Finding Your Path: Zen Practice, Healing and Returning to Silence

Sorting through 35–40 years of collected books today, I found myself in happy tears.

It's ironic really. I'm dyslexic and have never been much of a reader, yet I've gathered words my whole life. Maybe because I've always felt them rather than just read them.

As I was packing some away,  so I know they're safe. I picked up Returning to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life. The price is still pencilled inside the cover. 825 baht. That small detail took me straight back.

Back to the early 2000s. Back to Thailand. Back to living in and near the Temple of Dawn.

It was one of the most important chapters of my life.

I spent a year or two there, teaching English to the monks and locals. Of everything I've done, that still sits with me as one of the moments, I'm most proud of. There was something so simple and pure about it. Sitting on the floor,  always slightly lower, as tradition requires , sharing language, laughter, and presence.

Pra Matty ((พระ) is a respectful title that is commonly used for a Buddhist monk) oversaw much of the temple life while I was there. His very first English lesson was inspired by his alligator teddy bear: "See you later, alligator." "In a while, crocodile."

Writing this now, I can still hear his voice.

Tucked between the pages was a handwritten note. It was written by a Canadian seeker who had committed to a year of monastic life in the meditation centre, immersing himself in the prayers, rituals and silence of the path. He hadn't been born into that life, but he was walking it fully. We spent hours talking about truth, stillness, suffering, and what it means to come home to yourself.

He wrote:

"To my sister of the light, may the light in your eyes and in your heart always find a path to reveal within the heart of others. Thank you for sharing a journey that has brought me home. Finding your path can be the greatest form of healing. Thanks for casting a light back into my darkness. Teegro, AKA the mad monk, Karma in an ocean of joy."

Words have their own resonance. And when something is handwritten, it carries even more,  his energy is still there, pressed into those pages.

I'm sure I've read that message before. But today it landed differently.

"Finding your path can be the greatest form of healing."

Back then, I don't think I fully understood it. Now I do.

For 2,500 years, Buddhism has taught that everyone is already Buddha. Already enlightened. Lacking nothing. And yet we spend so much of our lives searching, striving, trying to become something we already are.

Zen practice in daily life isn't about escaping the world. It's about returning to silence within it. Serenity and tranquillity not as ideals you work towards, but as something lived. In washing a bowl. In teaching a phrase. In sitting quietly and just listening.

The message in all of this, for me, is simple.

The moments that shape us are not always the loudest. Some are quiet seasons that only make sense years later. And healing isn't always dramatic,  sometimes it's just remembering who you were when you felt most like yourself.

Today, sorting books wasn't organising shelves. It was reconnecting with a version of me who was brave enough to travel, to serve, to sit with monks, to be humbled, and to share light without even knowing that's what she was doing.

Sometimes a few words, placed at the right moment, can feel magical. Alive. Warm.

And sometimes, finding your path really is the greatest form of healing.

If this touched something in you, I'd love to hear about it.

That's it. Short, warm, genuinely open rather than instructional.