Ellen Besso Coaching

It’s Sunday of the third week of October. Moving day has finally arrived and we’re anxious to settle into Kirti Monastery in the heart of McLeod Ganj. The luggage is piled into a cab and we’re driven the two kilometres to the monastery, near the bottom of Temple Road. Our driver takes one look at the steep, narrow lane leading to the monastery and parks near the temple gate. At our request, he helps us cart our bags up the hill to the front door of Kirti.

The main building is perched on the side of the hill at the top of the lane. From this point on, the road becomes a restrictive walking path, winding uphill between Kirti buildings, a nunnery, private homes and guesthouses. Inside the front door of the monastery are several offices. From there stairs lead downward to a courtyard surrounded on three sides by walls.

The monks’ lodgings take up much of the building and two large decks, where the men and boys spend their free time, are located above and in front of the rooms. The guesthouse is situated underneath and to one end of the main building, and consists of three levels of single rooms and several suites.

A monk named Kunchok meets us at the door and helps us down the steep stairway to the guest residence. A mature thirty-three year old, he is the manager of this large monastery, a busy and demanding position. Kunchok has the peaceful, sensitive face of an aesthete and a lovely, mild energy.

With a combination of simple words and gestures, he indicates that our suite is being cleaned, and seats us comfortably in the window of a single room overlooking the mountains. After a short time we’re shown to our apartment. It’s small and lovely, with a magnificent view of the mountains and Lower Dharamsala in the valley below. We sense we’ll be very happy during our time here.

From the narrow communal porch outside our suite we have a view of the monks’ deck on the left. To the right is a lawn and a metal roofed building, both are used daily for lectures, chanting, prayers and debating practice.

Our friend Dekyi located the guesthouse through her network when Don requested a place with cooking facilities. (I myself had no plans to cook.) By Canadian standards the apartment is rough, but it’s relatively luxurious accommodation for McLeod Ganj, and affordable at an equivalent of 10 dollars a day. Electricity and hot water are available around the clock, except for occasional storm outages. The suite is bug-free, always a surprise in both north and south India, where one anticipates tropical beasties.

The door of the narrow apartment opens onto a cozy sitting room with a wide window. Behind is a small bedroom with large curtained windows on the living room side, providing both light and air, then at the back are the washroom and kitchen. The tiny refrigerator in the livingroom works after a fashion, but the freezer is defective and as the weeks go by the useable portion of the fridge shrinks because the food freezes.

The cold water kitchen’s location at the back of the apartment is not an ideal situation. Added to this, the rusted exhaust fan over the propane stove is broken; at times the odour of singed oil creeps into our rooms and we suspect that other fans are also defective. We happily make do, using the facilities to prepare cooked cereal with fruit salad most mornings and sandwiches accompanied by steamed vegetables for lunch. We eat dinner out each day, due to a combination of kitchen fumes, laziness and our enjoyment of an evening outing after conversation group. Before we leave we have one final hurrah in the kitchen, brewing up a huge pot of vegetable soup for our friends.

My favourite area is the sitting room, warmly furnished with an old, but attractive wine coloured couch and easychair, purple curtains, a coffee table and an old television set that displays ghostlike Western shows (oddly, my favourites like Grey’s Anatomy). I’m to spend many happy hours in this room, gazing at the valley below, reading and tutoring our new friends.

Sunday is the day of rest for monks and some are sitting in the shade on their deck. Two small boys play a game together at a table under a tree. Birds twitter, hawks soar in the sky and voices filter down from a second deck above the guesthouse. From the Dalai Lama’s nearby temple the deep, haunting sound of Tibetan horns resonates.

The energy is magnificent here at Kirti Monastery, light and uplifting. This “monk energy”, as I come to call it, built up over time, comes from the heightened state of consciousness achieved over years of disciplined practice.