The road here.

I grew up in a Muslim village. I started praying five times a day at four, before I understood what I was doing. From eight I sang the azan in the mosque, studied Arabic, read the Quran, then went further into the philosophy of religion.

I never asked why I was alive. The answer was already given: worship God, go to heaven. That arrangement suited me completely, until about seventeen.

After school I moved to the city, and the questions started. Is there a heaven, a hell, or is it just a way to tell a person how to behave? Why should I be punished for bad deeds? Why believe at all, if belief can't be verified?

The city, after school

I knew the answers by heart since childhood. None of them satisfied my heart. The hardest part wasn't the questions, it was the fear of asking them. Inside that system, to doubt meant to betray. I lived like that for years, then I simply stopped practising, without ever finding what I was looking for.

I decided the meaning was somewhere else: earn money, provide for my family, buy a car, an apartment. I dropped my studies, started my own business, moved into finance and investment. Things worked. I hit the exact number I'd been holding in my head for years. I felt nothing. No joy, nothing different from the day before.

You get 10 and want 100. You get 100 and want 1000. The moment it becomes enough never comes inside that logic. It's like drinking salt water when you're thirsty, the more you drink, the thirstier you get. I was chasing a shadow, and a shadow moves at exactly your own speed. I decided I didn't want to give my life to it. I had no idea yet what to give it to instead.

The video that started it

An ordinary YouTube video changed it: a monk in orange robes, calmly explaining how to meditate. I started that same day, twice, before breakfast and before dinner. Ten days later I quit smoking, after three years of failed attempts. This time it simply stopped being interesting.

Over those same ten days I understood that something greater than me exists, not as a belief, as direct experience. I went back to my old questions, about heaven, hell, the meaning of life, and found the answers in the philosophy of this tradition. Not from a book. Through practice. Before, I believed a higher consciousness exists. After, I knew it. The gap between believing and knowing turned out to be far bigger than I thought.

I found people like me in my own city. Every week we visited a nursing home, fed homeless people, held meditations for anyone who wanted to learn. I saw more meaning in that than in finance.

I left my job and asked to become a monk's assistant, living by all the rules of a monk, without the vows yet. For two years I travelled between cities, taught meditation, ran charity projects. Then my teacher sent me for training, to a monastic centre in Sweden.

Three and a half years, the most intense period of my life. Up at 4:30, five to five and a half hours of sleep, every day, no exceptions. Four meditations plus yoga daily, six to seven hours of practice in total.

The rest of the time: philosophy, the rules of monastic life, and manual work, building, repairing, restoring the monastery. The realisations came so densely I still feel I lived ten years there, not three and a half. That's where I found my brothers. I consider it the best period of my life.

In 2026 I finished the training and was sent to Spain, to Madrid, to keep serving people, to talk about meditation and yoga. I still practice four times a day, plus yoga. That part never changes, wherever I'm sent.