Matt and Isabella move to L.A. Despite the money, smart car and sunshine, problems pile up from the start. Work pressure for Matt is relentless and Isabella can’t get a job. With tensions between them escalating, the most positive thing in Matt’s life is a meditation center next door. He feels drawn to Geshe-la, the founding lama of the center, who singles him out for special teachings, and Alice Weisenstein, a calm and beautiful meditation teacher, whose day job is doing mind-body research. Matt visits Alice at her laboratory where the two discover shared research interests. The meditation center becomes a refuge when Isabella decides to go on a wine-making course in Napa Valley, a seven hours’ drive away.

Matt’s situation at work becomes intolerable and there’s a massive showdown. His relationship with Isabella is on a knife-edge.

At the moment that Matt seems at risk of losing everything, Geshe-la reveals a story about a secret, 8th century scroll smuggled out of Tibet in 1959. He explains why all Matt’s scientific training and growing meditation experience have qualified him for an extraordinary purpose. Matt also discovers a connection to this mission that is more intensely personal than he could have imagined. The real reason he moved to L.A.—though he didn’t know it at the time.

Humbled to be the person chosen to undertake a task envisioned over 1,200 years before, Matt sets out for the Himalayas with a burning sense of purpose.

Chapter One

Approach to Tiger’s Nest Monastery

Bhutan, The Himalayas

Dusk was already falling—and the last part of our journey was still to come. I knew about the dangers of nightfall on the mountains. How it was better to stop and wait out the darkness than risk a single, false step on sheer cliff tracks. But I didn’t want to stop—I’d been working towards this moment for too long.

‘Return on the full moon in May,’ Lama Tsering had told me, his expression bright with significance. ‘Then it will be time.’

When we’d set out from the valley floor earlier, our objective had looked like nothing more than a white speck on a distant rock face. Following the goat track that picked its way through the foothills, jack-knifing around increasingly precipitous crevices, many hours later we approached a place where the mountain curved sharply away revealing an altogether different view of our destination.