The Founder's Story: The Call That Pulled Me From The Himalayas

The silence, the stillness, and the beginning of something vast

I didn’t come to the Himalayas to escape the world.

It is the opposite. I love the world. But I have a lifelong desire to stop time—to be away from everything and anything and experience and understand my own nature and existence itself. I came to confront life in its raw, unfiltered form.

Himalayan life is magical, transcending calendars and deadlines. No contact with the outside world. No marriages, births, social media clamor, or Netflix. I’m stepping into a dream where time stands still—an ocean of silence and being. Special meditation techniques open experiences both cosmic and real—profound, sustained states of oneness with life. Precious. Transformative.

I’m not alone in this. I’m part of a small group of professionals—people who ran companies, led international programs, medical doctors, teachers—leaders in their fields. All of us fully committed to complete solitude. We’re not here for a retreat. We’ve come to stay indefinitely.

However, nothing prepares you for the unending silence in the mountains. Suddenly, we are thrown into a world with no identity or hierarchy, no one above or below us. In that silence we have no name, no career, no future, no plans. Arriving is almost like dying. After ten or twelve months with no communication, we imagine the world has forgotten about us. Disconnected from the news, we know nothing about what is happening in the world. On one hand, we revel in the purity and magic of solitude with life; on the other, we feel disoriented, disconnected, invisible, and starved for the encounters that once nourished us.

There is a deafening silence. Solitude.

Time disappears, but our urges seem to remain.

You can leave the world, but not yourself

We are thrilled to live a life devoid of responsibilities, without the need to manage others. We bask in a smug sense of liberation, convinced we’ve mastered the art of letting go.

But the habit of advising, teaching or managing others doesn’t disappear just because we want it to.

For the first year or even two, the urge to manage is still strong. The ashram is filled with distractions and disturbances: water problems, monkeys, no electricity, noise from a neighbor—you want a routine a certain way, and everyone seems to be in the way. “My life would be perfect, and I'd be enlightened if that person didn't take so long toasting their bread.” The inability to manage felt disempowering; we were not in control.

Eventually, we ease off the babysitting duties. It’s exhausting, pointless, and not what had brought us to the Himalayas. We also notice a funny thing: whatever habits or quirks drive us crazy one month, we often catch ourselves doing the next. It's clear that people aren't just breaking rules or making noise—they have needs we can all relate to. The real problem, we begin to see, isn't other people. We start focusing more on ourselves. More inward, more alone.

We settle into the deepest levels of existence—experiences so sustained they extend into sleep and dreaming.

We no longer are in the world. We no longer manage others—but we havent stopped managing, and its more dangerous. We are trying to manage our nature.

While I would have loved to be an exception to this self criticism I am not. I want to live perfection. I am hoping that the physical stress release and incredibly divine experiences will magically erase my old nature and replace it with a new one—that my individuality will simply disappear.

That’s often the promise of newfound wisdom, meditation retreats, even some therapies: that by leaving the world, learning about unity, and focusing on the goal, we’ll become this grand, improved ideal. If we dive deep enough, long enough, our annoying urges will vanish. We think we can avoid or override our annoying, unnatural desires and simply lose our bothersome traits.

But regardless of how cosmic the yogi experiences become, I eventually return to “earth” as an imperfect person. Like a few-month fling, taking a drug, or even meeting a great saint, reality sets in. We think we can escape, but we're always pulled back to our fundamental needs and who we are.

The swings are extreme, almost absurd: perfection in meditation… then back to being a small, flawed individual with mundane needs.

I am realizing deep truths. But I am still me.

My nature doesn’t match what I want it to be.

I am stuck in a room with the door closed, with someone who seems to feel, desire, and do a lot wrong.

I loved the idea of surrendering to nature, a concept preached in every ancient text. But I soon discovered: surrender isn’t just some spiritual or saintly ideal. It’s what happens when you realize you have no choice. It’s necessity. Resistance doesn’t just fail—it ends up destroying you. Nature doesn’t negotiate. You either obey it, or you suffer.

You can’t outmaneuver your nature. Your nature is nature. You can’t suppress it, bottle it, or bend it to your will. You can’t control or manage a hurricane. You can’t silence gravity. Trying to control yourself, correct yourself, or fix yourself only makes you feel managed, dismissed, and hated.

And yet, that realization was the beginning of something incredibly important. We began to see that our urges aren’t intrusions or mistakes. They are intelligent. Every pull, every craving, every yearning is a Drive—a critical force guiding us toward exactly what we need. They are essential to our health. This is why a drug addict can’t just snap their fingers and make the impulse vanish.

Our Drives are never harmful. But they’re powerful. And the more we try to avoid or compromise them, the louder they become. We don’t suffer because we have Drives. We suffer because we block them, shame them, misunderstand them. The craving is a cry for something real. And it won’t stop until it’s heard.

Over time, something started to shift. We stopped correcting ourselves. Stopped reacting to the parts we didn’t like. And what emerged wasn’t chaos—as if we were suddenly out of control. It was clarity. What we wanted was what we should want. Every urge pointed to what was critical.

I think it was only then—after three or five years—that we truly arrived in the Himalayas. Everything was exactly as it should be. There was beauty in people unabashedly being themselves.

There was beauty in people unabashedly being themselves. We were no longer disturbed by inflexibility, noise, or deviations from routine. What seemed off now was when someone was unnatural, straining, not true to themselves. The joy came not just from dissolving into some cosmic vastness, but from being Matthew—with all my passionate, quirky humanness. It was the magic of unboundedness and unity, reflected in my own nature.

In the summer of 2014, I made a rare trip from the mountains to support my father for his surgery. While there, I received an unexpected phone call—a psychologist I hadn’t spoken to in over twenty years. It was a jolt. I had mastered the art of hiding from the world. “How did they find me?”

The psychologist, calling on behalf of colleagues, was urgently seeking my expertise to help create a new psychology program at a university. The university sought a degree program that went beyond the typical approaches seen in other institutions. They wanted to promote real psychophysiological development and at the same time develop the spiritual element. 

The psychologists had tracked me down because 25 years prior, I had participated in a series of special meetings about psychology and Vedic counseling with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the late Harvard developmental psychologist Charles Alexander. Maharishi, widely considered one of the greatest exponents of Vedic Science, rarely discussed psychotherapy. However, during our meetings, Maharishi shared key principles, and wanted me to move forward in developing this field. As the meetings came to an end, and I was preparing to leave early in the morning, Maharishi emphasized to me what always seemed to be his general theme: 'The main thing is you dive deep in meditation. It’s from there, in the transcending process, that the principles of healing and counseling are revealed.” After Dr. Alexander's death, I was the only one left from those sessions. So now, the psychologists see me as a vital resource.

But while I feel honored they reached out, I have little interest in it. I appreciate their goals—but I decline. My life is different now. I’m no longer part of that academic world—or the world at all.

I discover there’s an urgent reason behind the initiative: the university wants to address the alarming spike in suicides across college campuses nationwide. Prestigious schools like Harvard and Cornell are scrambling to create mental health programs to tackle the crisis. Yet even they fall short—unable to address the deeper issues and underlying yearnings students are grappling with. Even students deeply committed to spirituality and holistic health still need help. This university wants to create a new therapy that can take on this urgency.

Hearing about the suicides strikes me deeply. The university isn’t simply chasing new revenue or engaging in abstract discussion—they are grappling with a critical urgency. They are facing the rawness of life and death, the very essence of human existence.

Something unexpected happens when I hear about the suicides—it feels personal. I don’t quite understand why this affects me so deeply. Tragedy isn’t new to me. In the Himalayas, I have long been aware of the world’s suffering—wars, suicides, and other traumas are just part of life. But now this is different. It isn’t only the loss of life, as tragic as that is.

In hindsight, I realize it is the image of these students—eager to grow, help the world, and reach their highest potential—hating themselves and their lives. It strikes a deeper chord I haven’t felt before. Their struggle mirrors the experience that came upon me when I first settled into my life in the ashram, alone in the Himalayas trying to manage or fight my nature. I know, on the deepest most intimate level, what this issue is about, even though I can’t fully articulate it. It isn’t just a passing recognition; it is a deep, unshakable sense of connection and understanding.

It becomes unmistakably clear: mental illness is rooted in a tragic misreading of our nature—a failure to recognize the intelligence behind our urges. In trying to fix or improve us, psychology and spirituality bury these drives in shame, leaving people convinced their deepest impulses are the problem.

Suddenly, this program they want to create seems to be calling to me. At the same time, I know this isn’t possible: I have absolutely no desire to leave the Himalayas. You don’t abandon a life like this—not for anything.

So instead of saying yes or no, I suggest we simply sit together so I can hear what they have been doing.

You can leave the world, but not yourself

There are countless stories of people going to the mountains and discovering profound truths about life. As cliché as it sounds, when you spend years alone practicing effortless, powerful techniques, it happens—not because a gift-wrapped bag of wisdom descends from heaven, but because you’ve spent 10-12 hours a day exploring the subtle nature of your own consciousness.

While we were all immersed in the same all-pervasive unified state, what we discovered within it depended on our lens. A businessperson might see management principles. A doctor, physiological systems. An artist, light and form. For me, with a background in psychology and my unique history of problems and challenges, what emerged was the mechanics of healing and growth within the wholeness of consciousness: how our conflict with our nature creates shame, binge-watching movies, identity issues, depression, anxiety, and even different kinds of addiction.

True psychological understanding doesn’t arise from abstraction. It emerges from directly observing how consciousness pulls, resists, connects, and transforms itself.

I began to see that the yearnings we carry—for intimacy, for autonomy, for authenticity and empowerment—aren’t minor or optional. They’re not distractions. They are innate urges, woven into the way consciousness moves. Disorders don’t stem from having Drives. They stem from not knowing how to recognize and fulfill them.

And it became clear: this wasn’t just a personal discovery. It was the foundation of a new psychology—one that had been missing. I wasn’t just meditating. I was watching how the mind actually works. The Himalayas, stripped of noise, distraction, and identity, had become the purest laboratory for understanding the human psyche.

Something real was taking shape: these Drives weren’t abstract—they were vital psychophysiological forces at the core of all growth, as essential to mental health as eating or breathing. It wasn’t enough to call a yearning “spiritual”; people needed to understand its biological and developmental necessity. With the support of therapists, facilitators, and a broader team of 48 psychologists, doctors, social workers, pharmacologists, Vaidyas, meditators, and graduate students, twelve manuscripts, diagnostic tools, and a therapy grounded in neuropsychology emerged—mapping how each struggle reveals the very forces pulling us toward our next stage of development.