Last year, I walked the Poon Hill trail in Nepal with my friends. Poon Hill is often seen as a little more than a checkpoint en route to bigger treks such as Annapurna Base Camp and beyond. This is an attempt, a reflection, a love letter, if you will, to the Himalayas and to the unspoken pilgrimage I found in what most consider to be an ‘easy’ trek.

For as long as I can remember, I have always felt an affinity for mountains, especially the Himalayas. I have often wondered where this fondness stemmed from. Maybe it was in my faith, where nature and divinity are interwoven, perhaps the devotional hymns I learned as a child and sang in worship, ingrained in my subconscious the Himalayas as devabhumi, a sacred abode, more than just a landscape. Or maybe it was simply a natural connection to the pancha bhutas (five fundamental elements). Whatever its source, that longing followed me up the stone steps of Poon Hill.

When I say the climb brought me to my knees, there is no exaggeration in it. In the hours of the trek when my burning quads met another flight of endless steps, I remember sitting in an out-of-body state, feeling absolutely all over the place. But it was not just about pushing the limits of my body; it felt like a mental test that brought me down to the basics.

There were moments when the path stretched further than my willpower, and I wondered how much longer I could keep going. Out of my comfort zone barely begins to describe it. Mine was closer to sea level, go figure. What surprised me most was how difficult it was to stay present. The climb demanded it. I silenced the doubts in my mind and focused on attuning my breath and movement to one another. Each step I took was not with physical ease, but with the resolve to keep going, anchored to a single stubborn thought: keep going.

Had I walked those trails alone, the trek might have revealed itself only as a test of stamina. Instead, it became an experience shaped by presence. With hands that steadied me when I stumbled and shared laughter that broke my fatigue, I felt the quiet strength of companionship.

One friend slipped into stories and local folklore, speaking into the thin mountain air without waiting for my response, as if he understood that words were enough to keep me moving while I focused on my breath. When frustration peaked at yet another false summit, reading exhaustion on my face, another friend slowed his pace to match mine, stopping for breaks I had not asked for but desperately needed. And as we got higher, when the altitude forced me to pause again and again, no one sighed or complained. They waited with me, taking in the view, and when I was ready, they would lead the way again, gently.

High on the winding path toward the summit, I felt the truth of satsang (spiritual gathering). Not as discourse, but as the grace in shared presence. No one walked the trek for me, yet I never walked it alone.

Standing atop Poon Hill, I watched as the first light peeked through the dark, silhouetted peaks of the Himalayan range. Dhaulagiri, Nilgiri, Annapurna, Himchuli, Machhapuchhre, and Manaslu stood before us, and as I honoured them with folded hands, tears came without effort.

Maybe it was the body’s release after hours of strain, or the sheer relief of having persisted. Or the overwhelm of witnessing what felt like the very spine of the Earth, the eternal axes between here and where the omnipresent dwells. Perhaps it was something subtler, the dissolving of self in the silence of those heights, atman (self, soul) momentarily forgetting its boundaries in the presence of paramatman (supreme self). Maybe it was all of it.

Looking back, that moment felt like a convergence of everything I knew and believed in. Faith, spirit and nature seemed to overlap and meet there. To me, the trek was never about scale, never about standing a certain number of metres above sea level, never about conquest. It was not Everest. It was never-ending stone steps, rain-soaked paths, unrelenting incline that burned through muscle and spirit.

Somewhere along the way, I felt a deep fulfilment; the Gita’s words, “The mind alone is the friend of the self, and the mind alone is its enemy,” were no longer abstract, and I had lived them. Perhaps this was the summit I had been climbing toward all along.