Completely responsible for my own life, I was a grown-up. I had my apartment, my car, my work, and my classes. These were the best years of my life. I quickly fell in love and started a relationship that would last for the next six years. I went to college for journalism and international affairs. I wanted to do something related with travel. Traveling was always in the back of my mind. I would take any opportunity to go somewhere. I was constantly planning a trip to go somewhere.

When I was twenty-two I felt the urge to go to Europe. I was taking art and history classes that semester in college and learning so much. I kept hearing from my classmates who went backpacking through Europe and I was so jealous. I just needed to go. So for an entire year I planned for it, researching, looking at catalogues, and working doubles and triples at a restaurant and saving every penny. Of course, I didn’t plan on going backpacking by myself for nine weeks in Europe. It just happened that way. Originally I was going to go for three to four weeks with my boyfriend. But a few weeks before buying the tickets and having it all settled, my boyfriend told me he wasn’t sure if he was in love with me. I told him I couldn’t decide for him and that he should go and think about it. The next day I was totally heartbroken, completely sad, and did the best therapy I could ever think of. I went to the travel agency and bought my plane ticket to go to Europe for as long as I could afford—nine weeks.

Two days later, he came back to the house to tell me that he loved me. I said, Great, but maybe you need a little more time to think about it. I’m leaving to Europe for nine weeks; you can think about it all you want and let me know when I come back.

We talked only once while I was in Europe, and when I came back to the States, we got back together. Two years later, I graduated from Florida State University and moved to California, leaving behind my boyfriend of six years and the love of my life. It was probably the hardest thing I did in my life. I loved him dearly. I didn’t want to leave him. I felt that I wasn’t leaving him, I was leaving behind the city, and unfortunate he just happens to be in it. I needed more adventure, more trips, and more excitement in my life. I was young and ready to fly, not ready to settle.

The first couple of years of my new life were hard. I was confused and very sad. I missed my now-ex-boyfriend so much. It took all my strength to keep on going forward and to not go back to his arms. I needed distractions. I wasn’t sure if I had made the right decision. I was having fun in California going to the beach, meeting a lot of new people, partying a lot, working and making a lot of money, but I wasn’t happy. Something was missing.

I worked at an office with a bunch of guys and mechanics. It was a company that customized utility cars. I know nothing about cars or mechanics and I didn’t care. The guys treated me well, but I hated my duties—dealing with papers and orders, answering the phone, and talking with clients about their utility cars. I wanted nothing to do with all that. It was fine for a while until I turned twenty-eight and got extremely bored of being locked in an office. But I was earning pretty good money, so it was hard for me to quit. I had a lot of free time at my work, so I took advantage of it and spent a lot of time surfing the web and looking for cool places around the world. I always wanted to go to another country to do some kind of volunteer work. I came across organizations, programs, and adventure expeditions, and after many hours of soaking myself with information, I decided to go as far as possible. I decided to go to the end of the world. The decision was made and I was going to Nepal. In six months I was going to go to a program in Kathmandu where I was going to stay in a monastery, living with the monks and teaching English. I was going to travel around the country, and then I was going hiking through the Himalayas all the way to Mt. Everest base camp.

Gosh, it took strength, but my entire focus geared toward that moment, and from that moment on, all I could think of were Nepal and the Himalayas. For the next couple of months, I did a lot of research on the Internet, looked for books, looked for the right gear to hike in the Himalayas, looked at maps, looked for things to do, read about Nepal’s culture, learned about their weather, the religions most dominant in that area, the language they use, their customs and traditions. I looked through all kind of images of Nepal. I even look at their street map and pretty much got to be very familiar with the country. Then I had to break the news.

I traveled to Virginia to see my parents, where they have been living for the past two years, to tell them that I was going for a couple of months to Nepal to live in a monastery, practicing Buddhism and teaching English, and that I would go hiking in the Himalayas for another two weeks—and that all that I was doing by myself. My mom took it better than my dad. She trusts my judgment and knew that if I had decided to go, it was because I had done my research and that I knew what I was getting myself into. My dad, not so well, but after many conversations with me and my brother, he managed to accept. Or better said, he had no other option than accept.

Back in California, I told my boss. Of course, he laughed at me, Why in the hell would you quit your job and go all the way to the other side of the world to learn about their culture and do some kind of charity work and leave behind the comforts of your life in the USA? If you want to give your money away, you can just give it to me.

My boss tried to talk me out of it, but I had already made up my mind, and this was my opportunity. Then I bought my airfare and signed up with a volunteer organization. Then the real preparation started: buying gear, biking every day, and researching everything I needed to know to be prepared for when I got there.

CHAPTER 2

On My Way to Nepal

April 1, 2006, 2:30 p.m. —I’m in the plane waiting for it to depart. I was kind of nervous yesterday. I think mostly because of all the things that had to be done before my trip. I got of work at 2:00 p.m., after they used lunch as an opportunity to roast me with jokes about sleeping on rocks and freezing my ass off. Laughed about me eating goat and potatoes. Aren’t you going to miss eating salads with ranch dressing?. Laughing at the comforts I wasn’t going to have for the next two months. Aren’t you going to miss your comfortable bed?.

I let them laugh and laughed with them, but deep inside I knew they had no idea what I was looking for. They didn’t know what I wanted in life, and I was excited to experience what they thought was so ridiculous.

When I got home I grabbed a beer and finished packing my stuff. I was supposed to get together with friends and go out to the bar I worked at in Laguna Beach, but somehow I didn’t feel like it anymore. I wanted to be home. So I cancelled and stayed home with a couple of friends and my brother and his girlfriend. Suzy, my roommate, cooked sausage, rice, and brownies. This was a complete different experience from the good-bye-lunch at the office. My friends here were excited for me. My roommates know me since we were in college in Tallahassee, and my brother, well my brother knows me since I was born. They all know my passion for traveling, so they knew that this trip was carefully planned and they trusted my judge on wanting to go. I was very happy to be with them, my family, on my last night.

Time unknown—I’m in Taipei right now, waiting for my next flight. It is 9:50 p.m. here (5:50 a.m. California time), so basically I skipped the entire day and now I’m in the future. It feels weird and a little disoriented. But it feels cool. I’m like a day ahead. The fifteen-hour flight to Taipei wasn’t bad. I read the People magazine I brought about amazing stories of survival. One of the stories that impressed me the most was the story of Beck Weathers, who almost died trying to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. He was left for dead, but miraculously he got up, walked, and found his way back to camp.

There was another story of a Tornado in Oklahoma where the whirlwind torn away a 10-month-old baby from her mother’s arms. After a few hours, the baby was found alive about 100 feet from where she was taken.

I read the entire magazine, fascinated with each story. Then I took a sleeping pill I got from my doctor. I really don’t know how much I slept. I kept waking up; I was kind of uncomfortable because the seats were too small. Luckily, I had nobody sitting next to me and I could stretch a little. I bought a bottle of water here at the airport for $3.00, more expensive than a gallon of gas in California, which is at $2.59.

I really don’t want to do these things by myself. I really would’ve loved to have someone here with me. I would’ve loved to share this with someone, a close friend, a partner. I want a partner to share my experiences with, someone who wants to do the same activities with me, to grow old together and look back at a life together. Am I asking for too much? Sometimes I wonder if I ever going to meet someone to share my life with, someone who connects with me and is in the same path as me. Or if I’m meant to be alone so I can travel all over the world by myself. Wait, no, that can’t be. I do want a family sometime. I’m going to meet that person. But I’m not going to hold back my dreams just because my partner hasn’t shown up yet to go with me. Maybe we will meet along the way.

They are calling us. We are boarding. Yay. Next stop, Bangkok. See ya!

Time unknown—I got to the Bangkok airport at 1:10 a.m. I walked for a bit, but I was