I stood at the top of a mountain overlooking Kharkhorin, the ancient capital of Mongolia, as the sun was beginning to set. Below me, golden light followed the curves of a river through a wide green valley. Children were playing. Horses were grazing. A dirt road wound between small yurts before disappearing among the green mountains in the distance. I had seen this valley 26 years earlier, but now, standing there again at 45, I had the strange sensation that I had not simply returned to a place. I had returned to something in myself.
Twenty-six years ago, in this very same place, looking at this very same scene, my heart raced as I faced the most important decision of my life. I had just come from the direction of that beautiful valley, where I had left my parents behind after they decided to live with the nomads. But I had had a vision: after almost a year on the road, arriving in Mongolia by car, driving all the way from Germany with them, I had fallen in love, and I knew I had to follow that love.
Here in Mongolia, at 18, I was swept away by the certainty that I was born to connect spirituality with art. I did not know what that would look like, there were no calculations at all, but when I saw Buddhist thangka art in the temples, it was as if the eyes of the buddhas had found me and opened a path for me to follow.
To pursue this path of study, I asked the director of the art school at Gandam Monastery for advice, and he recommended a school in India. I sensed that he was not entirely comfortable accepting a young woman into his school, which was made up exclusively of male students, so he graciously suggested that I go to India instead. And I did. I worked in Europe, saved money, and was accepted into the Norbulingka Institute of Arts. I married a Tibetan and returned to Brazil years later, with a baby in my arms.
Time.
Time passes and life unfolds . . . yet something within us, so small and easily overlooked, barely moves at all. It watches. I tried to connect with that observer, the same one who watched the girl throw herself into a new adventure, and the one who watches, without changing its essence, as the body ages, and perhaps even watches us all the way to death. I caught a glimpse of that which perceives beneath all the layers of perception, and realized that for each of these different “selves” time seems to move differently.
Twenty-six years later, I am back at the very same place where I once had to leave my parents behind and set out into the world on my own. This time, I have returned with a group of Buddhist students to study Shambhala and the teachings of the Kalachakra.
Kalachakra—literally, “Wheel of Time”—does not understand time simply as something that passes. Time is one of the very structures through which reality manifests, and perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of the system is the way it sees external time, the time of the body, and the time of consciousness as expressions of the same principle.
The Kalachakra begins by observing cosmic time: days, months, years, lunar cycles, the movements of the planets, the seasons and the great cycles of the cosmos. The universe is not conceived as something static over which time passes; the universe itself is movement and transformation, and the celestial cycles become a kind of cosmic clock. This is why astronomy and astrology are so important within the Kalachakra—not because the stars simply determine our destiny, but because their movements express the temporal order in which we, too, are immersed.
The same time, however, is taking place within the body. The Kalachakra establishes a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, finding echoes of the cycles of the universe in the cycles of the human body: in the breath, the movement of subtle energies, physiological rhythms, aging, birth, and death. The universe has its cycles, and so do we. The time we see moving across the sky and the time we experience within our bodies are not entirely separate; what happens “out there” and what happens “in here” participate in the same temporal structure.
This is what makes the Kalachakra, in a sense, a science of correspondence, and it immediately brings me back to my own studies of Hermetism and sacred geometry, to the ancient intuition expressed in the famous phrase “as above, so below.” There is a powerful conceptual parallel in the way the Kalachakra connects macrocosm and microcosm, although it takes this correspondence in a distinctly Buddhist direction: the purpose is not merely to understand the structure of the cosmos, but to use that understanding to move beyond the very cycle of time and toward liberation.
And then there is a third kind of time: the time of the mind. We tend to think of time as something objective, divided neatly into past, present and future, but our experience of it is profoundly shaped by consciousness. An hour can seem endless when we are suffering, and can disappear when we are happy; something that happened 20 years ago can feel more alive than something that happened yesterday.
In contemplation, we begin to look directly at this experience: the past is no longer here, the future has not yet arrived, and the present, when we try to grasp it, is almost impossible to locate as a fixed thing. Perhaps this is why the Kalachakra is not only a teaching about time, but a teaching about the wheel through which we are continually carried. We are born, we grow old, we die; we desire, obtain, lose; we meet people, separate from them; we construct identities and eventually have to let them go.
The problem, then, is not simply that time passes. It is that we become caught in its wheel, identifying ourselves with everything that appears within it. The spiritual path is, in part, the discovery of how to stop being completely carried away by the wheel—to remain within time while beginning to recognize something in ourselves that is not quite as bound by it as we once imagined.
In simplified terms, there is conventional time, measurable time—days, months, years, cosmic cycles—and there is a deeper dimension associated with primordial consciousness, which is not subject to time in quite the same way. This does not simply mean “living forever.” It is something more subtle. The idea is that what we experience as a sequence—past, present and future—depends on conditions and concepts. Through contemplative realization, one may recognize a dimension of consciousness that is not itself an object located within that temporal sequence.
This is why, in certain interpretations of the Kalachakra, liberation is also liberation from the compulsion to be bound by time. But the Kalachakra does not simply say time is an illusion, so ignore it. Quite the opposite: it begins by looking deeply into time itself—the movement of the stars, the cycles of the Moon, the breath, birth and death, impermanence, the way the mind constructs past and future. And through this observation, we begin to see that the time is actually composed of different layers of experience. It is almost as if the Wheel of Time were a doorway: you begin by looking at the clock of the universe, and end by looking into the very nature of consciousness.
So what does it mean to return to this same point on Planet Earth after a cycle of 26 years? I look out across the beautiful, vast steppes, and the horses seem to show me what it means to cross space through the rhythm of their gallop. The shaman we encounter dissolves the boundaries of time between the realities of the visible and invisible worlds.
Memory does not disappear; it creates threads between events, continually placing me at the center, like a bindu at the center of a mandala. No matter where I go, I will always be at the center, even as someone else stands at the center of their own mandala.
It is interesting to see events not as a continuous line along which we move farther and farther away from our starting point, but rather as part of a mandala that is constantly moving. That distance, as the Kalachakra explains, may be measured in years, but there is another kind of internal time in which the girl who was swept away by a calling is still alive within me. And why not look at her? Why not seek wisdom in a spirit that is still so present? I wanted to listen to her.
I took this opportunity to see myself clearly at the center of this mandala, as if resetting the stories that had unfolded since I left this place. To remember that innocent, fresh sense of direction, that force that once allowed me to follow the call of my heart without fear. Honoring that should always be a priority.
Remembering it with my whole body nourishes me from within, returning me to something that is unmistakably my own. To cultivate whatever it is that we have fallen in love with—an art, music, photography, a field of study, a vision, a country, a language, yoga. Whatever has touched our hearts, I believe that the thing itself has, in some way, also fallen in love with us. To enter into a relationship with it, one in which that love is honored, can only enrich our lives and give them meaning. When we live with meaning, something in us begins to vibrate and we become more receptive to the positive things that life has to offer.
The Mongolians have a word I love: khiimori. It speaks of a person’s vital force, spirit, fortune, courage, dignity, and capacity to move through life with strength and direction. A Mongolian might say that someone has khiimori, or that their khiimori has risen or fallen: when it is strong, a person seems more alive, confident and fortunate, as though life itself were moving with them; when it weakens, one can lose momentum, courage, luck, and a sense of direction.
The image of the horse is essential, because for Mongolians the horse is not merely an animal but a companion of movement, freedom, and the vast landscape, while khii, associated with wind and breath, gives the image its movement: this is not a horse standing still, but a horse carried by the wind.
Khiimori is therefore not simply something one possesses within oneself; it is also the way one stands in relationship to life, and there are traditional practices for restoring or strengthening it when it is thought to have diminished. Khiimori is the force that gives life momentum, the invisible wind beneath the horse, the quality that allows a person not merely to exist, but to move forward.
When we follow something that has passed through the curtain of fire surrounding our hearts, and touched us with the fingers of our muse, we shine, we vibrate, and our khiimori grows stronger. Even when we are afraid, we find courage and continue to follow. But perhaps we should not confuse this with the intensity of external time in the early years of our lives. At the beginning, it moves faster; later, its outward speed seems to diminish while the inner one intensifies—or perhaps it becomes like a deeper, more enduring fire, rather than the unpredictable flame of our youth.
It is important to understand this, and to care for our “horse” as we come to understand the changing nature of time, while remaining attentive to that which does not change—our essence, our observer.
With maturity, we draw closer to that observer who lives at the center of the mandala of our life, and that center becomes more serene, moving less. I felt this when we stopped at the yurt of a local family, who welcomed us into their home, warmed by a fire burning yak dung, its curved walls covered with skins from wolves the family had hunted with the wild eagles that nomads train for this purpose. The family offered us fermented mare’s milk, while their two boys watched from a little distance away, bareback on their horses.
I approached one of them and asked if I could ride his horse. He looked proud, but asked if I really wanted to ride without a saddle. Yes. It was exactly what I wanted. I had ridden bareback as a child, and in one leap I was on the small horse. My legs instinctively wrapped around him, and we became one almost immediately. My body remembered how to hold itself around a moving body, how to move with the rhythm of its gallop, and I galloped with the intense joy of there being no fences, no gates, no roads—only the steppes and wind. No rules, helmets, saddles or schedules—only the gallop, the energy, the freedom of four legs.
Of course, the next day, the body that was no longer a child felt every single bone. And perhaps that is precisely the point: today I hold on to the inner experience for longer. It reverberates. It nourishes me. I allow it to nourish me.
What is sad is when we lose the ability to listen to what makes our souls come alive. We become afraid, or, sometimes, we simply no longer know what that is—until religion tells us, or our parents, or the market. When we lose contact with our essence, when our hearts become protected beneath an armor of metal and curtains of fire, so thoroughly guarded, our willingness to take risks distances us from the possibility of life’s greatest miracles—the miracle of being alive.
Sometimes we have to ride without stirrups and helmets. I am not saying we should become reckless or foolish, but we should be careful not to convince ourselves that we need a stirrup and a helmet for everything! And worse still, we are encouraged to buy all of it. Everything is commercialized, especially when we are vulnerable, when we do not know our own strengths, when we doubt ourselves and imagine that nature did not give us enough innate resources to simply be who we are. We need to create spaces in which we can look at things with naked and raw eyes, and smell what the wind carries toward us.
We were born with this capacity, but we gradually stopped trusting it and began buying extensions of our own abilities, no longer trusting our nature. This is what khiimori reminds us of, and I find that extraordinary.
So perhaps reflecting on time through all these layers is also a way of refusing to underestimate the precious things we have lived somewhere in the past—things that, on a linear timeline, may seem very far away, but in our inner time are still so close, waiting for us with a kind of longing, asking us to look them in the eyes again and remember.
The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire. Your essence is gold hidden in dust. To reveal its splendor you need to burn in the fire of love. — Rumi
How many mystics have, in one way or another, repeated that life is simply what is happening now—and that it passes in the blink of an eye?
If your bones still hold your flesh with vitality, ride a horse. When your bones begin to ask for more warmth and serenity, feed the birds. Never stop writing about your day, or noting down the things that bring you joy—we do not notice them easily enough. We are afraid of the dark, and spend more than half our lives praying to an invisible god to protect us—the same god who gave us, and will one day take from us, the breath in our lungs.
We love fiercely imperfect beings like ourselves, already crumbling like sandcastles in the wind, and yet we insist on keeping promises frozen by our fear of loneliness, when our final kiss will be in the intimate arms of death. Time reveals us. And so we come to understand that life is a temporary but honest lover—it does not lie. It has already told us that it will eventually return our flesh, softened by its touch, to time. Another interpretation would be a poor translation.
This can be liberating. Whatever our reputation, we are all dust in the hands of time, which plays with forms. What matters is that the spirit, the khiimori that moves these cells through this brief passage of space and time, can move without boundaries toward whatever makes it feel alive, toward whatever moves it like the inexplicable miracle that life is. So that, in the end, we may surrender with clear eyes and kiss death without horror—and perhaps even embrace it, in complete repose.
Our bones will become earth. Our waters will evaporate and become rain, falling back upon the earth. From the earth, seeds will emerge, and life will continue through its infinite cycles.
That is Kalachakra.
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