What would happen if you spent a week with monks?

Bhutan sits high in the eastern Himalaya, between India and China: a country of steep valleys, fast rivers and forest. It is also one of the few places on earth whose government asks whether its policies make people happier. Gross National Happiness sits alongside economic growth as a measure of national progress.

You feel it before you can name it. Buddhist practice runs through ordinary days, in the prayer wheels turned on the way to work, the butter lamps in family shrines, and the dzongs that house both a district’s government and its monks. Tourism is deliberately kept small.

None of this is preserved behind glass. Bhutan is modernizing on its own terms, and in the south it is building Gelephu Mindfulness City to ask what its wisdom might offer the century ahead. Spending time here means watching a society work out, in real time, how ancient wisdom belongs in a modern world.

What might a week inside those choices reveal about your own?

Moelam translates literally as “aspiration path,” the prayer of aspiration at the heart of Bhutanese Buddhist life. In everyday Bhutan it means something wider. In Dr. Dorji’s words, “moelam is the reason that brings us together.”

Seen this way, no encounter is accidental. Not the stranger in the next seat on the plane, the monk who walks beside you on the trail, or your curated group of fellow travellers. Each meeting is the fruit of aspirations made long before. There’s a cherishing between people that’s present in every interaction, and once you know to look, you see it everywhere.

Prayer flags are hung high so the wind can carry their prayers to every being. Many people have a deity they feel especially close to, and a story from that deity’s life that speaks to them. Tales of patience, generosity, authenticity and compassion are told and retold until a whole community holds them in common. Life is organized around the deeper question of how we collectively lead and live well.

What would change in how you live and lead if you believed the people around you were there by design?

The monk’s trail starts at the edge of Thimphu and climbs into the mountains through pine forest and prayer flags, all the way to a hidden monastery. Halfway up, the guides call a pause and serve tea and snacks while the valley opens up below.

At the top, you enter into a different world. You’re free to wander the monastery, take in its vast views, talk with the monks who live there and get settled into your accommodation in this quiet mountainside retreat. You sit among the drums during prayers, take part in the rituals rather than watching from the doorway, and receive blessings performed for you and with you. Guided teaching along the way helps you understand what you are part of.

Adorned in your custom gho or kira, Bhutan’s traditional dress, our day closes with a fire and Bhutanese dancing around it.

This monastery receives other visitors on occasion, observers there to watch. But Abroad takes you inside the experience, as a participant. Sitting among the monks in prayer, ritual and ceremony, fully welcomed into it. Abroad’s relationship with this monastery goes back nearly a decade, and in that time our community has contributed more than $200,000 to their work and the site itself.

Bhutan is not a simple place to travel. Daily entry VISAs and accompanying guides are required, flights are few, roads wind for hours and much of what matters depends on knowing the right people. Abroad takes care of all of it, so your attention can stay on the people and places you came for.

You stay in premium boutique hotels, with a night of monastery simplicity in between. Groups are kept small, and the people in them are chosen with care. Before you go, you’ll be prepared for what you’re walking into, and when you come home there is space to make sense of it. The Bhutanese guides travel with you throughout, and by the last evening most groups count them as friends.