The Pilgrim’s Mindset: Becoming Anti-Fragile in a Chaotic World
The image above is of my eldest son Bodhi, age 11, who, together with his younger brother Pema, age 8, completed the five-day trek over the Himalayan pass to Rachen Nunnery in the remote Tsum Valley on the Nepal–Tibet border. Emily and I brought the boys on the Tsum pilgrimage for two reasons: as a rite of passage to push them beyond their comfort zones, and to connect them with the Rachen community and the World Peace Stupa. We may have underestimated them, but they surprised us with their resilience and their ability to embody the pilgrim’s mindset—even at such a tender age.
Culture of Fragility
We live in a culture that promises salvation through comfort, certainty, and instant gratification. At the swipe of a screen, every appetite can be appeased—food delivered, entertainment streamed, validation tallied in likes. But these conveniences are laced with poison. They leave us weaker, not stronger; fragile, not resilient. Rather than train us to bear the weight of reality, our culture teaches us to escape it—through distraction, consumption, and self-inflation.
And so we drift into lives riddled with quiet despair. Disappointed by broken promises, haunted by fears that no amount of planning can secure against, corroded by doubts about our worth, we reach for quick fixes. Some numb themselves with endless scrolling or substances. Others inflate into masks of false confidence. Still others curate lifestyles of ease that crumble at the first sign of disruption. But reality always finds us.
The pilgrim takes a different approach. The pilgrim does not demand that life bend toward their comfort and expectation—doing so only makes a person brittle. Instead, the pilgrim allows life to soften their rigidity. Where the tourist grows resentful, the pilgrim grows pliable. Where the consumer grows fragile, the pilgrim grows resilient.
Defense Against Vulnerability
Consider your own life. Perhaps your career has stalled, or your health is deteriorating with time, or a relationship feels perpetually disappointing. Add to that the fears—financial insecurity, loneliness, aging—and the doubts that whisper you are not enough.
How do we respond? Too often with avoidance: burying ourselves in work, in screens, in small distractions. When avoidance fails, we medicate with alcohol, food, or busyness. Others cling to grandiose self-images, hoping to mask from others and themselves the shame underneath. These strategies buy temporary relief, but they also deepen old wounds and defenses.
This is not simply avoidance of personal vulnerability; it is dysfunctional cultural conditioning. We’ve been taught that our personal preferences are unreasonably important, that discomfort is a mistake, that failure is shameful, that uncertainty must be eliminated, and that we should always be at the center of the world. The result is a generation unpracticed in adversity, unversed in fortitude, unskilled in resilience, with a sense of self unconsciously engineered to be fragile when expectations aren’t met or inconveniences inevitably arise.
What Culture Gets Wrong
Consumerism whispers that unhappiness can be solved with the next, latest purchase. Social media seduces us into comparison, masking insecurity with fabricated theatrics and highlight reels. Medicine and psychology, when stripped of holistic wisdom, collude with the quick-fix mentality: managing our symptoms but failing to address the root causes of illness and dis-ease. Even spirituality has its way of bypassing the fires of anger with quiet meditation, the thorns of relationship conflict with tiptoeing compassion, and the shadow fear of disobedience with compliance to the guru.
Despite the band-aids, life does not cooperate. Your health gives out. Flights are delayed. Complex plans collapse in an instant. A loved one betrays you. Your financial safety net fails, leaving you utterly exposed. The tourist expresses outrage at these intrusions, blames the tour organizer, and demands a refund. The spouse blames their partner. The spiritual shopper blames the technique and hops to the next. The pilgrim, however, expects the worst-case scenario, even welcomes it, and takes radical responsibility. Each disruption becomes part of the spiritual path, not an obstacle or detour. Inconveniences are the necessary inflection point for friction, which sparks the fire for inner development. Without hardship, struggles, outer and inner enemies, there is no growth.
The Buddhist Roots of Pilgrimage
Buddhism has long regarded pilgrimage as a sacred training. Traveling to holy sites was never about sightseeing—it was about purification and cultivation. Letting go of negative qualities while cultivating positive ones along the route, so that by the time you reach the sacred destination, or the return home, you are well on your way to being a transformed human being.
The pilgrim sees life through karmic science: past actions leave residues—what I call “dormant landmines”—waiting to ripen. On pilgrimage, when illness strikes, the weather turns foul, rooms are not comfortable, or plans are interrupted, causing inner friction or disappointments with one’s expectations, the pilgrim recognizes the ripening of old karmic negativity. Pain, annoyance, irritation, fatigue, and the like become gateways for purification. Rather than resist, the pilgrim embraces them quietly and goes to work integrating the unwanted or split-off parts of themselves that our culture of ease reinforces.
Equally, when joy erupts—a sudden blessing, a stranger’s kindness, the stunning view from a mountain ridge, the gift of a bowl of hot soup after a long day’s trek, a transcendent moment during temple prayer—what I call a “bliss-bomb.” The pilgrim savors it, rejoices, and shares the joy with others, amplifying its karmic magnitude. This is training in joy, turning fleeting blessings into refracting echoes of communal wealth.
Pilgrimage is thus a practice situated within what I call soul-plasticity. Just as neuroscientists speak of brain plasticity—the brain’s ability to rewire itself based on experiences—the soul is reshaped by how we choose to meet our experiences. The tourist is shaped unconsciously by comfort-seeking and avoidance patterns, which breed egocentrism and fragility. The pilgrim shapes themselves deliberately, using both hardship and joy as raw materials for greater altruism, flexibility, and presence.
Why It Matters Now
If the pilgrim’s mindset was vital in ancient times, it is indispensable today. We are living through a polycrisis: ecological breakdown, economic inflation, political fragmentation, nuclear threat, and technological upheaval. Each of these would strain a society on its own; together, they form a storm of uncertainty and chaos we have not seen in human history.
Our culture, however, doubles down on being comfortable, in control, and falsely protected by predictability. We are urged to curate perfection, engineer certainty, and anesthetize discomfort. But when disruption inevitably comes, we react, or worse, shatter. The pilgrim, by contrast, has trained for this moment; their spine (of character and integrity) has been tested. Pilgrimage is a voluntary initiation into discomfort, ambiguity, impermanence, and selflessness. It develops antifragility—the ability not only to withstand stress and trauma but to grow stronger through it.
The Other Side of the Equation: Joy
But facing hardship alone does not complete the spiritual path. Many of us struggle as much with joy as we do with pain. Some feel unworthy of love or happiness. Others cling to it so tightly that it eventually sours into disappointment. Still others chase it long after it has passed, squeezing the lemon dry, not knowing how to karmically renew it.
The pilgrim’s mindset includes training in joy: understanding its true origin, savoring it fully, accepting it with gratitude, amplifying it by sharing, and releasing it gracefully when it passes. Neuroscience confirms what ancient wisdom knew: joy or bliss is the most fertile ground for learning, the best neurobiology for reinforcing virtue. Hardship strengthens us, but joy sustains us. Together they balance the soul’s work—sorrow as fire, joy as water, each tempering the other.
Pilgrim Mindset in Daily Life
You don’t need to trek the Himalayas to begin. Try the pilgrim’s mindset experiment the next time you are triggered, and practice taking radical responsibility. Here's how:
1) Watch for inconveniences.
Notice the small disruptions of daily life—travel delays, people failing to deliver on agreements, weather disruptions, and unanticipated expenses. These are not random annoyances; they are invitations.
2) Notice your initial reaction.
Do you tense up, complain, blame others, or become outraged? After the initial reaction, do you then numb out, distract, or lash out? These reflexes reveal how deeply comfort, convenience, and control shape our expectations.
3) Trace the deeper layers.
Beneath the irritation and reactions, ask: What did I expect? What do I think this issue or challenge really means? What will happen to me if I don’t get the thing I want or expect? What happens when I am vulnerable or ill-equipped? Often, it is not the inconvenience itself that wounds us, but the deeper meaning and emotional implications. Through self-reflective inquiry, the underlying mythology or unconscious programming can be exposed and worked with. This is where trauma and karma often converge, as our historical experiences, particularly during childhood, deeply inform our self-protective mechanisms and future expectations.
4) Soften into the depths.
Let the inconvenience and your reactions now become a training ground; an opportunity for growth. In the Buddhist mind-training (lojong) tradition, they call this "turning adversity to advantage." Soften the self-protective defenses and entitlement, and open to the depths of vulnerability, unfamiliarity, and lack of control. Use unavoidable mishaps for your benefit, even while unpleasant, by stretching your patience and tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, and discomfort. What's it like to tolerate not getting or being what you want without reacting? Breathe, and as the moments pass, let those unpleasant feelings metabolize. This is the alchemy that takes the emotional reactions towards inconvenience and eventually transforms them into courage, compassion, and humility. The deepest alchemy is to reverse the restrictive flow of self-protective entitlement and hostility into altruistic sensitivity and multi-perspectival open-mindedness.
This is exactly how muscles grow in the gym: they must first be strained by a force or weight slightly greater than they can bear. Then the muscle has to soften, rest, and regenerate itself anew. Then tested again beyond its threshold of comfort. The same principle applies to the soul during initiation. Each inconvenience is a weight. If we meet it consciously, it has just enough friction to disrupt, then soften, then renew us. Over time, the unsettled energy underlying irritation or entitlement transforms into patience and understanding. Fragility becomes strength.
Closing
The pilgrim’s mindset is not about escaping life but embracing it. It recognizes that suffering and joy are not separate detours—the former to avoid, the latter to pursue at all costs—but are both integral parts of the path of transformation. As my teacher Geshe Tenzin Zopa likes to say, we “take all experiences as the spiritual path.” We know how to accept and use anything that comes our way to our advantage. At a time when culture makes us brittle and the world is in chaos, we cannot afford to remain fragile tourists in our own lives.
The choice is before us. The tourist clings to comfort and is heartbroken by reality. The pilgrim voluntarily bends to reality and is remade by it. One grows more fearful; the other grows up, more flexible. One is temporarily entertained; the other is gradually transformed.
Check out more on the pilgrim’s mindset in my podcast with Adrian Baker below. |
